Word: armfield
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Creative home for Neil Armfield is a former tomato sauce factory in Sydney's Surry Hills. It's here Australia's finest director goes, as Shakespeare's Hamlet says, "to sleep, perchance to dream." Here, under Armfield's gentle, bespectacled gaze, Geoffrey Rush first leaped to life as Proposhkin in Gogol's Diary of a Madman and Cate Blanchett came of age as Miranda in The Tempest. It's also where Armfield dreamed up his 1998 stage adaptation of Tim Winton's novel Cloudstreet, the epic production that put his name in theatrical heaven. With 14 actors playing 40 characters...
...Cloudstreet went on to acclaimed seasons in Sydney, London and New York-and planted the seed for Armfield's next artistic challenge: adapting Candy, novelist Luke Davies' 1997 elegy to young love lost to heroin. Not only was the story risky, but it was to be told in a medium he had yet to master: celluloid. While the director, 51, had toyed with filmed plays and TV dramas, "Candy was like starting again in a new form," Armfield says. Roping in some theatrical mates, including Cloudstreet production designer Robert Cousins, he set about opening up the story of doomed junkie...
...arrogance can be forgiven. Reared in the rarefied domain of theater and opera (he assisted Neil Armfield's acclaimed production of Hamlet, and Baz Luhrmann's staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream), Mclean here applies the finesse of fine art to the pulpiest of fiction. Wolf Creek is impeccably structured (apart from one or two creaky plot points later in the piece), and the director extracts pitch-perfect performances from his young leads, with a marvelously malicious turn from Jarratt, whose Mick Taylor is Grand Guignol with an Akubra hat. As for the charge of exploitation - well, directors have...
...suspect with multiple personality disorder, respectively. If anyone had the monopoly over damaged souls and troubled teens it was McKenzie. The elfin actress first broke hearts as the little girl lost in a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads in Romper Stomper (1992), and proved the perfect Ophelia in Neil Armfield's acclaimed 1994 production of Hamlet. But when that play toured, her role was taken over by Cate Blanchett. And for the latter part of the '90s, McKenzie's star seemed eclipsed by a succession of less dangerous, more girl-next-door types...
...writer's "death" in Venice, looks good but wobbles without a suitably dramatic engine. And with some of the most anticipated works still to come (Bangarra's Unaipon, based on the life of the late Aboriginal inventor; and actor David Gulpilil's one-man show, directed by Neil Armfield), it remains to be seen if Page's dot-painting festival really resonates...