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Distant biblical human figures trek steep hills wearing cotton, hemp, wool and linen garments hand-embroidered by Palestinian craftswomen. The finely grained grassy textures fill out film director Garth Davis’s visual poetry, weaving his intimate sense of the human condition with the epic, wind-battered landscape, before an arresting discovery of emaciated bodies strewn through a cave.
This journey of Mary, Jesus and a true-believing Judas is set, naturally, through Jerusalem, and in Cana of Galilee, the place the New Testament says the Christian saviour turned water into wine, although modern scholars debate its precise location.
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The bitch that bore Hitler is in heat again. German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 allegory for his country’s dark decades of fascism, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, comes to Sydney Theatre Company in a timely reminder that history is an infinite loop. As various nations veer to the right, strongmen demand their populaces turn up to vote in sham elections; the threat of violence dissuades challengers, while leaders award themselves virtually unlimited tenure at the top.
In a welcome return to the theatre after a three-year absence, Hugo Weaving is commanding as chief hoodlum Arturo Ui, whose murderous rise, originally set by Brecht in 1930s Chicago, is predicated on a corrupt government and business elite.
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Fifty essays and dispatches on what it means to be gay today.
On sale at Amazon and iTunes.
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