MAN ABOUT TOWN

Two more brief impressions of some of the events I've attended in recent weeks (certainly more recent than the last post of this nature, which covered events that were staged up to two months ago). I think this should cover the majority of them, save for the latest, Vamp , which I'll cover in my next post. Oh look, there have been a few events or occasions here and there that I won't be blogging about; the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards , for example (I was seated next to one of the Premier's police bodyguards; a big burly chap who didn't read much but who was an interesting conversationalist indeed - though I felt sorry for him that he had to sit through so many speeches at so many events just because he was babysitting Mr Brumby), and the wonderful launch of the 2008 Melbourne Fringe Festival programme (more of which shortly); as well as a disappointing film or two such as Hellboy II - The Golden Army , and a good film or two - such as the wonderful, an...

Best known for his magnificent, melancholy and blackly comic feature film In Bruges , and a series of plays which gleefully invert the clichés of the Irish character, A Behanding in Spokane is Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s first new theatre script in 15 years. Unlike the two trilogies on which his early reputation was based (including The Lonesome West and The Beauty Queen of Leenane ), set on Ireland’s rural west coast and written in a white-hot creative frenzy in 1994, A Behanding in Spokane takes place in the United States, and seizes on the familiar tropes of that all-American film genre, the Western – including bloody vengeance, vigilantism, and the quest for justice – in order to tell its tale. In a shabby, run-down hotel room partially illuminated by the ruddy glow of a neon sign, we meet the hulking Carmichael (Colin Moody), a one-handed racist whose obsessive quest to find missing his left hand, severed and stolen by a gang of hillbillies, has carried hi...