MAN ABOUT TOWN

Due to a comination of a nasty cold that I don't seem to be able to shake, and the general malaise of post-work procrastination (ever since I finished up at Express Media at the end of June, I don't seem to be able to get anything done: a result, I suspect, of going from an over-worked and over-regimented lifestyle to one with almost no demands on my time at all. The last few weeks I've been finding it difficult to do even simple things, let alone meet deadlines and schedule my day productively...) I've missed several of the film's at the Melbourne International Film Festival that I'd intended to see to date. This isn't entirely a bad thing, mind you. As I splashed out and bought a festival passport (entitling me to see everything bar opening and closing night) I booked a ridiculous number of films, sometimes as many as five or six sessions in one day. I've actually seen only one-three films a day. So, by today (day six of the festival) I've only se...

Former child star David Page speaks with Richard Watts about families, theatre and gay tradesmen. By the age of 13, ‘little Davey Page’ had already recorded two top 10 chart hits and appeared on Countdown . It seemed as if the young Aboriginal boy from Brisbane was destined to be Australia’s answer to the Jackson Five, until his voice broke, ending his showbiz career. Perhaps surprisingly, Page is not at all bitter today about his brief 70’s career as a child star. "I didn’t find the transition difficult, because I pushed all that stuff out my memory," he laughs. "I forgot about it. Okay, I found it difficult trying to work out what I wanted to do next, but the child star thing made me realise that I love music, and I had to do it. I had to perform." Today Page is a well-respected composer for theatre and television and as an actor has appeared in productions including Reg Livermore’s Big Sister and the film Oscar and Lucinda , directed by Gillian Armstrong. He i...

'Horatio, stay young.' (c) Lyndal Walker 2005 Richard Watts speaks to artist Lyndal Walker about portraiture, masculinity and half-naked boys. While working for a London photographic agency for a year, Lyndal Walker says she was struck by how disposable and commodified youth and beauty have become. "These 17-18 year old boys would come in, and we’d see four or five of them a day because guys have to work harder than girls to get work. The casting agent would look them up and down, then look at their folio, and within a couple of minutes they’d be sent back on the tube, see you later. These are our most beautiful young men, and this is how we value them!" Walker’s personal revelations about the disposable nature of male beauty, coupled with a lifelong interest in transience, which has become one of the central themes in her work, have informed her latest exhibition. Stay Young , which opened on Thursday at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, comprises a series o...

Richard Watts speaks with performer Marina Prior about the musical comedy Kiss Me, Kate . Kiss Me, Kate is one of the classics of musical theatre. First staged in 1948, it employs the timeless device of a play-within-a-play – a musical version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew – to explore the tempestuous relationship between a theatre director and his estranged actress wife. Melbourne has not seen a professional production of Kiss Me, Kate since 1952. A recent revival, already acclaimed in the West End and Broadway, and starring Marina Prior opens in two weeks at the Arts Centre. "I think both The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss Me, Kate are essentially love stories about two flawed people who are meant to be with each other, but are having trouble connecting," says Prior, when asked if this classic period piece is still relevant for modern audiences. "Two people who are meant to be together and who are frustrating the hell out of the audience because they’re no...

Richard Watts speaks with lesbian playwright Alana Valentine about euthanasia, spirituality, and her play Savage Grace . "Some of the most intellectually engaged and religiously opinionated people I know are gays and lesbians, because we’re huge consumers of cultural product and we’re often the target of religious lies," Alana Valentine explains, when asked why she chose to make the two characters in her play Savage Grace gay men. "I felt that the kind of plays which we’re served up in festivals usually draw an audience through a bit of beefcake or cheesecake, but honestly, I think that a lot of gay and lesbian people are incredibly keen to engage with much bigger ideas. Besides, I live in Sydney, what don’t I know about gay men?" she adds, laughing. Valentine has worked as a dramatist for 20 years, and was a founding member, together with playwrights Campion Descent and Alex Harding, of the Gay and Lesbian Arts Alliance . Her critically acclaimed play Run Rabbit R...

Richard Watts talks with visual artist McLean Edwards about painting, prizes and childhood influences. In the world of contemporary Australian art, where the conceptual and the abstract have elbowed the figurative and the representational out of the spotlight, Sydney’s McLean Edwards is proud to be considered unpopular. "It seems to me that there’s a lot of personal investigation by artists of whatever the flavour of the month is. You don’t want to be caught up in a fashion, do you? It’s so didactic and arbitrary and utterly unengaging," Edwards says. "I find a lot of conceptually based work leaves me cold, but then I find a lot of figurative work is shit too," he adds, laughing. The 33 year-old artist has his first solo Melbourne exhibition opening next week. The Revenge of Maggie Dubrovnik will comprise eight new paintings depicting young cricketers, a theme that is regularly repeated in Edwards’ work. "I wouldn’t regard it as an obsession," he chuckles...

(Published in The Age , Sunday July 3 2005.) T he notion of family - and its destructive forces - intrigues Christos Tsiolkas and defines his writing. He speaks with Richard Watts . Christos Tsiolkas says that he cannot remember the moment when he realised he wanted to be a writer, although apparently his mother does. "Mum told me about this a few years ago, after Loaded came out. I was 10 and we’d been visiting cousins in Northcote. We were waiting at the tram stop to get the tram back into the city when I apparently said to her ‘Mum, I want to be a writer, that’s what I want to do.’ She says she crossed herself," he laughs. Family memories such as this cast a long shadow in Dead Europe , Tsiolkas’ latest novel. "I think that exploring family history is always going to be a permanent part of the way I write and explore the world. Not in a family values kind of way; you could never say that about my work," Tsiolkas says wryly, "and in saying that I’m interested...