Arts Tuesday 16th December

Go to the Arts Tuesday page on our program guide and choose ‘Replay’ to hear the show.

Filling in for Gaz and Di this week and next you get me – Anna Kamaralli. Usually a theatre person, but happy to chat about the other good things in life.

I decided to check how many different ways to make coffee I have in my home

My first guest this week was Garritt Van Dyk, more informally known to us as Chip. Chip is a PhD candidate in the History department at the University of Sydney, but got there via the winding path of having been a derivatives trader and a cordon bleu chef. Not as surprising as it might be, then, that his field of research is Identity and Mercantilism in 17th Century French and English Food Culture. He spoke to us about the cultural impact of the introduction of coffee to Europe, and as a special treat for the holiday season he gave us some history on how bubbles began to appear in champagne.

I also spoke to Julian Garner, who is playing John Proctor in the Sport for Jove production of The Crucible. Reviewed by our own Diana Simmonds as full of “so many parallels and such richness in the play, the performances and the production”, it is being performed at Bella Vista Farm. We talked about Arthur Miller’s play and Damien Ryan’s production, and then had a chat about doing Shakespeare outdoors, as Sport for Jove is also presenting A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

If you want to hear more about the madness of Shakespearean love, tune in to Sylvia’s Arts Wednesday program, as she and I are doing a six week series of conversations about just that.

If you would like to know more about the background of Arthur Miller’s source material for The Crucible you can read about the implications of his fictionalising of the historic record at my own blog, Flaming Moth. It is an intriguing aspect of the storytelling process that in order to create a compelling tension between his protagonist (John Proctor) and antagonist (Abigail Williams), Miller invented a clandestine relationship between them that is not suggested at all in the historic record. In fact, the real Proctor was sixty years old and the real Abigail merely eleven, but Miller knew what he needed to construct a narrative that would give a frame to the broader themes of societal pressure and personal responsibility he wanted to explore.

Next week I will be back with a special episode looking into Burlesque and Steam Punk culture.

Do remember that you can play back the show anytime you like for the next four weeks, simply by going to the Arts Tuesday page on our program guide and choosing ‘Replay’.

The bubbles are now indispensable