ORIEL GRAY’S The Torrents is as relevant today as when she wrote it more than 60 years ago. The play explores gender equality in the workplace, the impact of mining on the environment, and the power of money to corrupt the media. In 1955 she was the joint winner of an Australian playwriting award for…

LIVES are condensed into brightly lit windows in Wendy Sharpe’s A Night with the Neighbours. The painting is an almost comic-book rendition of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with surreptitious glimpses into the lives of others. Sharpe is based in Sydney but spends part of the year in her ninth floor apartment in Montmartre, and her new…

A DOCUMENTARY about a chimpanzee TV star from the 1960s is just one of the quirky films on at this year’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival. Other Aussie movie festivals are happy to promote the latest franchise fodder, but Revelation ignores red carpet extravagance to deliver a diverse, cinematic feast. While there’s international films like…

CRYSTAL glasses are just some of the everyday items used to create haunting music by award-winning WA percussionist Louise Devenish. Twelve glasses are mounted on stands that vibrate and produce a “high, tinkly” sound as they slide over a bass drum. “It’s lovely to use glasses this way,” Devenish says. “They’re the sort of thing…

PERTH band Psychedelic Porn Crumpets will play the Astor Theatre as part of their whirlwind global tour. The tour has been a big hit with queues to seem them at the Great Escape Festival in England stretching around the corner, and their gigs in Los Angeles and New York quickly selling out. To top things…

IF you like black humour, A World of Dark Comedy will be right up your sardonic alley. Now in its second year, the Perth festival screens comedy shorts from around the world that were deemed a bit too confronting for the more-established Over the Fence Comedy Film Festival. Founder Greg Coffey says they have 13…

EVIE is a typical 17-year-old who sneaks out to meet boys, masturbates furiously and tries desperately to be cool. She’s the protagonist of See You Next Tuesday, a comedy play about adolescence written by Highgate’s Sam Nerida. Nerida was a trifle nervous about mum being in the audience on opening night. “There are small moments…

MICHAEL IMPERIOLI who played the volatile mobster “Chrissy” in The Sopranos will talk about his life on the show at a special event in Perth next week. In Conversation with The Sopranos will give fans a rare insight into the seminal HBO show, which ran for eight years and kick-started the move towards complex, multi-layered…

In 2009, a combo of highly respected Western Australian musicians came together to have some fun playing no-frills boogie rock n’ roll in pubs around Perth and Fremantle. But it was a yearning by leader Dom Mariani to get back to his early influences that formed the foundation of the band. “Blessed is the Boogie”…

JAZZ singer/songwriter Holli Scott is inspired by the “small flickers of magic” hidden in everyday life. “I try to bring out things everyone relates to. The things everyone deals with in their life,” the Yokine local says. “Like the day I saw my mum crying for the first time. “As a kid you think your…