January in Sydney signifies the annual rolling round of the Sydney Festival, an arts festival in a similar vein to the Edinburgh International Festival with elements of the more lowbrow 'fringe'. A perfect opportunity for some cultural pursuits!
But, before getting on to that, I must just say what brilliant fun I had at the cricket! We attended the first day of the second test between Australia and Pakistan at Sydney Cricket Ground on 3rd January. It was so exciting!! Unfortunately the weather was bad and the start of play was delayed until after lunch by rain (wow, just like in England), but they finished an hour later so we still got the best part of a full day.
The SCG is so big and shiny! I'd only been to Trent Bridge before, which is nice and pleasant in a way that you imagine an English cricket ground should be, but the SCG is just so different. And so huge. I'd only seen county cricket at Trent Bridge so the ground wasn't that full, but the SCG was heaving!
Pakistan bowled first and they managed to bowl out all the Australians! Which was crazy but also good because we got to see the whole team bat, although none of them for very long. Mark was excited to see Ricky Ponting bat but he ended up being out on the first ball! We bought tickets for the non-alcohol stand and there were quite a few Pakistan supporters sitting near by, so we got quite into Pakistan and did a lot of cheering!
After Australia all got out, we got to see Pakistan bat briefly, but only a couple of overs. I never realised cricket could be so exciting, and I can't wait to go again!
Sydney Festival
If you go down to Martin Place very early in the morning (like, 6am - the stall opens at 8 but you will need to get in the queue and some people camp overnight) on every day of the Festival, there are a few tickets available for every show that day for just $25. Mark decided to give this a go to see if we could get tickets for a new German production of Hamlet by Thomas Ostermeier of Schaubühne Berlin that was on at Sydney Theatre. He went to queue in Martin Place at 6.30am on a Monday morning, but this proved too late, although we did get one $25 ticket. Still, we really wanted to see it and there were a few full price tickets left for that night, so we got one of those.
And we were glad we did because it was great (there were subtitles on a screen at the top for anyone who's wondering if it's easy to understand Hamlet in German!). The pace was very fast and the whole thing was very in your face, with a set that came right out into the stalls. The guy who played Hamlet was really quite good at going mad, and his performance went from hilarious to shocking to repulsive and back again. And they had rain on stage and I'm always a fan of rain on stage.
Another play we wanted to see, and did manage to get $25 tickets for this time, was a new adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Six Characters is a metafictional play, concerning the arrival of the eponymous characters during the editing process of a documentary (in the original play it was during rehearsals for another play). They insist that they are characters looking for an author, and demand that one of the production staff step into this role. One of them eventually agrees, and they begin to play out the life stories of the characters, in the process posing many questions about the increasingly blurred boundaries between fiction and reality.
The idea is a pretty clever one and I would actually like to see the original play to see if it works better. The first half of this production was very good, but it seemed to lose its way slightly towards the end, becoming a little bit too clever and trying to incorporate various in-jokes which led to it seeming a little rambling. It was super-well acted though, particularly on the part of the Father (I didn't know the actor's name but his CV included a lot of big-name British tv drama work) and the Stepdaughter.
Last weekend, the Festival drew to a close with the Opera in the Domain. This year's offering was a production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, which seems an odd choice for an opera, since it...well...isn't an opera. It's a musical. Still, I thought it was great and we had a fun time, although Mark was not convinced since he hates musicals (except Cabaret)!
So there we go, that's the more interesting features of January. We also had some days out at Manly and Balmoral, but other than that, just money-saving and trying to keep cool, really.
Now I shall go and spend the rest of my Sunday afternoon making scones I think.
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