Bringing together a youthful cast of students and graduates from Toi Whakaari, Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art and our very own Victoria University, the 2011 Summer Shakespeare production achieves something quite remarkable—making Shakespeare interactive, dynamic, and refreshingly local while remaining true to the original text. Performed to an audience on picnic blankets at the […]
AuthorLaurel Carmichael
Author Archive: Laurel Carmichael
With a population of at least 12 million, Istanbul is the biggest city in Europe. And that figure doesn’t include the city’s estimated four million unregistered inhabitants. Effectively that’s give or take the entirety of New Zealand within one city, which is a great way to make us feel insignificant. Aside from the obvious fact […]
Stranded Pilots and Spanish Brothels: The more intrepid way to travel It’s 4am and sleep continues to evade me. There’s no spare benches left at Gatwick airport, especially since the arsehole over there has taken up two to himself. I have it in good mind to wake him abruptly with a lecture on basic courtesy […]
One of the first sights I was greeted with on arrival in Morocco was a middle-aged woman in a white miniskirt and cleavage-exposing top, utterly inappropriate by even Western, let alone Moroccan standards, her skin bearing the unflattering effects of years of baking in the sun, with the fruits of an extravagant shopping spree in […]
At 5.50am tomorrow I leave for Dublin for a week, returning to Leeds for a mere two days before embarking on a five-week-long adventure to Spain, Morocco, Italy and Turkey. Waiting to welcome me on return are three ominous deadlines, for essays currently nowhere near completion. Considering I certainly do not intend to lug my […]
When you can empathise with the words from the infamous Vogels commercial, you really do know you’re a Kiwi at heart. It’s funny the things you miss when you’re overseas, and thus far the search for those deliciously wholegrain loaves of bread has been utterly futile. Not only this, but when the Marmite tastes different, […]
A red rose, a bottle of champagne and a private capsule in the London Eye. Surely this is the proposal of every girl’s dreams. Slightly less cliché than the Eiffel Tower and yet still charmingly romantic, this English gentleman had perfected the equation. To his credit, he simply could have not avoided the only diminishing […]
Cutting hard-earned summer holidays two months short for the dark and wintery English city of Leeds hardly seems like any student’s proverbial “cup of tea”. And yet I found myself boarding flight Emirates EK407 to Dubai on 19 January, accompanied only by an unfinished summer school research essay, a stomach full of nerves and a […]