Report: Violence in Media Most Common in Rug Commercials – Charlie Mills

intensity. He looked as though he ached to leap from the chair and tear her head from her body, so he could cradle it in his hands and stroke a long smooth line from forehead, to cheek, to jaw, to the gushing bloody stump.

Laudanum is a funny drug. It loosens the tongue, but bones become leaden pipes sewn into the lining of the skin. I left Berenice to dress for dinner and found my way back to the library where I had left him, slumped, and fainting against the leather armrest. I propped him up and straddled him.

Smiling coquettishly, I leant down and whispered in his ear, “Why do you stare so at Berenice?”

His eyebrows furrowed. “She is to be my wife,” he said, voice slurring.

“She does not belong to you yet. It is impure to stare with such desire.”

His face was growing slack again, the drug deadening his thoughts. Fury coursed through me like venom and I gripped his throat. “Why?” His pupils shrank in fear as he blurted, “I only wanted her teeth!”

Her teeth? Her teeth!

I slid my hand into my sash and pulled out the pearl hatpin.

“Well,” I crooned, tracing the skin beneath his lower lashes. “Her teeth may concern you a great deal, but I am interested in something of yours.”

Berenice was in the retiring room. She sat by the piano forte but turned to greet me with a kiss.

“Where is Egaeus, my love?”

I smoothed her feathery curls as I smiled into the skin of her neck.

“He’s resting his eyes.”

Unbound: A Review

izaBela BarakovSka

“Presented by Blank Space Productions, Unbound is a story for our age: a bewitching collision of classical text and dynamic contemporary forms that is sure to challenge everything you think you know about the Bard.” - Blue Room Theatre

In literature, classics are greatly defined by their timelessness - their ability to give meaning to an audience, regardless of how many years after its original context.

Shakespeare’s works are widely considered classics for that exact reasoning. Julius Caesar teaches us that absolute power corrupts absolutely, The Tempest teaches us about the underlying orders of hierarchies in society and the inflexibility of its power, while Romeo and Juliet teaches us about the entwining of free will and the timeless belief of fate.

These stories are their own kind of parable, and whilst so much of their value can be transcended into our Twenty-First Century, there without a doubt still are key elements of power imbalances between classes, races, religions and genders that, whilst still prevalent today, existed to a much greater and more socially accepted degree in Shakespeare’s England.

Whilst I greatly admire the works of Shakespeare – having even had the chance to visit his family home, New Place, in the heart of Stratford-upon-Avon, and admired the sculptures of his most famous works – one simply cannot shake their beliefs and values inherent to our time today.

With great anticipation, I sat to watch Unbound, a Blank Space production at Perth’s very own Blue Room Theatre.

One word – goosebumps.

Unbound was the fruition of three years of work that set out to explore the women of ‘The Canon’, in particular by the Bard (Shakespeare), through an amalgamation of various existing plays and sonnets.

In literature, the ‘canon’ or ‘western canon’ – for those new to the phrase – refers to a collective body of work deemed important, influential and consequential by society, which is largely (though not wholly) composed of works in literature, music, philosophy and art by heteronormative, European white men from privileged socioeconomic and educational backgrounds.