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Articles by Gemma Betros
The Great Gatsby debuts in Toowoomba
In 2025, Queensland Theatre Company opened its season with a sparkling new adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. The performance took place not in Brisbane but in the regional town of Toowoomba, two hours away. Operating on a shared-risk model, it was an unusual move for a state theatre company but one that proved a huge success, with Toowoomba’s Empire Theatre selling over 2000 tickets across the two performances.
The Last Princess of Lebanon review: looking back at one's heritage
The Last Princess of Lebanon: quick links When Nadia Milford’s great-grandmother arrived in Australia in 1935, a newspaperfeatured a photograph of the young mother and her baby titled, ‘British Subject Who Speaks No English.’ Married in Lebanon at just 15 years of age to an Australian-based businessman, the fact that the already bilingual Mrs Nadia Ward did not (yet) speak English was perhaps the least extraordinary thing about her.
Book review: Women & Children, Tony Birch
Content warning: domestic violence. Tony Birch’s new novel, Women & Children, seeks to expose the silences of the past. Captivating from its opening line to its last, troubling chapter, it takes the reader into a world constructed so thoughtfully and with such simplicity that it is almost possible to miss the exceptional craft behind it. The first chapter is a case in point. It’s about 11-year-old Joe and the school he attends, run by nuns who terrify young children with their descriptions of Hell.
How Bluey made the move from animation to stage
Five years into the Bluey phenomenonand it could be easy to be cynical. After books, albums, and a merchandising juggernaut that can weary even the most dedicated parental Bluey fan, there is also, in case you missed it, a Bluey stage show. Bluey’s Big Play was first performed in December 2020 at QPAC after a lengthy COVID-induced delay, one of the first theatre shows performed to a live audience in Australia post-lockdown. The show has since toured Australia and the US.
Film review: Napoleon
In light of the criticism that has emerged since its release, it’s worth stating that – for this historian at least – Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is not all that bad. Napoleon Bonaparte is a notoriously difficult cinematic subject. There is first the problem of which story to tell. Many, particularly in the Anglosphere, regard Napoleon with some degree of awe, intrigued by the legend that Napoleon himself helped create.
Performance review: Son and Wolfgang’s Magical Musical Circus, Playhouse Theatre, QPAC
Contemporary circus company Circa, created in 2004, is something of a Queensland institution. It performs throughout Australia and around the world, runs its own Circus Academy and pushes the boundaries of what we mean by “circus” – blending acrobatics, music, dance and more across genres ranging from peepshow to kids’ shows.
Book review: The Sitter, Angela O’Keeffe
French artist Paul Cezanne painted almost 30 portraits of Marie-Hortense Fiquet (1850 –1922), his companion, and eventually, wife. On the surface, theirs seemed to be a prickly relationship. Contemporaries, and later, art historians dismissed Madame Cezanne as sulky, shallow and a drain on her husband’s talent. Fiquet left few written records that could be mined in her defence. Into this breach steps Angela O’Keeffe’s The Sitter.
Performance review: Chopin’s Piano, QPAC Concert Hall
Chopin’s Piano, currently touring Australia, poses an intriguing question: what can the history of one particular instrument tell us about how music – its composition and sound, performance and reception – changes over time? This was the subject of musician and scholar Paul Kildea’s 2018 book of the same name, a book that traced the extraordinary fate of a pianino (a precursor of the modern piano) played by Polish-born composer Frédéric Chopin.
The Many Lives of Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941) is perhaps Australia’s greatest literary export. Born in Kirribilli, she was extraordinarily successful in her lifetime, and was regularly compared to Jane Austen for her talent and wit. Yet, with the exception of those in on the secret, von Arnim’s novels have been almost entirely forgotten.
Gemma Betros reviews 'In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World' by Danielle Clode
Biography Jeanne Barret, an obscure circumnavigator In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World by Danielle Clode Picador, $34.99 pb, 335 pp Biography Jeanne Barret, an obscure circumnavigator One of the frustrating things about being a historian is the number of times you are told by others that surely everything in your specialty must already have been ‘done’. After so many decades or centuries, what more could there possibly be to discover?
Notre-Dame: The soul of France
France Reviewed by Gemma Betros • Notre-Dame: The soul of France by Agnès Poirier Oneworld, $36.25 pb, 240 pp France Reviewed by Gemma Betros • French journalist Agnès Poirier has a flair for relating the saving of France’s artistic treasures. One of the most gripping chapters of her previous book, Left Bank: Art, passion and the rebirth of Paris, 1940–50 (2018), told the story of Jacques Jaujard, who skilfully evacuated the Louvre’s greatest works mere days before the outbreak of World War II.
Gemma Betros reviews 'The Existential Englishman: Paris among the artists' by Michael Peppiatt
I wanted to like this memoir very much, not least because the inside of the book jacket promises, with some originality, a ‘not-uncritical love letter to Paris’. People (myself included) have a tendency to wax rhapsodic about France’s capital, but anyone who has ever lived there for any length of time knows just how dispiriting the reality of daily life can be.
Gemma Betros reviews 'The Years' by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer
The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer Seven Stories Press, $19.95 pb, 237 pp, 9781609807870 The word indicible appears frequently in the work of French author Annie Ernaux. In English, it means ‘inexpressible’ or ‘unspeakable’. Yet saying the unsayable – or rather, exploring the crevice between what is discussed openly and the inexpressible within – is where Ernaux excels.
Gemma Betros reviews 'The Years' by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer
Biography The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer Seven Stories Press, $19.95 pb, 237 pp, 9781609807870 Biography The word indicible appears frequently in the work of French author Annie Ernaux. In English, it means ‘inexpressible’ or ‘unspeakable’. Yet saying the unsayable – or rather, exploring the crevice between what is discussed openly and the inexpressible within – is where Ernaux excels.
Gemma Betros reviews 'Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950' by Agnès Poirier
'A country that fails its purge is about to fail its renovation,’ warned French-Algerian writer Albert Camus in a January 1945 editorial. Camus’ ominous edict, issued in the weeks following the end of Germany’s occupation of France, encapsulates something of what Agnès Poirier is trying to say in this, her second book in English. The Occupation and its aftermath form the start of an exuberant tour of the cultural and intellectual life of 1940s Paris, centred on the French capital’s Left Bank.
Napoleon divorces Josephine
The future Empress of the French was born in Martinique in 1763 as Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, daughter of a minor aristocrat. She was known as Rose or Marie and it was Napoleon who called her Josephine. At 16 she was sent to France to be married to the Vicomte de Beauharnais. They had two children, but the marriage did not work and they separated. Beauharnais was executed during the Terror in 1794.
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