Darryn King

Australians have a love affair with art, and with incredible galleries dotted throughout the country, it’s also one of the top reasons we travel interstate. Every year, our nation welcomes blockbuster international exhibitions, along with major showings of our most colourful and creative local talents.  Whether it’s contemporary Aboriginal art in Alice Springs, delicate glassworks in Wagga Wagga, topical portraits in Canberra or 21st-century Chinese art in Sydney, these are the best public galleries worth visiting in Australia.  RECOMMENDED: These are the 20 top tourist attractions in Australia.

John, playing the comic role of Falstaff in Henry 4 must be a relief after playing Lear and the Devil. Are you personally affected by taking on those darker roles?If you’re going to be serious about the darker roles, you’ve got to get in touch with that part of yourself. You’ve got to go to places you’d rather not go. When you’re younger, especially, you get far more intense about that – you really try to live the role. As you get older, you get more and more conscious that it is playing – you’re playing a role rather than living it. It’s a relief to realise that. When I did King Lear, though, I think I was far too intent on trying to live the role and experience those feelings. That was very defeating and very draining, and I felt a failure as a result of it. What about failure in the eyes of critics? Is it hard being in a show that hasn’t been received well?It’s amazing how actors come together and prevent each other from getting gloomy or downcast. A company’s resilience is very strong, and if it’s a good company they’ll overcome things like that. Does the audience ever simply not respond to the show?That does happen quite frequently – maybe once or twice a week. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s… Who knows what it is? But it’s never enough to disrupt the show. You just shrug it off. An audience is a very curious thing. It does have a personality of its own. If there’s one or two people in the audience who laugh at something, they can get the whole audience going. There’s