Thursday, September 22, 2011
In the past few years, adaptations of classic plays have become more the norm than otherwise in Australian innovative theatre. Two directors in particular wrenched opened the Pandora's box. …
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 12:01AMTuesday, September 20, 2011
I will be seeing very little of the Fringe Festival this year. This is because Life is getting in the way. To wit: the edits for my novel Black Spring (coming out late next year, but the lea…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:24PMThursday, September 15, 2011
The Australian Theatre Forum. Where to begin? For the past two days, I've been locked in a box with 260 theatre makers - performers, directors, designers, composers, writers, critics, arts f…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 08:55PMMonday, September 12, 2011
For four decades, Michael Leunig's savage and wistful universe has been one of the constants of Australian popular culture. His cartoons were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. Back in the 1…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:33PMSunday, September 11, 2011
NB: This review contains spoilers
"Shakespeare," says Jan Kott, "is truer than life. One can play him only literally." It might seem counter-intuitive to some, perhaps, …
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:14PMTuesday, August 30, 2011
"Complaining," said Rilke, almost a century ago. "The eternal vice of poets." But consider the poet in the 21st century! The digital age has amplified whingeing to a rema…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:23PMFriday, August 26, 2011
A quick heads up for tomorrow's Melbourne Writers Festival panel on independent theatre. I'll be chairing a discussion on our fertile independent scene with Declan Greene, Angus Cerini and A…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:02PMThursday, August 25, 2011
I was looking for a picture of my brain on the internet, but I couldn't find anything grotesque enough. Sorry everybody: especially to those young people at that excellent event, MUDFEST, wh…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:19PMWednesday, August 17, 2011
The notion of "authenticity" in art has whiskers all over it. Art, by definition, is artifice, mimicry, representation: at its most achieved, it can perhaps aspire to be authentica…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:25PMTuesday, August 16, 2011
Your Humble Blogger continues at a low ebb this week. As is probably clear to regular readers, Ms TN hasn't managed to control her wont to vastly overestimate her ability to do things, which…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 08:39PMMonday, August 8, 2011
I wish I could adequately explain the irrational joy that The Rabble's latest work, Special, invoked in me when I saw it last week. There is something in it of pure theatre, unafraid act, th…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 08:55PMSaturday, August 6, 2011
I've never seen a work by Pina Bausch. As with those of us who come too late, who miss the boat, who weren't there, my knowledge of her work with Wuppertal Tanztheater has been limited to th…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:47PMWednesday, August 3, 2011
The Melbourne Writers Festival, which opens later this month, is bearing down like some kind of benign leviathan. And this year there are a few events that might appeal to theatrenauts. Ther…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:37PMTuesday, August 2, 2011
We all know some variation or other of this feeling. You are alone, it is dark. You hear an almost inaudible sound, just on the edge of hearing, that you can't quite identify. Your body is s…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 04:40PMMonday, July 25, 2011
For the first ten minutes or so, I was completely transfixed by Matthew Lutton's theatrical extrapolation of Schubert's late song cycle, Die Winterreise. It is a beautiful idea: the juxtapos…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:48PMSunday, July 24, 2011
Back in another age, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a copygirl in the Finance section of that long-gone afternoon daily the Melbourne Herald, I found myself unexpectedly fascinate…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:38PMTuesday, July 19, 2011
Watching Rawcus's superb new production Small Odysseys was an oddly personal experience. For me, it was the psychological equivalent of that optical test in which, when a bright light is sho…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:43PMTuesday, July 12, 2011
Launches have their conventions: they are the events where those interests, state and corporate, who invest lavishly in an event get to stand in the spotlight and be thanked. And the Melbour…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 08:09PMMonday, July 11, 2011
If in art we are comparing a cat with another cat, or a flower with another flower, the artistic form as such is not constructed solely of the moment of cross-breeding; those are merely deto…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 12:20AMThursday, July 7, 2011
Right now, just after the winter solstice, Ms TN is struggling. The skies have been grey for too long, the news has been bleak for too long, and human beings have been stupid and destructive…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 10:15PMFriday, June 24, 2011
*Spoiler alert*In A Golem Story, Michael Kantor and Lally Katz reach into Judaeic folklore and mystic traditions, fashioning a work of theatre which is at once outstandingly beautiful and fr…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:58PMThursday, June 23, 2011
Last Wednesday, Lally Katz's A Golem Story and Robert Reid's The Joy of Text premiered at the Malthouse and the MTC. The same week, the Malthouse opened its remount of Declan Greene's 2010 h…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:46PMSunday, June 19, 2011
I'm a sucker for Shakespeare's comedies. They reveal his profound knowledge of the stage, and his pleasure in its vulgar tricks and conventions gives us some of the most sublimely funny scen…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:04PMThursday, June 16, 2011
Princess Dramas, now playing at Red Stitch, is the first play by Elfriede Jelinek ever to have been produced in Australia. And massive kudos to Red Stitch for finally giving us a chance to …
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 10:11PMI've often thought that the major weakness in Australian theatre is its writing. We have an astonishing design culture, an embarrassment of talented actors, and directors, young and establis…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:10PMFriday, June 10, 2011
*NB: Major spoilers after the fold*Deadpan irony is a perilous art. Australians are reflexively ironic, and can find themselves disconcerted when the irony doesn't carry, when a flip stateme…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:45PMThursday, June 2, 2011
A home is much more than a building. "Originally," says John Berger in his almost unbearably beautiful book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, "home meant the centre of…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 10:04PMTuesday, May 31, 2011
As some commenters have ruefully noted, TN has been on a lull for the past fortnight. I have a few reviews to write - and will, I hope, in the near future. This time I don't even have the ex…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:52PMSaturday, May 7, 2011
An apology and an explanation. As I said yesterday, I am in the lees of a foul cold: but the truth underneath is that, since the beginning of this year, my other lives have been more than us…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:23PMFriday, May 6, 2011
Those unfortunate souls who follow Ms TN on Twitter will be aware that this week she has been under the weather. "Crapulous" is the adjective that springs to mind: neither ill enou…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 08:46PMThursday, April 28, 2011
Consumerism depends on the frustration of desire. Unhappiness might be the most profitable emotion in first world society: it creates an ever-tightening spiral, the pursuit of happiness inev…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:53PM 
