Tuesday, February 14, 2012
This really is from the archives. I was looking for something else when I stumbled across this piece, which I have no recollection of writing. It was in a folder that dates from when I was W…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 05:51PMMonday, February 13, 2012
Ever since the Atreides clan established the dramatic template for dysfunctional relationships, the theatre has been a burning glass in which the psychoses of everyday life are focused to a …
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:59PMMonday, February 6, 2012
The launch of an independent news organisation is a major event in Australia, where the fiercest debates about our media circle around the fact that we have the highest concentration of medi…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 12:19AMWednesday, February 1, 2012
The Midsumma Festival occurs at an awkward time of year for Ms TN. Through January, I am usually cowering in a bunker, resolutely ignoring the explosions as the year's first press releases b…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 09:16PMMonday, January 23, 2012
One of the paradoxes of art is the uneasy legacy of success. As soon as a work is labelled a "classic", it becomes curiously invisible: it transforms into a monument, cobwebbed by …
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:21PMThursday, December 29, 2011
Was that 2011? I'm thinking of the Venerable Bede's story, in which one of King Edwin's thanes compares the life of a man (with the Anglo-Saxons it was always a man) to the swift flight of a…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:08PMWednesday, December 7, 2011
It's tempting to consider what Mary MacLane's life might have been, had she been born male. For one thing, I might have had a better chance of having heard of her: the work of interesting wo…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:03PMMonday, December 5, 2011
The great holiday guillotine has now slammed down across Ms TN's diary, and so last week I saw my last shows for the year. And then, in the way of the these things, I promptly came down with…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 05:10PMThursday, December 1, 2011
Ms TN seems unable to get her sentences together today, so let me briefly flag a couple of theatrical events that opened this week, both from Melbourne's thriving independent scene. Get thee…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:21PMMonday, November 28, 2011
George Hunka at Superfluities Redux (whom I'm sure you all read religiously) blogs on the recurrent death of criticism, and in particular on the argument that its death sentence is signed b…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 04:45PMSunday, November 27, 2011
It's proverbial that there is a Hamlet for every century. As Jan Kott says, it's a play that absorbs its times. The Romantic era gave us a pale, introspective youth; the 20th century an anim…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:18PMTuesday, November 22, 2011
I see that Dr Peter West, retired university lecturer and social commentator, is in today's Age fulminating on the bad manners of Young People at the Opera and the Consequent Decline and Fal…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:18PMMonday, November 21, 2011
*Spoiler warnings*The end of the year is rushing up like a behemoth. Melbourne has its traditional means of signalling this milestone - widespread admissions of astonishment that Christmas i…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:39PMMonday, November 14, 2011
I walked out of the opening night of Lally Katz's new play Return To Earth with my stomach in a knot. Readers, I have seldom seen a production which was so utterly wrong. It's wrong from the…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 05:48PMFriday, November 11, 2011
Recently quite a few theatre bloggers have been tracking their creative processes: George Hunka, for instance, is logging some of his thinking material as he writes a new play in his Elf Kin…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 08:15PMSaturday, October 29, 2011
Ms TN been making sad little meep noises all year about the increasing necessity to pull back on the blog and focus on my own work. Now, as the late, great Midnight Oil once had it, the time…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:51PMFriday, October 28, 2011
During the recent Australian Theatre Forum, one of the Open Space groups worked on a response to the National Cultural Policy discussion paper. This diverse group consisted of people from al…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 04:46AMThursday, October 27, 2011
Curating an international arts festival, says Adelaide Festival artistic director Paul Grabowsky, isn't simply a matter of assembling a shopping list. And it's complicated. "With someth…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:01PMSunday, October 23, 2011
When Brett Sheehy, Melbourne Festival artistic director, launched his program earlier this year at a lavishly corporate event, he announced that the themes of this year's festival were "…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 05:56PMFriday, October 21, 2011
Some of the dance at this year's Melbourne Festival has been full-on sensory overload. Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother hit like a sledgehammer, an avalanche of sound and imagery that stru…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:17PMWednesday, October 19, 2011
Watching Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler - the first of his works I've seen - was unexpectedly fascinating. Through directors such as Benedict Andrews, a stablemate of Osterme…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:34PMFriday, October 14, 2011
Byron Perry's new dance work Double Think opens in complete darkness in the vast space of the North Melbourne Town Hall. To the rhythms of Luke Smiles's electronic score, blindingly bright g…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 05:31PMThursday, October 13, 2011
La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsleywhen Yeats asked why he drew horrorsor at least not Burne-Jonesand Beardsley knew he was dying and had tomake his hit quickl…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 05:58PMWednesday, October 12, 2011
When Hofesh Shechter debuted here during Brett Sheehy's first Melbourne Festival, I was in the UK and missed it. So it's fair to say that I had no idea what to expect last night when I sat d…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:10PMTuesday, October 11, 2011
A pointer to my review of New York Theatre Workshop's Aftermath, which I saw at the Perth Festival earlier this year, and which opened in Melbourne last night.
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:49PMMonday, October 10, 2011
Much has been said about The Manganiyar Seduction, a stunning theatrical presentation of Rajasthni music, and no doubt I will simply add another bunch of superlatives. Indian director Royste…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:45PMSunday, October 9, 2011
One of the strongest aspects of this year's Melbourne Festival program is the local performance. I can remember a time when the under-developed local shows too often made an embarrassing con…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 07:58PMThursday, October 6, 2011
I've been dithering over this post for days, trying to find a way in to writing about this extraordinary show. As with Back to Back's Food Court, which remains one of the most compelling exp…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 06:59PMTuesday, October 4, 2011
Your faithful blogger has been shanghaied by the day job lately, dealing with an editing deadline for my forthcoming novel. (Forthcoming Christmas 2012, that is - lead times are long in the …
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 05:56PMThursday, September 22, 2011
Bangarra Dance Theatre's Belong demonstrates, once again, why Bangarra is one of our leading dance companies (and why it has such a huge international reputation). It consists of two dances:…
SOURCE: Theatre Notes at 12:13AMIn 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 12:01AM 
