146 stories from Theatre Notes
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…
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 …
I'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…
*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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Your faithful correspondent has been somewhat scattered of late, like a barrel of popcorn given a hefty thump. I have excuses, with which I won't bore you; suffice to say that recently my ot…
Things might have been quiet on TN (aside from the shenanigans on the Baal comment thread) but that doesn't mean that Ms TN has been idle. No, indeed: life in all its glorious variety has be…
I gave this talk on Monday at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane as part of the Low-Fi Forum, organised by Arts Queensland. "Amateur" is an interesting word. It usuall…
Baal, pagan Lord of Heaven, god of rain and fertility. Baal, the first king of the Christian Hell, best known to us as Beelzebub. Milton's Baalim, one of those evilly ambiguous demons who, &…
Watching the development of theatre companies is a fascinating business. They are organisms subject to all the travails of being alive: growth, change, decay, death and renewal. They are net…
* It's all over US newspapers, but I can't seem to find it in any local sheets, at least online: former MIAF director Kristy Edmunds has landed a plum job at UCLA as artistic director of its…
Finally - the last of my responses to Dance Massive, which, such is the pace of life around these here parts, feels in the remote past already, although it only closed a few days ago. I mana…
Last week Ms TN took a few days off to lounge about in the fleshpots of Sydney. And lo, it was good, although the perilous aspect of taking a short holiday is that it makes you understand ho…
I saw three fascinating performances last week: two Dance Massive works (BalletLab's Amplification and Gideon Obarzanek's one-man piece Faker) and, in Sydney, Simon Stone's astonishing adapt…
Less, so the conventional wisdom goes, is more. Like most truisms it isn't always true, but it's a handy rule of thumb that Narelle Benjamin might have heeded when creating In Glass, a multi…
Dance Massive is now in full swing, offering the kind of fare that means I am constantly kicking myself (an interesting athletic feat) for not seeing everything on the program. Altogether, I…
You know, I thought that Melbourne was a small city, just the right size for a cultural grasshopper like Ms TN. Unlike the seething metropolises of London or Paris, it seemed to me that in M…
