The Great War uses scale models to give a worm’s eye view of titanic violence. In Kings of War, by contrast, lethal events are viewed from the unsteady perspective of leaders.
- Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University
Memorial brings Alice Oswald’s poetic retelling of the Iliad to the stage, with its furious indictment of war and its aftermath.
Robert Merritt, author of The Cake Man, grew up on the Erambie Mission at Cowra. His play captures the grinding poverty and emotional paralysis of the mission experience.
David Williamson and Jack Hibberd tower over Australian drama. Williamson’s The Department and Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination both showcase the strange yet compelling detachment of these playwrights’ visions.
The plan is there is no plan. On climate change, immigration, energy, marriage equality – pick an area – the federal government displays policy desuetude and political exhaustion. Around the world, the…
A new approach to arts advocacy and research could be the breath of fresh air the sector needs - or just more of the same.
This year Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre celebrates its 50th year of operation. In an interview for the company’s 20th anniversary, the founding director Betty Burstall said: The basic thing is the money…
It’s a strange thing when the re-entry of genuine choice into political contests is framed as “anti-politics”. It feels more historically accurate, and logical, to see it the opposite way. For the past…
Fairfax’s plans to reduce arts coverage as part of 125 jobs to go put Australia’s cultural enterprise in jeopardy.
No other Australian playwright has mined their own life as much as Dorothy Hewett. In this expressionist drama, she depicts a girl of yearning heart, looking for love and hungry for life.
An oft-occurring phrase in Peter Temple’s award-willing crime novel, Truth, is “moving on”. Characters say it when they want to change the subject, or there doesn’t seem much more to say about a subject…
This year has got off to an awful start. Thank God for the Adelaide Festival, a blaze of hope, skill and fun. Here are our critics’ highlights of a beautifully crafted program.
Every part of this production - staged outdoors in a quarry - shows evidence of the highest degree of collaboration and the greatest subtlety of decision.
It’s one thing to read Irvine Welsh’s grim tale of 1980s Scotland - it’s another to see it happen three feet away from you.
The plays of Alex Buzo captured the spirit of rebellion of a new generation of theatre artists.
An early review of Patrick White’s A Cheery Soul said it ‘upset everybody who saw it’. But this extraordinary play, once a victim of 60s cultural cringe, marked a turning point in Australian theatre.
In 1955 two plays – The Torrents and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll – burst into Australian theatre. Funny and tragic in deeply Australian ways, they marked a new horizon of creative possibility.
The best Australian play ever written is revolutionary in its treatment of plot, character and language. It has a weary, sardonic perspective on war and an unheroic worldview.
The idea of a ‘canon’ changes over time and despite its elitist overtones, identifying one can be both illuminating and fun. In a new series, we nominate the best of Australian drama.
Recently I got told this joke. Two economists are having lunch. One of them has to make a decision about changing jobs, moving cities, disrupting his family and so on. What should he do, he asks the other…
The organisation Senator George Brandis described as having an “iron wall” around it, is refreshing its sentinels. This week’s announcement of four new appointments to the Australia Council Board represents…
Modern society has become addicted to ratings and league tables. But a new scorecard, which aims to give ‘good art’ a numerical ranking, is utterly wrong-headed.
In creativity, skill and daring, the productions on offer embodied an energy and imagination comparable to, and at times exceeding, anything prestigious European-focused international festivals might present.
In one of those abyssal silences that punctuate official Thinkfests when artists have to come up with new policy ideas that don’t involve asking governments for more money, I once facetiously suggested…
The first Australian National Playwrights Centre (ANPC) was founded in 1973 – the age of bongs, thongs and social wrongs. Australian drama was by then well into its Biggest Renaissance Ever. The Pram Factory…
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