Theatre
-
"On our opening night at La Mama, whilst getting ready 15 minutes before opening, I was suddenly invited to a smoking-ceremony about to get under way onstage. I refused, muttering something like, 'I don’t want to be part of that oogah-boogah.' I am a blasphemer, no doubt, having read too many Phantom comics as a kid"January 29, 2024
13 mins
-
A number of the Sydney Theatre Company's luvvies took a recent curtain call draped in kaffiyehs, presumably to support Hamas and spray contempt at the Zionist Entity. A subscribers' backlash led to instructions they must never do so again, which marks a definite change from 2008. That was when Daniel Keene's The Serpent's Teeth also stumbled onto Middle East turf and the only complaints concerned a memorably stupid productionDecember 1, 2023
12 mins
-
If the impresario is remembered these days, it is for his later career as a producer of 'Neighbours'. But before that he brought heresy to the proscenium arch with his popular and long-running Music Hall plays, which he wrote and produced. Unlike so many others then and now, he grasped the simple fact that theatre is about un-boredomNovember 10, 2019
11 mins
The latest
-
Progressive Melbourne playwrights have a brainwave moment and decide to contribute short performance texts inspired by May 18's election. These are published daily online, and the result? Crying trees, wailing authors, a dismal certainty about voters' ignorance and, just for the fun of it, a child burned at the stake
August 2, 2019
11 mins
-
The difference between the theatre of not-so-long-ago and now is that modern audiences don’t know what has been discarded and what has been added. What seemed youthful experimentation has aged into Alzheimer productions of the classics which have lost all sense and any sensibility.May 31, 2019
13 mins
-
Welcome to Melbourne, the corrupt City of Literature. The Victorian […]
April 1, 2019
11 mins
-
IT’S midsummer in Australia and the Somewheres are fighting bushfires. […]
February 28, 2019
12 mins
-
Our subsidised theatres do not read unsolicited play scripts and have set up layers of barriers to keep real writers away, favouring scripts word-processed by and for the ABC-Guardian-Fairfax Cultural Complex. Playwrights' agent Margaret “Peggy” Ramsay would have given them something to think aboutFebruary 17, 2019
10 mins
-
The back story to Andrew Lloyd Webber's autobiography is creativity and business. It’s a telling moment in the Phantom when the owners of the haunted theatre are reminded they must pay their resident ghost. An Australian spectre would have had to apply to the Australia Council
October 28, 2018
10 mins
-
No scribe in the stalls has ever quite matched the Melbourne actor's brief turn as a theatre reviewer for the long-departed Argus newspaper. A small taste: "Writhing onto the stage," he wrote of one production's dancers, they treated the audience to "the agonised twistings of a run-over cat"August 11, 2018
14 mins
-
In the culture wars our conservative governments are batting for, and paying, the other side. Though it always ends in their own masochistic humiliation, they never consider a cultural policy which would remove the Left's stranglehold, patronage and dominion over the taxpayers' arts dollarJune 17, 2018
15 mins
-
When Playwriting Australia (PWA) acknowledges the traditional custodians and pays […]
April 30, 2018
16 mins
