IT’S midsummer in Australia and the Somewheres are fighting bushfires. Elsewhere the Anywheres are going to music and gender and arts festivals, and painting nasty signs for Invasion Day. Somewheres and Anywheres are names, suggested by British writer David Goodhart, to indicate the two sides of the great split that divides Western societies. On the […]

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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 about

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Philippe Lançon survived, just, the Islamist massacre in the office of Charlie Hedbo and has now written of his hard road to a recovery of sorts. Today, with news of another Christmas market massacre, his story is a timely reminder that West remains under attack regardless of media and officialdom's reluctance to name and counter the enemy within

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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

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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"

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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 dollar

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When Playwriting Australia (PWA) acknowledges the traditional custodians and pays respect to “elders past, present and future”, its play-acting words are giving thanks for smart offices on level three of a nice address in Sydney’s Rocks—paid for by us. Over the four-year period from 2017 to 2020 PWA will receive two million dollars from the […]

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All Australian plays are rubbish, apart from those which are underrated and underplayed. But which are which? The website australianplays.org, operated by the Australian Script Centre, promotes, publishes and sells play scripts. Funded by the Tasmanian, New South Wales and Commonwealth governments, it holds 2225 scripts by 909 playwrights. It’s a glossy treasure trove—or a […]

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Weather forecast: very hot, late storm. A revolution is coming. A civilisation is collapsing. Be afraid, be warned. We can’t stop it. We can’t hold back. It is going to happen. Go, read Chateaubriand. Be afraid for those coming after us. It’s mid-summer and hot. Usually, in Hobart, I remind our neighbour, watering his roses, […]

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Welcome to Theatre Street. The weather is fine today, and the year is twenty-something. Although you could be in Sydney or Melbourne, I’ve placed my fantasy street in the great Pacific city. Not long ago this was a dusty and decaying thoroughfare, not far from Central Station. Now, it’s a dynamic streetscape which houses half […]

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