Changing the Face of Australian Theatre

New Matilda, part 2.

‘Non-conventional casting’ continued…

I am swimming in the deep, deep waters of performativity and stage; that is, Butlerian performativity and Schechnerian stage. It is for the purposes of my thesis, and a very muddled place to be (not a place you’d pop over to straight before breakfast, say). But while wrestling with the questions of what it means [...]

Three perhaps not-so-obvious points on ‘Pornography’ (the play, not the genre)

I do need to preface this comment by noting I am writing it from behind the opaque screen of a 38°C fever, and that I saw Pornography as the swine flu was comfortably settling in. It was, however, a remarkable theatrical event, for many non-obvious reasons.

1st non-obvious reason: demonstrating that an artists’ festival is not [...]

RW: Peer Gynt

A sprawling dramatic poem, Peer Gynt careens freely between social verisimilitude and outrageous flights of fancy. In its psychological externalization, each troll is a momentarily irresistible girl, each nightmare a folktale monster. It was not intended for performance, and Ibsen joyously did away with reasonable staging demands: spanning 50 years, two continents, an obscene number of characters, changes of tone, pace and fabular focus, it is as unstageable as a play gets. But it was Heiner Muller who said that only dramatic writing that cannot be realised on stage is of any use for the theatre.

Realism

A post that slipped under my radar a near-month ago, Andrew Haydon in the Guardian theatre blog complains, with the characteristic spirit of advocacy, that mainstream Anglo-American theatre tradition remains absolutely married to the idea of literal-minded mimesis.
In itself this is not a new idea, but he relates it back to the political question of [...]

On accents and other forms of realism: a mini essay.

1. A few weeks ago, my review of Hoy Polloy’s production of Fin Kennedy’s How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found appeared on vibewire.net:
“Two of the things ostensibly most cherished in a work of art are battling throughout the Hoy Polloy's production of Fin Kennedy's How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. On [...]

The Chosen Vessel; unhappy.

15.xi.2007. The Petty Traffikers: The Chosen Vessel

Direction: Stewart Morritt. Cast: Chloe Armstrong, Joe Clements & Margot Knight. Design: Peter Mumford. Lighting design: Felicity Hoare. At Theatreworks, November 1-18.
The bush gothic may be the simplest way for the baffled settler to come to terms with this land, and seems to me to have remained the central [...]

Melburnalia; acerbic.

We can learn from Kevin Lynch’s study The Image of the City that the “alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) [are not capable of consciously processing or localizing] their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves [they are at the [...]

How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

How much theatrical naturalism is too much theatrical naturalism, asks Jana Perkovic, and wishes there were fewer Irish accents on stage.