In Which Ms TN Discourses At Length

KO: REVOLUTION. What takes place as indicated by Ko is believed in only after it has been accomplished. Hexagram 49, I Ching.It's no exa...

2010: or Why I Love Living In Melbourne

It's that time of year again. Mechanical Santas litter the pavements, cheering on the shopping with catatonic hohohos, and those of us w...

Review: The Nest

A fascinating phenomenon over the past few years has been the revival of naturalism as a theatrical force. For years, commentators divided A...

Collected Works benefit

Collected Works, under the proprietorship of Kris Hemensley, is one of the treasures of Melbourne. It is that rarest of businesses, a poetry...

Independent theatre

The Australian today publishes my whistle-stop and inevitably partial guide to Australian independent theatre. Feel free to note significant...

Review: Peer Gynt, Elektra, Creditors

The talk in the foyers of late has been that of scarred veterans swapping notes from the front-lines of culture. Never, say hardened theatre...

Holding post

Ms TN's brain has once again gone AWOL. I've released its description on Interpol, on the off chance that it's done something gl...

Interview: Lally Katz

Next year, Lally Katz is probably the most produced playwright in Australia (although Shakespeare might give her a run for her money). She h...

Art and its uses

I've a short speculation up at the Overland blog today which wonders about art, use and politics. All extremely difficult questions whic...

Review: A Woman in Berlin, Irony Is Not Enough, The Tell-Tale Heart

I saw three astonishing works of theatre last week, all created from texts not originally intended for the stage. One, A Woman in Berlin, is...

Fragmentary musing

I am sometimes puzzled by a disconnect between form and content. No, let's go further: I am baffled by how a perceived form can oblitera...

Review: The Animals & Children Took to the Streets, Electronic City, Songs for Nobodies

Some days, writing is about as much fun as flogging yourself with a wooden spoon. Different parts of the brain refuse to speak to each other...

Review: The Hollow, The Bedroom Project

Ms TN spent most of last week in her bathchair with smelling salts taped under her nose, which partly accounts for the belatedness of these ...

Enter Marion Potts - Malthouse 2011

Briefly: Marion Potts, the incoming artistic director at the Malthouse, announced her first season yesterday. And she's giving us a soli...

Ah, November...

One would think that, after more than a month of thespian festivities, Melbourne theatre should have collapsed, gorged with its own dizzy ar...

Briefs

* There's no shortage of new writing in November. In fact, Melbourne is so lousy with readings of new plays that there is absolutely no ...

Kitchen table interview: Daniel Keene

For the first time I can remember, Daniel Keene has two productions on at once in his home town. One, the comedy Life Without Me, opened las...

Helplessness, grief, agency: a personal note

This weekend, I spent two days at the Malthouse Theatre talking about the climate crisis. It was part of an event called Tipping Point Austr...

Melbourne Festival: The Wrap

After several thousand words and a couple of days ruminating, what else is there to say about MIAF 2010? There it was. Here we are. We'v...

MIAF diary #8: Seven Songs, Tomorrow, in a Year, An Anthology of Optimism

So, that was MIAF 2010, signing off last night with a huge star-studded Black Armband extravaganza in the Myer Music Bowl. The weather gods ...

MIAF Diary #7: Opening Night

Finally, in its last week, the Melbourne Festival has warmed up. Quite literally - there's no doubt that a couple of balmy nights help l...

MIAF Diary #6: Vertical Road

Death cultivates visibility...The image does not reflect reality, but rather, the spectacular end of all reality.To see, means to die; to wa...

MIAF Diary #5: Jack Charles v. The Crown, Adapting for Distortion / Haptic

Now I'm facing Melbourne Festival Week #3: and I confess that my feathers are a little bedraggled, my tail and whiskers a little less th...

MIAF Diary #4: The Beckett Trilogy

This inertia of things is enough to drive one literally insane.Molloy, Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett is famously one of the most recondite of...

MIAF Diary #3: Carnival of Mysteries, Come, Been and Gone, Thomas Adès and the Calder Quartet

Ms TN is still standing: but I was grateful for a couple of nights home early this week. I'm not complaining - don't get me wrong - ...

MIAF Diary #2: Intimacy, The Blue Dragon

In 2007, Raimondo and Adriano Cortese's company Ranters had an independent hit with their production Holiday, which saw a return season ...

MIAF Diary #1: Stifters Dinge, The Raft

Born in 1952, Heiner Goebbels is a difficult artist to categorise, although it's probably most accurate to call him a composer. He has w...

Just a quick note...

The first few days of the Melbourne Festival have been a time of maximum input, with no time for outputting (aside from Twitter, which exist...

Fringe: Intimate Exposure, The Event, Dances with Worms

Ms TN's second week of Fringe demonstrated her craft and guile in negotiating the program: I enjoyed all three shows. There were a coupl...

Launch speech: Keepers

It's unlikely to be published anywhere: so here is the celebratory speech I wrote for last night's launch of Philip Salom's new ...

Poetic asides

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of editing Cordite Poetry Magazine's Creative Commons issue. Now, for your further pleasure, t...

Quick hits

Sometimes a gal just has to do the bullet-point thang, even if I'm not quite sure how to get a bullet point on blogger and have to settl...

Marion Potts: Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture

Direct your browsers this instant to Marion Potts's robust and optimistic Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, delivered yesterday, which is ...

Fringe: The Arrival, Home?, The Endarkenment, Testimony

You can tell it's spring, because the ants are co-ordinating a spirited insurgency in the bathroom, and bare branches everywhere are bur...

Fringe review: Thyestes

Their flesh is heaving Inside me.Thyestes, Seneca, translated by Caryl Churchill. An idea - the antagonism of the two concepts Dionysian and...

And what is this blog about, Cameron?

Update: The article is online here. With thanks to Nicholas Pickard. (Now with crunchy comments! [Further update: sadly, it seems that three...

Australian theatre & nationalism

A while back, I teased out some of my thoughts on nationalism in Australian theatre into an essay, How Australian is it?, for the 200th edit...

Review: The City/Bare Witness

I'm loath to say this, for several reasons, but nevertheless: sometimes you have to point out the obvious. (In Ms TN's case, pointin...

The return of the amateur critic

Update: The Wheeler Centre has uploaded edited videos of two Critical Failure sessions - film and theatre - on its website.The ABC's opi...

Combing the Fringe...

Every September for the past five years, Ms TN has looked up from her desk to see the Melbourne Fringe Festival bearing down on her like an ...

Review: Twelfth Night, Mix Tape

Gentle breath of yours my sailsMust fill, or else my project fails,Which was to please...The Tempest, ShakespeareIt begins, as all imaginati...

Quick hit: Critical Failure

Those who missed Tuesday's panel on theatre criticism at the Wheeler Centre will be able to catch up with it next week, when all the Cri...

Holding note

Although she is, in essence, the most retiring of violets, Ms TN has been gadding about town as if gads are going out of fashion. My final g...

Melbourne Festival: The TN preview

This year's Melbourne Festival, Brett Sheehy's second, is a program that repays some attention. The more you look, the more exciting...

More dates

My diary is insane. The rollercoaster seems to be plunging right on until November: and then it's the end of 2010. Like, what happened? ...

Overland, MWF and stuff

I hope you've all ordered your copy of the 200th issue of Overland, due to be launched in a shower of bubbly at the Melbourne Writers Fe...

Review: The Trial, All About My Mother

Last week, as is our wont now and again, Ms TN and her alter egos spent some hours pondering what it is that most matters to me in art. Is t...

Review: This Kind of Ruckus

I've been meaning to catch up with version 1.0 for years. Under the guidance of David Williams - listed, I note uneasily, as the company...

Review briefs: Superheroes, 2 Dimensional Life of Her, Fraudulent Behaviour

I have been squinting at these unwritten reviews for a few days now, pondering my complete inability to write a legible paragraph. Why is it...

Cybec readings

One for your diary. The MTC's Cybec Readings, developed under the watchful eye of associate director Aidan Fennessy, offers an eye-catch...

Review: Sappho...in 9 fragments

As the poet Anne Carson points out, it was Sappho who first described eros as “bittersweet”. “No one who has been in love,” says Carson, “di...

More on Mills, and other stuff

The Wheeler Centre, aka the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, nicely asked me for another response to Jonathan Mills's lecture, so th...

Review: Dying City, Do Not Go Gentle...

Christopher Shinn is rightly lauded as one of the most powerful and accomplished playwrights now working in the US. Like his compatriot Will...

A matter of art: Henson and Mills

In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the...

Tracy Letts

My interview with Tracy Letts, author of August: Osage County, is in today's Australian.

Review: Measure for Measure, Human Interest Story

With All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and, sometimes, Hamlet, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is most often charact...

Stuff online

Recently I guest-edited the poetry for Cordite's Creative Commons issue. Today it goes live online, and it's well worth a browse. Mo...

Greetings, Earthlings!

Your long-lost blogger is circling back to the planet after a hiatus that was rather longer than planned. As you know, we moved house, which...

Review: Dead Man's Cell Phone

An overdose of whimsy can bring out the worst in a girl. Take the obsidian Dorothy Parker, celebrated critic of the Algonquin Round Table se...

Review: Maybe Forever

It’s astounding how little it takes to communicate human feeling. Watching Meg Stuart and Phillipp Gehmacher’s 2007 dance piece, Maybe Forev...

Moving house

Rather unexpectedly, the Croggon-Keene clan is upping stakes and moving. Always, of course, the risk of renting, but over the past 11 years ...

Review: The Threepenny Opera

Fame, so the proverb goes, is a calamity. To be sure, it's the kind of calamity that looks like a privilege, a disaster that masquerades...

More linketies

It occurs to me that in the past couple of months I've been doing more criticky stuff in the off-blog world than here, which perhaps acc...

Oz review: Brecht

Despite my best intentions - which lead, so the proverbs tell us, straight to hell - I am yet to tackle Brecht at the Malthouse. I will, gen...

Writings, of various kinds

I'm slightly surprised, given the heat the issue has generated, that there's been no response within our sea-girt shores to my ALR p...

Review: Next Wave: Bromance, The Folding Wife

For various reasons, I ended up seeing only three shows in Next Wave - the marvellous Hole in the Wall and the two I briefly discuss below. ...

Linkety links

The Australian Literary Review (published in today's Australian) today runs my piece on the controversy about whether plays are literatu...

Review: King Lear

If one is an actor, a bare stage must be the most perilous place in the world: it leaves nowhere to hide. In last year's STC production ...

Urgencies

My, it's June already. Like around 30 per cent of the Melburnian population, I've had a cold for more than three weeks. And Ms TN is...

Ewen Leslie

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Ewen Leslie, currently the driving force of the MTC's production of Richard III, for the Weekend Aus...

Quick hits

1. Ex-Melbourne and Red Stitch director Sam Strong has been appointed the new artistic director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre. Joanne Ersk...

Review: Moth, The Ugly One, Hole in the Wall

As readers will know, last week Ms TN suffered a knock-out blow in her long-running war with the Dreaded Lurgy, putting her on the benches. ...

Dear Theatrenauts

I seem to be suffering from something very like flu, which is putting the kybosh on both seeing and writing about the theatre. And at such a...

Running behind myself

Ms TN just realised that she has driven herself nose-first into a large furrow in the ground. In practical terms, this means that writing an...

Various stuff

Despite a certain personal discombobulation - finishing a novel will do that to a woman - Ms TN has been having a fine time at the theatre i...

Review: That Face

Polly Stenham's That Face - famously written when she was 19 - is most often compared to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - not least...

The Salon des Refusés

As TN readers will know, the judges of this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards declined to shortlist any plays, sparking a debate ...

Waiting for Godot

Today's Australian review of the touring production of Theatre Royal Haymarket's Waiting for Godot is now online. With apologies for...

A note of thanks

To the lovely readers who have kindly (and discreetly) emailed me to correct the typos in my last couple of reviews. Richard III set a typo ...

Review: Cageling

Few poets write of desire with such passionate delicacy as Federico García Lorca. Lyric, erotic and savage, his poems celebrate the anguish ...

Review: Richard III

The MTC's Richard III at last bears out the promise of the Sumner Theatre. Here is a show that is everything main stage theatre ought to...

[Title of Show]

My Australian review of [Title of Show], a recent Broadway musical now making its Australian debut at Theatre Works, is online. No, you read...

Malthouse Season 2

Briefly - a heads up for the Malthouse Season 2, which you can peruse online here. There's lots I'm anticipating in a season which i...

Monday report

Gad, what a weekend. Your faithful blogger has been, and continues to be, under the pump: Herakles and the Hydra ain't got nothing on me...

Review: Crime and Punishment

The Stork Theatre's production of Crime and Punishment (in fact, its entire oeuvre) is a reversal of the question that has recently so e...

The Grenade

I've not the time nor, I confess, the incentive, to do a long blog review of the MTC production of Tony McNamara's The Grenade, whic...

Review: Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman

Dario Fo makes people laugh. One would think this a harmless activity, except that in Fo's case, the laughter is allied to his revolutio...

Plays - second class literature?

A quick blurt, for those who think the artform that's inspired lacklustre talent like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Churchill, Beckett, Brecht, Ch...

It's Wednesday

And I realise I have yet to expatiate on the Malthouse production of Dario Fo's Elizabeth: Almost By Chance A Woman (except for the brie...

What literary award?

The eyebrow-lifter of the week is the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. In particular, the decision by the judges of the Play Award not to ...

Review: Fatboy

This review contains spoilers.In 2010, it's difficult to avoid a profound - even a paralysing - pessimism. Everywhere you look, human gr...

Review: PropagandA

But who are they, tell me, these vagrants, a littlemore fugitive even than us, in their springtimeso urgently wrung by one who - who pleases...

Review: My Stories, Your Emails

You might have noticed that Ms TN is pretending that the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is not happening. If the Melbourne Fringe s...

Reviews elsewhere

Let me remind you about John Bailey's mandatory Capital Idea blog - not least because the Hon. John, reviewer for the Sunday Age, gets t...

Because I should be writing my novel...

...I decided to do some ego-graphing. Different from, and hopefully more accurate than, the creative eco-graphing practised by Andrew Bolt a...

Review: Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin)

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this review contains the name of a deceased person.Many people will have first...

Why crrritics must have no taste

For your Monday morning rumination: a thought provoking post on criticism from Maladjusted. It syncs very well with my long-held view that...

Review: Triple Bill of Wild Delight, Little Mercy

The oft-asserted wisdom behind the categories "Fringe" and "Mainstream" runs something like this: the mainstream is main...

The Green Rooms (& some Airplay)

Ms TN is not a morning person. I was supposed to be at Footscray Hospital bright and early this a.m. so I could be injected with radioactive...

Review: Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise

If you haven't heard of Harry Kondoleon, as I hadn't before seeing this play, let me fill you in on my googling. Kondoleon blazed br...

Adelaide Fringe: Heroin(e) for Breakfast

If Britain is as fucked as playwright Philip Stokes claims it is - and there's little reason to disbelieve him - it's trailing some ...

Adelaide Fringe: True West, Bully

Last night's dip into the Adelaide Fringe was a testosterone-soaked adventure, packed with rivalrous brothers, bad fathers, bewildered o...

Adelaide Festival: Le Grand Macabre, Vs Macbeth

Note: there are spoilers in these reviewsMs TN is bereft of complaint (which is, as Rilke said, the abiding vice of poets). It's gloriou...

Adelaide Fringe: En Route, The Rap Guide to Evolution, My Name is Rachel Corrie

For reasons which now are mysterious to me, but which probably reside in a diabolical subconscious masochism, I decided to see three Adelaid...

Review: Furious Mattress

Furious Mattress is a vastly disconcerting experience. I walked out of it more than usually unsure what I thought. The last time I felt some...

Review: Madagascar

J.T. Rogers's play Madagascar made me think of American MFA programs. When I looked him up, it was no surprise to discover that he gradu...

Green Room Awards

The 2009 Green Room nominations were announced today. You can peruse the nominations - in music theatre, main stage theatre, independent, al...

Nothing at all to do with theatre

This morning, I heard that Bree died. She was 29 years old.Bree lived down the road, at the commission flats. I didn't know her very wel...

Review: Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper

Lloyd Beckmann Beekeeper, a particularly personal show devised by Tim Stitz and Kelly Somes, is suffused with an old-fashioned, home-made ch...

Yes, yes, yes...

Because I have a sadistic superego, I feel vaguely conscience-stricken by the couple of commenters making sad cheeping noises about my (rela...

One for Queenslanders

New York playwright Will Eno joins David Williamson and Michael Gow in Staged Lives: a conversation on theatre, writing and the line between...

Review: The Swimming Club

Hannie Rayson's new play, The Swimming Club, picks up the classic trope of middle-aged friends reuniting to relive their youth. Six peop...

Marion Potts new Malthouse AD

After months of fevered speculation, the Malthouse Theatre announced today that Marion Potts, currently Bell Shakespeare's associate art...

Le Mort de Theatre - again

According to Guy Rundle, theatre isn't just dying, it's dead. In a piece in today's Crikey in relation to e-books, he claims in ...

Theatre Forum

Your correspondent was most pleased today to receive her copies of international theatre journal Theatre Forum, a fab magazine focusing on i...

Happy Invasion Day

Happy Invasion Day 2010 from Fear of a Brown Planet on Vimeo.Courtesy Footscray Arts.

Review: The Drowsy Chaperone/Acts of Deceit

It's Australia Day today. As our national day of celebration, it acts as a post for all sorts of flags. Once, in more innocent times - o...

Review: 66a Church Road

Daniel Kitson - a shy, rather literary man with a stutter and a protective beard - is the most unlikely of stand-up comics. It isn't sur...

Festival season

My feature on what arts festivals mean in our culture is in today's Australian. It gave me a chance to do some happy reminiscing:These s...

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