Exit 2011

Was that 2011? I'm thinking of the Venerable Bede's story, in which one of King Edwin's thanes compares the life of a man (with ...

Review: The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself

It's tempting to consider what Mary MacLane's life might have been, had she been born male. For one thing, I might have had a better...

Review: The Economist, Cherry Cherry

The great holiday guillotine has now slammed down across Ms TN's diary, and so last week I saw my last shows for the year. And then, in ...

Review preview

Ms TN seems unable to get her sentences together today, so let me briefly flag a couple of theatrical events that opened this week, both fro...

Bits and bobs

George Hunka at Superfluities Redux (whom I'm sure you all read religiously) blogs on the recurrent death of criticism, and in particula...

Review: Ophelia Doesn't Live Here Anymore

It's proverbial that there is a Hamlet for every century. As Jan Kott says, it's a play that absorbs its times. The Romantic era gav...

Ms A's Guide To Theatre Etiquette

I see that Dr Peter West, retired university lecturer and social commentator, is in today's Age fulminating on the bad manners of Young ...

Review: Little Match Girl, The Importance of Being Earnest

*Spoiler warnings*The end of the year is rushing up like a charging rhino. Melbourne theatre has its traditional means of signalling this mi...

Review: Return To Earth

I walked out of the opening night of Lally Katz's new play Return To Earth with my stomach in a knot. Readers, I have seldom seen a prod...

Shop talk

Recently quite a few theatre bloggers have been tracking their creative processes: George Hunka, for instance, is logging some of his thinki...

Away from my desk: and then back again

Ms TN been making sad little meep noises all year about the increasing necessity to pull back on the blog and focus on my own work. Now, as ...

NCP preambling

During the recent Australian Theatre Forum, one of the Open Space groups worked on a response to the National Cultural Policy discussion pap...

Interview: Paul Grabowsky

Curating an international arts festival, says Adelaide Festival artistic director Paul Grabowsky, isn't simply a matter of assembling a ...

Art and revolution

When Brett Sheehy, Melbourne Festival artistic director, launched his program earlier this year at a lavishly corporate event, he announced ...

Melbourne Festival review: Aviary

Some of the dance at this year's Melbourne Festival has been full-on sensory overload. Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother hit like a...

Melbourne Festival review: Hedda Gabler, The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane

Watching Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler - the first of his works I've seen - was unexpectedly fascinating. Through d...

Melbourne Festival review: Double Think, Journeys of Love and More Love

Byron Perry's new dance work Double Think opens in complete darkness in the vast space of the North Melbourne Town Hall. To the rhythms ...

Melbourne Festival review: Whiteley's Incredible Blue, Foley

La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsleywhen Yeats asked why he drew horrorsor at least not Burne-Jonesand Beardsley kn...

Melbourne Festival review: Political Mother, The Magic Flute

When Hofesh Shechter debuted here during Brett Sheehy's first Melbourne Festival, I was in the UK and missed it. So it's fair to say...

Melbourne Festival: Aftermath

A pointer to my review of New York Theatre Workshop's Aftermath, which I saw at the Perth Festival earlier this year, and which opened i...

Melbourne Festival review: The Manganiyar Seduction, Rhinoceros in Love

Much has been said about The Manganiyar Seduction, a stunning theatrical presentation of Rajasthani music, and no doubt I will simply add an...

Melbourne Festival review: Assembly

One of the strongest aspects of this year's Melbourne Festival program is the local performance. I can remember a time when under-develo...

Melbourne Festival review: Ganesh Versus The Third Reich

I've been dithering over this post for days, trying to find a way in to writing about this extraordinary show. As with Back to Back'...

Melbourne Festival review: Clybourne Park, Half-Real

Your faithful blogger has been shanghaied by the day job lately, dealing with an editing deadline for my forthcoming novel. (Forthcoming Chr...

Review: Belong

Bangarra Dance Theatre's Belong demonstrates, once again, why Bangarra is one of our leading dance companies (and why it has such a huge...

Review: The Dollhouse

In the past few years, adaptations of classic plays have become more the norm than otherwise in Australian innovative theatre. Two directors...

A note about the Fringe

I will be seeing very little of the Fringe Festival this year. This is because Life is getting in the way. To wit: the edits for my novel Bl...

Australian Theatre Forum

The Australian Theatre Forum. Where to begin? For the past two days, I've been locked in a box with 260 theatre makers - performers, dir...

Review: Look Right Through Me

For four decades, Michael Leunig's savage and wistful universe has been one of the constants of Australian popular culture. His cartoons...

Review: Julius Caesar

NB: This review contains spoilers "Shakespeare," says Jan Kott, "is truer than life. One can play him only literally." I...

Review: Circle Mirror Transformation, It Sounds Silly, Interface

"Complaining," said Rilke, almost a century ago. "The eternal vice of poets." But consider the poet in the 21st century!...

Independent theatre

A quick heads up for tomorrow's Melbourne Writers Festival panel on independent theatre. I'll be chairing a discussion on our fertil...

Sorry, everybody

I was looking for a picture of my brain on the internet, but I couldn't find anything grotesque enough. Sorry everybody: especially to t...

Review: Namatjira, Rising Water

The notion of "authenticity" in art has whiskers all over it. Art, by definition, is artifice, mimicry, representation: at its mos...

Holding note

Your Humble Blogger continues at a low ebb this week. As is probably clear to regular readers, Ms TN hasn't managed to control her wont ...

Review: Special, Silent Disco

I wish I could adequately explain the irrational joy that The Rabble's latest work, Special, invoked in me when I saw it last week. Ther...

Review: Pina

I've never seen a work by Pina Bausch. As with those of us who come too late, who miss the boat, who weren't there, my knowledge of ...

Melbourne Writers Festival diary dates

The Melbourne Writers Festival, which opens later this month, is bearing down like some kind of benign leviathan. And this year there are a ...

Review: Pin Drop, Observe the Sons of Ulster

We all know some variation or other of this feeling. You are alone, it is dark. You hear an almost inaudible sound, just on the edge of hear...

Review: Die Winterreise, Undine

For the first ten minutes or so, I was completely transfixed by Matthew Lutton's theatrical extrapolation of Schubert's late song cy...

Review: Hamlet

Back in another age, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a copygirl in the Finance section of that long-gone afternoon daily the Melbo...

Review: Small Odysseys

Watching Rawcus's superb new production Small Odysseys was an oddly personal experience. For me, it was the psychological equivalent of ...

Melbourne Festival: here we go

Launches have their conventions: they are the events where those interests, state and corporate, who invest lavishly in an event get to stan...

Form, content, feeling, perception, knowledge

If in art we are comparing a cat with another cat, or a flower with another flower, the artistic form as such is not constructed solely of t...

Review: The Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne

Right now, just after the winter solstice, Ms TN is struggling. The skies have been grey for too long, the news has been bleak for too long,...

Review: A Golem Story

*Spoiler alert*In A Golem Story, Michael Kantor and Lally Katz reach into Judaeic folklore and mystic traditions, fashioning a work of theat...

Review: Moth, The Joy of Text

Last Wednesday, Lally Katz's A Golem Story and Robert Reid's The Joy of Text premiered at the Malthouse and the MTC. The same week, ...

Briefs: Much Ado About Nothing, Crossed

I'm a sucker for Shakespeare's comedies. They reveal his profound knowledge of the stage, and his pleasure in its vulgar tricks and ...

Review: Princess Dramas

Princess Dramas, now playing at Red Stitch, is the first play by Elfriede Jelinek ever to have been produced in Australia. And massive kudo...

A divagation

I've often thought that the major weakness in Australian theatre is its writing. We have an astonishing design culture, an embarrassment...

Review: The Gift

*NB: Major spoilers after the fold*Deadpan irony is a perilous art. Australians are reflexively ironic, and can find themselves disconcerted...

Review: Dwelling Structure, Animal, Inside a Mime's Compact

A home is much more than a building. "Originally," says John Berger in his almost unbearably beautiful book And Our Faces, My Hear...

Back in ten mins

As some commenters have ruefully noted, TN has been on a lull for the past fortnight. I have a few reviews to write - and will, I hope, in t...

Review: Random, The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later, Next to Normal

An apology and an explanation. As I said yesterday, I am in the lees of a foul cold: but the truth underneath is that, since the beginning o...

Catch up

Those unfortunate souls who follow Ms TN on Twitter will be aware that this week she has been under the weather. "Crapulous" is th...

Review: Porn.Cake

Consumerism depends on the frustration of desire. Unhappiness might be the most profitable emotion in first world society: it creates an eve...

Briefs: Howie the Rookie, Hypatia II, In The Next Room

Your faithful correspondent has been somewhat scattered of late, like a barrel of popcorn given a hefty thump. I have excuses, with which I ...

Advertisements for myself

Things might have been quiet on TN (aside from the shenanigans on the Baal comment thread) but that doesn't mean that Ms TN has been idl...

The Rise of the Amateur

I gave this talk on Monday at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane as part of the Low-Fi Forum, organised by Arts Queen...

Review: Baal

Baal, pagan Lord of Heaven, god of rain and fertility. Baal, the first king of the Christian Hell, best known to us as Beelzebub. Milton...

Review: Delectable Shelter, Minotaur

Watching the development of theatre companies is a fascinating business. They are organisms subject to all the travails of being alive: grow...

Newsy bits

* It's all over US newspapers, but I can't seem to find it in any local sheets, at least online: former MIAF director Kristy Edmunds...

Review: Amplification, Faker

Finally - the last of my responses to Dance Massive, which, such is the pace of life around these here parts, feels in the remote past alrea...

Review: The Wild Duck

Last week Ms TN took a few days off to lounge about in the fleshpots of Sydney. And lo, it was good, although the perilous aspect of taking ...

Holding note

I saw three fascinating performances last week: two Dance Massive works (BalletLab's Amplification and Gideon Obarzanek's one-man pi...

Briefs: In Glass, These Are The Isolate

Less, so the conventional wisdom goes, is more. Like most truisms it isn't always true, but it's a handy rule of thumb that Narelle ...

Dance Massive: Sunstruck, NOWNOWNOW

Dance Massive is now in full swing, offering the kind of fare that means I am constantly kicking myself (an interesting athletic feat) for n...

Dance Massive: Connected

You know, I thought that Melbourne was a small city, just the right size for a cultural grasshopper like Ms TN. Unlike the seething metropol...

Divertissement

Ms TN has been having one of those curiously pointless fortnights that are the special purgatory of writers. Today, as I was attempting to g...

Review: The End, The Dream Life of Butterflies

The catastrophe of the body is never far away in Samuel Beckett's writing. Mortal, decaying, risible, smelly, full of inconvenient humou...

Well, how about that

Quick pointer this morning to Peter Craven's latest peroration on the Evils of Postmodernity in this morning's Age. Which gives me a...

Brief: The Wau Wau Sisters' Last Supper

The Famous Spiegeltent is back in its cosy niche in the Victorian Arts Centre forecourt, lighting up the grey environs with a pleasurable se...

Perth Festival: Trust, Aftermath

Ms TN is now back at her desk, dazed and bizarrely jetlagged after a mega-packed week in Perth. With some cunning scheduling, I managed to s...

Perth Festival: My Bicycle Loves You, Waltzing the Wilarra

Ms TN is not normally in the business of doling out writing tips, of which there is a sufficient plenitude online: but here's one. If ev...

Perth Festival: Out Of Context - For Pina, Martha Wainwright

On Sunday afternoon, I saw les ballets C de la B's performance of Out Of Context - For Pina at the stunning new Heath Ledger Theatre, a ...

Perth Festival: Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, The Red Shoes

Sometimes there's an unexpected serendipity to picking festival shows. So it was on Saturday, when your humble correspondent landed in P...

David Williamson and the Never Ending Story

Yes, I know; but sometimes a gel has to do what a gel has to do. Today Ms TN has a piece on the ABC's website The Drum about David Willi...

Perth Festival

Ms TN is up at this ungodly hour on a Saturday morning because she is imminently flying to the other end of the continent. I'll be there...

Review: 'Tis Pity She's A Whore

It's unsurprising that the 20th century saw a renewal of interest in the Jacobean tragedies. Aside from their unapologetic theatricality...

Review: A Behanding in Spokane, No-Show

First, an apology of sorts: Ms TN is wearing another couple of hats at present, and has only so much forehead where they can fit. Worse, one...

Review: Ruben Guthrie, Skin Tight

Yes, there is life after David Williamson. It must be said that lately the man has been hard to ignore: even John Bailey found himself addin...

Review: Song of the Bleeding Throat

On a mild summer evening in the ivy-clad courtyard of The Eleventh Hour's headquarters in Fitzroy, it's not difficult to think that ...

Review: Don Parties On

Every time David Williamson writes a new play, the Australian theatre world launches into one of its favourite games. It goes like this.Ther...