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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Navel gazing

In the past week or so, the Age has been running a series of opinion pieces on criticism that amount to a mini-forum. Check out The changing...

The trouble with Craven

The National Times - aka Fairfax's op-ed pages - yesterday hosted a Peter Craven polemic which purported to analyse "the trouble wi...

Response from Neil Pigot

On Monday, I pointed to Neil Pigot's recent Age op-ed as part of a global sweep of items of interest, making a couple of brief comments....

Monday morning rantaround

The Public Intellectual (PI, for the acronymic among you) debate continues with a Guardian blog post by Andrew Haydon, in which he robustly ...

Criticism in the age of PR spin

Stephanie Bunbury today reports on the film industry's hard ball tactics with critics and journalists in today's Age, remarking that...

Monday portmanteau

* I forgot yesterday to mention James Waites's continuing meditations on the Bacchanalian qualities in Barrie Kosky's work, includin...

But I don't wanna be a pirate!

Born Dancin' gets all Coleridge on the Critic Question. Dudes! Pirates! Sharks! Whales! Poetry! Is he totally taking the piss, or what?

Et cetera

You're probably all sick to death of last week's Meyrick/Woodhead/Croggon showdown but, as is the way of these things, it is prompti...

Craven on criticism

In today's Age, Peter Craven writes a sober and sensible analysis of this week's excitement, namely Julian Meyrick's attack on C...

The Birthday Party revisited

Director Julian Meyrick has answered reviews of his production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party with an essay which is posted today on ...

The guilty pleasures of schadenfreude

I've long thought that plays about writers ought to be banned. With rare exceptions (none of which, admittedly, I can think of at this p...