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: 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...

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: 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: Namatjira, Rising Water

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

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: 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, ...

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...

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: 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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 ...