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...

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: 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!...

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: 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: 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: The Gift

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

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...

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 ...

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: 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...

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: 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...

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...

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...

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...