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...

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...

Mainstage explorations

Ms TN was intending to be at this morning's launch of the Melbourne Theatre Company's Lawler Studio Season, an event I was anticipat...

Reviews: Gatz, Clickity Clack & Aoroi, The Wonderful World of Dissocia

At first blush, the idea of reading the entire text of The Great Gatsby on stage seems intriguing. Rather than approaching F. Scott Fitzgera...

Review: Realism, Travesties

Life, as you may have noticed, sometimes has a way of behaving as if there is a grand (or at least modestly intentional) design, as if behin...

STC does Churchill

The Sydney Theatre Company is presenting a reading of Caryl Churchill's controversial short play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza....

Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

If criticism were simply a matter of ticking boxes, it might be safely assumed that I would hate The Year of Magical Thinking. It's a 90...

Review: The War of the Roses

History is the discourse of power Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended Here's a good world the while! Why, who's so gross That ...

Smoke, war and Mudd

Ms TN flew back into the smoke haze of Victoria yesterday afternoon. It was all a bit spooky, peering out from my little metal tube 38,000 f...

Notes on The Serpent's Teeth

The Serpent's Teeth: Citizens and Soldiers, by Daniel Keene, directed by Pamela Rabe and Tim Maddock. Set design by Robert Cousins, cost...

Review: The Season at Sarsaparilla

The Season at Sarsaparilla by Patrick White, directed by Benedict Andrews. Design by Robert Cousins, costumes by Alice Babidge, lighting by ...

That was the year that was

I don't know what happened to 2007. One moment it was shining before me, bright with everything that new years are supposed to be bright...

A series of digressions

Little Alison is still in reset mode. On Wednesday night she saw Lucy Guerin's Aether, a work of exquisite complexity and beauty, but ca...

STC saga #354

Boy, they like a good feeding frenzy up in Sydney. Nicholas Pickard is doing a good job of logging the controversy. Meanwhile, the latest ST...

Mopping the blood

So much for bloggers being scummy scandal-mongers only interested in drawing blood. In Sydney, Nicholas Pickard is scornful of the Fairfax s...

Moody Moody

...while we're on the subject of State theatre companies, actor Colin Moody is in the Age today tearing strips off the STC. Moody's ...

Along the grape vine...

...the word is that MTC associate director Julian Meyrick has resigned. And, according to several sources, he's resigned not in sorrow b...

Woolf x Three

So here's why I've been flying along the Australian coastline like a confused fruitbat. From today's Australian, your peripateti...

Hot conversations

Update: Lyn Gardner at the Guardian weighs in on the critic/blogger question with a typically thoughtful post which claims that blogs have g...

Sunday sermon

For the past few days TN has been a dull bunny indeed. I lay prostrate on my chaise lounge feeling sorry for myself and canceled all my thea...