146 stories from Theatre Notes
The launch of an independent news organisation is a major event in Australia, where the fiercest debates about our media circle around the fact that we have the highest concentration of medi…
The Midsumma Festival occurs at an awkward time of year for Ms TN. Through January, I am usually cowering in a bunker, resolutely ignoring the explosions as the year's first press releases b…
One of the paradoxes of art is the uneasy legacy of success. As soon as a work is labelled a "classic", it becomes curiously invisible: it transforms into a monument, cobwebbed by …
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 the Anglo-Saxons it was always a man) to the swift flight of a…
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 chance of having heard of her: the work of interesting wo…
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 the way of the these things, I promptly came down with…
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 from Melbourne's thriving independent scene. Get thee…
George Hunka at Superfluities Redux (whom I'm sure you all read religiously) blogs on the recurrent death of criticism, and in particular on the argument that its death sentence is signed b…
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 gave us a pale, introspective youth; the 20th century an anim…
I see that Dr Peter West, retired university lecturer and social commentator, is in today's Age fulminating on the bad manners of Young People at the Opera and the Consequent Decline and Fal…
*Spoiler warnings*The end of the year is rushing up like a behemoth. Melbourne has its traditional means of signalling this milestone - widespread admissions of astonishment that Christmas i…
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 production which was so utterly wrong. It's wrong from the…
Recently quite a few theatre bloggers have been tracking their creative processes: George Hunka, for instance, is logging some of his thinking material as he writes a new play in his Elf Kin…
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 the late, great Midnight Oil once had it, the time…
During the recent Australian Theatre Forum, one of the Open Space groups worked on a response to the National Cultural Policy discussion paper. This diverse group consisted of people from al…
Curating an international arts festival, says Adelaide Festival artistic director Paul Grabowsky, isn't simply a matter of assembling a shopping list. And it's complicated. "With someth…
When Brett Sheehy, Melbourne Festival artistic director, launched his program earlier this year at a lavishly corporate event, he announced that the themes of this year's festival were "…
Some of the dance at this year's Melbourne Festival has been full-on sensory overload. Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother hit like a sledgehammer, an avalanche of sound and imagery that stru…
Watching Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler - the first of his works I've seen - was unexpectedly fascinating. Through directors such as Benedict Andrews, a stablemate of Osterme…
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 of Luke Smiles's electronic score, blindingly bright g…
La beauté, "Beauty is difficult, Yeats" said Aubrey Beardsleywhen Yeats asked why he drew horrorsor at least not Burne-Jonesand Beardsley knew he was dying and had tomake his hit quicklyHen…
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 that I had no idea what to expect last night when I sat d…
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 in Melbourne last night.
Much has been said about The Manganiyar Seduction, a stunning theatrical presentation of Rajasthni music, and no doubt I will simply add another bunch of superlatives. Indian director Royste…
One of the strongest aspects of this year's Melbourne Festival program is the local performance. I can remember a time when the under-developed local shows too often made an embarrassing con…
