The Great Australian Plays: “The Front Room Boys” and New Wave Theatre
“Fucken boong”. With these words Australian theatre entered the swinging sixties – eight years...
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Australia
“The Secret River”: Colonial Oppression on Australian Stages
One way of looking at a story is as a mental suitcase that brings together a bunch of actions that...
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What It’s Like To Be A Theatre Director in Australia
For a theatre director, plays are like bulls: it doesn’t matter how fancy your cape work is, any...
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The Great Australian Plays: “A Cheery Soul” Is Really A Theatrical Monster
In 2004, Melbourne Theatre Company, where I worked at the time, asked me to write a short history...
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“Little Emperors” Brings China’s One-Child Policy to the Stage
China’s one-child policy officially ended in 2016. Little Emperors, currently showing at...
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Joyous, Comic and Grim: The Best New Indigenous Playwrights
“Yellamundie” is a Darug word for storyteller, and the name of a biennial play development...
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OzAsia Festival Brings A Global Perspective To Australia With Theatre And Dance
Sometimes the weather simply won’t cooperate. Between a state-wide blackout, monsoonal rain, and...
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Who Was Mary? And How Plausible is Colm Tóibín’s Reconstruction of Her?
Colm Tóibín’s play and the Booker-nominated novella The Testament of Mary aims to “demythologise”...
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Refuge and Refusal: Why Theatre About Asylum Seekers Matters
When, some eight or nine years ago, I began researching the responses of Australian and refugee...
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Heterosexual Dystopia in “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”
Bold and provocative, directed by Sarah Vickery.Thomas Ian Doyle’s latest work – The Upstairs...
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The Great Australian Plays: “The Torrents,” “The Doll” and The Critical Mass of Australian Drama
In 1955, two plays, The Torrents by Oriel Gray and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler,...
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The Great Australian Plays: Speaking ‘Orstyrlian’ in “Rusty Bugles”
Rusty Bugles is a comedy-drama by Sumner Locke Elliot, one of the many talented writers to abandon...
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What Are The Great Australian Plays? Part I
You could say that a canonical play is one where you’re the problem if you don’t like it. The...
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“Gonzo”: On Teenage Boys and Porn
Young men’s use of pornography has been the focus of considerable debate, if not anxiety and moral...
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The OzAsia Festival Is Young And Confident – Here Are the Shows to Watch
The formal launch of the OzAsia Festival’s visual arts program at the Adelaide Festival Centre...
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Sequins and Symphonies: How Opera Ran Away With the Circus
Circus has always shamelessly borrowed from other performance forms. It has coopted all types of...
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Absurdist, Poignant Slapstick in “En Avant, Marche!”
David Berthold’s 2016 Brisbane Festival aims to connect artists and audiences in ways that disrupt...
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“Seventeen” at Belvoir – A Brilliant Theatrical Event
Our experience of plays is always profoundly affected by how they end: comedy or tragedy, death or...
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“The Chat” Puts Audiences in The Hot Seat
As the ethics of punishment are debated in mainstream media, statistics, images and unanswerable...
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Playwriting In Australia
The first Australian National Playwrights Centre (ANPC) was founded in 1973 – the age of bongs,...
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