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 there one quality, we wondered, by which I gauge how much a work matters to me, one value by which we measure the rest? Yes, I answered myself, there is. What’s more, for all the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written here and elsewhere, I have never
Archives for “malthouse”
As the poet Anne Carson points out, it was Sappho who first described eros as “bittersweet”. “No one who has been in love,” says Carson, “disputes her”. Desire is, after all, fraught with paradox: it is the zenith of human bliss, but its annihilating power destroys the illusion of human autonomy. As Sappho describes in her most famous fragment (here in Carson's translation), it can seem like
With All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and, sometimes, Hamlet, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is most often characterised as one of his "problem plays". This is an anachronistic label, placing Measure for Measure in the context of an early 20th century theatre conditioned by the socially-conscious plays of Shaw and Ibsen. But that doesn't mean that it's not a problem.It's perhaps
It’s astounding how little it takes to communicate human feeling. Watching Meg Stuart and Phillipp Gehmacher’s 2007 dance piece, Maybe Forever, I couldn’t help reflecting how few Australian artists have the courage to do almost nothing.Meg Stuart is an American-born choreographer and dancer who moved to Brussels in 1994. There she formed her company Damaged Goods, and became a leading figure in
Fame, so the proverb goes, is a calamity. To be sure, it's the kind of calamity that looks like a privilege, a disaster that masquerades as respect. But consider what happens when perhaps the greatest calamity of all befalls a writer and he turns into an adjective. A lifetime of work - diverse, idiosyncratic, speculative, contradictory, above all contingent - freezes into a single epithet. The
As readers will know, last week Ms TN suffered a knock-out blow in her long-running war with the Dreaded Lurgy, putting her on the benches. There she has been grinding her teeth and annoying her neighbours, like the nameless anti-hero of Notes From Underground. In the interests of social amity, it's probably time I got my personae under control and started work again. So here, on tottering feet,
Despite a certain personal discombobulation - finishing a novel will do that to a woman - Ms TN has been having a fine time at the theatre in the past week. And hearing of much more that I'm not seeing, what with the Next Wave Festival flinging open its doors to what many people are saying is a very high quality program that is practically compulsory for theatre nerds. Crazy times, guys.Last week
Briefly - a heads up for the Malthouse Season 2, which you can peruse online here. There's lots I'm anticipating in a season which includes Hayloft in residence at the Tower, a new show from Ranters, a new dance from Lucy Guerin, Matt Lutton's take on The Trial, a theatrical adaptation of A Woman in Berlin, Sappho and a return season of the magnificent The Tell-Tale Heart. It's also Michael
Dario Fo makes people laugh. One would think this a harmless activity, except that in Fo's case, the laughter is allied to his revolutionary ideals: the targets for his satire are the rich and powerful, and his work has always dealt with the travails of the oppressed. During his long career, he has ridiculed the hypocrisy of the Pontiff and politicians, attacked no-go figures like the Mafia and
You might have noticed that Ms TN is pretending that the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is not happening. If the Melbourne Fringe sends me into a tailspin, contemplating the MICF causes flat-out panic. This is not a syndrome that afflicts punters; it is an anxiety peculiar to crrritics, who all (the real ones, that is) start looking haggard about this time of year, as if they have been
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this review contains the name of a deceased person.Many people will have first encountered the Chooky Dancers on YouTube. Their hilariously unlikely Yolngu version of Zorba the Greek became a viral hit, scoring 1.5 million viewers.They come from Elcho Island (Galiwin’ku), which is north east of Arnhemland. They live in a poverty which
Furious Mattress is a vastly disconcerting experience. I walked out of it more than usually unsure what I thought. The last time I felt something like this aesthetic dizziness was when I went to see Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players at the 2005 Melbourne Festival. Good Samaritans was a play which my conscious mind told me was of execrable banality, but which alerted something deeper – an
After months of fevered speculation, the Malthouse Theatre announced today that Marion Potts, currently Bell Shakespeare's associate artistic director, will be its new artistic director. She replaces Michael Kantor, who leaves at the end of this year.With last year's appointment of Ralph Myers as the successor to Neil Armfield at Company B, this completes the picture of what the theatre culture
The melancholy of modernityThere’s a poignancy in looking down over a city from a plane that in certain moods can be overwhelming. The structures that dominate and shape our lives are suddenly rendered minature by perspective and – especially at night, when the lights give it a shimmering unity – a city seems a live creature, a single organism that pulses and consumes and excretes. A parasitic
I’ve often pondered the astounding ability of puppets to generate intense emotional responses. How is it possible that we can identify so fiercely with an overtly unrealistic object made of sticks and paper?The power of animation plumbs our imaginative humanity. It's a simple and crude device that every child exploits in play, but it enacts a totemic magic, an ancient ability to invest an object
Hot off the Malthouse's press machine: Michael Kantor today announced that he will depart the Malthouse at the end of 2010, after six years as artistic director and CEO of the company. He'll be leaving to pursue other opportunities as a freelance director."Theatre is the most malleable and mercurial of artistic forms, and needs to constantly reinvent itself to stay alive and relevant," said
The lost child is an iconic, even obsessive, figure in Australian folklore, the subject of song, story and painting. Frederick McCubbin’s 1886 painting Lost encapsulates the myth: a young girl stands hesitantly, almost invisibly, in bushland, on the verge of being swallowed by the trees. The story focused a settler’s anxiety in a land which refused to obey the known laws of European agriculture,
Yes, Ms TN has been whinging heroically this past fortnight, but that hasn't stopped her getting out to the theatre. Writing about it has been a different matter. But this morning she awoke from her slumber, brutally thrust aside the heap of used tissues that had accumulated overnight, and cried out: "Now or never!" Or something of the sort. (Witnesses differ: another report claims she actually
* I forgot yesterday to mention James Waites's continuing meditations on the Bacchanalian qualities in Barrie Kosky's work, including the recent production of Poppea. In the course of which he reveals that Kosky is unlikely to be working in Australia in the future, as his job with Berlin's Komische Oper looms closer. Which is sad news for us.* The Malthouse production of Optimism finished its
(Note: there are spoilers in this review).Written in 1995, David Harrower’s first play, Knives in Hens, already has the status of a modern classic. This is no empty claim. It’s an extraordinary play: radical in its language, profound in its thought, and utterly original.Set in an imaginary pre-industrial landscape, it follows a deeply strange love triangle between three characters: a ploughman,
Over the past few days. Ms TN and the man to whom she's a spectacularly Bad Wife (although, of course, a deeply empathic partner and awesome literary colleague) have been discussing whether to revisit Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, which both of us saw on opening night at the Malthouse. It ended up being a peculiarly Kierkegaardian dialogue."I think," said my beloved, "that I'd prefer to stay home.
A busily theatrical weekend is looming in the Keene/Croggon household. To begin with, those who bemoan that Daniel Keene's work is never done in Melbourne have a chance for a bit of catch-up: the Dog Theatre in Footscray, under the direction of the dauntless Matt Scholten, are putting on The Cove, a season of eight short works, over the next four weeks. Keene is of course one of Australia's most
Slaved By The BellThe Beckett estate seem to have relaxed a little over the author's instructions and stage directions (permission for the Belvoir Street production of Waiting for Godot was nearly withdrawn when music was played at a point where the author had not prescribed it). In Michael Kantor's new production of Happy Days the famous mound of earth consuming the central character Winnie across the two acts is interpreted as a jumble of black metal plates surmounted with jagged rocks and looking as though Emil Pretorius's sets for a pre-war Bayreuth Walküre has mated with Ron Robertson-Swann's sculpture Vault ...
Feeling, real feeling, is the hardest thing to recreate in art. Too crudely represented, and it is coarsened to sentimentality, a victim of the limited vocabularies we have for emotional nuances and extremes; too refined, and we miss the point altogether, in a maze of cerebrations that elide its visceral genesis. The phenomenon of feeling encompasses everything that makes human beings such
Yes, a little bit of parochial preening is in order. Our Geoffrey just won the Tony for best actor for his role in the Broadway run of Exit the King - which premiered at our very own Malthouse, of course, in a Belvoir St co-production. What larks, eh?Meanwhile, my review of the Broadway show Avenue Q is in today's Australian.
