AustLit

'Theatre director John Clark’s close namesake John Clarke, in character as that infamous Kiwi schlep Fred Dagg, once averred that autobiography

is a highly recommended form of leisure activity, as it takes up large chunks of time and if you’re a slow writer or you think particularly highly of yourself, you can probably whistle away a year or two … It’s not a difficult business and remember this is also your big opportunity to explain what a wonderful person you are and how you’ve been consistently misunderstood … 

 (Introduction)

'STCSA’s The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race features an excellent production and performances but can’t conceal the play’s troubling blind spots. By Ben Brooker.'

'Talking animals in fiction have, for the most part, been confined to children’s or otherwise peripheral literature. Yet they often serve a serious purpose. Aesop’s fables, with their anthropoid wolves, frogs, and ants, have been put to use as moral lessons for children since the Renaissance. The ‘it-narrative’, fashionable in eighteenth-century England and perhaps best exemplified by Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little: Or, the life and adventures of a lap-dog (1752), saw various animals expatiate their suffering at human hands.'  (Introduction)

'From the Man’s horse ‘blood[ied] from hip to shoulder’ in Banjo Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1890) to the kangaroos drunkenly slaughtered in Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), non-human animals have not fared well in Australian literature. Even when, as in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014), the author’s imagination is fully brought to bear on the inner lives of animals, their fate tends towards the Hobbesian – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – reflecting back to us our own often unexamined cruelty. The rare exceptions, such as J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), incorporating a fictionalised series of animal-rights lectures, serve only to point up the rule.' (Introduction)

'When Alison Croggon’s theatre review blog Theatre Notes closed in late 2012 after eight years in existence, its demise was met with a response akin to grief. The first blog of its kind in Australia, and one of the most enduring anywhere, TN became essential reading for anyone interested in Australian performance. Croggon’s often expansive and always erudite critical commentary earned her an international following (and, in 2009, the Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year, the first time it went to an online critic).'  (Introduction)

'Every other day, it seems, a new controversy erupts around the programming decisions of one or another of Australia’s ever-proliferating literary festivals. If the object of outrage is not an unrepresentative panel discussion, it’s a politically contentious keynote, or else a disastrous clash between ill-suited speakers. Whatever the specifics, the regularity with which such brouhahas flare up speaks to our anxieties about what purpose literary festivals serve.'  (Introduction)

'I think it was Peter Brook who said the longest that a staging of a play could remain vital was five years. The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, directed by Simon Stone and adapted from Seneca’s tragedy by Stone himself, Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, and Mark Winter, was first seen at the Malthouse Theatre in 2010. Notwithstanding a handful of updates to the text, this production feels like it belongs to a particular moment in time, appearing amid the largely confected furore around the proliferation of adapted classics on Australian stages. There is something, too, in its depiction of a certain kind of hypermasculinity that seems to date it to a specific period in Melbourne’s independent theatre scene, before the recent upsurge of queer work by Sisters Grimm and others. And yet this Thyestes remains viscerally alive: confronting and funny, a deeply compelling mix of the excessive and the ascetic, like the pared-back, shoulder-to-the-wheel rock and roll of a middle-period Bruce Springsteen album. (The Boss does not feature in Stefan Gregory’s raucous sound design, but Wu Tang Clan, Queen, and Roy Orbison do.)' (Introduction)

'Thirty years old is a difficult age for a play in this country. Australian cultural memory is not exactly short, but it certainly tapers in the middle where such plays lie, flanked on one side by The Canon and, on the other, by The Next Big Thing. Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner – initially a melancholic one-acter for three women, later expanded and recast by the playwright for his drama school peers as a sort of boulevard comedy – feels exceptional in this regard: a not-quite-new, not-quite-old Australian play that has nevertheless entered the repertoire. On its completion in 1988, it played in Melbourne for almost half a year and seems to have been produced uninterruptedly since, including by Sydney Theatre Company as recently as 2015. In Bovell’s program note for this solid revival by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, he describes it, not wrongly, as ‘a classic comedy of the Australian theatre’.' (Introduction)