tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72029062012-02-26T02:37:45.395+11:00Independent theatre criticism from Alison CroggonAlison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.comBlogger1041125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-5265299302679856852012-02-25T20:11:00.001+11:002012-02-25T20:11:46.612+11:00

On this mercifully cool Perth day, Ms TN found herself in a fragile state. This is entirely the fault of the "festive" part of "arts festival". After last night's show I met some writerly friends at the Festival Gardens, the pleasantly democratic festival bar. The gardens are a wittily designed astro-turfed space strung with rows of lamps and stocked with reclaimed furniture. There's a looping

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-21304379448147132202012-02-24T16:24:00.000+11:002012-02-26T02:37:45.458+11:00

UK Shakespearean company Propeller is an odd beast. Under the artistic direction of Edward Hall, its mission is to refresh Shakespeare using physical theatre. With this goes an attempt to recreate the rough-house theatre of Elizabethan times: without claiming that Propeller is a theatrical version of those early music groups that play baroque scores using authentic instruments of the time, the

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-39218283866918417602012-02-23T20:07:00.000+11:002012-02-23T20:13:27.936+11:00

Mozart's The Magic Flute often seems to me like a quintessence of opera, equal parts nonsense and delight. It's an absurd fairytale, with all that form's arbitariness and illogic. It also includes some of Mozart's most sublime melodies and dazzlingly playful conceits. The arcane Masonic symbolism that informs much of the story suggests a multitude of possible meanings, but the truth is that this

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-65404301257941690622012-02-22T15:35:00.000+11:002012-02-23T12:57:14.941+11:00

NB: Serious spoiler warnings. After I left Teatro de los Sentidos's Oráculos last night, I wandered back to my hotel room through the Perth streets feeling as if my skin were luminous, as if I moved through the luscious darkness like a soft, cool flame. It was the kind of night when the air is exhausted after a day of brutal heat and now wants only to touch you tenderly. And, as is often the way

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-34429261618312248652012-02-20T11:18:00.000+11:002012-02-22T20:02:04.098+11:00

Regular readers will know that Ms TN has spent the past few years vainly attempting to find a balanced life. Every year I vow to see less theatre; every year my vow crumbles spectacularly, like a meringue in the hand of a greedy toddler. 2012 may be the year where I give up vowing altogether: perhaps at last I will enter a Zen state of bug-eyed acceptance of my lot. I may have novels to write,

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-56250777355317002102012-02-19T09:53:00.002+11:002012-02-19T09:54:36.077+11:00

After an interesting week in Melbourne, about which more soon, Ms TN is off to the Perth Festival tomorrow. It may do me good to be locked in a hotel room for a week, with my scope for procrastination firmly curtailed. Meanwhile, I have uploaded all my translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's The Duino Elegies, as well as an essay about the poems that was published in the UK poetry magazine Agenda,

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-88273181069069170152012-02-16T09:03:00.000+11:002012-02-16T09:05:28.203+11:00

In today's Age, critic Cameron Woodhead buys into the recent controversy around Shit on Your Play. For once, a sensible, informed piece about theatre blogging in the mainstream press. As he points out: Perhaps the most worrying aspect of Simmons' writing is that her relentless formula, which runs something like - ''I couldn't give a toss about this show. It's the director's fault. Pretentious

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-15233541222878012002012-02-15T09:51:00.000+11:002012-02-15T14:52:34.768+11:00

This really is from the archives. I was looking for something else when I stumbled across this piece, which I have no recollection of writing. It was in a folder that dates from when I was Writer in Residence at Pembroke College in Cambridge, in 2000. It must have been written for a series of workshops I gave there at the time. I'm putting it up here in case it interests any of you. It pretty

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-35016572354118775192012-02-14T11:59:00.000+11:002012-02-16T12:42:22.715+11:00

Ever since the Atreides clan established the dramatic template for dysfunctional relationships, the theatre has been a burning glass in which the psychoses of everyday life are focused to a white-hot lance. It's no mystery why Freud loved the Greeks. Nina Raine's noisy bohemian family in Tribes, now on at the MTC, is a worthy addition to the canon of patriarchal disaster. From L: Brian Lipson

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-10557947894367662072012-02-06T16:19:00.000+11:002012-02-16T12:39:14.863+11:00

Update: Jana Perkovic weighs in at Guerilla Semiotics. Well worth the read. Update 2: The Guardian's Noises Off rounds up the brouhaha. Update 3: And now Ben Eltham in Crikey. Update 4: Ray Gill in the Age. Also, see the postscript below. Update 5: Cameron Woodhead restores some balance in the Age. * The launch of an independent news organisation is a major event in Australia, where the

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com70tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-24205533490427871282012-02-02T13:16:00.000+11:002012-02-02T13:18:40.351+11:00

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 burst overhead in showers of light and noise. This year was the same, only more so. But a letter trickled through my defences, despite everything I could do; and so last Sunday I found myself at Theatreworks,

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-74876396264424341062012-01-24T11:21:00.000+11:002012-01-25T08:15:12.996+11:00

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 all the extraneous things its success now symbolises, and the energies that made it a success in the first place are polished away by the pieties that must now attend it. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a good example

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-25019380182838664032011-12-30T10:08:00.002+11:002011-12-31T12:06:35.047+11:00

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 sparrow through a banqueting hall on a dark winter's day. The past year has seemed the mere flip of a wing. Yet somehow I reviewed around 86 shows this year - quite a lot more than last year, when I reviewed

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-53724598112408355292011-12-08T11:03:00.004+11:002011-12-08T16:51:10.528+11:00

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 women is all too apt to disappear after their deaths. Perhaps MacLane might have been known as an early 20th century Thomas Chatterton or Arthur Rimbaud, a wayward brilliance that ignited rebellion into a

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-3114891589631507382011-12-06T09:10:00.008+11:002011-12-07T21:06:30.833+11:00

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 a cold. I blame Melbourne's increasingly absurd weather for this, as much as the exigencies of the end of the year: this city has always, admittedly, been proverbial for its changeability ("if you don't like

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-60695375804297111222011-12-02T10:21:00.001+11:002011-12-02T10:31:43.249+11:00

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 hence to A is for Atlas's wholly charming Cherry Cherry (details here), which takes place in a private home in Thornbury and includes a delicious dinner, and MKA's wicked take on political delusion, The

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-36946222521134483922011-11-29T08:45:00.005+11:002011-11-29T09:20:50.377+11:00

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 by the new democratisation of the web. This is (sigh) an old and whiskery argument, but as George points out,"the real danger is in formalizing (the) informal process of inclusion and exclusion". It's an

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-33346637664074544522011-11-28T10:18:00.007+11:002011-11-28T14:17:16.402+11:00

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 animal trapped in the pitiless mechanisms of power. In the 21st century, the Prince of Denmark has become the random particle in a corrupted, dysfunctional and claustrophobic nuclear family.Stripping the play of

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-31527242941348911622011-11-23T12:16:00.003+11:002011-11-23T12:26:42.935+11:00

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 Fall of Civilisation. Apparently nobody obeys Rules any more. It's all the fault of entitled young people with their newfangled phones, according to Dr West. Or possibly people on drugs. Anyway, I was inspired,

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com56tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-32035930620898723672011-11-22T10:39:00.012+11:002011-11-23T08:20:00.109+11:00

*Spoiler warnings*The end of the year is rushing up like a charging rhino. Melbourne theatre has its traditional means of signalling this milestone - widespread admissions of astonishment that Christmas is only 34 sleeps away, the issuing of phalanxes of party invitations, and, of course, the Christmas shows, crowd-pleasers that fill the houses with cheer and, hopefully, audiences. The Malthouse

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-16254812131513565092011-11-15T09:48:00.007+11:002011-11-15T12:38:13.938+11:00

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 ground up, wrong from the first moment, and goes on being wrong all the way through to the end. Every flicker of life in this play is wrestled to the ground and throttled to death.Any text, if it's at all

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-51109022347767316032011-11-12T12:15:00.008+11:002011-11-12T14:06:19.414+11:00

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 King notebooks on Superfluities Redux. I don't especially want to do this myself - if I wanted to talk about my writing process, I would start a different blog - but I thought some readers might be interested in

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-34819121324191913662011-10-30T09:51:00.006+11:002011-10-30T10:53:40.882+11:00

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 has come: for the next fortnight, circumstance will forcibly remove me from my desk. Next week I'll be in Sydney workshopping Night Songs, a music theatre piece co-written with Daniel Keene, with music by

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-86161672654170544552011-10-28T19:46:00.004+11:002011-10-28T20:13:47.826+11:00

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 all areas of Australian theatre, including funding bodies, major organisations, independent companies and independent artists. They decided that a preamble to the policy would be a good idea, and to model this

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202906.post-76152136318681448412011-10-28T10:01:00.009+11:002011-10-28T12:06:55.023+11:00

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 something like the Adelaide Festival, there are so many areas to cover," he says. "The performing arts, literature, visual art, film, public outdoor events... they're all things which people rightly expect..." And all

Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0