Carving in Snow

Jacobean playwrights played well together. They were forever dividing up the playwriting labours. Shakespeare sometimes wrote with others, but for Thomas Middleton it was a happy habit. His best play, The Changeling (1622), was written with William Crowley, who probably wrote the beginning, the end, and the subplot. But it's Middleton's play. This production of The Changeling at the Young Vic is instructive. It was a big success in the theatre's small space and here has similar success in the main space, its season already extended. It's good to see Rowley's subplot, so often cut, treated equally. In fact, considerable effort has gone into equalising the two layers of the story. All are bedlam. And there's a lot of wedding dessert that finds its way into bed, in a very Jacobean way. When the food fights begin, all are equal. But the production instructs in a different away. This kind of production, with its febrile sense of play and its re...

I’m in London for a few weeks and thought I’d share a few observations about what’s on in town. I caught the all-male Twelfth Night , a transfer from the Globe now playing in the West End. It was performed in 'original conditions' - the production was created for the anniversary of the first recorded performance of the play in the Middle Temple Hall, and so it suited the comfort of the Apollo Theatre more than it might have. It stars Stephen Fry as Malvolio and the incomparable Mark Rylance, the oft-proclaimed greatest British actor of his generation, as Olivia. It plays in rep with Rylance's Richard III . I've never 'got' Twelfth Night . I've never found it very funny or interesting. There was a period when it was fashionable to give 'brown' productions, glossing the play with a Chekhovian melancholy. It's never worked much for me, I'm afraid, though I am prone to gentle drifts into ennui and, like Orsino, am often best when least in c...

It's been a fascinating few weeks for the representation of race on stage. The American playwright Bruce Norris withdrew his very fine play Clybourne Park from Berlin's Deutsches Theater, one of the the top line German-speaking theatres, when he discovered that the theatre intended to cast a white actress in a black role and 'experiment with make-up'. What made matters even worse is that the play, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and London's Olivier Award for Best Play, deals centrally with race relations. It's not often that we hear of 'blacking up' in the theatre anymore, although the practice is still current in the world's opera houses. Most singers who sing the title role in Verdi's Otello are white and employ make-up. That will happen next year here in Brisbane, for example, when the Lithuanian tenor Kristian Benedikt plays the Moor for Opera Queensland. He will, presumably, 'black up' a little and no one will remark on it.

The plays of Philip Ridley: the Marquis de Sade meets Liberace. That's not me, that's an American critic whose name escapes me, but it's not a bad description. I begin rehearsals tomorrow for Ridley's Tender Napalm , for La Boite Theatre Company and Brisbane Festival. To think of Ridley is to think of violence and beauty. His first play, The Pitchfork Disney (1991), produced at London's Bush Theatre, included images of cockroach eating, finger breaking, snake frying and penis scraping. It's a brilliant work, and heralded what later became known as 'In-Yer-Face Theatre', a whole genre of mostly British '90s playwriting that includes work by Antony Neilson, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, Martin McDonagh and many others. World-beating theatre.          I have never found violence in Ridley's plays to be pointless. Ridley himself has pointed out that travelling Indian magicians would rip the heads off live birds while, at the s...

Last week, a film crew landed in my living room. I was to be interviewed for a documentary called John and Tim , being made by Waterbyrd Filmz, about the lives of John Caleo and Timothy Conigrave. Conigrave wrote Holding the Man , a candid and magical memoir of his 15-year relationship with Caleo. I was being interviewed because I directed the theatrical adaptation of the book. In 2005, as Artistic Director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre Company, I commissioned  Tommy Murphy  to adapt the memoir. By November 2006 we had it onstage at the Stables Theatre. We remounted it six times, including at the Sydney Opera House, Belvoir and Melbourne Theatre Company, and most recently in 2010 in London's West End. There have bee n productions in San Francisco and Auckland, with others coming up. For such a particular Australian story, it's a remarkable trajectory. Conigrave was born in 1959 and went to Xavier College in Melbourne, an elite Jesuit school (also attended by Bill Shorten...

Last night, La Boite Theatre Company hosted a fascinating forum called Towards Diversity . It linked two areas of current interest in the Australian theatre: gender equity and cultural diversity. Both, of course, speak to one of the leading questions of the forum: What are the forces that prevent our theatres from adequately reflecting the society in which they operate?  These two topics arise at this time because of special circumstances. On 24 April, the Australia Council released a report on Women in Theatre . It highlighted a very real problem of gender equity within Australian theatre. It's been a much spoken about topic since the announcement of Neil Armfield’s final season at the then Company B in September 2009, at which the sight of a stage full of bright young men, and just one woman, got people talking. The second topic springs from the upcoming appointment of a two year, fulltime Theatre Diversity Associate, to be shared between La Boite, Queensland Theatre C...

We don’t just sit and watch TV anymore. There’s hardly a TV program that doesn’t ask us to comment or get involved – whether it’s SMS voting on talent shows, or by giving twitter commentary on morning television, or the ABC’s Q & A, which centres the audience – there, we are constantly reminded, we ask the questions and tweet a witty commentary from home. We are our own producers. We don’t just read the news as it’s given to us anymore. If you read a news story online, you can very often comment about it and provide one of 25 or 68 or hundreds of comments that will sometimes give you a much better picture of what’s really going on than the story itself. And we have a huge range of news sources available to us. We are our own editors. We don’t just read facts from scholar-authored and vetted encyclopedias anymore. At the very heart of Wikipedia is a democratisation of the definition of knowledge. We – any of us, from anywhere – help determine how knowledge is defined and under...

I stumbled across a recording of Laurence Oliver as King Lear on YouTube recently and was shocked by it. I have some memories of when Olivier recorded this King Lear . It was in 1983, and made especially for television. He was 75 or 76. His final Shakespeare role on film. It was well known that he had suffered decades of serious illness, including prostrate cancer. In 1975, he had nearly died of dermatomyositis, a degenerative muscle disorder, but struggled on for another decade or so, during which time he filmed this performance. It was clearly out of the question to perform the role on stage - his final performance on stage in a full role had been in 1974. Olivier was to die five years after this Lear . I had admired Olivier when I was a teenager. I was a bit of a Shakespeare nut. In high school, I directed a 90 minute version of Hamlet in which I made the costumes, choreographed the fights, compiled the music and played the central role. Scenes not involving Hamlet were...

I've been thinking more, lately, of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who passed away on 18 May, just shy of his 87th birthday. He was a giant among classical baritones and simply the best singer of lieder, especially Schubert, ever. The statistics are hard to nail, but he may be the most recorded artist in classical music history - around twice as many recordings as Placido Domingo, to give you an idea. He is the sound of many private moments in my life, a source of solace and of inspiration. During some periods of his career he was criticised for being 'mannered'. But this was because he sang like an actor. Sometimes he would inflect individual syllables in the most surprising, but revelatory, way. He could change both the shape of the syllable and the texture of the musical note so that there was a unity of meaning mostly unknown until then. This was not the lieder singing of a Richard Tauber, and some didn't like it. This was singing full of sharp insight and endles...

On 24 April, the Women in Theatre report was released. It is a report commissioned in July 2011 by the Australia Council for the Arts ‘to bring the research on the issue of women in creative leadership in Australia up to the present day, and provide a basis for the sector to discuss these issues and to reach agreement on some strategies to address the situation.’ This fresh wave of interest in this most complex matter was stimulated by the announcement of Neil Armfield’s final season at the then Company B in September 2009. The sight of a stage full of bright young men, and just one woman, got people thinking and talking . One response was to have the annual Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, usually delivered by one person, given over to a panel discussion, Where are the Women? Is there a lack of women in key creative roles in theatre? On Sunday 6 December, the panellists lined up: Rachel Healy, Alison Croggon, Shannon Murphy, Marion Potts and Gil Appleton, moderated by Monic...

Jill Shearer , who passed away on 6 May, was an important Australian playwright, living in Brisbane.  Jill's plays were produced all over the world, and on Broadway ( Shimada , 1992, directed by Simon Phillips and starring Ben Gazzara, Estelle Parsons, Ellen Burstyn and Mako). She was, I think, the first Australian woman to have a play on Broadway.   She had a long relationship with La Boite Theatre Company - over the years the company has produced, I think, four or five of her plays. La Boite hosted a fond memorial tribute to Jill last Sunday.  There was no one like Jill Shearer. I didn’t know her well, but I do know how important she was to the community of artists in Brisbane, and well beyond. She was a genuine inspiration. I first met her when I was working for Queensland Theatre Company in the early 1990s. The company had just produced Shimada , and we were then developing her new play The Family. She was already something of a legend by then, of course. I ...

George Hunka reminds us that in some parts of the world theatre provides a genuine political threat. Two nights ago, Israeli armed forces raided the home of Nabil Al Raee, the artistic director of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, arresting h im and terrifying his three year old daughter Mina. The Freedom Theatre is a theatre and cultural centre in the Jenin Refugee Camp, 60km from Ramallah and home to 10,000 people (40% of whom are under 15), that "offers space in which children and youth can act, create and express themselves freely, imagining new realities and challenging existing social and cultural barriers." Its productions have toured internationally, giving these young people a voice. Drama is often used as therapy for trauma, as this short video shows. I'm told by those who have visited the theatre that this is a place in which Palestinian, international and even Israeli artists and activists come together despite (or maybe because of) differences in nat...