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Showing posts from 2018

On Stan Lee and the Marvel of the Superhero

The paeans to Stan Lee at his passing this week make us more aware than ever of the power of superheroes. They are an American invention, up there with jazz and musicals. And the story of superheroes is the story of change in America. Superman, essentially the first, arrives in April 1938, towards the end of the Great Depression. He fights corrupt businessmen and politicians as a champion of o rdinary Americans. He’s a socialist people’s hero. He is also an immigrant from another world who is accepted and gives back. In his story is the DNA of the American ideal. Batman, arriving in 1939, is the opposite. He is human and urban while Superman is alien and regional. Superman is day and idealistic while Batman is night and revengeful. They are the Superego and the Id. This duality reflects America’s growing divide. Spider-Man is the first teenage superhero, and Marvel’s mascot. What a gift: a confused teenager, trying to balance crime fighting with passing calculus,

Strangers in Between

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Last night, in Melbourne, I saw a new production of Tommy Murphy’s Strangers in Between . It’s a play I developed with Tommy at Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney back in 2004/05, before directing the premiere at Griffin in 2005. It was such a show of strength from Tommy that I quickly commissioned him to adapt Holding the Man , which we got on stage a bit over a year later. I hadn’t seen the play onstage since then, and perhaps because of that I was caught off-guard. Here  was a mature play, perfectly measured. Tommy was only 24 when he wrote it, but scene after scene displays a writer in clear command of comedy, character and, perhaps most impressively, of the contours of human emotion. It’s also, in the words of director Daniel Lammin, ‘a play whose heart is wholly good’. You can’t fake that. And it’s emboldened with that heart’s blood that the actors thrive. Wil King inhabits Shane, Guy Simon summons up two fantastically different characters with disarming ease, and Simon Burk