Carving in Snow

Sometimes a person, or a nation, isn’t very good at expressing what’s at core. It’s why we have artists. An actor sacrifices a moment of their own life in order to give us a story of ours. A playwright scaffolds that sacrifice. The 50 stories of ‘Dear Australia’, a project of Playwriting Australia that livestreamed from 30 organisations between 2-5 July, express a moment in history when a pandemic changed everything. They tell of the cracks that opened up, and of the darkness and light revealed. They are, in turn, confronting and comforting. Together, they are a revelation and celebration of Australian voices. They deal with where our nation is and where it might need to go. I can’t think of another manifestation of theatre in Australia that has enjoyed such a remarkable coalition of forces working so whole-heartedly towards a common goal. How did we get there? To get an even 50 playwrights, we thought we’d ask 25 organisations from across Australia to each select two pla...

[This article was published in The Weekend Australian on Saturday 28 March 2020] Crises can change behaviour permanently, sometimes for the better. For example, the need to share work around during the Great Depression helped kill off the six-day working week, creating the ‘weekend’. Unexpectedly, we discovered something we liked, and kept it.  Sometimes there is light in the dark. Enforced social distancing over the coming months might also change some behaviours. We will have a different relationship with time, and some people will cope with that changed relationship better than others. Here are ten ways to make friends with time, and maybe lighten things a little. They won’t pay your bills, but they might help you wring some advantage from adversity, for you and for others, and maybe permanently. One. If you bought tickets to a live performance that’s been cancelled, consider donating to the artist or venue instead of asking for a refund. You’ll feel better. You’ll he...

( Published in The Courier-Mail , 10 October, 2019) The great Australian sport is criticising the Grand Final pre-match entertainment. OneRepublic was caught offside before the NRL match, after Dean Lewis missed the mark at the AFL. Daryl Braithwaite and Paul Kelly saved the days. Arts criticism is alive and well. On AFL Grand Final day, I played my own grand final. The whistle blew on my fifth and final Brisbane Festival. It’s been a privilege to be captain of the team, and to curate 3,000 performances and 30 world premieres from 7,000 artists. This year, we broke our box office record for the third year running, topping $4m. More than 1.2 million people turned up, many of them tourists.   But hey, arts and sport aren’t in competition. We can be passionate about both, and on the same day. In fact, people encounter the arts more than sport, mostly without knowing it. Every time you mouth the words to a song in a supermarket, or are attracted to an image o...

My friend Andrew McGahan, that great Australian novelist, passed away yesterday . Pancreatic cancer is persistent and February is the shortest month. I first met Andrew in 1991, just at the moment when Praise changed the shape of Australian fiction and became the book of a generation. I had taken up a job at Queensland Theatre Company, charged with finding ways to develop the state’s playwriting culture. For a young director at the beginning of his career, this was quite a task. I had never set foot in Queensland. Praise was my introduction and Andrew became my buddy. We hit it off immediately, hanging out, devouring beers, and talking about and exploring anything that took our interest. He was very happy to discover the theatre and even became a resident writer at the company. I commissioned him to write a play. Bait follows the story of Gordon Buchanan, the central character of Praise , just as he begins working in the absurd bowels of the Department of Social Security. If Pra...

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, ...

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 disarm...

Brisbane Festival wound up on Saturday night after 22 days.   There were 540 performances, 60 productions, around 20 venues, five world premiere commissions, 11 Australian premieres, and more than 1,400 artists from here and around the world, including those from 28 Queensland arts companies. Those artists, through their skill and insight, shared wonderfully different ways of living in and looking at the world. We broke lots of records: the biggest box office ever, the biggest crowds at our hub at Treasury Brisbane Arcadia ( mostly enjoying free shows), our largest ever Theatre Republic, the most number of performances. At Treasury Brisbane Arcadia alone, around 300,000 people engaged with the Festival – that’s an average of 15,000 people for every day it was open. Amazing. Saturday night's massive festival finale was Sunsuper Riverfire, Australia's longest fireworks display, drawing around 500,000 people to the edges of the winding Brisbane River and a great many mor...

( This article was first published in The Courier-Mail on 24 August 2017 ) I HAVE just returned from the world’s largest arts festival. I travelled down many paths searching for work to include in next year’s Brisbane Festival. The Edinburgh Fringe offers 3600 different productions from every corner of the globe. Its open access philosophy – anyone can be part of it, if you’re prepared to lose money – means that much of the work is pretty rough. But taken as a whole the event provides a fascinating snapshot of the things that are occupying the world’s artists. Right now. There are many shows about Trump, democracy, Brexit and migration. There is an Arab Arts Focus and the transgender experience is the subject of a number of very good shows. The arts can explore complex things in ways that surprise us. We all live in echo chambers of some sort, and that’s not always good. The arts extend our contact with the world beyond the boundaries of our lot. This is part of a greater...

Alexander Malofeev I had a wonderful experience with the  Queensland Symphony Orchestra  on Saturday night. An 80-year-old American man gave us the rhythms of life, then a 15-year-old Russian boy gave us the melody of life. Alondra de la Parra, from Mexico, was in charge of all. Almost Trumpian geopolitics. The Philip Glass Symphony No. 11, commissioned by the Bruckner Orchestra, the Istanbul International Music Festival, and the QSO, had its second ever performance, following its January premiere at Carnegie H all in NYC on Glass's 80th birthday. We heard the repeated rhythms of living, and the jagged. The audience loved this new work from an old man. Then an old work from a boy when Alexander Malofeev ravished the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto, that miracle of melody. This Russian prodigy, winner of the 8th International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2014, is the real thing, brilliant and brave. We leapt to our feet. Nice to know that in July last year he rec...

I am in the middle of directing Tommy Murphy's new play, Mark Colvin's Kidney , for Sydney's Belvoir. It's been extraordinary.    I remember being glued to the Leveson Inquiry. All that rigorous interrogation and the testimonies of the famous, including a fragile-looking Rupert Murdoch. It felt like we were witnessing the fall of a media empire. It felt like the world was about to change and that ‘truth’ and ‘ethics’ and ‘justice’ would somehow flourish. Five years on, that feeling is foreign. ‘Alternative facts’ fight with the truth, and justice for many seems more distant than ever. I was not aware of Mary-Ellen Field’s story until Tommy Murphy, that most intrepid of playwrights, brought it to my attention. Things struck me with immediate force. Here was a very successful woman, a member of the Conservative Party, who bit by bit had her natural faith in the cornerstones of British justice eroded. More specifically, here was someone who had been treated...

Senator James Paterson wants Blue Poles sold , and all funding of arts and sport stopped, to help pay off our national debt. The estimated $350 million the painting might gather would represent about 0.07% of our $470 billion gross national debt. Paterson claims that we "fund $7 billion a year into the arts". He's wrong. Federal spending on the arts this financial year is $639 million. Not even close. The budget he's referring to is the culture budget and includes everything from arts, the ABC, libraries, museums, and even zoos. I imagine he's not actually suggesting we wipe all those things away. Or does the Senator genuinely believe that a society with a little less debt is better than one with libraries, a national broadcaster and working artists? Has he ever been to a movie? Does the Senator also realise that the $7 billion government investment in culture makes a $50 billion economic impact? Does the Senator mean that we should ignore this r...

[A version of this piece was first published in The Courier-Mail on 5 September 2016]  More Australians go to art galleries each year than go to AFL and NRL games combined. The creative industries employ more people than agriculture, construction or mining. Around one million people will experience this year’s Brisbane Festival, Brisbane’s international arts festival. Theatre, dance, circus, music, stand-up? With almost 500 performances across three weeks, it’s all on the menu. How do we value this love for arts and culture? A festival is a remarkable thing. People relax and become more receptive to the unfamiliar. It’s all in the name. During the festival of a holiday or the festival of a dinner party, we let our guard down and allow ourselves to absorb new ideas and experiences. It’s also when artists reach for things at the very edge of their imaginations. You could say that ‘‘why not?’’ is the festival spirit. Part of it is making sure people have acces...

The attack in Orlando was a gay hate crime. The Prime Minister today initially omitted this fact from his expression of sympathy. He later changed his language , calling the mass shooting “an attack on the gay community and an attack on all of us - on all our freedoms, the freedom to gather together, to celebrate, to share time with friends.” He went on to say that there “are people outside our country, and some within it, who hate the freedoms that we enjoy and would seek to threaten them and undermine them with violence... Together, at home and abroad, we continue the fight against terrorism and stand up for the values of our free nations.” There seems to be no acknowledgment of the glaring irony. What are these “freedoms that we enjoy”? Certainly not the freedom to marry. For that, we must argue the case during a plebiscite that is sure to unleash homophobic hate. It's difficult to feel that it's "an attack on all of us" when the LGBTQ community ar...

This week the Australia Council allocated more annual fund ing to small-to-medium arts organisations than ever before. Yes, you heard right. In announcing $28 million to go to these organisations each year, it invested more, not less, in operational, multi-year funding than it had in recent years. This funding round saw more of a realignment of support than a reduction. Here are the figures: 2009-10 2010–11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15 To Key Orgs $21.2m $22.1m $21.4m $21.1m $22.8m $23.1m Total Funding $163.5 $163.8 164.5 174.8 199.2 191.5 It remains unclear, though, what other programs will be available to complement this multi-year funding, if any. In the past, a good variety have been available to organisations both with and without operational funding. It will be important to see how many of these, and indeed others available to individual arti...