Carving in Snow

I saw Simon Stone's debut feature film ' The Daughter ' recently. It's a terrific film, with an Ingmar Bergman-like tautness and a keen understanding of film form that makes for a deeply affecting experience. The film is derived from Ibsen's 1884 play ' The Wild Duck ', which also stimulated a stage production written and directed by Stone in 2011 . That production has played a few places in Australia, as well as Amsterdam, Vienna, London, and at Oslo's Ibsen Festival. Stone has had a sometimes uneasy relationship with Australian theatre, particularly in regard to his adaptations of plays by other authors. But it has not affected his now terrifically successful career in Europe. Last year his production of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman for Vienna's Burgtheater and Theater Basel earned him a best director award. In March this year, he staged Ibsen's Peer Gynt in Hamburg, while in July his take on Lorca's Yerma will open at...

In late May in The Weekend Australian,  Rosemary Neill lit a fire that seems to still be burning. There have been various breakouts since then, including here , here , here and here , each fueled differently.  Today, The Weekend Australian fans more flames, publishing letters by director Aubrey Mellor and playwright Peter Fleming (alarmingly headlined 'Can Ralph Myers be taken seriously? ') . I t also report s on playwright David Stevens' dissatisfaction with how Australian playwrights are treated, and on a recent forum at NIDA chaired by playwright Stephen Sewell titled 'Rolling in Their Graves - Working with the text of a dead author' .  Roland Barthes, of course, famously argued 'The Death of the Author' in a 1968 essay. He died in 1980. This 'debate', and I use the inverted commas with purpose, has had unusual longevity. The framing has often been poor: auteur vs author, director vs playwright, adaptations vs new plays, Simon Stone vs A...

Ahead of the Australian Theatre Forum in Canberra this week, The Australian newspaper today floated a couple of articles to get people talking. Firstly, Rosemary Neill followed up her Weekend Australian report on what appears to be a surfeit of adaptations on the Australian stage with an incendiary opinion piece on how in "some areas of the theatre there is an astonishing lack of respect for dramatists". She quotes Andrew Bovell as describing the growing popularity of refurbished foreign classics as "lazy", "easy" and "conservative", and takes swipes at Simon Stone, Andrew Upton and Malthouse Theatre. There should be a place for such adaptations, and a place for new plays. I don't know how anyone could reasonably argue otherwise. Indeed, such adaptations have always been part of our theatre menu, although perhaps not as obviously as now, and auteurs and authors have always shared the cooking. The question is one of balance....