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Keywords: Theatre

  • AUSTRALIA

    What does it mean to be complicit?

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 27 June 2024

    To be complicit, must you share the same intent? If one says nothing, does nothing, does this signify complicity? Is there then such a thing as an innocent bystander? 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Trump, convicted

    • David Halliday
    • 11 June 2024

    When Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, it represented a long-awaited triumph of the rule of law in the United States. But the verdict may not mean much in the long run, and has not affected Trump's popularity among voters. Watching Trump’s conviction from afar prompts us to consider how good we have it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Punisher

    • Barry Gittins
    • 24 May 2024

    In the latest Quarterly Essay profile of Peter Dutton, author Lech Blaine may well describe his work as character delineation, rather than character assassination. But we seem to be at an impasse in Australian market of ideas, and scorn gives greater bang for the buck than dialogue.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Dressing up, down and all around

    • Michele Frankeni
    • 14 March 2024
    1 Comment

    There just doesn’t seem to be anywhere that demands a consistent standard of dress. Even a trip to the theatre, once an occasion to dress up, has become a place of anything goes. Has the casualisation of dress gone too far? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A Christmas Carol and the making of a miser

    • David Halliday
    • 30 November 2023
    2 Comments

    Why another Christmas Carol and why now? This version takes a detour from Dickens’ original delving deeper into Scrooge’s past, painting him not just as a villain, but as a victim of circumstances. It suggests that behind every act we hastily label as ‘cruel’ lies a story of fear and anxiety, and a flesh-and-blood human being. And forgiveness, then, becomes an acknowledgment of our shared human frailty.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Carrying the weight of the daily news

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 29 March 2022
    13 Comments

    A house bursts into flames as it’s submerged in floodwaters. A doctor tells a cameraman filming a dying Ukrainian child to send the footage to Putin. A newspaper delves into the murder of a young woman. It’s like a fever dream: a pandemic bleeds into the edges of a global war. The news presents information, and it has no moral duty to tell us how we should feel about it or help us untangle the knot of feelings which emerge. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The promise of alchemy

    • David Rowland
    • 01 November 2021
    8 Comments

    Ben Jonson is one of the great English Renaissance playwrights but he can also be challenging for the modern reader. When I first came to Jonson some years ago, I attempted a comedy from 1610, The Alchemist. I soon felt out of my depth. Conceding defeat, I put the book aside and told myself that there would be some ‘other time’. This year in Melbourne, with the theatres closed, the streets largely deserted, and travel restrictions firmly in place, that ‘other time’ arrived.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tis the times' plague

    • Brian Matthews
    • 24 November 2020
    5 Comments

    In measures now sadly familiar in 2020, theatres were closed once the number of weekly deaths exceeded 30, later 40, but because actors and the theatre world itself were so economically vulnerable, actors, understandably intent on earning a living, soon legally or otherwise cut themselves some slack by taking liberties with the rules governing performances and quarantine — again, a phenomenon that is now, against all previous odds, familiar to people of 2020.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The art of storytelling

    • Julie Perrin
    • 18 August 2020
    31 Comments

    The capacity to story our experience is a powerful tool for reflection and understanding. As adults we learn that no story is pure and we are capable of telling ourselves spin, but the shaping of experience into story is the bread and butter of our lives. Narrative, it has been said, is a primary act of mind.

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  • CARTOON

    Cancelling the culture

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 14 August 2020

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The theatre of distance

    • John Allison
    • 25 November 2019
    2 Comments

    I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Jacqui Lambie conundrum

    • John Warhurst
    • 17 September 2019
    8 Comments

    Serendipity is defined as the gift of finding valuable things in unexpected places by sheer luck. It is a good description of Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie in Australian politics. But there is a sting in the tail. A system which depends on serendipity potentially also has a big downside.

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