Theatre and performance

Richard tells me I should meet this old guy he knows, Jimmy Somerville, a strong union man, living legend – he remembers everything, Richard says – including that famous night during the war when tenor player Merv Acheson shot a bloke on stage at the 2KY Radiotorium over a missing shipment of illegal whisky.

‘The conflict between scientist and politician at the heart of Ibsen’s¬†An Enemy of the People is replete with allegorical suggestion. The play is, for this reason, easy to oversimplify as a tale of pristine scientific truth versus grubby government coverups. The conflict is better characterised according to competing reactions to a truth already out in the open. In the age of the endless news cycle, Anne-Louise Sarks observes in her Director‚Äôs Note, “the question is not so much will the truth come out ‚Äì as what will we do about the truth that is already out in the open and known?”‘

‘Each participant brought a certain cultural heft to this collective, creative, and collaborative writing process. Our distinctiveness as individuals made the process complex yet fluid: from being born and raised in the very places we had set our drama, to specialising in a particular art form, namely the Arabic qanun, or the contemporary urban movement of parkour. Together, we created a deep listening space where our shared cultural capital counted for a great deal.’

‘Finely balanced and spiced with well-placed expletives, Patricia Cornelius talks as she writes. The poetic/profane dynamic that surges through her short, grungy plays about the Australian underclass is audible in her voice too. There is frequently a note of anger, a sudden, unapologetic coarsening that reminds you that Cornelius, who is now in her early sixties, has lost none of the fire that forged her first plays at the Melbourne Workers Theatre in the late 1980s (her ‘apprenticeship’ as she calls it). If anything, by her own admission, Cornelius has been emboldened by age. When I telephone her in Melbourne it has only been a couple of months since the infamous exchange at Carrillo and Ziyin Gantners’ dinner for 70 notable Australian playwrights at which Cornelius publicly upbraided Arts Minister Mitch Fifield for the Government’s cuts to the Australia Council. As Fifield left the stage following a platitudinous speech, Cornelius was reported to have risen to her feet like one of the Furies from Greek mythology to punish Fifield’s “false oaths”’.

The vacillation between genius and madness characterises the tragic life story of Vaslav Nijinsky, undisputed star danseur of the twentieth century Russian Ballet… Nijinsky pushed the dramatic and athletic possibilities of classical ballet to a new level and rehabilitated the historically negative image of the dancing male through a highly charged sensuality.