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Ken Healey

Ken Healey reviewed plays for the Fairfax Press in Canberra and Sydney for twenty-five years, from 1972. For the past twenty years, he has taught playwriting at NIDA, as Literary Manager.

Ken Healey reviews ‘A Leader of His Craft: Theatre reviews by H.G. Kippax’ edited by Harry Heseltine

March 2005, no. 269 01 March 2005
The eighteenth-century French Academician Buffon gave the world the aphorism ‘Le style est l’homme même’. It makes a fine epitaph for H.G. Kippax. Harry Kippax was a distinguished journalist and, for more than thirty years, until his retirement in 1989, a theatre critic of singular authority and style. In the late 1950s, while employed by the Sydney Morning Herald, he began to write thought ... (read more)

Ken Healey reviews 'Not Wrong – Just Different: Observations on the rise of contemporary Australian theatre' by Katharine Brisbane

April 2006, no. 280 01 April 2006
Imagine, if you will, the blessed child of a parthenogenetic conception involving the Oracle of Delphi and Cassandra. The girl has Cassandra’s clarity, passion and a good deal of her accuracy, combined with the Oracle’s high degree of credibility but without its duplicity. What could that girl grow up to become but a theatre critic and commentator, even if she had been raised in the 1930s, in ... (read more)

Ken Healey reviews 'Contemporary Australian Drama' by Leonard Radic

October 2006, no. 285 01 October 2006
When Prince Hamlet cried ‘The play’s the thing’, he was about to use a performance of The Mousetrap to demonstrate a point central to his purpose: he intended to ‘catch the conscience of the king’. Nearly 400 years later, British playwright David Hare endorsed and expanded Hamlet’s utilitarian approach, writing: ‘Indeed, if you want to understand the social history of Britain since t ... (read more)