Diane Stubbings
Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her plays have been shortlisted for a number of Australian and international awards, and staged in Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand. She has written for Australian Book Review, The Australian, The Canberra Times, and the Sydney Review of Books. Her study of Irish Modernism was published by Palgrave. Diane has recently completed a PhD at VCA, University of Melbourne, investigating intersections between science and theatre.
The opening frames of Steve McQueen’s Blitz situate us in the midst of all the horror and chaos of Hitler’s lightning war – his blitzkrieg – on Britain in 1940-41. Bombs rain down on the densely populated streets of London’s East End, while firefighters and air raid patrol (ARP) wardens rush to counter the raging flames, dragging bodies, alive or dead, from the rubble. In a confusion of ... (read more)
In 1983, actor Noni Hazlehurst was invited to London by Robyn Archer to be part of Archer’s new cabaret Cut and Thrust. Hazlehurst, less than a decade out of acting school and having just been fêted in Cannes for her performance of Nora in the film adaptation of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1982), was ‘thrilled to bits’.
Born at Brighton Community Hospital in August 1953, Hazlehurst was t ... (read more)
Watching the denouement of Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, I was reminded of David Edgar’s 1980 stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Ensconced within the travelling theatrical company of Mr Vincent Crummles, Nicholas and his hapless companion Smike are cast in a production of Romeo and Juliet, Smike as the apothecary and Nicholas (of cou ... (read more)
In The Forever Wars: America’s unending conflict with itself – a searing account of the ways in which the seeds of Trumpism and the MAGA movement reach back to the first throes of American nationhood (reviewed for ABR by Timothy J. Lynch) – journalist Nick Bryant characterises the narrative by which America defines itself as ‘a story of unrivalled national success, shared values, common pu ... (read more)
When we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability. Ha ... (read more)
There is a perennial fascination with the nature of creativity – what ignites it, what sustains it, and what, too often, destroys it. In this, creativity might be viewed as analogous to life itself, the consequence of a complex array of often unpredictable connections and influences, its ultimate viability always uncertain. That any individual cell of an idea develops into a fully fledged work o ... (read more)
Addiction is the third wheel in many a stage relationship. Plays such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), J.P. Miller’s Days of Wine and Roses (1958), and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) examine the ways in which addiction – whether to alcohol, morphine, or even love – offers a heady sense of ‘something’ where once there seemed to be ... (read more)
In late 1999, NASA announced that its Mars Climate Orbiter, a multi-million-dollar robot probe designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was lost somewhere in space. The craft had failed to manoeuvre into its optimal orbit, ending either on a course towards the sun or in a fatal collision with the red planet. Investigations uncovered the source of the blunder: one team working on the orbi ... (read more)
When amateur historian Catherine Corless wrote in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society (2012) that the bodies of 796 children who had died in Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home between 1925 and 1961 might have been interred in a disused septic tank within the home’s grounds, she supposed her involvement in the search for truth would be at an end. The article, she expected, would prompt academics, poli ... (read more)