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.
In her essay ‘The Irish Woman Poet’, Eavan Boland (herself considered Ireland’s greatest female poet) noted that ‘The life of the Irish woman – the ordinary lived life – was both invisible and, when it became visible, was considered inappropriate as a theme for Irish poetry.’ The only place within poetry for an Irish woman, history seemed to insist, was as either muse or myth. Any hi ... (read more)
Some of Australia’s most enduring plays have dealt with war and its legacy. Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year (1960), John Romeril’s The Floating World (1974), Dorothy Hewitt’s The Man from Muckinupin (1979), Kate Mulvaney’s The Seed (2008), and Tom Wright’s Black Diggers (2015) have, each in their own way, interrogated the baptisms of blood upon which much of our national mytholo ... (read more)
In his survey of the notebook Arthur Miller kept while writing Death of a Salesman, John Lahr, in Arthur Miller: American witness (2022), relates that early in its composition Miller considered calling the play ‘The Inside of His Head’. Correspondingly, Miller envisioned the stage ‘designed in the shape of a head, with the action taking place inside it’.
Miller’s instinct to discard the ... (read more)
Voices in Caryl Churchill’s plays swell and ripple and surge, but they are an unquiet river in whose streambed is hidden the unspeakable, the incomprehensible. Like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter – the two playwrights with whom she is most often compared – Churchill is a doyenne of the unspoken, silences manifesting as much through their presence as their absence.
Silence, too, surrounds ... (read more)
British sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote that ‘there is no landscape without the human figure’. Similarly, there is no human without the landscape in which they are situated, human and landscape mutually shaping, resisting and defining the other.
Three new Australian novels probe this interdependence, each of them concerned with the historical forces that have silenced and confined women, and ... (read more)
In previous memoirs, Brisbane-based writer Kris Kneen has examined their life through the lens of their sexuality (Affection, 2009) and their family history (The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, 2021). In Fat Girl Dancing, Kneen’s lens is their body, specifically the body of a ‘short, fat, ageing woman’.
The struggle with body image that Kneen depicts here – a struggle that will be familiar ... (read more)
In his preamble to a playlist for Faber Radio, Max Porter writes: ‘So much injustice but so much beauty, life is short and strange and I better run upstairs and tell these noisy little shits [my children] how much I love them.’ The quote would be an apt epigraph for Porter’s splendid new novel, Shy. The story of a troubled teen (Shy) who lives in a special education facility housed in a ‘s ... (read more)
More than a century ago, long before gender-blind casting became modish, the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), a woman in her fifties, had the audacious idea that she would play Hamlet. Not only would she – scandalously – don breeches to do so, but she would also defy the critical consensus that Hamlet was a man in his early thirties. In her imagination, Hamlet was a wet-behind-the-e ... (read more)
Since first being produced at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre in 2019, Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie – a legal drama about consent and sexual violence – has become something of a phenomenon. Awarded Griffin Theatre’s playwriting prize in 2018, the subsequent production was enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike. A 2022 West End production – propelled by the star power of K ... (read more)