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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.
Connections made across time and space have long been a focal point of Irish writer Colum McCann’s oeuvre. From the construction of the first railway tunnels under New York (This Side of Brightness, 1998) to his singular portrayal of the history and emotional toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Apeirogon (2020), McCann has weighed what it means to tether oneself to another person, anothe ... (read more)
In her essay ‘This Little Theory Went to Market’ – one of more than thirty pieces included in The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 – Elizabeth Finkel undertakes a pinpoint dissection of the two prevailing theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19): ‘natural origin versus a lab leak’. What Finkel is at pains to point out in her essay is that science ‘advances ... on the ... (read more)
Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.
For much of My Brilliant Career’s length, Franklin’s novel (published in 1901) seems to have been reduced to its lowest common denominator, a not unusual tendency i ... (read more)
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)