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Ian Dickson
Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales, and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee.
The fifteen years from the end of the World War II to 1960 were in many ways a dark period of queer history in the United Kingdom. The 1920s and 1930s were relatively relaxed in their attitudes to the gay world. As Adam de Hegedus, writing as Rodney Garland, wrote in his novel The Heart in Exile (1953), ‘the war broke down inhibitions and the element of danger made sex rampant. Public opinion wa ... (read more)
For the past thirty years, breakthroughs in video and sound technology have, for better or worse, seeped into live performance. For better in the case of Kip William’s production of Suddenly Last Summer and Lindy Hume and Dave Bergman’s Winterreise for Musica Viva. For worse with David Livermore/Opera Australia’s ludicrous Anna Bolena and Ivo van Hove’s self-indulgent All About Eve. With D ... (read more)
King Lear is the Everest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, looming over theatre companies, challenging them to make the perilous ascent. It is also the darkest. Hamlet may finish with almost as many bodies strewn around the stage, and Macbeth delves deep into malign forces unleashed by cravings for power, but with the former ending with the arrival of Fortinbras, Hamlet’s chosen successor, and the l ... (read more)
Recuperating after an almost lethal bout of tuberculosis contracted in his twenties, the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) wrote that he had ‘discovered my method of working, my own brand of infamy, my particular form of brutality, my own idiosyncratic taste’. It was a method that from the start made him Austria’s literary hair shirt. In novel after novel and play af ... (read more)
More over-heated gush has been written about the Greek-American singer Maria Callas than about any other performer, with the possible exception of Greta Garbo. Given that Callas’s centenary has just occurred (2 December), we can expect much more of the same. Steven Knight is shooting a biopic, Maria, with Angelina Jolie, which one hopes will fare better than Franco Zeffirelli’s cringe-making v ... (read more)
Don’t contradict strange gentlemen. Take special care around the George Street light rail. Watch out for flying pigs. Treat any black cat you might meet with caution, especially ones that speak to you. Woland and his satanic crew have taken up residence at Belvoir.
One of the many ironies connected to the Russian playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) is that though he wrote sev ... (read more)
What makes the physical and mental disintegration of famous performers so compulsively fascinating to so many people? The breakdown of a talented artist, usually female, brought down by her insecurities and the betrayal and abandonment of those close to her, usually male, is a trope that is endlessly trotted out to and repeatedly lapped up by audiences. The unhappy finales of Judy Garland, Marilyn ... (read more)
The French-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco’s ambivalent attitude towards the power, even the usefulness, of language played out throughout his career. Speaking of Jean-Paul Sartre, Ionesco (1909–94) said that he ‘wrote an important book called Words and there he noticed that he had talked too much all his life. That words are not saying anything.’ Later, Ionesco claimed ‘[w]ords no l ... (read more)
In the history of the American musical, Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) presents us with what his Siamese king would have described as a puzzlement. Lacking the sophistication of Cole Porter, the verbal dexterity of Lorenz Hart, and the sly wit of Ira Gershwin, his lyrics, taken out of context, can seem hokey and sentimental. Will he ever be forgiven for The Sound of Music’s ‘lark who is le ... (read more)