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.
‘Great wits to madness sure are near allied,And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’
For no one were Dryden’s partitions thinner than for Robert Lowell, as Kay Redfield Jamison’s exploration of the links between his work and the manic depressive illness which dogged him for most of his life makes clear. Previous biographers have, with varying degrees of compassion and opprobrium, chro ... (read more)
The Rape of Lucretia is the most problematic of Benjamin Britten’s operas. Recent productions of Gloriana, the opera Britten wrote to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, have proved that its notoriously unsuccessful première in 1953 had more to do with an uncomprehending audience than with the piece itself. But the problems with Lucretia (first performed on 12 July 1946, at Glyndebourne) ... (read more)
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ William Faulkner’s much-quoted line from Requiem for a Nun (1951) could be the subtitle for Diane Samuels’s play Kindertransport, first performed in London by the Soho Theatre Company in 1993, which has just opened at the Eternity Playhouse, in Sydney. It is shocking to have to concede that with the many unaccompanied children who have been e ... (read more)
Louis Nowra’s latest play, his first in ten years because apparently and appallingly no major company in Australia has asked him for one, is the third in his semi-autobiographical Lewis trilogy. In Summer of the Aliens (1992), the young Lewis, growing up in housing-commission Melbourne, has to find a way to come to terms with the unpredictable adults who surround him and to deal with his feeling ... (read more)
Clive, a splendid chappie, has taken up the white man’s burden in darkest Africa and is attempting to bring some British order to the lesser breeds without the law, even though the ungrateful blighters are getting a bit restless. He’s accompanied by that jolly good stick of a wife of his, Betty, their little nippers, Edward and Victoria, his mother-in-law, Maud, a bit of a dragon if you ask me ... (read more)
Three women are staring into space. They are dazed, in shock, not yet believing that what has just happened has actually occurred. Beneath them is the body of a man, husband and father, whom they have just murdered. So begins the wild, darkly lyrical nightmare ride that is Australian playwright Angus Cerini’s The Bleeding Tree, which won several 2016 Helpmann Awards, including Best Play and Best ... (read more)
The theatre has given us mutilation, Titus Andronicus comes to mind, and cannibalism in Thyestes and Sweeney Todd, but as far as I am aware there is no dramatic genre based on organ donorship. After Tommy Murphy’s Mark Colvin’s Kidney, this may well change.
Murphy’s funny and moving play is built around a series of circumstances that would seem to have emerged from the imagination of an abs ... (read more)
Lucy Kirkwood, the present darling of the British critics, is a playwright who is not afraid of tackling momentous subjects. Her most recent play, The Children (2016), is a post-nuclear apocalyptic chamber piece which explores the responsibility of the baby boomer generation to those who come after. Her new play, Mosquitoes, to be presented by the National Theatre in July 2017, apparently deals wi ... (read more)
Away reached the dubious status of ‘Australian Classic’ in a remarkably short period of time. It has become so ubiquitous that I would hazard a guess that fully two thirds of the Australian audience for this production who are under thirty will have been involved with the play either as performers, audience, or students. In the keynote address (‘The Agony and the Agony’) at the National Pl ... (read more)