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Jonathan Ricketson

Jonathan Ricketson

Jonathan Ricketson is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University, where he is working on a novel. His short fiction has been published in Meanjin.

'Henry 5: Bell Shakespeare’s production of a martial play' by Jonathan Ricketson

ABR Arts 06 March 2025
Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play? No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year. Henry V is far from the Bard’s worst, but it is a second-rate work that is poorly suited to the present day. Fundamentally, the final play in Shakespeare’s second history cycle is about the glories of militarism. It follows an arrogant ... (read more)

Jonathan Ricketson reviews ‘The Empusium: A health report horror story’ by Olga Tokarczuk

March 2025, no. 473 20 February 2025
The title of The Empusium, the newly translated work by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is an invention. It is a portmanteau that fuses masculine and feminine literary allusions: first, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken Athenian banquet in which great statesmen give speeches on the nature of love; second, the empusa, a shape-shifting female demon ... (read more)

'My Brilliant Friend: The Story of the Lost Child: The darkly glittering world of Elena Ferrante’s Naples' by Jonathan Ricketson

ABR Arts 06 December 2024
The previous season of My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale) ended with a moment of fairytale-like transformation, with the protagonist Elena (Lenù) Greco staring at herself in the mirror of an aeroplane bathroom. She has torpedoed her marriage to run away with the man she always loved. Looking at the glass, she ages decades in the space of a heartbeat: the cherubic, adolescent features of Marg ... (read more)

Jonathan Ricketson reviews ‘The Season’ by Helen Garner

December 2024, no. 471 25 November 2024
Helen Garner has death on her mind. In recent decades, it has permeated her work in fascinating and unexpected ways. There is her novel The Spare Room (2008), which is about a woman’s struggles to care for a dying friend held hostage to dangerous delusions; This House of Grief (2014), a true-crime book about a devasting act of filicide; and, in her most recent volume of diaries, How to End a S ... (read more)

Jonathan Ricketson reviews ‘Dark City: True stories of crimes, cock-ups, crooks and cops’ by John Silvester

November 2024, no. 470 29 October 2024
In 2020, John Silvester posed for a portrait by the artist Mica Pillemer. The picture is an arresting one: Silvester, in business attire, posing as a boxer. Behind him, the walls are plastered with newspapers and posters, a testament to his more than four decades of experience as a Melbourne crime reporter. His fists are raised, his dark eyes hold the viewer’s, his mouth is upturned with the fai ... (read more)