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Ben Brooker
Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, essayist, and former bookseller. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from Flinders University and an Advanced Diploma of Professional Writing from Adelaide College of the Arts. His work has been featured by Overland, New Matilda, New Internationalist, Australian Book Review, RealTime, The Lifted Brow, Witness, and Daily Review.
Thirty years old is a difficult age for a play in this country. Australian cultural memory is not exactly short, but it certainly tapers in the middle where such plays lie, flanked on one side by The Canon and, on the other, by The Next Big Thing. Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner – initially a melancholic one-acter for three women, later expanded and recast by the playwright for his drama school p ... (read more)
In a Festival glutted with plays about war and the violence wrought by powerful men, Dutch theatre company Toneelgroep’s Kings of War stands tall. A four-and-a-half-hour conflation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III, it is directed by Ivo van Hove whose monumental Roman Tragedies – which conceived Shakespeare’s Roman history plays as an immersive treatise on contemporary p ... (read more)
I think it was Peter Brook who said the longest that a staging of a play could remain vital was five years. The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, directed by Simon Stone and adapted from Seneca’s tragedy by Stone himself, Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, and Mark Winter, was first seen at the Malthouse Theatre in 2010. Notwithstanding a handful of updates to the text, this production feels like it belong ... (read more)
In a 1974 paper, American philosopher Thomas Nagel famously wondered what it was like to be a bat. He concluded that we could never know what it was like to be a member of a different species – that the inner lives of animals are ultimately inaccessible to us. In Consciousness Explained (1991), Daniel C. Dennett, while acknowledging the influence of Nagel’s thought experiment, offered a rebutt ... (read more)
Macbeth, directed by Geordie Brookman, artistic director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, is the second production to showcase the STCSA’s new acting ensemble. The first, A Doll’s House, with an updated text by Elena Carapetis and also directed by Brookman, was underwhelming – a limp, misjudged effort whose contemporisation struck a false note and, in giving the final word to ... (read more)
It has been almost forty years since Robyn Archer first performed A Star is Torn, her one-woman cabaret honouring the too-short lives of female singers from Bessie Smith to Janis Joplin. Playing for a year on the West End, and spawning both an album (in 1980) and a book (1986), the show substantially made Archer’s reputation overseas, touring widely for four years. Now she has written and direct ... (read more)
In recent years George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949) has twice been returned to bestseller lists around the world – in the wake of the United States National Security Agency’s global surveillance scandal, and following Donald Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway’s decidedly Orwellian coinage of ‘alternative facts’ while defending the White House’s false claims a ... (read more)
It was in early 1974, while Harold Pinter was in America and working on a screen adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, that the originating image of No Man’s Land occurred to him:
I remember, I was sitting in this taxi and I actually saw two people sitting in a room and one of them was about to pour the other one a drink and he said: ‘As it is?’ and the other character said: ... (read more)
Web articles proliferate that aim to show the disparity between Donald Trump’s religious sentiments (‘I think the Bible is certainly, it is the book’) and his decidedly unholy behavior (including, but not limited to, numerous allegations of sexual harassment and assault). It is from within this space – what Martin Luther King Jr called the ‘the agonising gulf between the ought and the is ... (read more)