Cirrus@Austlit

'Sweet Country, the first conventional feature that Warwick Thornton has made since Samson and Delilah (2009), his début, puts the lie to its title. It opens with a shot of boiling tar and only gets angrier from there. The film was christened a western after its première at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017, though it is set a decade after World War I, far removed from the period we associate with the traditional oater. This doesn’t stop Thornton from invoking the genre and the medium explicitly, with 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang at one point projected onto a sheet outside an outback pub. The same pub is presided over by a madam whose bustier looks decades out of fashion, and the film is littered with well-worn lines like ‘I am the law’ – courtesy of an unsmiling Bryan Brown – that would seem to locate it squarely within the genre.'  (Introduction)

'In Simon Baker’s film, there is a visually stunning moment – one among many – of a giant curving wave on the verge of breaking that recalls the Japanese artist Hokusai’s famous ‘The Great Wave of Kanagawa’. What these two images share is the sense of rapturous beauty that doesn’t underestimate the challenge it offers. It seems appropriate to start on this note as the cinematography (the work of Marden Dean and Rick Rifici) creates from the outset the centrality of the surf to the film, as indeed it is in Tim Winton’s 2008 novel.'  (Introduction)

'In the introduction to her seminal memoir of life as a transgender person, Conundrum (1974), the author Jan Morris makes it clear that she is not concerned with merely narrating the facts of her condition. ‘What was important’ to relate ‘was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels.'' (Introduction)

'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 peers as a sort of boulevard comedy – feels exceptional in this regard: a not-quite-new, not-quite-old Australian play that has nevertheless entered the repertoire. On its completion in 1988, it played in Melbourne for almost half a year and seems to have been produced uninterruptedly since, including by Sydney Theatre Company as recently as 2015. In Bovell’s program note for this solid revival by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, he describes it, not wrongly, as ‘a classic comedy of the Australian theatre’.' (Introduction)

'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 belongs to a particular moment in time, appearing amid the largely confected furore around the proliferation of adapted classics on Australian stages. There is something, too, in its depiction of a certain kind of hypermasculinity that seems to date it to a specific period in Melbourne’s independent theatre scene, before the recent upsurge of queer work by Sisters Grimm and others. And yet this Thyestes remains viscerally alive: confronting and funny, a deeply compelling mix of the excessive and the ascetic, like the pared-back, shoulder-to-the-wheel rock and roll of a middle-period Bruce Springsteen album. (The Boss does not feature in Stefan Gregory’s raucous sound design, but Wu Tang Clan, Queen, and Roy Orbison do.)' (Introduction)

'Gay theatre, or at least identifiably queer theatre, has never had much of a presence in Australia; most of what we consider canonical has come from overseas. The Elizabethan stage had Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare had two characters named Antonio, in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, who are fairly obviously queer. Since then, most quintessentially gay theatre has come from the United States. Tennessee Williams perfected the unspoken queer subtext, often tying himself in knots to speak clearly what remained unspeakable. But it took Tony Kushner to produce the first openly gay theatrical masterpiece in the two-part Angels in America (1991–92). Anyone who caught last year’s production of Angels at fortyfivedownstairs will know just how vital and electrifying the piece remains as a touchstone of gay representation on stage.'  (Introduction)

'The opening of Peter Carey’s satirical novel Bliss (1981), where the body of Harry Joy lies dead on the lawn while his spirit hovers above, is one of the most memorable in modern Australian literature. Harry’s laconic out-of-body narration hovers like a spare and airy jazz riff until a defibrillator jolts him back into the land of the living, and a newly recognised living hell. It’s not an easy scene to stage, and in Tom Wright’s adaptation at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, it’s been dismembered.'  (Introduction)

'Black Swan State Theatre Company’s terrific new production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll joins other recent revivals such as those by Belvoir Street Theatre (2011) and State Theatre Company of South Australia (2015) in showing that Ray Lawler’s 1955 classic has lost none of its power to entertain and provoke.' (Introduction)