Cirrus@Austlit

'Angus Cerini’s Into the Shimmering World is an unforgiving and, frankly, bleak meditation on what it is to be good; what it is to live a good life.'

'Over five engaging and enjoyable hours, the Lewis Trilogy, three works by Lewis Nowra, works insistently to convince its audience it is about love. Love that overcomes, that transcends, that is everything. And there certainly is a lot of love in the room.' (Introduction)

'Sophie Fletcher’s set for David Williamson’s new state-of-the-nation play comprises two major elements shoehorned into the intimate, asymmetrical diamond of the Stables Theatre.' (Introduction)

'Fredric Jameson has written of the 'structures of feeling' immanent to the postmodern condition: the breakdown of temporality and the associated experience of euphoric, intoxicating intensity, what he calls 'postmodern schizo-fragmentation'. For Jameson, this contrasts with the 'anxieties and hysterias' of modernism. 

'Taking up Jameson's concern with what, for want of a better term, we might call the 'dominant moods' of modernism and postmodernism, this article seeks to nuance and expand our understanding of modernism as it was lived and experienced. Specifically, I turn to Robert Genter's identification of 'Romantic Modernism', characterised, in contrast to high modernism's preoccupation with formal innovation, in terms of a search for redemption through sublime, primitive innocence, and instinctuality.

'I use this rubric to think about the work of a handful of innovative theatre-makers working in Sydney in the late 1960s: a brief, romantic modernist moment blooming in the years immediately prior to, and to a large extent overwhelmed by, the Australian New Wave theatre of the early 1970s. Those artists are Nico Lathouris, one of the driving forces behind the Performance Syndicate and the attempts to create a collective practice based upon Grotowski's writings, and the experimental group called the Human Body, members of which included Clem Gorman, Judy (later Juno) Gemes and Johnny Allen.' (Publication abstract)

'Rex Cramphorn was one of the key theatre practitioners to come out of the renaissance of Australian theatre in the 1960s and '70s. When Cramphorn died in 1991 at the age of 50, he left a legacy of theatre productions, research and ideas, that have influenced his own and subsequent generations of Australian theatre artists.

In A Raffish Experiment, Ian Maxwell presents an eclectic collection of Rex Cramphorn's writing, including theatre reviews for the Bulletin and the Sunday Australian, self-assessments, production diaries, essays and proposals, working notes for actors and selections from surviving correspondence.

Each chapter is framed by a short essay contextualising the material biographically, historically and culturally. The collection offers not only valuable - and unique - insights into a significant theatre practitioner as he wrestled with his craft, but a contribution to the historiography of Australian theatre, from a practitioner's point of view, through a formative period of that history.' (Publisher's blurb)