The Rising Debt of Gratitude: Actions and Transactions in Maggie Stone
It was Polonius, in Hamlet who said : “Neither a borrower or a lender be/ For loan oft loses both itself and friend.” He is right, of course, but like much of the old man’s advice to the young prince, it is a platitude; something easier said than done. It is not how we live in the world, because the world won’t let us.
In his insightful, engaging, sometimes …
Continue Reading Back to topDear Senators
I have been a theatre reviewer for national publications, including The National Times, The Australian Financial Review and currently The Australian, since 1985.
My comments refer particularly to theatre funding in Australia but inferences can be made across all of the performing arts.
I am profoundly concerned by the recent changes to arts funding announced in the 2015 Budget by Senator Brandis : both in the reduction of allocation to the Australia Council and the siphoning of as …
Continue Reading Back to topI have been asked to provide some reminiscences and perspectives on Massey University’s student paper Chaff during the editorship of Arthur Ranford and Stuart Loudon. For me this was mostly 1969 and 1970. Before that time I had contributed the occasional (woeful) poem or perhaps a book review, but my connection with the paper was through Arthur.
I had known Arthur when we were both at separate high schools in Palmerston North. Arthur was at Freyberg and I was at …
Continue Reading Back to top2009
Weathering the Past and Reconciling the Future:
Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling
Murray Bramwell
It is not often we see a play that has its first scene set in 2039 and features a fish falling from the sky. But When the Rain Stops Falling is no ordinary play. Even its genesis was a slow and sometimes arduous one. This work, as Chris Drummond’s introductory note has indicated, had its origins some five years before its premiere at …
Continue Reading Back to top2008
Currency Press
Beautiful Words, Harsh Realities and Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Murray Bramwell
In December 2001 a story was published in The Age newspaper about a young Afghan girl named Zaynab. Her photo shows a very typical looking twelve year old wearing a boldly patterned headscarf – but her expression is solemn, her eyes downcast. The report notes that although she is in the care of her uncle, a government spokesman says her future in Australia is uncertain.
Zaynab …
Continue Reading Back to top1994
A view of the writings of James K. Baxter
Murray Bramwell
Flinders University
The day before I left Adelaide I received a fax from Vince O’Sullivan listing the conference program. To my surprise I discovered that the vagaries of international subscriber dialling had created a new topic for me. The title I dictated down the phone was Looking for Runes – what got transcribed was: Looking for Rooms. This caused a flurry of reconsideration. Was this verbal flip an …
Continue Reading Back to top1994
Murray Bramwell
“My criticism has not, I hope, any other fault than the inevitable one of extreme unfairness.”
So wrote George Bernard Shaw in Our Theatre in the Nineties. He was writing of his Nineties, not ours, but it is notable that many of the conventions of reviewing today are indelibly Edwardian. Or at least you might say that nothing much has changed. Except that the vigorous, impassioned, lucid criticism that Shaw produced by the boatload was both more …
Continue Reading Back to topCRITICISING CRITICISM
By Murray Bramwell
Perhaps because theatre criticism is such a long established enterprise everyone thinks the business and purpose of it is self-evident. In fact, theatre reviewing is a rather strange, some might say barbaric, ritual. Of all reviews, theatre ones are the most intimate and immediate. A film will be widely available and screened and re-screened over a long period of time. Once made, it is infinitely repeatable and open to reconsideration. All sorts of films deemed …
Continue Reading Back to top1989
Murray Bramwell
To say that theatre reviewing is a strange and sometimes excruciating ritual is hardly a revelation. Yet the reasons for this and the assumptions on which they are based are rarely considered except in times of crisis. Of course, in the theatre that means quite often. The theatre, after all, is a volatile, sometimes giddy creature and much inclined to generating and attracting hyperbole. In fact, theatre is often seen as synonymous with crisis. No other art …
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Reviewing the Adelaide Festival : Recollections in Grateful Tranquility
March 11, 2020
File under Archive, Current, Festival, Commentary.
Adelaide Festival
Reviewing the Adelaide Festival : Recollections in Grateful Tranquility.
Murray Bramwell
My life in Adelaide has always included the Festival. Less than a month after I arrived, in February 1972, to begin postgraduate study at Flinders Uni, I was in the thick of Writers’ Week. Beat legends Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg were reading in the Town Hall. Ginsberg had invited Indulkana songmen from APY lands to share the …
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