Susan Lever

Richard 3 (Bell Shakespeare)

ABR Arts • 03 March 2017

The stage is open – a glossy art deco drawing room with plush velvet chairs and a chaise longue, cocktail glasses, and champagne, ready for a party. An engaging young man, dressed formally in a three-piece suit steps onstage and begins the famous speech: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York ...’ Of course, the young man is played by a woman, but that ... (read more)

Susan Lever reviews 'Ink in Her Veins: The troubled life of Aileen Palmer' by Sylvia Martin

June–July 2016, no. 382 • 23 May 2016

In her new biography, Sylvia Martin tells us that Aileen Palmer wanted to be remembered as a poet. Until now, she has been best known as the elder daughter of Vance and Nettie Palmer, those beacons of Australian literature who devoted their lives to developing our literary culture. Aileen, with her sister Helen, carefully preserved the legacy of her parents, ensuring that their papers were deposit ... (read more)

Susan Lever reviews 'Contemporary Australian Literature' by Nicholas Birns

March 2016, no. 379 • 24 February 2016

From time to time, Australian literature has been fortunate enough to attract the enthusiasm of international critics, from C. Hartley Grattan in the 1920s to Paul Giles, who compared Australian and American literature in his scholarly Antipodean America (2013). Nicholas Birns, a New York academic, tells us that he first encountered Australian writing back in the 1980s and has been a member of the ... (read more)

Susan Lever reviews 'The Natural Way of Things' by Charlotte Wood

November 2015, no. 376 • 27 October 2015

In an isolated hut in the countryside, a young woman wakes from a drug-induced sleep to discover that she is dressed in a nineteenth-century smock. She soon finds another young woman in the same condition, and both are forced to submit to the shaving of their heads. It is contemporary Australia: kookaburras cackle outside. Are they in a prison, or a religious cult, or – as one of their fellow in ... (read more)

The Tempest (Bell Shakespeare)

ABR Arts • 31 August 2015

Twenty-five years ago, John Bell undertook to create an Australian theatre company devoted to Shakespeare, a travelling repertory company that would give wide access to this wonderful legacy of our language. It harked back to a time when Shakespeare mattered so much to Australians that an actor could make a name performing Shakespeare rather than appearing in Hollywood films. At Belvoir you can se ... (read more)

Susan Lever reviews 'The World Without Us' by Mireille Juchau

September 2015, no. 374 • 26 August 2015

From the opening pages of Mireille Juchau’s new novel, The World Without Us, we know we are in the hands of a poetic writer in control of language and ready to invest every sentence with resonant detail. In this scene, two of the central characters encounter each other at a river above a waterfall: Now the water was strung with reflected clouds, and the canopy, backlit, was dark as the earth. T ... (read more)

Reading Australia: 'The Floating World' by John Romeril

Reading Australia • 11 June 2015

Late in 2013, the Griffin Theatre in Sydney revived John Romeril’s The Floating World as its annual production of an Australian classic. The play is now forty years old, and unfamiliar to contemporary audiences who would have been lucky to see its first performances in the tiny Pram Factory in 1974 or any of the handful of intervening performances of the play. By all accounts, that first product ... (read more)

Susan Lever reviews 'Merciless Gods' by Christos Tsiolkas

January-February 2015, no. 368 • 01 January 2015

Christos Tsiolkas has established himself as a fiction writer to be reckoned with, especially since the publication of the explosive Dead Europe (2005) and the bestselling The Slap (2008). His latest novel, Barracuda (2013), marked a return to the adolescent anger and simpler naturalism of his early work. So his new volume of stories, Merciless Gods, may offer some help in understanding the trajec ... (read more)

Susan Lever reviews 'Warning: The story of Cyclone Tracy' by Sophie Cunningham

August 2014, no. 363 • 01 August 2014

Forty years ago next Christmas, a cyclone devastated Australia’s northernmost city, Darwin. It is a disaster still clear in the living memory of most Australians over fifty, but it also belongs to the past, the time before we had become aware of climate change. At the time, it was the kind of natural disaster to be expected in summer in the Top End, even if its festive timing appeared ominous in ... (read more)

Susan Lever reviews 'Always Almost Modern: Australian print cultures and modernity' by David Carter

May 2014, no. 361 • 30 April 2014

Australia was colonised in the period of modernity, with the Industrial Revolution driving much of its development and a belief in improving technology and political progress underlying its public institutions. The society may have been modern but its culture, in particular its art and literature, has borne the recurrent charge of backwardness. The centres of innovation in twentieth-century art ha ... (read more)