Diane Stubbings

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her plays have been shortlisted for a number of Australian and international awards, and staged in Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand. She has written for Australian Book Review, The Australian, The Canberra Times, and the Sydney Review of Books. Her study of Irish Modernism was published by Palgrave. Diane has recently completed a PhD at VCA, University of Melbourne, investigating intersections between science and theatre.

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Diane Stubbings reviews 'Willowman' by Inga Simpson

December 2022, no. 449 • 25 November 2022

In American culture, the baseball novel is virtually a genre unto itself, baseball offering a metaphor through which the American dream – the rise and fall and rise again of unlikely heroes – might be interrogated. The prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) offers a stunning example: within all the noise and spectacle of a baseball final an entire nation, as it teeters on the edge of th ... (read more)

'Emilia: A mock history of an Elizabethan poet' by Diane Stubbings

ABR Arts • 14 November 2022

Cessalee Stovall as Emilia (photography by Dylan Hornsby)

William Shakespeare is hiding behind a set of drapes. Wearing baggy black breeches, he is a buffoon, waggishly stalking his prey. His prey is Emilia Bassano, the young and (unusually for the times) educated daughter of a musician at the court of Elizabeth I, a woman who longs to be recognised for ‘how brilliant [her] mind is’. She wants to write and be published, to speak and be heard. When sh ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'Salonika Burning' by Gail Jones

November 2022, no. 448 • 25 October 2022

In 1917, at the height of World War I, a fire destroyed the Greek city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), a staging post for Allied troops. The centre of an ‘Ottoman polyglot culture’, Salonika was at the time home to large numbers of refugees, many of them Jewish and Roma. It was in one of the refugee hovels that the fire started, an ember from a makeshift stove igniting a bundle of straw. From that ... (read more)

‘Anna K: An insipid new play from Suzie Miller’ by Diane Stubbings

ABR Arts • 18 August 2022

Australian playwright Suzie Miller, a mainstay of independent stages both in Australia and overseas, is having something of a breakthrough year. Two of Miller’s play are having their mainstage premières – Anna K and RBG, Miller’s ode to American jurist Ruth Bader Ginsberg (Sydney Theatre Company, October–December) – and her Griffin-award-winning play Prima Facie (2019) has been a sell-o ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'Daisy & Woolf' by Michelle Cahill

July 2022, no. 444 • 25 June 2022

Daisy Simmons – twenty-four years old, the wife of a major in the Indian Army, mother of two children, ‘dark [and] adorably pretty’ – is an ephemeral presence in Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Clarissa Dalloway’s former lover, Peter Walsh, has travelled to London from India to secure a divorce so that he might marry Daisy. From a mere handful of references, we are ... (read more)

‘The Sound Inside: Textual healing’ by Diane Stubbings

ABR Arts • 30 May 2022

On paper, American playwright Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside is an intriguing piece of writing. Bella Baird, a professor of creative writing at Yale University, ‘emerges from the darkness’ onto a nondescript stage and introduces herself. She speaks in the ‘heavily embroidered, figurative’ sentences that she dissuades her students from using, a liberty she allows herself standing here, alon ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'The Colony' by Audrey Magee and 'The Leviathan' by Rosie Andrews

June 2022, no. 443 • 23 May 2022

Two new novels probe national myths and histories, offering insights into the political and religious forces that continue to shape contemporary conflicts. Set during the height of the Troubles, Irish writer Audrey Magee’s The Colony begins with English artist Mr Lloyd travelling to a remote island off Ireland’s west coast, ‘a rock cutting into the ocean, splitting, splintering, shredding t ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'Skin Deep: The inside story of our outer selves' by Phillipa McGuinness

April 2022, no. 441 • 23 March 2022

In Skin Deep: The inside story of our outer selves, Australian writer Phillipa McGuinness gathers some impressive facts about skin. A square centimetre contains, among other things, six million cells, two hundred pain sensors, and one hundred sweat glands. The skin of an individual weighing seventy kilograms ‘covers two square metres and weighs five kilograms’. A YouTube channel where you can ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious' by Antonio Damasio

March 2022, no. 440 • 22 February 2022

In Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious, neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher Antonio Damasio asks us to imagine life without consciousness. We would, he argues, still have patterns of neurochemical, sense-derived information ‘flowing in our minds, but [that information] would be unconnected to us as singular individuals’. ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews '12 Bytes: How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love' by Jeanette Winterson

October 2021, no. 436 • 22 September 2021

In her novel Frankissstein (2019) – a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) that embraces robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and transhumanism – Jeanette Winterson writes, ‘The monster once made cannot be unmade. What will happen to the world has begun.’ This observation might have served as an epigraph for her new book, 12 Bytes. Comprising twelve essays that rumina ... (read more)