Ben Brooker

Macbeth (State Theatre Company of South Australia)

ABR Arts • 31 August 2017

Macbeth, directed by Geordie Brookman, artistic director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, is the second production to showcase the STCSA’s new acting ensemble. The first, A Doll’s House, with an updated text by Elena Carapetis and also directed by Brookman, was underwhelming – a limp, misjudged effort whose contemporisation struck a false note and, in giving the final word to ... (read more)

The Sound of Falling Stars (Adelaide Cabaret Festival)

ABR Arts • 22 June 2017

It has been almost forty years since Robyn Archer first performed A Star is Torn, her one-woman cabaret honouring the too-short lives of female singers from Bessie Smith to Janis Joplin. Playing for a year on the West End, and spawning both an album (in 1980) and a book (1986), the show substantially made Archer’s reputation overseas, touring widely for four years. Now she has written and direct ... (read more)

1984 (State Theatre Company of South Australia)

ABR Arts • 18 May 2017

In recent years George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949) has twice been returned to bestseller lists around the world – in the wake of the United States National Security Agency’s global surveillance scandal, and following Donald Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway’s decidedly Orwellian coinage of ‘alternative facts’ while defending the White House’s false claims a ... (read more)

No Man's Land (Wyndham's Theatre)

ABR Arts • 19 December 2016

It was in early 1974, while Harold Pinter was in America and working on a screen adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, that the originating image of No Man’s Land occurred to him: I remember, I was sitting in this taxi and I actually saw two people sitting in a room and one of them was about to pour the other one a drink and he said: ‘As it is?’ and the other character said: ... (read more)

Tartuffe (State Theatre Company of South Australia and Brink Productions)

ABR Arts • 11 November 2016

Web articles proliferate that aim to show the disparity between Donald Trump’s religious sentiments (‘I think the Bible is certainly, it is the book’) and his decidedly unholy behavior (including, but not limited to, numerous allegations of sexual harassment and assault). It is from within this space – what Martin Luther King Jr called the ‘the agonising gulf between the ought and the is ... (read more)

Ben Brooker reviews 'Ethics in the Real World: 86 brief essays on things that matter' by Peter Singer

November 2016, no. 386 • 28 October 2016

In its original meaning, the word ‘philosopher’ simply meant ‘lover of wisdom’. At a time when theories of knowledge were still in their infancy, it was applied to thinkers – often, by the standards of the day, polymaths – who were able to turn the light of their intellects onto a vast range of fields: physics, chemistry, political science, ethics. A philosopher thus defined could not ... (read more)

Things I Know To Be True (State Theatre Company of South Australia and Frantic Assembly)

ABR Arts • 17 May 2016

At least as far back as 2002, playwright Andrew Bovell was advocating for more diversity on Australia's main stages: 'I see the same actors,' he told Hilary Glow in an interview for her book Power Plays (2007), '[and] they are invariably white and Anglo-Saxon, and I am not satisfied with that as a portrayal of our culture.' Fourteen years later, in his new play – his first original stage work, ... (read more)

Desdemona (Melbourne Festival)

ABR Arts • 27 October 2015

'What's in a name?' asked Juliet. Desdemona, like the rose, might have been called anything else and retained the same meanings. But for us, as we are reminded at the beginning of Desdemona, the name has become synonymous with misery and doom. The speaker is Desdemona herself. How can this be? If we know anything else about her, it is that Othello murdered her within hours of the consummation of t ... (read more)

The Aspirations of Daise Morrow (Brink Productions)

ABR Arts • 16 October 2015

‘Down at the Dump’ is the final story in Patrick White’s 1964 collection, The Burnt Ones. It begins with a colloquial ‘Hi!’, marooned on the story’s first line, and ends with a short, unpunctuated paragraph, intensely poetic, that recalls James Joyce at his least opaque: ‘The warm core of certainty settled stiller as driving faster the wind paid out the telephone wires the fences the ... (read more)

Faust and Verdi's Requiem (State Opera of South Australia)

ABR Arts • 14 September 2015

Good and evil, damnation and salvation, love and death, virtue and folly: State Opera of South Australia’s pairing of Gounod’s five-act grand opera Faust () with Verdi’s momentous opera cum oratorio Requiem() epically traverses the profoundest bays of the human condition. Together, they round out a season inaugurated by Mozart’s Don Giovanni, another staple of the repertoire that has at it ... (read more)