Thérèse Radic

‘What do you reckon this is? Some kind of joke’ This final ironic cadence to Bill Reed’s sixth novel, with its upbeat question asked of death and the literary establishment, is never resolved; that isn’t Reed’s way. In a grand guignol of a novel, ostensibly about the repercussions of publishing an expose of crime bosses in New South Wales (which Reed actually did as the publisher of Aust ... (read more)

On my desk lies a review copy of Leah Purcell and Scott Rankin’s play, Box the Pony, which comes as a particularly lavish edition put out by Hodder, not a name usually associated with Australian play publishing, let alone anything as new as this. The review appears elsewhere in ABR, but I was surprised at being asked to offer a critique of it at all. Productions get reviewed, but once in print p ... (read more)

Katherine Brisbane’s Currency Press is the major play-publishing house in the country and no stranger to the snap-freeze process of producing program play texts by women as well as men. The women have a fair representation in Currency’s general range, but they proliferate in the Current Theatre Series, those pre-first production texts so impossible to follow up with the writer’s post-natal r ... (read more)