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ABR Arts

Theatre

Gaslight 

Rodney Rigby for Newtheatricals in association with Queensland Theatre

Book of the Week

Ghosts of Paradise
Poetry

Ghosts of Paradise by Stephen Edgar

With a title like Ghosts of Paradise, it is no surprise that Stephen Edgar’s latest poetry collection is haunted by loss, mutability, and mortality – the great traditional themes of elegiac poetry. But Edgar’s poetry has long, if not always, been characteristically elegiac. In this new collection, Edgar’s first since winning the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry in 2021 (and his first for Pitt Street Poetry), the poems are haunted by the poet’s late parents, late fellow poets (especially W.B. Yeats, but also the Australian poet Robert Adamson, for whom there is an elegy), and ancient poetic forms, such as the sonnet. The collection also includes meditations on ageing, corpses, and photographs (including Roland Barthes’ ‘theory / That every photo is a memento mori’). An interest in the intertwining of memory, embodiment, and visual representation is powerfully realised in ‘Still Life’, in which the memory of a trip to Broken Hill is

Interview

Interview

Interview

From the Archive

March 2012, no. 339

Joel Deane: David McKnight's depiction of Rupert Murdoch

 It is a thought-provoking photograph. In 1988, during the bicentenary of The Times, Rupert Murdoch and Queen Elizabeth are pictured sitting at a news conference within the inner sanctum of the London broadsheet. Mogul and monarch are at arm’s length – she, straight-backed, legs crossed, hands gathered together above her lap; he, leaning forward and slightly to his right, towards her, with a piece of paper pinched between thumb and forefinger. Behind and between them, pinned to the wall, is what appears to be a photograph of Prince Charles crossing the road holding the hand of a very young Prince William.

From the Archive

July 1996, no. 182

Performances by Greg Dening

Greg Dening was trained for the Catholic priesthood. He became an outstanding historian of the Pacific, although perhaps better described as an anthropologist-historian, in company with Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, Nathalie Zemon Davis, and his colleague Rhys Isaac, to whom this book is warmly dedicated. Yet echoes of his initial calling linger in his work, certainly as evidenced in this collection of essays.

From the Archive

August 1991, no. 133

The State of Play by Leonard Radic

The subtitle of this book, ‘The Revolution in the Australian Theatre since the 1960s’, is the clue to its subject and its thesis. If it is plain that Australian theatre and, in particular, Australian drama, is now an established fact, a splendid feature of the cultural landscape, this is only a recent growth.

The author has been peculiarly placed to watch this growth, to assist it and even to inspire it. Since 1974, as theatre critic for the Melbourne Age, he has seen and reviewed more than 2000 productions, more than 1000 of them plays by Australian writers.