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Ben Brooker

Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, essayist, and former bookseller. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from Flinders University and an Advanced Diploma of Professional Writing from Adelaide College of the Arts. His work has been featured by Overland, New Matilda, New Internationalist, Australian Book Review, RealTime, The Lifted Brow, Witness, and Daily Review.

'Far Away: Caryl Churchill’s play about power' by Ben Brooker

ABR Arts 17 July 2023
Now an octogenarian, and with more than thirty plays to her name, Caryl Churchill must be the English-speaking theatre’s nearest equivalent to a rock star of a certain age. It’s no exaggeration to say that without her plays – which, like Samuel Beckett’s, have become increasingly spare and crystalline over time, some running to as little as ten minutes – it would be hard to imagine the e ... (read more)

'Worstward Ho: Late Beckett at Theatreworks' by Ben Brooker

ABR Arts 26 May 2023
It is a curious fact that perhaps the most famous lines in all of Beckett are contained in one of his least-known works, the 1983 prose piece Worstward Ho. ‘All before. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ These words, the ne plus ultra of Beckettian endurance in the face of existential adversity, have entered the culture in a way individu ... (read more)

Ben Brooker reviews 'Dark Winter: An insider’s guide to pandemics and biosecurity' by Raina MacIntyre

June 2023, no. 454 24 May 2023
In the months leading up to the 2022 federal election, as the two major parties duked it out over the cost of living, integrity, and the climate crisis, one issue barely rated a mention amid the barrage of leaders’ debates, press conferences, and doorstops: the Covid-19 pandemic. Having raged in Australia for more than two years, resulting in once-in-a-generation disruption to daily life, includ ... (read more)

'Loaded: Christos Tsiolkas’s novel finally comes to the stage' by Ben Brooker

ABR Arts 15 May 2023
Christos Tsiolkas’s début novel Loaded (1995), the story of a single, debauched night in the life of nineteen-year-old Greek-Australian queer man, Ari, is no stranger to being given fresh life in new mediums. In 1998, it served as the basis for the film Head On, a breakthrough for director Ana Kokkinos and star Alex Dimitriades, even as its sexual explicitness proved controversial. A new stage ... (read more)

Ben Brooker reviews 'Abandon Every Hope' by Hayley Singer

March 2023, no. 451 26 February 2023
There is a slaughterhouse-like logic to the way humanity’s mistreatment of animals tends to be written about. Repetitive. Relentless. Atrocity piles upon atrocity, with no hope of remedy. Readers, probably appalled by the abattoir to begin with, likely vegetarians or vegans or animal fosterers, discomfort themselves yet again in the name of … what exactly? Duty? Academic interest? A renewed se ... (read more)

Ben Brooker reviews 'An Eye for Talent: A life at NIDA' by John Clark

December 2022, no. 449 25 October 2022
Theatre director John Clark’s close namesake John Clarke, in character as that infamous Kiwi schlep Fred Dagg, once averred that autobiography is a highly recommended form of leisure activity, as it takes up large chunks of time and if you’re a slow writer or you think particularly highly of yourself, you can probably whistle away a year or two … It’s not a difficult business and rememb ... (read more)

Ben Brooker reviews 'Regenesis' by George Monbiot

November 2022, no. 448 29 September 2022
Recently, I overheard a commercial television promotion for some current affairs or lifestyle program on Australian farming. ‘Of course,’ the gruff male voiceover intoned, at pains to ward off any idea the reportage might be unpatriotically negative, ‘Aussie farmers are doing a bang up job!’ To suggest otherwise is, of course, tantamount to sacrilege in a country steeped in the mythology ... (read more)

‘Chalkface: An undercooked play on educational inequity’ by Ben Brooker

ABR Arts 11 August 2022
Every other day there seems to be a news story about the largesse with which public money is dispensed to private schools while the public education system falls further into disrepair and dysfunction. As reported in February 2022 by the Guardian, recent analysis by Save Our Schools shows that between 2009 and 2020 government funding for independent schools increased by $3,338 a student compared w ... (read more)

‘Girls & Boys’: Speechifying violence in Dennis Kelly’s one-woman show

ABR Arts 03 March 2022
I’ve never cared much for first-person direct address monologues in the theatre. Too often, one feels talked at rather than implicated in the action, the interpersonal dynamics of multi-actor drama shorn away in favour of a kind of speechifying. British playwright Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys – the ampersand seems to be official – is one such monologue. ‘Woman’ (Kelly doesn’t giv ... (read more)

Ben Brooker reviews 'This Is Your Mind on Plants' by Michael Pollan

September 2021, no. 435 23 August 2021
At sixty-six years of age and best known for his books on the sociology of food, the American author and journalist Michael Pollan has become an unlikely figurehead for the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’. In How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan surveyed the recent revival of psychedelic drugs as adjuncts to psychotherapy, and the emerging evidence that supports their use in the treatmen ... (read more)