Miscellany ~ theatre notes

Friday, April 17, 2009

Miscellany

My review of Stomp 09, now at the Princess Theatre on its Australian tour, is in today's Australian.

And permit me to point you to a couple of interesting discussions that have caught my eye recently. George Hunka on Superfluities takes issue with Michael Billington's rather odd Guardian blog post about the dangers of theatrical auteurs. (Billington makes a startling parallel between Hollywood and European avant garde theatre - mais oui!) It raises an interesting question about critical responses, especially in Britain, where theatre, for better or worse, still looks narrowly across the channel at those dubious Continentals. Or so Guilia Merlo claims in Spark Online, in a stimulating discussion about Romeo Castellucci's Purgatorio, which garnered a rare one star review from Lyn Gardner.

2 comments:

Jake said...

Blaming the alleged bankruptcy of today's Hollywood on poor old Andrew Sarris is like blaming the present financial crisis on Marx and Engels -- ridiculous on so many levels I don't know where to begin.

Re the Hollywood/avant-garde parallel: certain cutting-edge European filmmakers, notably Portugal's Pedro Costa, have very explicitly acknowledged a debt to the auteurs of Hollywood's classic period, such as Jacques Tourneur and John Ford.

Finally, Man's Favorite Sport? is a great film! I wonder if Tynan had even seen it.

Alison Croggon said...

Billington is drawing a parallel of bankruptcy, rather than richness...! I'm a big fan of the classic American film - recently revisited The Hustler, which looks as marvellous as it did the first time I saw it. This time I noticed that it owes a surprising amount to theatre! I rather suspect that the present "crisis" in Australian film scripts stems from an ignorance of the tradition of dramatic writing that infuses so many great movies. But that's another issue.