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Dec 16, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
Science The trap of equating opinion with fact In her essay ‘This Little Theory Went to Market’ – one of more than thirty pieces included in The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 – Elizabeth Finkel undertakes a pinpoint dissection of the two prevailing theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19): ‘natural origin versus a lab leak’. What Finkel is at pains to point out in her essay is that science ‘advances ... on the “weight of evidence”’ and that, based on that weight of evidence,...
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.
For much of My Brilliant Career’s length, Franklin’s novel (published in 1901) seems to have been reduced to its lowest common denominator, a not unusual tendency in musicals.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
The opening frames of Steve McQueen’s Blitz situate us in the midst of all the horror and chaos of Hitler’s lightning war – his blitzkrieg – on Britain in 1940-41. Bombs rain down on the densely populated streets of London’s East End, while firefighters and air raid patrol (ARP) wardens rush to counter the raging flames, dragging bodies, alive or dead, from the rubble.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
In 1983, actor Noni Hazlehurst was invited to London by Robyn Archer to be part of Archer’s new cabaret Cut and Thrust. Hazlehurst, less than a decade out of acting school and having just been fêted in Cannes for her performance of Nora in the film adaptation of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1982), was ‘thrilled to bits’.
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Sep 8, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
Watching the denouement of Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, I was reminded of David Edgar’s 1980 stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Ensconced within the travelling theatrical company of Mr Vincent Crummles, Nicholas and his hapless companion Smike are cast in a production of Romeo and Juliet, Smike as the apothecary and Nicholas (of course) as Romeo.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
In The Forever Wars: America’s unending conflict with itself – a searing account of the ways in which the seeds of Trumpism and the MAGA movement reach back to the first throes of American nationhood (reviewed for ABR by Timothy J. Lynch) – journalist Nick Bryant characterises the narrative by which America defines itself as ‘a story of unrivalled national success, shared values, common purpose and continual progress’.
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Jul 29, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
When we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability.
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Jul 17, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
There is a perennial fascination with the nature of creativity – what ignites it, what sustains it, and what, too often, destroys it. In this, creativity might be viewed as analogous to life itself, the consequence of a complex array of often unpredictable connections and influences, its ultimate viability always uncertain. That any individual cell of an idea develops into a fully fledged work of art, let alone one that survives across the centuries, is no less than miraculous.
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Jun 6, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
Addiction is the third wheel in many a stage relationship. Plays such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), J.P. Miller’s Days of Wine and Roses (1958), and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) examine the ways in which addiction – whether to alcohol, morphine, or even love – offers a heady sense of ‘something’ where once there seemed to be nothing at all.
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May 22, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
In late 1999, NASA announced that its Mars Climate Orbiter, a multi-million-dollar robot probe designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was lost somewhere in space. The craft had failed to manoeuvre into its optimal orbit, ending either on a course towards the sun or in a fatal collision with the red planet. Investigations uncovered the source of the blunder: one team working on the orbiter had been using metric measurements, another team had been using imperial.
