The threads are spinning on this discussion. The comments are flying on Lee Lewis's paper on Cross-Racial Casting, with some interesting observations from American practitioners bringing an international perspective; Matt's response Lee Lewis's paper on Cross-Racial Casting is up at Esoteric Rabbit: "[Lee's essay] has inspired me in a way that, thus far, I'm still not entirely sure I understand". Ming at Minktails is more concerned with the problem of translating talk into action and there's a response from David at Jotternotes noting that it's crucially an artistic question. Tony (aka Jay Raskolnikov) has some fascinating stuff to add about "the safe black play".

At the moment, I'm feeling slightly uncomfortably that, aside from Ming, it's a bunch of "white" people talking. We need to talk, and I don't think we should stop - it's our problem too - but I'd like to hear something from those who find themselves filed under "other". (Update: An example of why it's our problem too can be found in this enraged comment on Nicholas Pickard's blog - as usual, most rage seems to come from those who haven't actually read the paper).

I'll resist spinning off into self-reflection, tempting though it is - the construction of privileged whiteness is something that has deeply concerned me, nay, pained me, for many years (I spent my first four years in apartheid South Africa, and I'm descended from bigwigs in the Raj in India, and I guess I feel it as a kind of scar, quite aside from some other familial complexities). But I just watched Peter Brook's Lear - a deeply appreciated gift - and am still a bit dizzied by its brilliance; and I think I ought to go to bed.

Last night, Lee Lewis' Platform Paper on Cross-Racial Casting was launched at the Beckett Theatre with vim, espièglerie and lashings of after-launch conversation lubricated by copious amounts of wine. Among a crowd of 30 to 40 interested people were Stephen Armstrong and Michael Kantor (respectively executive producer and artistic director of the Malthouse) as well as a notable blogger presence - Matt from Esoteric Rabbit, Ming from Mink-Tails and Daniel from Our Man in Berlin.


An hour and a half flew by. Or it did for me, anyway. Platform Papers editor Dr John Golder was MC; I spoke briefly (see below) and then Lee talked with lively passion about her paper and responded to questions from the audience. Topics covered included: the reasons why she decided to investigate this issue; the responses so far to what she has written; the influence of the dominance of naturalism and Lee's conviction that the first step should be aggressive cross-racial casting of the classical repertoire; the present conservative political climate that has so inhibited experiment on main stages and, perhaps most interestingly of all, Lee's interrogation of her own practice and ethics as a director. Peter Brook turned up once or twice, although sadly not in person.

Conversation afterwards flowed through many byways (the differences between Sydney and Melbourne, Dr Who and Harry Potter, blogging, the general theatrical discourse, the inhibitions that surround discussions about race, and so on...) One major question was how to extend the conversation about cross-racial casting into a general ethic in theatrical practice. Ming - whom I'm sure will write further about this - was bothered that such an important issue was considered by many of her peers to be a minority concern that doesn't affect white people. There was a notable sense throughout the evening that this issue is not about "worthiness" and rather has everything to do with the task of making exciting theatre that engages with the Australia in which we all live.


It was all, as my kids used to say, very fun. Let's hope the conversation does continue: I'm with Lee in thinking it one of the vital questions in Australian theatre. If you haven't read it, buy the book - I assure you that it's a fascinating, smart and stimulating read - and maybe subscribe to the Platform Papers series, which is well worth your attention.

Here's what I said in launching the book:

I’m honoured that Katherine Brisbane asked me to launch this book, and would like to thank her in absentia. It seems to me that Lee Lewis’s paper, Cross-Racial Casting: Changing the Face of Australian Theatre, is an important contribution to the continuing conversation about theatre in Australia, and I’m delighted to be here today. The editorial board at Currency House is to be congratulated for this series of Platform Papers, which has for the past few years provided a valuable and sorely-needed space for extended and thoughtful analyses of Australian performing arts culture.

This particular paper has already generated a lot of comment and discussion, some of it excited and positive, some of it hostile. Perhaps, as Lee Lewis ventures so fearlessly into such a delicate and complex area, this is only to be expected. But I’d like to begin with some negative theology. There are a number of things that I think this paper is not.

This is not an accusatory paper. It’s not an argument that blindly points the gun of racism at theatre directors or writers or artistic institutions. It is not concerned with apportioning blame. As Lewis quite rightly says, “Little is served by this discourse of blame beyond encouraging inertia”.

Rather, I think Lee does something much more interesting and much more positive. She intelligently and sensitively identifies a complex problem that she perceives within Autralian theatre culture, and then, without ignoring the minefields that surround the issue, she suggests a possible approach towards its resolution.

What is the problem? According to Lee, the diverse ethnic make-up of the Australian population is not reflected by a similar diversity on our stages. Sydney main stages – and by extension, mainstream stages in other Australian cities – remain "reprehensibly White". Not reflecting this diversity, she argues, means that theatre is missing a huge opportunity to re-imagine our national identity, that we are unwittingly participating in implicitly colonial practices that privilege the White over every other kind of identity.

In order to develop her thesis, Lee examines the social construction of Whiteness and the broader implications of the marginalisation of what she calls Third World Looking People. And she takes a searching and not unsympathetic look at how this plays out in the complicated culture of theatre.

The solution, she says, by no means lies in simplistic identity politics. TWLP actors are not, for example, granted the same possibility of transformation that White actors are: a White actor is considered neutral and able to be protean, whereas a TWLP is forever trapped in the biological reality of his or her ethnic origin.

I think Lee’s identification of the problem is pretty much unarguable. On the whole, our mainstages are, as Barrie Kosky said while casting his eye over the STC’s Actors Company, very “white bread”. And actors who do not identify as White are very seldom seen on our main stages outside ethnically-specific roles. We recently had an Indigenous Othello in Melbourne, but we are yet to see a Black Lear or an Asian Hedda Gabler. And, as Lee points out, even if cross-racial casting began to happen routinely, this could only be the beginning of a complex and exciting shift in our cultural dialogue.

I hope that Lee’s paper does lift us past the discourse of blame to a more positive recognition that there is a problem, and more, to further discussion on how it might best be dealt with. I declare this book launched and now pass over to Lee to talk more about her ideas.

And then she did...

Nicholas Pickard's blog report on the Sydney launch here.

Pictures: Top: Lee Lewis speaks at the launch. Bottom: Some of the later conviviality: (L-R) Brad and Sarah from the Malthouse, David, me, Matt the Esoteric Rabbit (front), Stephen from the Malthouse, Ming from Minktails. Photos: Brett Boardman

Yes, I know, Ms TN has been blogging like a maniac. Rest assured, I'll calm down over the next few days - I have a quieter week ahead. But some things of interest demand the attention of my tired little fingers.

Don't forget the Cross-Racial Casting Launch and Forum at the Malthouse tomorrow afternoon, where I will be launching Lee Lewis's controversial Platform Paper for Currency House. Join us, as they say, for a chance to discuss this landmark paper and maybe even buy it for yourself if you haven't seen it yet. The event is free, at 5.30 for 6: details at Currency House.

Which gives me an excuse to point to Outlier, the blog of Australian playwright Noëlle Janaczewska, who has recently posted some stimulating thoughts about the whole question of representation on our stages.

Meanwhile, partly in response to the fierce debate my review of Sleeping Beauty unleashed on these pages, Malthouse dramaturg and co-creator of Sleeping Beauty Maryanne Lynch answers her critics in Arts Hub in a fascinating essay about the ideas behind the show. "What is it about using music, popular music, that has created such fierce commentary?" asks Lynch. "Or, more positively, why did we make this artistic choice?"

What our critics have found hardest to deal with is using such music as the narrative of a theatrical work and how this might accurately reflect the journey of a young girl from childhood to adult life. Underlying both issues is that hoary old question “but is it theatre?”

So, the nay-sayers say, Sleeping Beauty was nothing more than a tarted-up Year 12 Eisteddfod, we’re just a bunch of theatre artists who don’t even know what’s contemporary for teenagers, and most interestingly that the work failed to engage with the real-life experience of real-life young women.

Lynch goes on to explain the thinking behind their choices of music, what they did with it theatrically, and why they were playing with ideas of entertainment. Popular songs, says Lynch, are the contemporary equivalents of fairy tales.

Just as a culture takes on other influences and moulds them into its own, [Sleeping Beauty] tries on first this and then that idea of female identity, attempting to find out who she is as she works it out. There’s a musical parallel here too. Indigenous Australia has embraced Country and Western, and we all know the origins of white rock and roll but always these sources are reconfigured by those who appropriate them. Our Sleeping Beauty knows these songs, the same songs our critics know, but she receives them from where she’s at, for better and worse, and does the same to them.

She wanders through a dreamscape of her own making, and she inhabits but must discard all these versions of herself as she goes on. Instead, she faces life as a journey, navigated by choice and circumstance and culture, with no clear destination.

Popular music tracks the pathways she could take but knows, as theatre does, its own limitations in embodying the rich confusion of the journey. It satisfies us because it pins us down and we in turn take it up and spin it around. Like a record; like a tune in our heads.

The Arts Hub link is here (registration required). Well worth checking out, if you can get there.

World Croggon is a little ott at the moment (for those not hip to the cyber-acronyms, it means over the top). While some of my beetle-browed brethren are glued to Harry Potter, and others are just crashed with the flu, Little Alison feels a little like Cadel Evans in last night's stage of Le Tour, going backwards despite his most dogged efforts as Alberto Contador and Michael Rasmussen fly past him on wings of steel. (Ok, I admit, my sleeping patterns are a little disrupted by an unseemly obsession with a bike race: but the metaphor still holds. I really felt for Evans last night).

Anyway, this is a hotchpotch post on some of the things that are taking up my time, and which might interest some of you.

First, Currency House has announced two free public discussion sessions on Lee Lewis's controversial paper on racial casting, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, where Lee will be in conversation with me at the Malthouse on Wednesday August 15. Details are on Nicholas Pickard's blog. It promises to be a stimulating discussion, so grab the book, read it, form opinions and questions, and come and join in.

Second, I'm making a couple of rare poetical appearances in Melbourne in upcoming months. On Sunday July 26, I'm a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival, for a session called Poets Against the War. I'll be reading a favourite poem (possibly Neruda's passionate protest against what happened to Lorca in the Spanish Civil War) as well as some of mine, and discussing poetry and war with Barry Hill and JS Harry.

Third, I'm also, to my delight, one of the 200 local artists who will be part of John Cage's Musicircus at the Melbourne Festival on Friday October 26. Look out for me: I'll be there somewhere, sometime, in the BMW Edge, possibly declaiming poems about mediaeval mystics.

Fourth, TN gets a brief mention in Sophie Cunningham's huge overview of blogging in Saturday's Age, which takes a whistle-stop tour through the world of writers' blogs, and which rehearses the debate around the value of blogging through writerly glasses. Worth a look.

Meanwhile, I've finally managed to finish a review for The Book Show of Iain Sinclair's gigantic book, London: City of Disappearances. A very late review. The staff at the ABC have been saintly in their patience. This book inspired lust in me when I saw it, and I don't regret volunteering to review it for one minute; but next time I plan to find one of those slim, lyrical, lucid masterpieces, like Alessandro Baricco's Silk, which you can read on the train because they're about 100 pages long...

Next on my to-do list is proofing an essay I've written for the anthology Navigating the Golden Compass, about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is due to be published in the US next month. I daren't look further down. I think next week looks less squished, but it might just be an optical illusion.

Reviews on Thom Pain and The Eisteddfod up tomorrow. Promise.

To my distress and dudgeon, I did Matt's Which Book Are You? quiz and found out that I am J. Alfred Prufrock. I guess it could be worse, but I'm not sure how. Anyway, perhaps there is a truth there - I am short, I drink a lot of coffee, I'll never play Prince Hamlet and maybe I am measuring out my life in blogs. And it's only getting worse. In one of my lives I have actual fans, whose mail keeps piling up uncontrollably, and in a (probably futile) attempt to wrestle my selves into some kind of order, I've started a Books of Pellinor blog. Pretty, ain't it? Like, I needed something else to do...

Meanwhile, as promised, Ming has posted at length on Lee Lewis's Currency House paper on Cross Racial Casting. And over at Nicholas Pickard's place, the debate still rages. Lewis seems to have touched some very sensitive nerves. (Yes, I will - when I have a moment - buy the paper and read it for myself). Watch this space for details of an up-coming public forum with Lee Lewis in Melbourne-town.

Skipping over to George Hunka - the man is, according to the current issue of The Dramatist, one of 50 playwrights to watch in the US, but us blog denizens knew that already, eh? Anyway, check out his excellent meditation on Howard Barker's latest book, A Style and its Origins (written, it seems, by Barker's alter-ego, Eduardo Houth). More blowing of the budget, I fear.

And finally, just to prove that theatre types have their sweaty fingers pressed firmly on the popular pulse, see several bloggers on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Andrew Haydon at Postcards from the Gods liked its new grunge aesthetic and thought it the best yet (as did I); Richard Watts thought it was good, but not as good as the last one and Isaac over at Parabasis has got all the fanboys excited with a suggestion that someone write about the books as literature...

Some very interesting conversations are enlivening the blogosphere at the moment. Over at Nicholas Pickard's blog, the race issue is still causing all sorts of sparks, after Sydney director Lee Lewis's Platform Paper on racial casting in Australian theatre (which is turning into a must-read). Ming at Minktails has already posted passionately on this issue, and having got her hot little hands on Lewis's paper - as personally witnessed by me - promises more. So we will hold her to it.

Meanwhile, George Hunka has been posting heroically on Pinter's The Homecoming (several short essays, so check here, here, here and here) at Superfluities, leading to a fascinating debate on the virtues or otherwise of Peter Hall's film version. (Reader, I loathed it).

And Guardian critic Lyn Gardner, bless her cotton socks, has this great post arguing that if mainstream theatre is to survive, it has to embrace experiment. The sell-out success at the STC of Barrie Kosky's eight-hour epic The Lost Echo, or the popularity of Kristy Edmunds' Melbourne Festival programs, suggest that Gardner's onto something...