“I know it’s unpopular... but I just love Robyn Nevin. Such a giving soul, generous and so much time for everyone. Her creativity and insight surpasses expectation. No one could best represent the theatre industry in Sydney than our wonderful Robyn!” Sydney Morning Herald (Posted by: KurtAngst on September 4, 2006 3:25 PM)

Robyn Nevin would have been able to sit down to her Xmas lunch, retired from her position as Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company, satisfied with a job well done. Relaxed and comfortable you could almost say. Possibly lifted a glass as loved ones toasted her achievement and welcome her home.

When I was first starting out as a theatre reviewer I received some advice from Katharine Brisbane, the doyenne of the form in Australia at that time and now the publisher and much-cherished theatre matriarch! I should choose: either keep my distance from the artists and players and run my own race; or get in close, to mix as much as a could with the very same people whose work I would be writing about. Brisbane herself had chosen the second option and she advised that it was more difficult - but, in her view, more rewarding.

I hope, by the close of this entry, we will have discussed the excellent production of Sizwe Banze is Dead, directed by Peter Brook, still playing for a few more days at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House. But why not let’s start somewhere else and, in the wandering manner of Aboriginal story-telling, begin with:

I visited Melbourne recently to complete some interviews on tape with ‘eminent theatre practitioners’ for the OralHistory Unit of National Library of Australia. One my inteviewees was Mike Mullins, who gave Sydney and, indeed, the national theatre scene, a good rattle with his cutting-edge practice, and engagement in debate, for two decades from the late 1970s.