Blog Archives

Plays and playmaking, Mark Houlahan

Performing Dramaturgy
Fiona Graham
Playmarket, $40.00,
ISBN 9780908607648

Floating Islanders: Pasifika Theatre in Aotearoa
Lisa Warrington and David O’Donnell
ISBN 9781988531076

Dawn Raids
Oscar Kightley
Playmarket, $18.00,
ISBN 97809080607631

“What is a dramaturg?” I overheard that question earlier this year while sitting in a theatre waiting for a show to begin. As it happened, this was a show which listed me in the programme as “dramaturg”, and the couple asking the question were reading my notes. So I quickly said to them, “script advisor”, and left them to get on with their pre-show reading. A few months later, I was reading Fiona Graham’s Performing Dramaturgy, which offers a much richer, contextualised series of answers to the question. It would be egregious to thrust her book into the hands of someone directly waiting for a performance to start, of course, but otherwise it can be safely recommended to a broad range of researchers, students and theatre practitioners. Graham herself prefers the alternative spelling “dramaturge”, because of its use to indicate “an expanded and interdisciplinary practice”, so I’ll use that form here.

See more ›

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Art, Literature, Non-fiction, Pacific, Plays, Review

Stories on stage, Mark Houlahan

The Plays of Bruce Mason: A Survey John Smythe Playmarket and Victoria University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9781776560554 Here/Now: 8 Plays by Award-Winning New Zealand Playwrights David O’Donnell (ed) Playmarket, $35.00, ISBN 9780908 607594 John Smythe’s survey of the plays of

See more ›

Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Posted in Literature, Plays, Review

Dynamic Māori plays, David O’Donnell

Ta Matou Mangai: Three Plays of the 1990s. ed Hone Kouka Victoria University Press, $ 24.95, ISBN 0 86473 348 8 The publication of He Reo Hou, the first anthology of Maori plays, in 1990 was a landmark event, acknowledging

See more ›

Tagged with: , , ,
Posted in Literature, Plays, Review
Search the archive
Search by category