your portal for australian theatre
Noel Christian · 11 January 2010
There was no moon last night, and just before going to bed I took a tin of old and nearly fermented blueberry muffins into the back paddock to leave them for the birds for breakfast. I knew where I wa…
Read more →Noel Christian · 5 January 2010
It is impossible to get decent potatoes where I live. I grew up on the south coast of WA among potato growers and in a potato growing family, and potatoes have been copious in the cast of my life. I n…
Read more →Noel Christian · 29 December 2009
There have been fires in the valleys and gorges of the Lachlan Fold just to the north of my house, and for days RFS helicopters and crop-dusters have been flying overhead, keeping an eye on things, oc…
Read more →Noel Christian · 25 December 2009
There is a very fat gecko that hunts on my office windows. It has an executive attitude to life. It allows its prey to come to it, and merely opens and closes its mouth at need. If the opening and clo…
Read more →Noel Christian · 22 December 2009
Of all, what I miss most is going for a walk. My gate is half a kilometer from my back door. At about that point, painkillers become obligatory. I used to walk for kilometers every day. It was my answ…
Read more →Noel Christian · 18 December 2009
There are rosellas in the jacaranda tree just outside my office window. I sit at my desk with a pen between my teeth and my computer drifting asleep, wondering if they are Pale-faces driven south of t…
Read more →Noel Christian · 15 December 2009
My life used to have people everywhere in it: not only audiences, but service station attendants, truck drivers, the occupants of the motel room next door, farmers, Priests, journalists and artists. I…
Read more →Noel Christian · 11 December 2009
Great herds of kangaroos have come down out of the hills and the National Parks to fill the harvested paddocks and to line the road verges and to sneak like nightly thieves through my garden and my ga…
Read more →Noel Christian · 8 December 2009
People no longer ask where the ideas for what I write come from.They just assume that I am unhinged and that no further explanation is necessary. I don’t know where they come from, either, and I…
Read more →Noel Christian · 4 December 2009
There is a tiredness that stretches from the rib-bones to the finger-ends, but that can be chased away by strong coffee, sex, brandy and other pleasurable things. And then there is a tiredness that fe…
Read more →Noel Christian · 2 December 2009
When I was six, my best friend and I used to play in his father’s shearing shed. One day, we found an old wind-up gramophone on top of a wool-bin. It turned out the neighbour on one side had a b…
Read more →Noel Christian · 27 November 2009
The worst performance I ever gave was in Essendon. What the audience thought, I do not know. I was so overwhelmed by my own badness that the rest of the world could make no impact. A little while ago,…
Read more →Noel Christian · 21 November 2009
Galahs are the unacknowledged legislators of Australia. They can smell a microphone from kilometers away. This is one of the many lessons I have learned as I have shaken down my plein-air rig. Galahs…
Read more →Noel Christian · 15 November 2009
When performers talk about what we do we are full of vagaries and suppositions. This is as it should be. Ours is an art of guesswork, not a bureaucracy. When a performance starts to go wrong, when it…
Read more →Noel Christian · 14 November 2009
The Weather is nice. The winds are light. There are flies everywhere. I am recovering more slowly than I would like from the procedure with the big needle. Walking is still a struggle in the latter pa…
Read more →Noel Christian · 10 November 2009
A doctor with a great big round machine lay me on my guts and stuck a needle in my spine. It still hurts. This will be a serious post. For the first half of my career, I wanted theatre in a box: forma…
Read more →Noel Christian · 6 November 2009
It’s not so much that pride goeth before a fall as that a fall succeedeth pride. Out on the Central Tablelands not much is supposed to happen. Certainly not weather. This should make it perfect…
Read more →Noel Christian · 5 November 2009
Theatre is a place where you can sometimes meet yourself coming the other way. I have been re-rehearsing Genesis to prepare it for recording. This show last saw the stage a year and a half ago, and ha…
Read more →Noel Christian · 29 October 2009
It is time to give up giving up theatre. Full time touring is wonderful at first - every town is a new universe, every audience an untried animal. After a while, the detail begins to percolate in - th…
Read more →