The face for radio.

Back when I was young and naïve and thought I would be able to keep pace writing about the shows I was seeing in the festival season (oh, how I will look back on that period and laugh!) I was a guest on radio show The Scenery.

If you follow this handy link, you can hear me talk about things including: what it means to me to be a young critic in Adelaide; how a critic came to be production managing Sepia; how I fit in to the wider arts scene here, and how I fit into a national landscape; problems I see in the local industry when it comes to the perception of criticism and critics; wanting to make arts writing a conversation; issues I have with the old guard of the Adelaide Critics Circle; dealing with criticism for my criticism; and the crazy experiment I’ve taken this fringe when requesting tickets, which has been quite wonderfully received.

Listen; discuss; and come help me on my crazy trek to increase this conversation I’m one teeny tiny part of.

Fringe Review: Gobbledygook

In a room sits a woman (Aileen Huynh).  In the same room sits her phone.  It’s them, alone. Just the two of them. Well, them, and everyone else in the world: it’s a phone.  Gobbledygook is a series of short scenes of the perhaps agoraphobic woman, too dependent on her phone, but then, would she actually be better off with out it?

Perhaps it is too easy as an arts writer to expect everything to have a “point”, or perhaps, rather, to expect everything has a theme they are trying to explore or comment on. But: I’m genuinely confused as to if Gobbledygook had this or not.

Their fringe blurb tells us:

A theatre work by Bodysnatchers, ‘Gobbledygook’ examines the apparatuses our lives are filtered through; the mess of signal, frequency and wire. A duet for a lone woman and her iPhone, it irreverently tackles the core of contemporary anxiety: who is listening? Anyone?

And yes, some ways the production seemed to be a commentary on the advent of technology on our lives, but it is overall so specific to this character – and, yes, so unrecognisable from myself – that it felt like one woman’s story.  To try and extricate anything more about us as a society just feels fake.