Mark Ravenhill

There should be a lot to say about theatre and globalization, right? Seriously, I could have done a better job without researching it. He does talk a great deal about globalization, but rather superficially in general. He does talk a little bit about theatre. Occasionally he makes a halfhearted effort to talk about theatre and globalization, but the effort is lost. He is pompous and pretentious, like so many in the field, trying to put on the airs of the more objective fields like science or show more math, but not succeeding. He is really just a blowhard. A better approach would be to take less time talking about globalization in general, instead discussing plays that deal with the topic. He does mention a few, and several of them are familiar, but in the end he does little to demonstrate why they have anything to do with globalization, or why we should care. I do agree with his basic stance on globalization; it's a shame he didn't do a better job. show less

Pool (No Water) is a dazzling piece of theatre. In a year of excellent theatre in Melbourne it came up maybe top for me. And yet Red Stitch theatre saw it as their 'dangerous' piece, the one that might fail. In that case, thank heavens they were brave enough to put it on.

This is one of my 'crawl over broken glass to see it' theatre experiences.

Some old-school in-yer-face theater to remind me that theater doesn't have to stay up in the clouds. The play fits in the same shelf as stuff like LaBute and McDonagh - it's got something to say and it's going to say it in a way that feels like a gut-punch. Unfortunately, Ravenhill never quite takes the arguments anywhere. He says that you can't stay an angry young man your whole life and that connection is essential... but most of the thoughts I had about the play made me feel like I need show more to see it in order to see if it was something actually in the play or if it was just my mind jumping off from this starting point.

A few more thoughts on the same vein at Raging Biblioholism: http://wp.me/pGVzJ-lj show less

This was billed to me as a play about science; it isn't. It's a play about sex, particularly homosexual sex, where one of the characters is a philosopher, and the other character has a disc that explains chaos theory and contains applications to use it to control the world. This is the only (totally tangential) relationship to science. The driving point of the play is purely philosophical, and also a standard boy-meets-boy with the added "benefit" of including online conversations. Not show more really much to write home about. show less