Contibutor profile: Benjamin Brooker
Ben Brooker
Bio
In 2010 I completed an honours degree in drama at Flinders University. By that time I had abandoned plans to train as an actor, my creative energies increasingly directed towards writing.
I’m interested in the complete writer, the wordsmith who, like Camus, is able to turn their hand to a multiplicity of forms. I’ve penned short stories, plays, polemics, reviews, and a handful of dazzlingly unsuccessful poems. Everything I write seems to be an attempt to understand something of the nature of human suffering, but always humour seems to find a way in. This is probably significant.
Earlier in 2013, I completed a three-month emerging writer’s residency at the SA Writers’ Centre, during which I completed the first draft of my new play Dark Moon. As I write this, in November 2013, my first full-length play, the absurdist The Lake, is in production by the award-winning Adelaide independent theatre company five.point.one.
I am currently working on several projects including a performance piece that will draw on the archived letters and correspondence of the SA Writers' Centre, and a play based loosely on a short story by French Resistance writer Vercors.
Expose
I always begin a review with this thought in my mind: art would exist without criticism, but criticism would not exist without art. There’s no use denying it. Critics should never write out of a desire to belittle or to diminish, but simply because they believe art is too important to ever let it get away with not being as fulfilled and fulfilling as it can be. In other words, criticism ought to always be closer to a kind of love than a kind of loathing. Plain speaking, rigour, and unfettered engagement are the keys. Critics should never sit on their hands, only their egos.
Recent articles
Sons & mothers, from two angles
Benjamin Brooker: No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Sons & Mothers
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p5
A painful proximity to truth
Benjamin Brooker: Flying Penguin, STCSA: Angela Betzien, The Dark Room
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p36
Shadow boxing with illusions
Ben Brooker: Vitalstatistix, Adhocracy
RealTime issue #116 Aug-Sept 2013 p46
Unsettling the idea of ideas
Ben Brooker: The Festival of Unpopular Culture
RealTime issue #106 Dec-Jan 2011 p16
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 pg. web
