Louise Bezzina’s year of living culturally

Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton, Bohemian Rhapsody and The Letdown impressed in 2019.

Alison Bell in The Letdown, on ABC and Netflix.

Favourite book

Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton. This book was so compelling, intense and hopeful all at the same time. There is a good reason this book is a bestseller and is being made into a stage production.

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Favourite movie/TV show

Favourite movie was Bohemian Rhapsody and favourite TV show was The Letdown on Netflix. Dramatically different in style; however, I had a deep emotional connection to each for completely different reasons.

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Favourite live show

Scenes from Counting and Cracking

Counting and Cracking, a Belvoir production, part of both the Sydney and Adelaide festivals. It was joyous at times and deeply gut-wrenching.

All Australians should see this production. It literally was as Belvoir described: “Counting and Cracking is a big new play about Australia like none we’ve seen before.”

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Future events

Apart from what you have in store, what arts event are you looking forward to most in 2020?

I am looking forward to seeing what the new iteration of the Melbourne International Arts Festival will be under the direction of Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek. I also think Metro with Love, the farewell festival for Metro Arts, will be something very special for Brisbane and I am looking forward to celebrating this great history of our city.

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Emerging trends

What arts trend do you expect to emerge most strongly in 2020?

We are living in complex and unpredictable times. This will have a huge impact on the work being made by artists across Australia over the coming year. We have so many deeply concerning issues that we are faced with in Australia right now and they cannot be ignored. Artists are responsive and help us to see the world through different lenses. They bring us connection, hope and provoke many important conversations. I believe our communities are yearning for this and in 2020 we need our artists more than ever.

Louise Bezzina is the Brisbane Festival artistic director.

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Chris Boyd’s cultural moment of 2019

Tim Minchin and Milly Alcock in a scene from the TV series Upright. Supplied by Foxtel. Picture: Matt Nettheim

I’ve been chiding Aussie playwrights since the 1980s for writing epic plays that are thinly disguised screenplays. The transition to the small screen never works. (OK, hardly ever works: Secret Bridesmaids’ Business started out as a charming comedy about premarital infidelity and made it to the small screen as a tangled stalker thriller, a good one too, but it took 20 years.)

Nowadays, even our most literary authors seem to be auditioning for Netflix or Showcase or HBO, dipping their toes in genre fiction’s murky shallows. Stella winner Heather Rose’s newie, Bruny, is an excellent family-political-terrorist drama in the vein of Foxtel’s Secret City. Angela Meyer’s A Superior Spectre is a brilliant and filmic time-bender in which a dystopian future bleeds into an agrarian past. Margaret Morgan’s The Second Cure is a pandemic thriller begging to be optioned.

But do you know what? The best Australian storytelling this year, maybe this decade, maybe since Thea Astley’s Drylands at the end of the 90s, came from a writers’ room in which a comedian, a satirist, an actor turned playwright and another actor collaborated. If ever a TV series deserved to be reverse-engineered into prose, it is the glorious eight-part Foxtel/Sky series Upright, by Chris Taylor, Tim Minchin, Kate Mulvany and Leon Ford. It’s a great Australian novel. Or should be.