Benjamin Brooker

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Benjamin Brooker, known as Ben Brooker, is a writer, editor and theatre-maker based in Adelaide, South Australia.

Brooker attended Flinders University and Adelaide College of the Arts, and was later mentored by Julian Meyrick. Brooker was a featured playwright at the Emerging Writers’ Festival Adelaide Roadshow in September 2014, and at the National Play Festival in Adelaide in July 2015. He was a 2013 Emerging Writer in Residence at the SA Writers’ Centre, and was an inaugural Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellow.

As a critic, author and arts journalist, his work has been published in Australian Book Review, Overland, New Matilda, New Internationalist, RealTime, ArtsHub, The Lifted Brow, Witness Performance, Daily Review and the Sydney Review of Books.

In 2018 Brooker was embroiled in public debate with former Adelaide critic, amateur actor and radio personality, Peter Goers. As part of his role as The Mill’s Writer in Residence, Brooker had “embedded” himself in the rehearsal process of Theatre Republic’s debut production Lines by Pamela Carter, spending 20 hours in the rehearsal room, having multiple conversations with the production’s director and reflecting on the “role of the theatre critic in the age of mass opinion”, using the term ‘embedded criticism’ from independent theatre reviewer Andrew Haydon.

In a speech to the Adelaide Critics Circle and an article published in The Advertiser, Goers stated he was “astounded” by Brooker’s article, mocking it as a “ridiculous trend” and stating “The critic can never be part of the creation of art.”

In his response to Goers, Brooker described the "old guard" of Adelaide’s theatre criticism as "criticism at its most close-minded" and that “Goers-style bellicosity, which, for all its rhetorical fireworks, tends to the conservative and is, in the end, just as boring as the anodyne”.

As a playwright, Brooker’s work has been performed in or commissioned by Hopgood Theatre Youth Theatre Project, ActNow Theatre, and OzAsia Festival, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Vitalstatistix and Next Wave Festival. His work Below The Line for Next Wave festival 2020 explored climate denialism, online comment culture, and complicity with climate change

References

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