In an effort, perhaps, to ease the sense of loss occasioned by TN’s demise, Croggon wrote in her penultimate post: ‘Several people have suggested that I should put together a book of reviews and essays, and when I have caught my breath, I will think about doing so. (Publishers are welcome to flood me with offers.)’ At least one of those offers was forthcoming and that book has now arrived, not a moment too soon, in the shape of Currency Press’s Remembered Presences: Responses to theatre, which collects almost a hundred of Croggon’s reviews and essays.

Arranged in chronological order, most of the pieces here are drawn from TN but also ABC Arts Online (now, like TN, defunct) and print media such as The Monthly and The Australian. Regrettably, though probably inevitably, those singularly animated discussion threads are not reproduced (they remain accessible on the archived version of the blog, though, and are well worth having on hand as you make your way through this collection).

Croggon herself provides an intriguing clue to the book’s raison d’être in a speech – sadly not included here – given to students at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1997:

This uninteresting book [Leonard Radic’s The State of Play (1991)] wouldn’t matter if other useful critical commentaries were easily available: but they’re not. There is a scrappily researched history produced by Currency Press, but that is as useless. Nowhere do we have, for instance, books like Michael Billington’s One Night Stands or Kenneth Tynan’s collected reviews of British theatre, that can tell you what it was like to be there, why it mattered, why it was exciting.

Remembered Presences, scrappily produced though it may also be (more on this later), is such a book. It joins those by Billington and Tynan – and, it must be said, others by Australia’s Katherine Brisbane and H.G. Kippax, published in the years after Croggon’s speech – as a vital firsthand account of an innately ephemeral art form. And just as Kippax’s A Leader of His Craft (2004) and Brisbane’s Not Wrong – Just Different (2005) trace the contours of significant cultural struggles for public subsidy and recognisably Australian voices in our theatre, positioning their authors as vocal advocates for both, so too does Remembered Presences amount to something more than a blow-by-blow account of a significant chapter in this country’s theatre history.

Alison Croggon (photograph by Daniel Keene)‘In the end,’ Croggon writes, ‘a critic is only as good as the work she writes about.’ The period covered here, 2004 to 2012, was an unusually rich one for Australian performance, particularly when viewed through Croggon’s Melbourne-centric lens (most of the seminal productions assayed here, from Melbourne Theatre Company’s Blackbird to The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, are by Victorian companies). While independent companies like Sisters Grimm and Back to Back Theatre foregrounded queer and disabled stories with renewed formal and conceptual rigour, the majors seemed to find new energies in the naturalism with which they had long been, often sneeringly, associated. Indeed, it appeared as though the distinction between the independent and mainstream sectors – often expressed in binary terms pitting naturalistic and theatricalist modes against each other – was breaking down altogether, or at least reconstituting itself as a vitalising interdependence. Among it all emerged new critiques of gender and colonialism, the reverberations of which are still being felt today in the ongoing revival of feminist and Indigenous performance.

Which is all very well, but every revolution requires a witness equal to the task of describing it. There is no question that Croggon is among the best critics this country has produced, and there is not a review here that doesn’t attest to her precision of thought and expression, her ability to put theatre into multiple contexts – historical, intellectual, political – and to exercise formal control (it’s hard to think of another critic whose reviews can so convincingly enter a poetic register). But for all its fierce intellectualism, Croggon’s criticism locates the effects of performance in the body as much as the mind, emphasising theatre’s embodied, visceral nature. ‘The point is not to drive home a lesson,’ she writes of the kind of work she admires the most, ‘but to open a scab.’ Despite the thought and felt brilliance of Croggon’s writing, again and again in Remembered Presences she acknowledges the limits of language when it comes to writing about theatre: ‘Performance always exceeds language: it is at once word embodied as action, and presence that can’t be contained by words. Writing about performance is by definition a dance with failure, an attempt to translate the untranslatable.’ But what a dance!

What’s perhaps most surprising, for a critic whose ‘vitriolic’ reviews for The Bulletin in the 1990s saw her blackballed by what was then Playbox Theatre, is how generous these pieces are. Clive James once said the stupid critic who likes everything and the smart one who likes nothing are equally contemptible. Croggon is smart, and she likes a lot. While it’s possible to quibble with the individual selections – where, I wondered, is Croggon’s terrific long-form essay ‘The Critical Gap’, her definitive account of the arts funding crisis published in The Monthly in 2016, or her usefully contrarian takes on Alan Bennett’s The History Boys or the plays of Stephen Sewell? – the book’s real shortcomings lie elsewhere.

Unlike Currency’s Kippax and Brisbane books, Remembered Presences has no index – an essential tool, I would have thought, for students, researchers, artists, and the general reader alike. An equally serious omission is the lack of a contextualising introduction or foreword, in lieu of which we are offered Croggon’s fine but inapposite short essay ‘How to Think Like a Theatre Critic’ (which, in any case, has appeared in print at least twice before). It’s a shame the book itself, in glaring contrast to its contents, seems to have been put together with such little thought.