What distinguishes man from machines? What is artificial life, death, progress? These are just some of the questions Jeanette Winterson explores in her brilliant new novel, Frankissstein, a modern take on Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Two warnings: first, the structure is complex, as the narrative segues (at times, unclearly) between the early 1800s and the present; second, readers unfamiliar with Frankenstein will find parts of the novel difficult to follow, especially when Winterson quotes from Frankenstein without explaining that she is doing so. Those riders aside, Frankissstein is a rich, multilayered book that is at once a transgender ‘love story’ (the subtitle), a warning about the perils of unchecked scientific progress, and a frightening look at the potential of artificial intelligence.

First, a brief recap of Frankenstein and its context. In 1814 seventeen-year-old Mary Godwin scandalised English society by running away with the married poet Percy Shelley. In 1816 they spent a summer at Lake Geneva, with Lord Byron. There, Mary wrote Frankenstein, about Victor Frankenstein, a doctor who creates an animate creature, only to be filled with remorse when his creation turns into a murdering monster. When the monster argues that he was born good and only became evil after being abandoned by Victor and spurned by other humans, Victor is forced to acknowledge his responsibility as a creator. ‘Learn from me’, he warns, ‘how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.’

Nowadays every second young person seems to want to be a stand-up comic, an occupation that perfectly represents the ‘gig’ economy in its precariousness and occasional nature. Anne Pender gives us mini-biographies of seven Australians who succeeded, often spectacularly, in the risky business of being a comic long before the idea of a ‘gig’ economy entered the collective mind. Beginning with Carol Raye, Pender relates, in forty or so pages each, the life stories of Barry Humphries, Noeline Brown, Max Gillies, John Clarke, Tony Sheldon, and Denise Scott – in other words, members of the two cohorts who rode the national theatre and television wave from the 1960s to the recent past.

Pender, a professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of New England, is the author of One Man Show (2010), a biography of Barry Humphries. The essays in Seven Big Australians, based on in-depth interviews with her subjects and careful research, demonstrate an empathy that makes them quite engrossing. A good part of their charm comes from the details that Pender elicits from her subjects about the upbringing. The men especially suffered. Their lack of interest in sport and ‘manly’ occupations made them outsiders (Humphries’ headmaster farewelled him with the words, ‘I hope you’re not turning pansy’); in some cases their parents regarded them as ‘no-hopers’ (Clarke). Here, the pathos is underlined by photos showing them looking hapless, usually in fancy dress.

It was during the still relatively tentative explorations I was making into the world of international arts festival direction that I swallowed hard and made my first visit to Glyndebourne. I had lived in London throughout the 1980s, had performed there many times in various venues from the National to the Drill Hall to Wyndham’s in the West End, and had sung in Paris, Vienna, and Amsterdam. I’d been to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, but never to Glyndebourne.

The cost had probably kept me away initially, but its apparent veneer of privilege made me feel uneasy even on that first visit. It was 26 May 1996. As Artistic Director Elect, I’d just experienced Barrie Kosky’s Adelaide Festival and was now on the hunt for performances that would populate my 1998 edition.

Giotto’s frescoes invite us to ponder the nature of what we instinctively, conveniently, but not very satisfactorily call realism. Compared to the work of his predecessors, these images have a new kind of material presence. Bodies become solid, take on mass and volume, and occupy space. Those in front overlap with and partly occlude our view of those behind, for Giotto wants to set them in the same kind of space that we ourselves dwell in, rather than the immaterial space in which Duccio’s rows of angels can hover one above the other.

There is nothing literally illusionistic in this, nothing that tries to trick us into believing that we are seeing the real world instead of a picture. There is instead an artifice of illusion, a play of conscious reference to natural experience; indeed even in the most overtly naturalistic images, like those of Caravaggio, the effect and the intention are entirely different from the beguiling but superficial conceits of trompe-l’œil.

The purpose of this ‘realism’ is inherently double, or even ambivalent. On the one hand, it is an attempt to give new substance and cogency to the sacred stories. Giotto brings images of faith down from what Yeats called ‘God’s holy fire’ and into the world of human experience. But this is also to accord a new importance to physical and sensorial apprehension; to give the sacred stories new reality by setting them in our world is, implicitly, to modify the standard of reality itself.