AustLit

'[...]an overview of our programming study findings looks closely at a selection of the highest selling spoken-word plays with female protagonists between 2006 and 2017. Historically, mainstream theatre has served a largely white, middle-class audience.4 Contemporary mainstream Australian society is both socially and culturally diverse, and this has been at odds with mainstream theatre, which 'continues to construct and represent ... a masculinist, colonial and white hegemony'.5 Furthermore, research into contemporary audiences indicates that mainstream theatre has a noticeably larger female fan base6 and yet the repertoire of Australian mainstream theatre points to a disparity in the representation of female-centred stories.7 The under-representation of women's stories in mainstream Australian plays can be considered critically important to the field of contemporary Australian performance when we consider the gendered voices, and audiences, who are shut out of an important cultural and socio-political conversation by the noticeable absence of women's stories in mainstream repertoire. Historically, the female characters of Australian theatre tended to serve as a reflection of men's perspectives of women, failing to challenge the clearly Anglophile ethos of traditional gender roles.10 In Female Absence: Women, Theatre, and Other Metaphors, Rob Baum argues that gendered constructions of women in domestic roles, particularly as mothers, stems from the flawed design of women as written by men in 'the standard [theatrical] canon'.11 In mainstream plays, Baum calls out the common construction of the female character as 'the metaphorical opposite [to men], circumscribed by [her] relationship to both male roles/ identity and social possibility'.12 It was not until the impact of second-wave feminism on Australian theatre that the problems associated with women's lack of representation, and their misrepresentation, began to be addressed more widely in the industry.13 In an overview of female characters in mainstream repertoire, it is not uncommon to find characters in plays who seemingly exist to be what Kerrie Schaefer and Laura Ginters describe as 'empty vessels for the projected desires of the male characters'.14 While there are exceptions to the stereotypes, it should be noted that the majority of these exceptions in mainstream repertoire are written by women playwrights.15 There have been several texts that give accounts of female representation in Australian plays, which provide a context for understanding the perseverance of stereotypical female characters and largely absent female protagonists. In this text, Gilbert discusses how Australian theatre has perpetuated the dominant culture as masculine, and the 'Other' as feminine, stating that 'patriarchal hegemony proceeds ... through the privileging of the masculine pole of a series of binary oppositions constructed on gender difference'.17 Gilbert writes that the idea of an 'Australian voice' has always been associated with a white, male, Eurocentric voice at the expense of other voices, and had been relatively unchallenged by drama critics until scholarship informed by second-wave feminism appeared in the 1970s.'  (Publication abstract)