AustLit

'Saturn has returned, and a moment of doubt changes everything. The universe conspires against Matt and Zara, and Zara is jettisoned into orbit.

'Sex on drugs has become sordid, but the allure of the threesome is still tempting. The prospect of having children is no longer odious, but mortgages and responsibility remain objects of contempt. It's time for lock down. But who's playing?

'Shifting perspectives on identity and Tommy Murphy's trademark comic flair combine to create a lively theatre of insight and ingenuity.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.

'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'

Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.

Television play, dealing with nuclear energy, national and political survival, and the threat that nuclear conflict offers to peace and freedom. When a nuclear disaster occurs in Scotland, it throw the whole question of uranium mining in Australia open to impassioned debate. The government is divided and, against a background of community protest and public discord, the Prime Minister has to make the most serious decision of his career.

Written in Hewett's freewheeling epic style, The Chapel Perilous is a journey play that spans the period between the 1930s and the late 1960s. The story concerns Sally Banner, an over-reacher who attempts to find fulfilment – whether through her gift of poetic expression, through her sexual relationships, or in later years through political activism - and ultimately finds it through self-acceptance. Thematically the play contains the qualities and concerns which are often associated with Hewett's style – female sexuality, questioning of authority and morality, and anarchic tendencies towards structure in both dramatic text and social attitudes.

As Hewett remarks in her 1979 Hecate article: 'Sally is balanced by several symbolic female figures, the "Authority figures" of Headmistress, Anglican teaching "sister", and mother... [along with the] lesbian love figure, Judith, who stands for intellectual control and denial of sensual love' ('Creating Heroines in Australian Plays', p. 77).

'Sons of Cain is a 1985 play by David Williamson about three female investigative reporters.

'It looks at the New South Wales Labor government of the 1980s'

'Production

'Williamson directed the original production himself, the first time he had done this with one of his own plays. He says he did five full drafts of the play over a period of six months.

'The original production was presented in London in 1986 by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust.' (Source : website)

'Brutality in the workplace, rage in the streets, seething in the home. The vulnerability of political parties when they’ve forgotten why they’re there. The intellectual torpor of modern Australia. How power corrupts.

'Stephen Sewell’s play is an angry and tender depiction of an idealist who becomes so embroiled in a party power struggle that he loses sight of what’s at stake. When it premiered in 1983, The Blind Giant is Dancing felt like a sharp slap in the face. And in an age of ICAC, Union credit cards, speculative housing bubbles, a pulverised working class, vapid leadership… it’s definitely time for another look at this Australian classic.

'Artistic Director Eamon Flack begins his tenure with a company of twelve of the country’s great actors and one of the country’s great plays.'

Source: Belvoir 2016 production summary.

'In his first play, the award-winning David Malouf peoples his stage with characters whose inner selves are as immediate as their environment. A family group gathers at Christmas about the dynamic and manipulative patriach, Willy - a man of many pasts. They are joined by two inquisitive characters bent on uncovering his secret. The relevation uncovers a further mystery of guilt and reconciliation.'

Source: Currency Plays back-cover blurb.

New writing from old Australians this collection presents Aboriginal playwrights using the dramatic form to tell how black and white Australians interact.'

'These are modern, urban plays, but traditional beliefs give strength and resilience to many of the characters in them. These city dwellers are joined to the land and their dreaming, with ancient bonds of common belief; the four plays provide a remarkable, often humorous insight into Aboriginal experience in Australia.' (Source: backcover)

'In 1939, a lost tribe of Europeans was discovered in the Tasmanian wilderness. They were a band of outcasts who had escaped the torture of convict life, scratching out an existence at the forgotten edge of the island, alone for almost a century.

'Inspired by this true story, writer Louis Nowra (Cosi, Radiance) penned The Golden Age – an extraordinary play that blends historical fact, Australian folklore and poetic language to create a post-colonial myth for our times. Nowra’s outcasts have developed a culture and dialect all of their own, but their bodies are failing them and their very existence is in danger. Brought back into the fold of Australian society, what fate awaits this band of exiles?'

Source: Sydney Theatre Company (2016 revival).

'In a small, racially tense town in South Australia the white copper's daughter marries an aboriginal artist. a searing look at black-white relations punctuated with humour and music. ' (Source: Doollee.com website)

Set in the northern Queensland town of Charters Towers the action takes place over one day in 1957 - the day on which the world's first artificial satellite (the Sputnik) and a symbol of the possibilities of the future is to be seen in the sky over the town. It is also the day during which most of the characters will have to deal with significant and sometimes painful change. The main character, Clivvy, is thirty seven years old and is battling with the past and her inability to leave the town. Having won a sponsorship to go overseas to study piano at age nineteen the war intervened. In the following years many other occurrences deny her a life of her own. It is, however, her sense of being a composer - with her music coming 'out of the underbrush' which gives her the strength she needs.

Set in the Australian goldfields of the 1860s -- a world of travelling freak shows, grave robbing, convicts, angels of retribution and Chinese opera -- Fortune tells the story of Chang the 'Tartar Monster'. Eleven years old, 7 feet tall and alone in the world, Chang is enslaved to the cruel Reinhardt, who sells his appearance, at fourpence a time, for souvenir snapshots. Into his life comes Kathleen, Irish, newly free, determined and a passionate survivor. Finally treated as a human being, Chang begins to turn the tables. Showing how readily society's oppressed embrace the role of oppressor. Through richly wrought prose and controlled flights into non-naturalistic realms, Bell probes the complexities of racial prejudice and cultural difference, whilst unsentimentally scrutinising the universal surge for survival (2 acts, 2 men, 3 women).

(Source: Book Depository)

Musical

Set in the exciting and bizarre world of post-war Kings Cross. Tim, a young writer, arrives in Sydney to explore the temptations offered to delight a war-weary population, but must choose between his love for the city and an offer to try his luck on the international theatre circuit.

'Brutality in the workplace, rage in the streets, seething in the home. The vulnerability of political parties when they’ve forgotten why they’re there. The intellectual torpor of modern Australia. How power corrupts.

'Stephen Sewell’s play is an angry and tender depiction of an idealist who becomes so embroiled in a party power struggle that he loses sight of what’s at stake. When it premiered in 1983, The Blind Giant is Dancing felt like a sharp slap in the face. And in an age of ICAC, Union credit cards, speculative housing bubbles, a pulverised working class, vapid leadership… it’s definitely time for another look at this Australian classic.

'Artistic Director Eamon Flack begins his tenure with a company of twelve of the country’s great actors and one of the country’s great plays.'

Source: Belvoir 2016 production summary.

Graham, a conscript just back from the Vietnam War, is awaiting a reunion with his wife Keren when her lover Neville appears instead. Their confrontation is interrupted by the arrival of Neville's pregnant wife Elizabeth and then by Keren herself. The domestic comedy is dramatically overlaid by Graham's reverberating question: 'What have you done to stop the war?', but the ethics of protest are further complicated by the arrival of Dennis, Graham's army mate, who having discovered his own wife with another man, kidnapped their child and robbed a service station.

Graham's and Keren's marriage is an uncertain one for uncertain times; its resolution has as much to do with the changing social and political forces in Australia in the 70s as it has with their mutual dependence. (Publisher's blurb, back cover).

Play with music.

Set in a suburban pub-bistro on a Friday night. Two sexually dysfunctional and socially crippled males and three desperately unhappy and lonely women are brought together in a night of social tension and humour. They clumsily go about their courting rituals and displays of humanity as the influence of alcohol takes an ever-increasing hold.

'An unsettling play about infidelity seen from the perspective of the three women involved: the wife, the lover and the daughter.

'George and Honor have been happily married for thirty-two years. She is a successful writer, he is a revered columnist. They have a perfect understanding of each other. Until a pushy young female journalist - on an assignment to 'profile' George - quite deliberately seeks to undermine that understanding. The fallout is dreadful - but beautifully and convincingly portrayed in all its painful consequences.' (Publication summary)

Three landmark plays from the renaissance of Australian playwriting: 'White with Wire Wheels' was the first play to examine the insecurity inherent in the male culture of women and cars; 'Dimboola', a Rabelaisian account of a country wedding; Monk O'Neill, of 'A Stretch of the Imagination' has become an archetype of Australian character.

'Alana Valentine's play is a verbatim piece about the battle to overturn the decision to exclude the South Sydney Rabbitohs from the NRL. Based on extensive interviews with both public faces of the campaign including George Piggins, Andrew Denton and Nicholas Pappas, and grassroots supporters such as Mark Courtney, Barbara Selby and Marcia Seebacher, this is a story of passion and politics that goes beyond football.'

(Source: Currency Press)

'Based on Elliot Perlman's award-winning novel, THREE DOLLARS tells the story of an honest, compassionate man who finds himself, at the age of 38, with a wife, a child and three dollars.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 16/12/2013)

'After an extensive period of writing for film, Louis Nowra returns to the stage with The Boyce Trilogy, an epic saga about the Boyce family, a family made wealthy through property development. The trilogy starts with The Woman with Dog's Eyes which introduces us to the Boyce family as they gather to celebrate the parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Inspired by events that traumatised Sydney's Moran family, the play explores the universal themes of family, love and disappointment.

'The second part of the trilogy, The Marvellous Boy, unwraps the story of this notorious Sydney family. Malcolm Boyce is dying at a time when his biggest building project - and so his whole empire - is threatened by protesters. He hires an important criminal, the charismatic Ray Pollard, to threaten his enemies. Malcolm gets his son, Luke, to liaise with Ray. Luke not only falls under Ray's spell but also finds himself involved with his father's mistress. The results are tragic. This story follows Luke from detachment into an emotional involvement that will be liberating and then shattering as the consequences of his and his father's moral duplicity emerge.

'In the final instalment of the trilogy, The Emperor of Sydney, the three sons fight for control of the company as their father lays dying in the master bedroom above the huge Beauchamp mansion living room. The company is near bankruptcy because of a huge stalled project (their father's personal vision) and they are facing a criminal investigation into the father's role in the suspicious death of the project's outspoken critic.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Tim, an airline pilot and Angela, his young, beautiful wife, live the successful urban dream in a streamlined apartment in the inner city. One night a friend of Angela's, Dez, pays them a visit. There's just one problem: Angela flatly denies she's ever met him, and despite Dez's growing protestations, she wants him out. Rejected and humiliated, Dez leaves. But not before making some seemingly ominous threats. Now Angela and Tim are having trouble readjusting. Dez has thrown their comfortable lives out of kilter and fear of future incursions escalates.

'Enter Dick, private eye - smarmy and menacing by turns, a Man who Makes Things Happen. Though he charges by the hour and his approach is definitely unconventional, Dick may be exactly what the situation requires...' (Publisher's blurb)

'Australia, 1996. The winds of change begin to blow like a gale through the nation as a new government has taken the reins.

'"From now on people will have to make their own way in the world. People will no longer be rewarded for being weak. The madness is over... The people have spoken. This is what they want, this is what we voted for, and if you don't see it like me, then you are out of step. So get used to it."

'Nick's out of step; he's a writer. No writer has ever lived in Liberal Street before. And the residents are making sure he knows it.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Gwen is 90. She woke up this morning to discover that purgatory is sitting alone in a new house in a new subdivision on the edge of town, trying to work out if the remote in her hand operates the TV, the air-con or the fan-forced oven. But the kids are coming round and Father Ezekiel is on his way to bless the house, so the beginning of the end is looking up ...

'Written specially for Company B, Gwen in Purgatory is Tommy Murphy's brilliant existential comedy about an African missionary in the wilderness of Australian suburbia. Gwen's brood of ordinary souls is battling along in a changing world and wringing out the last drops of their matriarch's faith. Between them they may just find their way to some sort of forgiveness.'

Source: Belvoir Street Theatre website, http://www.belvoir.com.au/
Sighted: 22/09/2009

'The Bougainville Photoplay Project:

'A slideshow with fireside chat:
1. An eminent Australian orthopedic surgeon makes a series of trips to Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) during the 1960s, just as the era of Australia's colonial mandate is drawing to a close. The doctor is presented with dozens of crippled children and lepers; his operations allow many of these people to walk for the first time.
2. The giant Panguna copper mine is established against the wishes of Bougainville's traditional landowners. Environmental destruction is caused by the mine, and the struggle for Bougainville to become independent of PNG leads to a brutal civil war during which roughly one in ten of the island's inhabitants die.
3. An Australian academic begins fieldwork study of reconciliation ceremonies on Bougainville in the current period of post-war reconstruction. He carries with him a book of photographs.

'Three narrative threads are delicately interwoven in an intimate, moving, and constantly surprising monologue performance from acclaimed performance group version 1.0. Combining field notes, oral history, slides, Super-8 film, video installation and the display of various artifacts, "The Bougainville Photoplay Project" grapples with the ethical, epistemological and practical dilemmas of making art and conducting research in post-colonial, post-conflict settings, particularly when the artist/researcher is a citizen of the former colonial power. This is politics and performance at its most personal.'

Source: version 1.0 website, http://www.versiononepointzero.com/
Sighted: 09/11/2010

'It's 21 August 2010, the night of yet another federal election and, of course, yet another election night party at Don's place. Over the decades, as he and his friends watched governments come and go, they have also closely followed the incoming results from each other's lives: the tallies of luck and misfortune, the unexpected swings for and against. And through it all, the lesson that this crowd of superannuated Baby Boomers never seemed to learn is that politics and strong personalities should never be mixed with alcohol.'

Source: Melbourne Theatre Company website, www.mtc.com.au (sighted 29/09/2010)

'Tamara and Jasyn are in love. Tamara is fourteen. Jasyn lives with Aunty and his brother Dane is in prison for dealing. Jasyn wants to take Tamara to the formal, but he hasn't got the cash.

'In a world of absent mothers and missing fathers, Mrs Petchell battles to keep another year of students out of the ranks of the vanished. The Outsiders is on the syllabus again, but instead of Socs and Greasers, this is the world of Speds and Skanks - fuelled by Red Bull and powered by iPods. It can be hard to find your own rhythm when everyone is marching to the beat of a different drum.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Red Sky Morning is a lyrical exploration of dislocation and the need to connect told through the experience of a father, a mother and their teenage daughter in the course of a single, life-changing day.'

Source: Red Stitch Actors Theatre website, http://www.redstitch.net/
Sighted: 11/08/2008

'Time for a comedy - a mad, gorgeous, bittersweet comedy about how good it is not to be dead yet.

'A group of more or less ordinary Sydneysiders go about their lives: Anna makes toast, Henry dresses for work, Milla catches the train to school, Moses deals drugs - that kind of thing. But hovering above this unholy parade of life is the sobering fact that Milla will die before her 15th birthday.

'Rita Kalnejais is a young playwright of uncommon genius. She looks at the humdrum world around us and sees something radically alive. Dogs, Paganini, figs, an eight-year-old Vietnamese violin prodigy, morphine, clear skies and a Latvian immigrant are amongst the magnificent conflagration of ingredients which make up this wonderful, funny play. Written specially for Belvoir, its theme is what Rita calls the violent sweetness of life.

'Eamon Flack (The End, As You Like It) directs a play of unexpected brilliance about that very old and almost forgotten quality of life: grace.' (Source: Belvoir St Theatre website)

'This is the story of Thom and Alethea. Two neighbours in a West End apartment block, trying desperately to keep their lives from falling apart. But the Wall that stands between them has decided they belong together. A one-man show using chalk, sock puppets, a projector and over two-dozen characters in a tall tale of whimsy, imagination and architectural enlightenment.

Source: Metro Arts (www.metroarts.com.au/) (Sighted: 06/08/2010).

'Odyssey weaves the stories of Andreas Litras' migrant family through the legend of Odysseus, hero of the Trojan war. While Andreas shares his stories of family and fish'n'chips, it is the character of Karagiosi, the wise-cracking stage manager, who throws everything out the window and has the audience in hysterics with his own personal rendition of Homer's Odyssey.

The two narrative threads contrast and compliment the other. Odysseus is desperately attempting to return home and Andreas extended family (mother, father, aunts and uncles) have left home and Greece forever and will never return. The central theme of the play is the nature and question of home, of belonging, of family. Journeys and characters cross paths as the performance moves between Andreas and Karagiosi, past and present, Greece and Australia, memory and imagination.' Source: http://www.nexusarts.com.au/view_performer_teacher_notes.php?id=69 (Sighted 23/3/2012)