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metamorphosis into a tree, the drought breaks, washing away the foundations of white civilization based there. This apocalyptic flood is perhaps the end result of the nuclear testing. The rain washes away the dust,
which remains outside the natural order of things, and is essentially the
residue of white civilization. In Wongar's writing, for example in the
poem "The Dust", dust is not an element from which anything can be
created. At the end of Karan, the river cleanses and the land slowly
greens, and the scars left behind by white men are gradually healed.
ELIZABETH PERKINS
DRAMA ROUNDUP
Clem Gorman, A Fortunate Life (adapted from the novel of A.B. Facey).
Sydney: Currency Press and Harvest Theatre Company, South Australia, 1987. Leslie Rees, A History of Australian Drama, Vol. 2 "Australian Drama 1970-1985." Revised and enlarged. Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1987. Michael Gow, Away. Sydney: Currency Press and
Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1986. Daniel Keene, Cho Cho
San. Sydney: Currency Press, Playbox and Company B, Belvoir Street,
Sydney, 1987. Jim McNeil, Collected Plays. Australian Dramatists Series. Sydney: Currency Press, 1986. Stephen Sewell, Dreams in an Empty
City. Sydney: Currency Press and State Theatre Company of South
Australia, 1986. David Williamson, Emerald City. Sydney: Currency
Press, 1987. Gordon Francis, God's Best Country. Sydney: Currency
Press and Western Australian Theatre Company, 1987. Heather
Nimmo, The Hope. Sydney: Currency Press and Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1987. Steele Rudd, In Australia, or The Old Selection.
Edited by Richard Fotheringham. St. Lucia: University of Queensland
Press, 1987. John Cousins, The Inspector (adapted from Gogol's The
Government Inspector). Sydney: Currency Press and Harvest Theatre
Company, South Australia, 1987. Patricia Cornelius, Lilly and May.
Sydney: Currency Press and Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne,
1987. Louis Nowra, edited by Veronica Kelly. Australian Playwrights
Monograph Series, General editor, Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt. Amsterdam:
Rodopi Press, 1987. Rosemary John, Luck of the Draw. Sydney: Currency Press and Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1986.
Dymphna Cusack, Morning Sacrifice. Sydney: Currency Press and Griffin Theatre Company, 1986. Jack Davis, No Sugar. Sydney: Currency
Press, 1986. Barry Dickins, Royboys. Sydney: Currency Press, 1987.
Tony Strachan, State of Shock. Sydney: Currency Press, Playbox and
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Company B, Belvoir Street, Sydney, 1986. Richard Beynon, Summer
Shadows. Currency Press and Spoleto Melbourne Festival, 1986.
A muster of play texts, issued from Currency Press over twelve
months, shows again the strengths of this indefatigible publishing
house and the value of its co-operative policy with the Theatre Companies, representing here all the States except Queensland. Queensland is
rescued from oblivion once again by editors Veronica Kelly and Richard
Fotheringham of the University of Queensland, and general editor
Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt of Griffith University.
Two eminent drama critics and editors, Kelly and Fotheringham
also initiated Australasian Drama Studies, a substantial, scholarly and
lively journal which has regularly appeared twice yearly since October
1981, and which offers its subscribers a series of free play texts. Veronica Kelly's Introduction to the monograph of Louis Nowra is an in formative and thoughtful summary of the present achievements of a playwright and novelist who, her argument convincingly suggests, is "one of
the most exciting living dramatists." Kelly's Introduction in itself
sketches out "the territory of Australian dramatic criticism, its concerns, assumptions and debates", a task which she points out is undertaken by the book in greater detail. Since one of Nowra's earliest
preoccupations has been the way in which human consciousness is
constructed through language and is reflected in the language used by
others, and the way the individual is made by the surrounding culture,
Nowra's plays, his novel The Misery of Beauty (1976) and his compilation The Cheated(1979), are of special interest to psycho-linguists who
might normally ignore dramatic texts as a field of concern.
This, however, is peripheral to Nowra's achievement as a stage
dramatist who has contributed to that dimension of Australian theatre
which could be called "operatic", his own word, rather than "stage
realistic", or the "filmic" dimension, exploited, for example by David
Williamson. A fourteen page Autobiography by Nowra included in the
monograph is a fascinating private account, which supplies background
to some of the plays without in any way explaining the creative imagination and theatrical craftsmanship that go into their making. Nowra also
speaks in his lecture, reproduced from Australian Literary Studies,
"Inner Voices and the First Coil", explaining his concept of his themes
as "developing like a spiral"; in an interview with Jim Davidson from
Meanjin; and in a video interview with Veronica Kelly.
Director Rex Cramphorn and academics Veronica Kelly, Brian
Kiernan, Gareth Griffiths, John McCallum and Peter Fitzpatrick contribute articles collected from earlier sources, providing almost as com-
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prehensive an overview of Nowra's work as is possible at this stage. His
work emerges as an impressive, unique achievement, rich in thematic
significance and pre-eminently theatrical.
This monograph is the first in a projected series edited by ZuberSkerritt, which will include Patrick White, Jack Hibberd, Stephen
Sewell, Dorothy Hewett, and a shorter monograph on David Williamson to complement Peter Fitzpatrick's study published by Methuen. The
series is fully referenced, with chronological lists of theatre works and a
bibliography, and accompanied by photographs of stage productions. A
series of videos, Australian Playwrights Speaking, is also available as a
companion resource, compiled by Zuber-Skerritt at Griffith University.
Among the most interesting of the play texts issued by Currency, all
of which have something to recommend them as outlines at least of a
stage performance, are Stephen Sewell's Dreams in An Empty City, Jack
Davis's No Sugar and Patricia Cornelius's two-women piece, Lilly and
May. Some widely acclaimed stage successes like Williamson's Emerald
City, Gorman's adaptation of A.B. Facey's A Fortunate Life, and Gow's
Away, are provocative reading in that although they are undeniably well
written, it is not always easy to see in the script, even when foreseeing
the inherent possibilities of stage projection, the qualities that brought
audiences to their feet. That could be better expressed, perhaps, by
saying that a script reading can reveal what these qualities are, without
finding them demanding dramatically. Yet the fact that in Townsville
many of the first-night audience of Away were apparently disconcerted
by its mixture of comedy and seriousness, although they loved the
production, indicates that the play has too much complexity to allow a
facile audience response. Audiences, in the main, love and need warmth,
something with which they can "identify", especially if this something
does not really mirror their own lives, something not too unlike the
better type of TV family soapie. A script which combines this with good
roles for actors can hardly fail to be a box-office success. Only seldom
will the audience reach beyond its grasp to respond whole-heartedly to
theatre that attempts to do more than add zest to its melancholy and
grace to its dreams. The theatre exists for its audiences, but it is the
theatre itself that must persuade the audience to venture further in
exploring the possibilities of theatre.
Sewell's Dreams in An Empty City is an ambitious play in theme
and construction, involving some forty or more characters in a two-act
play comprising a Prologue and forty-three scenes. Its theme is the
gross, greedy, corrupt and ruthless financial structure set up by the giant
banking companies and capitalists who control the economic welfare of
the modern state. Yet a careful reading of history suggests that contem-
porary greed for power through money is merely a growth out of the
past. Sewell establishes an allegory of two rival mediaeval war lords
fighting for power, with hirelings and shepherds as their pawns, to
indicate the essential shape of the struggle between the financier Simon
Wilson and the business man Derek Wiesland, who sell lives more
lightly than they would sell a hundred dollars worth of stock. The play is
pushed beyond a Marxist analysis into a spiritual dimension, without
straining the normal bounds of human psychology, by interweaving a
Christian allegory, in which the disposable pawn, Chris, is an ex-priest
turned actor, who is beaten and murdered on Good Friday, as the
money-lenders' temple is rent in a full-scale financial crash. The detailed
Christian allegory, which involves a play within the play, perhaps unnecessarily complicates what is already a rich examination of the contemporary financial world and of human psychology, but it is interesting to
follow Sewell's ambitious attempt to mix the Marxist and Christian
analysis.
Jack Davis's No Sugar is an historically accurate fictionalized
account of the manipulation and abuse of Aborigines in Western Australia during the "smooth the dying pillow" policy of the twenties and
thirties. The play's four acts trace the struggles of the Millimurra family
to survive with dignity as they are uprooted and harassed by wellmeaning and vicious Government employees. Its great success overseas
and in Australia not only testifies to the essential depth of the play, but
also indicates how much better than polemic against the oppressor is the
dramatization of the courage and dignity of the oppressed. Davis is a
consummate playwright, showing a steady perfection of his chosen
mode of episodic realism from Kullark (1979) and The Dreamers
(1983). Although No Sugar is not particularly innovative in theme or
design, it is innovative in its perfectly balanced and complex dialogue
strategies. White and Aboriginal history - power, ignorance, innocence, oppression, loss, hopelessness, homelessness and betrayal - are
summed up in three lines of dialogue:
Sergeant: I've got warrants here for
the arrest and apprehension of all of
youse.
Milly: What for? We ain't done
nothin'.
Sergeant: I never said you did. You're
bein' transferred, every native in
Northam's goin'!
It is against hopelessness that No
Sugar makes its stand.
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Lilly and May by Patricia Cornelius is a well-written, economical
script, with two female actors assisted by a Music Man, whose role is
multiple and ambiguous. Not overtly feminist, aggressively radical,
markedly comic or poignant, Cornelius's play speaks for the streetdwellers everywhere. It is a fine-drawn script for a stage performance
that might seem to go nowhere in particular, but adds up to something
delicate and disturbing.
Summer Shadows, a family tribute by Richard Beynon, is a nostalgic, Long Day's Journey Into Night kind of script that would succeed
very well in a theatre where actors and audience have a penchant for wellwritten realism. Another competently realistic play is Rosemary John's
Luck of the Draw, which joins Rob George's Sandy Lee Live at Nui Dat
(1981) as another Australian play about Vietnam and its legacy for
Australian and Vietnamese participants and their families. Heather
Nimmo's The Hope takes its title from the name of an old Western
Australian mining-town on the verge of another boom, which attracts
the newly married Michael and Bet. In the end, it is Bet who wants to stay
and who feels she has come to terms with the arid environment, and
Michael who fears it will destroy them as it has destroyed others. The
dialogue is economical, the speeches brief and terse, imaging the aridity
and sparseness, and the toughness needed to survive them.
Other titles in this series of texts will be reviewed more fully in the
next issue of LiNQ. This will allow the variety of present Australian
stage writing to be seen in diverse plays like Francis's God's Best
Country, a dramatic confrontation in the isolated far north-west
between a cattle man and the Aboriginal Development Commission,
Barry Dickins' nostalgic celebration of Melbourne football, Royboys,
and adaptations like Cousins' script from Gogol, and Daniel Keene's
rewriting and transformation of Madame Butterfly under the title, Cho
Cho San. The Aboriginal concern is also dramatized in Tony Strachan's
State of Shock, based on the story of Alwyn Peter, a Queensland
Aborigine charged with murder in 1979 and later released on parole.
The re-printing of Dymphna Cusack's Morning Sacrifice has interesting implications for reader-reception theory, while Richard Fotheringham's edition of Steele Rudd's The Old Selection, described as
possibly his best play, is an example of the successes of painstaking
research in uncovering a hitherto unperformed text. A complete edition
of Jim McNeil's prison plays is a welcome re-issue of these thoughtprovoking theatrical scripts from a tragic and gifted writer.
An account of the work of Australia's first drama and theatre
historian, Leslie Rees, will accompany a review of his recent update of
the two volume History of Australian Drama.
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