Weepie

WEEPIE is an early and unpublished play by Chris Goode, called by The Guardian, ‘British theatre’s greatest maverick talent’. It tells the true story of a murder perpetrated by two nineteen-year-olds in January of 1994, two years before the play was written. The victim, Mohammed el-Sayed, was unknown to his murderers; he was chosen by them because he was the tenth motorist to pull up at the lights where the boys waited with their knife. There was no racial motive. The murderers were students at a crammer in Oxford where their enthusiasm for the military and the SAS became an obsession with killing and death

Counter-imperialism in Louis Nowra's The Golden Age

An examination of the imperialist theme in Louis Nowra's The Golden Age

Two plays, one nation

Examining two related plays by Alex Buzo, separated by more than thirty years, Donald Pulford measures changes to Australian self-identity in the light of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon and the refugee crisis

Shadow boxing

Shadow Boxing continues my interest in the production/performance of gender on stage. It tells the story of a closeted, gay boxer and the devastation that ensues when he is outed. The central device is the play’s appeal to the audience’s imagined ‘bad faith’ concerning masculinity and the shock when the attendant expectations are subverted or upturned. I expressed the foundation of our enterprise in the New York programme by quoting from Calvin Thomas’s Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: ... to leave masculinity unstudied, to proceed as if masculinity were somehow not a contingent form of gender/sexuation, would be to leave it naturalized, and thus to make it necessary, to reproduce contingency as necessity, to protect masculinity from change

Immigrant voices in recent Australian theatre

The plays and companies treated in this essay reveal a truism of immigrant experience: that the psychological adjustments required in migration are harder to achieve than the physical aspects of the process. Culture and identity are at the heart of the matter. Alienated from the adopted country's culture, eager for the familiar, and anxious about cultural discontinuity, recent immigrants commonly attempt to preserve as much as possible of their original culture in their new environment. After a time, as the bonds of the parent culture loosen, immigrant populations may develop a hybrid identity, not so closely identifiable as part of the parent culture, which is continuing and changing without them, but part of the adopted one in new and special ways. Such a position is a sometimes-uncomfortable amalgam of doubleness and difference. Recent Australian theatre well reflects these two aspects of the immigrant experience and adds a third, in which the difficulties, pleasures and transformations involved in migration provide theatre makers with material for more generally applicable representations of human experience. These three types of response to migration in recent Australian theatre (the desire for cultural continuity, the attempt to blend or bridge the parent culture and the new, and the greater recognition of migrant experience as part of a more generally human experience) suggest departure and arrival in differing degrees. While the first two proceed from a sense of various kinds of distance, the final reveals an awareness of commonality or unity with others, of being at home

1971, a year in The Pram

This article traces the birth of the New Wave of Australian theatre in the late '60s and early '70s. While describing the nationalist influences on the young theatre-makers involved, the article is careful to describe such international forces as the European avant-garde and American youth culture

Counter-imperialism in Louis Nowra's The Golden Age

Counter-imperialism in Louis Nowra's The Golden Ag