AustLit

'This article discusses the findings of a qualitative study of the effects of eighteen months of the COVID pandemic on the careers, livelihoods and creative practice of ten Australian women playwrights. We find that the gendered impacts of the pandemic, and the calls for resilience it prompted, compounded a series of challenges that were already being faced by women playwrights in Australia. Between March and September 2021, we interviewed Australian women playwrights, asking them to speak about their experiences throughout the COVID crisis. These interviews were situated within a broader study of the effects of the pandemic upon Australian women writers.2 Expanding upon our previous work, we wanted to explore how those writing specifically for theatre – a fundamentally communal creative form – were impacted by the pandemic, and whether there was a gendered dimension to the pandemic’s effects in theatre as seen elsewhere.3 Our methodology, the interview, was chosen primarily to offer playwrights an opportunity to speak freely about the situations in which they found themselves. A key observation from our interviews was that playwrights had entered the pandemic against the background of an already depleted and under-resourced industry. Drawing on work by Suman Gupta and Ayan-Yue Gupta along with John Yves Pinder, and extending the provocations offered by Margaret Ames and Stephen Greer in their 2021 editorial ‘Renegotiating Resilience, Redefining Resourcefulness’, we explore the problematic notion of resilience and its deployment as a part of a neoliberal rhetoric.4 We connect the social and political contexts of the austerity crisis in which Australian theatre-makers encountered the pandemic, extending and expanding their observations on ‘resilience’ and the arts in the Global North.' 

(Introduction)