Compares plays by Irish playwrights Sean O'Casey and Brian Friel with works by Aboriginal writer Jack Davis. Argues that what these plays have ideologically in common is a concern with dispossesson and materialist socialist analyses of that dispossession; a gendered and culturally critical account of heroism; a sense that language alone does not carry all the meanings of the culture; and a refusal to see the facts of oppression as the matter of tragedy.