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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'In Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly, a collection of four plays by one of Australia’s most fearless playwrights, Patricia Cornelius displays all her skill, wit, beauty and anger, and serves them up like a still beating heart on a chipped plate.
'Cornelius’s signature grungy poetic style is at its finest in the early play Love, a brutally beautiful journey into the emotional core of three broken souls in a broken world. In SLUT, a short, sharp stab into the heart of internalised misogyny, Cornelius explores the life and perceived crimes of Lolita, a schoolgirl whose sexual confidence both frightens and fascinates her peers. In The Club takes us into the adrenalin-fuelled, macho-pumped world of professional footballers and its intersection with slut-shaming and issues of consent. And in the sweeping, Lorca-inspired The House of Bernadette, the family of women left behind after the death of a patriarch is a goldmine of female desire, sexual repression, and individual compromise.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
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Contents
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Love,
single work
drama
'Tanya, Annie and Lorenzo are on the bottom of the heap. They're young but already the youth has been wrung out of them. They've been abused, they're abusive, and they're difficult to like let alone to love. But it is love in all its distorted and mutated forms that holds them together. Annie and Tanya make a pact; their love will protect them from an unloving world and it will endure. Even the dreadful and charming Lorenzo will not threaten it. Only doubt in each other's love can put a wedge between them.' (Back cover, Currency Press, 2006)
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Slut,
single work
drama
'Lolita is crowned the queen of sluts. And no matter how much a girl thinks her life's her own and thinks she can do whatever she wants, a slut's a slut. A mob of young women take a stick to the pinata and watch Lolita's final devastating fall.'
Source: www.fortyfivedownstairs.com (Sighted 20/02/2008).
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In The Club,
single work
drama
'Annie, Ruby and Olivia are going out. They want to get laid, get loose, get love — but they are women in a world of men. Not just any men, gods among men, their beloved boys, the boys of the AFL. And the rules of the game out there in the world of the night club and the dance floor are merciless, and the lines of division are clear.
'Patricia Cornelius is one of Australia’s most awarded, brilliant and uncompromising playwrights. In this brand new work she weaves fiction together with verbatim material to shine her fierce light on women’s accounts of sexual violence in the dark world of the club behind the club.' (Production summary)
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The House of Bernarda Alba,
single work
drama
'With their mining-mogul father dead, the Alba household is in mourning. All four daughters have been called home to pay their respects by their mother, Bernarda, who is truly a force of nature.
'The future seems wildly uncertain for all but the eldest sister, who has inherited a fortune and is engaged to the local heartthrob. But as tensions rise and tempers flare, will any of them have the power to alter their own destinies?' (Production summary)
