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Australian Theatre & Cinema (EL306)
Semester 1 / 2014

Texts

form y separately published work icon Cloudstreet Tim Winton , Ellen Fontana , ( dir. Matt Saville ) Australia : Screentime Showtime , 2011 Z1582485 2011 series - publisher film/TV (taught in 1 units) 'The highly anticipated three part mini-series of the modern Australian classic novel. Set in and around Perth during the 40s and 50s, Cloudstreet tells the story of two rural families who suffer separate catastrophes and flee to the city to pick up the pieces of their lives and start again. Brought together in the same house at No.1 Cloud Street, the Lambs and the Pickles' share numerous tragedies and triumphs that draw them closer together, until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.' (Showtime website)
y separately published work icon Hotel Sorrento Hannie Rayson , Sydney Melbourne : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 1990 Z481931 1990 single work drama (taught in 3 units)

Hotel Sorrento is a vivid, moving and funny play which explores the concept of loyalty both to family and to country. Three sisters come together after ten years: Hilary who lives in Sorrento with her father and her sixteen-year-old son; Pippa visiting from New York where she works in advertising; and Meg, who returns home from England with her English husband after her new novel Melancholy is shortlisted for the Booker prize. Unspoken aspects of their shared past, jolted by the autobiographical flavour of Meg's book, haunt their reunion.

Coincidentally, Marge, a teacher, with a holiday house in Sorrento, reads the novel and finds it captures an Australia she knows. Her friend, Dick, however, is worried by Meg's expatriate status. This interest draws them into the family where the issues of culture, patriotism, and using the past are battled out.

Source: Publisher's blurb (back cover).

y separately published work icon Radiance Louis Nowra , Paddington : Currency Press Belvoir Street Theatre , 1993 Z25564 1993 single work drama (taught in 3 units)
— Appears in: アップザラダ; レイディアンス 2003;

'Louis Nowra’s Radiance is an exuberant black sabbath for three great Indigenous dames. It begins conventionally enough: Mae, Nona and Cressy gather at the old Queenslander in the tropics for Mum’s funeral. But these three sisters are forces of nature, and they haven’t been in the same room for years, and years. It isn’t long before that old house can’t contain the joy and pain of them all being together again…

'Radiance began its life at Belvoir in 1993. After 22 years, Nowra’s feat of playwriting – almost Shakespearean, a Tempest-like packet of lust, rage, grief and high-flying foolery – is ready to be unleashed again. Leah Purcell is the woman for the job.

'Purcell is a powerhouse. She burst onto the national stage nearly two decades ago and is as full of fight and life as she ever was. What better idea than for this all-round theatre elder to direct herself in this mighty little classic?' (2015 Production summary)

y separately published work icon No Sugar Jack Davis , 1980 (Manuscript version)x400874 Z264453 1980 single work drama (taught in 21 units)
— Appears in: ドリーマーズ : ノー・シュガー 2006;

'The spirited story of the Millimurra family’s stand against government ‘protection’ policies in 1930s Australia.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Don's Party David Williamson , 1971 1971 (Manuscript version)x402002 Z1505961 1971 single work drama satire (taught in 17 units)
y separately published work icon Selected Plays Jack Hibberd , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2000 Z795032 2000 selected work drama (taught in 3 units)

Three landmark plays from the renaissance of Australian playwriting: 'White with Wire Wheels' was the first play to examine the insecurity inherent in the male culture of women and cars; 'Dimboola', a Rabelaisian account of a country wedding; Monk O'Neill, of 'A Stretch of the Imagination' has become an archetype of Australian character.

y separately published work icon Cyberbile [and] Grounded Alana Valentine , 2013 5989652 2013 selected work drama (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Ray Lawler , 1955 London Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1957 Z522838 1955 single work drama (taught in 56 units)

'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.

'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'

Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.

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