AustLit

'Professor Barry Spurr and I were in class together with Dame Leonie Kramer in the early 1970s. Then, as a friend and student colleague, he was always a wonderfully strong and committed champion of Australian literature, especially poetry. I have watched with awe and wonder his rise to academic distinction at the University of Sydney as Australia’s first Professor of Poetry and Poetics. I was particularly interested in his passion for religious poetry in English and his deep and searching expertise on T.S. Eliot, especially the Four Quartets. The sad circumstances of Barry’s retirement from the University of Sydney in 2015 after forty years of service at that institution are perhaps well known. These circumstances illustrate the illusion of so-called academic freedom in this country, which allows the digital hacking of a private correspondence to become the basis for a politically motivated vendetta against some of Barry’s probably misperceived attitudes. The fact that this situation was never brought to a fair hearing and was the direct cause of Barry’s enforced retirement sent shock waves through the academic community at the University of Sydney and more widely in this country.' (Introduction)

'This gripping play has two endings, and at the completion of Act 2, the audience vote for the one they think is appropriate.

'A family has come together to choose a nursing home for their mother. She has Alzheimer’s. Jack wants them to let her go, tonight, and he has brought the means to do it. Jack will be so convincing that you may find yourself not only being persuaded into thinking that his way is right, but wondering whether this is a new morality struggling to evolve. On the other hand you may feel that this is just good old evil, hidden in the sheepskin of logic.

'Let her go? Place her in a home? You decide.'

Source: La Mama.