Australian Theatre after the New Wave
Australian Theatre after the New Wave

Author: Julian Meyrick

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-09-25

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9004339892

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In Australian Theatre after the New Wave, Julian Meyrick charts the history of three ground-breaking Australian theatre companies, the Paris Theatre (1978), the Hunter Valley Theatre (1976-94) and Anthill Theatre (1980-94). In the years following the controversial dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1975, these ‘alternative’ theatres struggled to survive in an increasingly adverse economic environment. Drawing on interviews and archival sources, including Australia Council files and correspondence, the book examines the funding structures in which the companies operated, and the impact of the cultural policies of the period. It analyses the changing relationship between the artist and the State, the rise of a managerial ethos of ‘accountability’, and the growing dominance of government in the fate of the nation’s theatre. In doing so, it shows the historical roots of many of the problems facing Australian theatre today. “This is an exceptionally timely book... In giving a history of Australian independent theatre it not only charts the amazing rise and strange disappearance of an energetic, radical and dynamically democratic artistic movement, but also tries to explain that rise and fall, and how we should relate to it now.” — Prof. Justin O’Connor, Monash University “This study makes a significant contribution to scholarship on Australian theatre and, more broadly... to the global discussion about the vexed relationship between artists, creativity, government funding for the arts and cultural policy.” — Dr. Gillian Arrighi, The University of Newcastle, Australia

Theatre Australia (Un)limited
Theatre Australia (Un)limited

Author: Geoffrey Milne

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-12-28

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 900448583X

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Theatre Australia (Un)limited tells a truly national story of the structures of post-war Australian theatre: its artists, companies, financial and policy underpinnings. It gives an inclusive analysis of three ‘waves’ of Australian theatrical activity after 1953, and the types of organisations which grew up to support and maintain them. Subsidy, repertoire patterns, finances and administration, theatre buildings, companies, festivals and notable productions of the commercial, mainstream and alternative Australian theatre are examined state by state, and changes to governmental policy analysed. Theatrical forms comprise not only spoken-word drama, but also music theatre, comedy, theatre-restaurant, circus, puppetry, community theatre in several forms and new mixed-media genres: physical theatre, circus, visual theatre and contemporary performance. Theatre Australia (Un)limited is the first comprehensive overview of the fortunes of Australian theatre as a national enterprise, providing the industrial analysis of the ‘three waves’ essential for the understanding of the New Wave and of contemporary drama.

Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White
Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White

Author: Denise Varney

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2018-09-15

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1783088370

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In the early 1960s the board of governors of the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia rejected two Patrick White plays, The Ham Funeral in 1962 and Night on Bald Mountain in 1964. Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White documents the scandal that followed the board’s rejections of White’s plays, especially as it acted against the advice of its own drama committee and artistic director on both occasions. Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso analyze the two events by drawing on the performative behaviour of the board of governors to focus on the question of governance. They shed new light on the cultural politics that surrounded the rejections, arguing that it represents an instance of executive governance of cultural production, in this case theatre and performance. The central argument of the book is that aesthetic modernism in theatre and drama struggled to achieve visibility and acceptability, and posed a threat to the norms and values of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The recent productions indicate that despite the Adelaide Festival’s early hostile rejections, White’s plays endure.

Australia in 50 Plays
Australia in 50 Plays

Author: Julian Meyrick

Publisher:

Published: 2022-03-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781760627386

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AUSTRALIA IN 50 PLAYS is Julian Meyricks lively and accessible account of the remarkable relationship between our national drama and our national life, examining fifty outstanding plays of diverse content and style that have appeared in the 120 years since Federation. Energetic, entertaining and original, Meyrick shows the key contribution drama has made to the development of modern Australia through its role in the major issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the impact of two world wars, the ravages of the Great Depression, the changing role of women, the gradual acknowledgement of First Nations culture, the social liberation of the 1970s, and the economic rationalism of the 1990s. It argues for an expansive idea of nationhood as a key driver of debate in the political, social and cultural challenges that face contemporary Australia, while exploring the surprising links between our drama, our history and our collective life.

Playing Australia
Playing Australia

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9004485872

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Playing Australia explores the insights and challenges that Australian theatre can offer the international theatre community. Collectively, the essays in this book ask what Australian drama is, has been, and might be, both to Australians and non-Australians, when it is performed in national and international arenas. Playing Australia ranges widely in its discussions and includes analysis of Australian practitioners playing away from home; playing with Australian stereotypes; and the relationship between play, culture, politics and national identity. Topics addressed in this diverse collection include: whiteness, otherness and negotiations of Aboriginal and Asian identities; Australian school and college drama; the discourse of Australian professional theatre magazines: Aboriginal Shakespeare; Australian drama and Australian cricket; the marketing of Australianness in Germany; the international successes of Tap Dogs and Cloudstreet. New histories of Australian theatre are offered and practitioners whose careers are reconsidered in detail include high wire-walker Ella Zuila, playwright May Holt, suffrage worker and playwright Inez Bensusan, classicist Gilbert Murray, and commercial playwright Haddon Chambers. With contributions from authors as diverse as Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington and leading post-colonial critic Helen Gilbert, and interview discussion with Cate Blanchett and Tap Dogs producer Wayne Harrison, Playing Australia seeks to pay tribute to the complexities of Australian theatre experiences, to reassess Australian theatre as a significant force in the international arena and to challenge traditional thinking on what Australian theatre can be.

Patrick White's Theatre
Patrick White's Theatre

Author: Denise Varney

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Published: 2021-09-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1743327560

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“Varney combines a theoretically astute sense of the hybridity of the dramatic event, with a dense but lucidly rendered sociological history of White’s plays as they progress through different productions, revivals, and receptions … This is an essential insight, and one which could be usefully extended to White’s novels, and perhaps to Australian modernism broadly.” - Jonathan Dunk, Australian Book Review One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting. In Patrick White’s Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White’s eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White’s complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.

The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature
The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature

Author: Jessica Gildersleeve

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-22

Total Pages: 669

ISBN-13: 1000281701

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In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize, have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companion emerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It considers works of Australian literature on their own terms, as well as positioning them in their critical and historical context and their ethical and interactive position in the public and private spheres. With an emphasis on literature’s responsibilities, this book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts.

Contemporary Australian Playwriting
Contemporary Australian Playwriting

Author: Chris Hay

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-29

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1000784568

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Contemporary Australian Playwriting provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwriting is taking in the twenty-first century. In 2007, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was William Shakespeare. In 2019, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was Nakkiah Lui, a Gamilaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman. This book explores what has happened both on stage and off to generate this remarkable change. As writers of colour, queer writers, and gender diverse writers are produced on the mainstage in larger numbers, they bring new critical directions to the twenty-first century Australian stage. At a politically turbulent time when national identity is fractured, this book examines the ways in which Australia’s leading playwrights have interrogated, problematised, and tried to make sense of the nation. Tracing contemporary trends, the book takes a thematic approach to the re-evaluation of the nation that is dramatized in key Australian plays. Each chapter is accompanied by a duologue between two of the playwrights whose work has been analysed, to provide a dual perspective of theory and practice.

John Romeril
John Romeril

Author: Gareth Griffiths

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9789051835243

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John Romeril has been one of the most prolific contributors to Australian theatre in the last twenty years. But since until recently few of his plays have been published, he has had inadequate recognition. As a founding member of the APG he was 'in at the start' of the revival of the so-called New Wave in Australian drama in the sixties. Romeril continues to be a leading influence in contemporary theatre. His work ranges from the well-known The Floating World (1974) to such recent successes as the community based play The Kelly Dance (1984), the mainstream drama Lost Weekend (1989) and the political play Black Cargo (1991). John Romeril is truly the great survivor of modern Australian theatre.