tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/playwriting-15779/articles
Playwriting – The Conversation
2021-10-25T12:48:51Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/169700
2021-10-25T12:48:51Z
2021-10-25T12:48:51Z
Five plays about enslavement by Black British women playwrights
<p>“There’s a sidestep that Europe does where it takes itself out of the triangle … I’m never quite sure how that sleight of hand is achieved, but it’s like, slavery, it’s that American thing, we don’t have to worry about it,” said playwright <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09z0bbc">Selina Thompson</a> when talking about Britain’s role in the transatlantic trade of humans from Africa. She’s not wrong. The narrative of slavery in the UK has long been shaped by the celebration of white abolitionists, while the violent part is often obscured.</p>
<p>Most plays, television shows and films about slavery are set in the US. They tend to repeat the same traumatic images of violence against Black people as if there is no other way of getting the horror across than in such visceral and gruesome scenes, particularly those involving Black women. </p>
<p>Speaking about Black British director Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave, and many films like it, Black feminist cultural critic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAaslq_ihyk">bell hooks</a> said:</p>
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<p>If I don’t see another Black woman naked, raped and beaten as long as I live, I will be just fine.</p>
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<p>hooks challenges storytellers to think about how enslavement is represented and to think about how these histories can be explored without re-traumatising Black performers and spectators.</p>
<p>Five recent plays by Black British women have taken this on as they tackle Britain’s missing history, rewriting the record of it as “the country that ended slavery”. They do not resort to violence to show the seriousness of their stories but do so through thoughtful writing and by drawing connections between real stories from our past and our present.</p>
<h2>debbie tucker green’s ear for eye</h2>
<p>A play in three parts, tucker green’s <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0010t0c/ear-for-eye">ear for eye</a>, which has recently been adapted into a film for the BBC, is about the different ways that racism plays out in the UK and USA. While part two explores the power of language and how it can be weaponised to create dangerous stereotypes in the media and in conversation, parts one and three show clear threads that connect contemporary police brutality against Black people to legacies of colonial violence. </p>
<p>Part one portrays African American and Black British parents having “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12401792/police-black-parents-the-talk">the talk</a>” with their sons about how to conduct themselves when they’re stopped by the police. Many Black parents will know this talk; it stresses how the onus is placed upon young Black men to behave in ways that avoid appearing “threatening”, “aggressive”, “belligerent”, or “provocative”. Yet, the play suggests that any gesture he adopts can be misinterpreted.</p>
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<p>Intergenerational conversations about civil rights and contemporary activism are interspersed with scenes describing police officers teargassing Black protesters and using aggressive and humiliating arrest techniques. These are similar to scenes that played out across the world in 2020 as many <a href="https://theconversation.com/george-floyd-why-the-sight-of-these-brave-exhausted-protesters-gives-me-hope-139804">protested against racial injustice and police violence</a>. </p>
<p>Part three features excerpts from the US Jim Crow segregation laws and the British (Jamaican) and French slave codes, which are read aloud on camera by white actors and non-white actors. While US laws focused on keeping Black people and white people separate, British slave codes legislated the brutal punishments of runaways. Hamstrings were cut following a second attempt to escape and death was the punishment for a third. These infringements of Black human rights show how contemporary violence against Black people stems from much longer histories of racism. </p>
<h2>Janice Okoh’s The Gift</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/jan/21/the-gift-review-black-britons-queen-victoria-janice-okoh">The Gift</a> also uses a three-part narrative structure that moves from Brighton in 1862 to the present day rural English countryside. </p>
<p>A story about the adopted African goddaughter of Queen Victoria, <a href="https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/real-stories/the-african-princess-sarah-forbes-bonetta/">Sarah (Forbes) Bonetta</a> are paralleled with present-day Sarah – “a black middle-class woman staying in a Cheshire village with her husband and [white adopted] small child”. </p>
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<p>Okoh implies that colonial ideas about race continue to shape understandings in the present. This is clear when well-meaning white neighbours drop by for a cup of tea and microaggressions start to slip out in comments about it being unusual for Black parents to adopt a white child. </p>
<h2>Juliet Gilkes Romero’s The Whip</h2>
<p>Contemporary resonances are also evident in Juliet Gilkes Romero’s <a href="https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-whip/">The Whip</a>, which focuses on the abolition of slavery in 1833. This play moves the narrative away from the celebration of white abolitionists by providing a backroom view of British politicians wrangling about abolition in parliament.</p>
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<p>Gilkes Romero focuses on the much-obscured part of this legacy – the £20 million borrowed to pay to “compensate” owners of enslaved people for the “loss of property.” This was such a large debt (the modern equivalent of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/12/treasury-tweet-slavery-compensate-slave-owners">£17 billion</a>) that it was only fully paid off in 2015 using taxpayer’s money. While enslavers were paid off, reparations to those descended from enslaved people have been denied – many of whom have unwittingly paid towards this “compensation” through taxes.</p>
<h2>Selina Thompson’s salt.</h2>
<p>A one-woman show, <a href="https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/salt/">salt.</a>, part of which has also been <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0010zdp">adapted for the BBC</a>, narrates a journey that Thompson took on a cargo ship in 2016 to retrace the transatlantic triangular route from Europe to Africa and the Caribbean. Thompson explores African-American scholar Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the “<a href="https://iaphs.org/the-afterlife-of-slavery-how-racial-logics-maintain-racial-health-disparties/#:%7E:text=Author%20Saidiya%20Hartman%20writes%20in,afterlife%20of%20slavery%20also%20includes">afterlife of slavery</a>”, which is the idea that a racial logic that was established during slavery continues to disadvantage Black people through “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration and impoverishment”.</p>
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<p>Thompson shows how colonial dynamics are reproduced in racist and sexist assertions of power on the ship and on the surveillance of her Black female body as she passes through border security controls. She experiences contradictory feelings as a Black woman visiting the dungeons of the notorious <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/27/africa/ghana-elmina-castle/index.html">Elmina’s Castle</a> in Ghana, where enslaved people were held before being transported, and in Jamaica, where she recognises the implicit racial dynamics of the tourist industry. </p>
<h2>Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/rockets-and-blue-lights">Rockets and Blue Lights</a> uses a dual narrative framework that is set in the present and the past. One strand portrays the making of a film about JMW. Turner’s 1840 painting, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-50-autumn-2020/winsome-pinnock-jmw-turner-slave-ship">The Slave Ship</a> in the present day. The other strand is set in 1840 as “Londoners Lucy and Thomas try to come to terms with the meaning of freedom” and Turner boards a ship to research the sea for his paintings. </p>
<p>Turner’s painting is believed to be a response to the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/jan/19/the-story-of-the-zong-slave-ship-a-mass-masquerading-as-an-insurance-claim">Zong massacre</a> of 1781, when the captain of a ship ordered the crew to throw 133 enslaved people overboard so that he could make an insurance claim for the loss of cargo. </p>
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<p>Pinnock’s use of past and present questions the responsibility of storytellers when exploring enslavement. The Black actress in the fictional film challenges the director’s decision to cut aspects of her story to give more space to Turner’s. This draws attention to how certain stories are written out of historical narratives while others are foreground.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169700/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lynette Goddard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Black British women have been staging plays in recent years about Britain’s role in slavery, a history the country is too eager to forget.
Lynette Goddard, Professor of Black Theatre and Performance, Royal Holloway University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/152669
2021-01-08T15:49:30Z
2021-01-08T15:49:30Z
Shakespeare and Cervantes: what similarities between the famous writers reveal about mysteries of authorship
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377555/original/file-20210107-19-8xmtuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5053%2C3378&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://webgate.epa.eu/?16634349628007773501&MEDIANUMBER=55764109">Andy Rain/EPA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, two of the most important writers of literature, are surrounded by a halo of mystery related to authorship.</p>
<p>In the case of Shakespeare, the question of whether he is the true author of his plays has circulated for some time. In the case of Cervantes, mysteries about authorship tend to concern who wrote the sequel to the first part of Don Quixote, one of the earliest modern novels.</p>
<p>Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605. In 1614, an unofficial sequel by the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda was published. In response, a year later, Cervantes published his sequel to Don Quixote, denouncing Avellaneda’s version in the prologue. Since then, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX5g2SfUFxLYt_O6KJWC2PtP_b4beG93y">Avellaneda’s identity</a> has become the greatest mystery in Spanish literature.</p>
<h2>Cervantes, Shakespeare and education</h2>
<p>Both Cervantes and Shakespeare lived and died at around the same time. Shakespeare was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare#Life">born into a wealthy, rural family</a> and Cervantes had <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes#Biography">humbler origins</a>, yet both had a passion for the theatre and wrote plays. </p>
<p>In both cases, we hardly know anything about their childhoods and education (although it is known that neither went to university).</p>
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<img alt="Person’s finger on magnified page of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, reading: " src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377557/original/file-20210107-14-ndt4jz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377557/original/file-20210107-14-ndt4jz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377557/original/file-20210107-14-ndt4jz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377557/original/file-20210107-14-ndt4jz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377557/original/file-20210107-14-ndt4jz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377557/original/file-20210107-14-ndt4jz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377557/original/file-20210107-14-ndt4jz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Shakespeare’s works have been attributed to 80 different authors.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://webgate.epa.eu/thumb.php/55763975.jpg?eJw1jrEOgkAMht-ls8NdufbKbYYFE9FETNTJHBy4GAeRSXx3K8Tpy9_vT9s3FGsIfbwP3QqKEgKA8gzBKi4zthsIqNip7B636zhE7VSaiDxnuadfPM7deq7WBQSnqJaZqtdz1P2nRR8geGM0Vn-xVwGSkD273EcnVjxzjtxHtFlLbWdd0iv6KqAhpAkNGpmaJMTciFBvjEsEny8tSTIC">Andy Rain /EPA</a></span>
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<p>Great authors lend themselves to speculation. Shakespeare’s lack of education is one of the main arguments against the idea that he wrote his works, which have been attributed to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question">80 different authors</a>. While Cervantes’ authorship tends not to be under the same scrutiny, questions about who exactly Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda was, remain.</p>
<p>Cervantes’ own educational background, however, suggests that it is possible to write to a high standard without academic training. If this could be true for the Spanish writer, why not for Shakespeare too?</p>
<p>A very large number of authors have also been proposed as <a href="https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/2090">candidates for the authorship of Avellaneda’s sequel to Don Quixote</a>.</p>
<p>Social and cultural prejudices have been important in both cases. Shakespeare’s works show a detailed knowledge of the highest social classes, which is why it is thought that they should have been composed by some illustrious person of the time, such as <a href="https://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2011/10/did-shakespeare-really-write-his-plays-a-few-theories-examined/2">Sir Francis Bacon</a>.</p>
<p>However, Cervantes also had knowledge of the higher social classes and did not belong to them. Some researchers have even proposed that Avellaneda could have been Lope de Vega, the most prominent Spanish playwright at the time, since it is more attractive to imagine Cervantes confronted with a great author than with a mediocre person.</p>
<p>In both cases, figures who died well before both Shakespeare and Cervantes have been proposed as authors: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare’s plays, and the Spanish writer Pedro Liñán de Riaza as Avellaneda, the unconvincing argument being that their works were left incomplete and were finished by other writers.</p>
<p>That said, it’s important to look at other plausible explanations. At the time of the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, there were no copyright laws protecting writers from continuations or plagiarism of works, which explains how Avellaneda’s version came to be. </p>
<p>Similar confusion has been caused in Shakespeare’s case. The Taming of the Shrew had an earlier anonymous version titled: <a href="https://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/taming.html#:%7E:text=The%20only%20quarto%20edition%20of,bookseller%20John%20Smethwick%20in%201631.&text=Smethwick's%20copyright%20in%20The%20Taming,folio%20and%20the%201631%20quarto">The Taming of a Shrew</a>, seemingly supporting <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/authorship-of-the-taming-of-the-shrew/53EEB169C4B837834F7AC7504F6325B4">theories</a> that Shakespeare’s version was co-authored, or written by someone else entirely. </p>
<p>These days, however, following a theory <a href="https://academic.oup.com/sq/article-abstract/3/4/367/5136733?redirectedFrom=fulltext">put forward by Shakespearean scholar Peter Alexander</a> in 1926, it is generally accepted that The Taming of A Shrew was simply an attempt to record the live production version of the play from memory.</p>
<p>In the case of Cervantes, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OmFF1oRXzg">I think I have cleared the mystery</a>: we already know what Cervantes thought about Avellaneda’s identity, which should put an end to absurd speculation.</p>
<h2>Cervantes and issues of authorship</h2>
<p>As one popular theory goes, Avellaneda’s sequel to Don Quixote should be read as an embittered response to Cervantes’ parody of two real people: Lope de Vega and Jerónimo de Pasamonte. Pasamonte was a soldier from the region of Aragon who took part – as did Cervantes – in the battle of Lepanto (1571). Cervantes is said to have behaved heroically in the battle since, despite being ill, he insisted on fighting and was wounded several times.</p>
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<img alt="Red hard-bound editions of Miguel de Cervante’s Don Quixote books in a row on a shelf" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377559/original/file-20210107-15-14fm9xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377559/original/file-20210107-15-14fm9xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377559/original/file-20210107-15-14fm9xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377559/original/file-20210107-15-14fm9xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377559/original/file-20210107-15-14fm9xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377559/original/file-20210107-15-14fm9xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377559/original/file-20210107-15-14fm9xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Cervantes’ parody of the apocryphal Don Quixote hints at Avellaneda’s true identity.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/don-quixote-antique-books-1181401978">Amani A/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Shortly afterwards, in 1574, Pasamonte was taken prisoner and spent 18 years in captivity. Upon his release, he returned to Spain and finished his autobiography, <a href="http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/vida-y-trabajos/">Life and Works</a>.</p>
<p>When writing about the capture in 1573 of La Goleta (where there was in fact no actual battle), Pasamonte claimed to have acted as heroically as Cervantes at the battle of Lepanto.</p>
<p>After seeing how Pasamonte had usurped his heroic deeds in his autobiography, Cervantes satirised it in the first part of Don Quixote. Cervantes turned Jerónimo de Pasamonte into Ginés de Pasamonte, a galley slave, who is presented as a liar, a cheat, a coward and a thief, and is gravely insulted by characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.</p>
<h2>The revenge of Pasamonte</h2>
<p>The hypothesis that <a href="https://theconversation.com/cervantes-y-el-quijote-apocrifo-quien-fue-avellaneda-113331">Pasamonte was Avellaneda</a>, proposed by Martín de Riquer, an academic at the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language, is <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjEt5uDloXuAhVYZxUIHXk8DCsQFjAAegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fusers.pfw.edu%2Fjehle%2Fcervante%2Fcsa%2Fartics02%2Fpercas.pdf&usg=AOvVaw05HtrFdlG3iEA7YVq2TF9N">increasingly</a> <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjHhrqKl4XuAhUGhlwKHWQ9CeoQFjAAegQIAxAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fusers.pfw.edu%2Fjehle%2Fcervante%2Fcsa%2Fartics05%2Fpercas.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1_CQd_8CYhunBFuhXP0amR">accepted</a>.</p>
<p>As I have probed in my book, <a href="http://alfonsomartinjimenez.blogs.uva.es/publicaciones-en-internet/libro/">“The two second parts of Don Quixote”</a>, Pasamonte sought to take revenge on Cervantes, writing a sequel to Don Quixote with the intention of robbing Cervantes of his earnings from the second part. In order not to be linked to Cervantes’ galley slave, he then signed it under a pseudonym.</p>
<p>To get revenge on Avellaneda, Cervantes imitated his imitator and created a masterly scene, making the literary representation of Avellaneda (personified in a character known as Jerónimo) recognise his Don Quixote as the true one.</p>
<p>As attractive as speculation about Shakespeare and Cervantes’ authorship may be, looking closer at their lives shows just how irrelevant class, education and conspiracy theories are in terms of explaining their genius.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152669/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alfonso Martín Jiménez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Looking closer at the Spanish writer’s life work shows that social and cultural prejudices have kept us from seeing the full picture
Alfonso Martín Jiménez, Catedrático de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, Universidad de Valladolid
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/133846
2020-05-05T11:19:32Z
2020-05-05T11:19:32Z
Playwriting can give vulnerable young people confidence and a sense of control
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332678/original/file-20200505-83736-bftv2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=733%2C0%2C3443%2C1197&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/silhouette-men-behind-curtain-theater-on-1111644830">Valerka Stepankov/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For a group of vulnerable students in Southampton, the opportunity to try playwriting had a transformative effect. “This process taught me that what I feel counts,” one student told me. “Seeing it up on the stage, and the mentor believing in me – what I write means something.” </p>
<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14452294.2015.1128303">Recent research</a> has found that playwriting can be used to increase academic skills and a sense of agency.</p>
<p>As a writer, I wanted to understand why there was such a disconnect between alienated young people and their potential. This led me to explore how writing a play can change a negative story, and the process of creating a piece of art is so empowering that it can change the way young people see themselves. </p>
<p>My PhD research, underway at the University of Winchester, linked up a group of young people with a professional playwright as a mentor in order to write a short play. A key part of the process is that the young people must be pushed not just to complete the task, but to write well.</p>
<h2>Building confidence</h2>
<p>The young people in my study were not in education or training and were struggling with confidence. The writing course lasted for three months, meeting weekly. The plays were then performed in front of an audience by actors on the stage of the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton. The young people will be asked at intervals of a year if they feel their confidence has improved. </p>
<p>Narrative education, with an emphasis on story, is often overlooked by schools in favour of education based on logic. Asking vulnerable young people to focus on their story, and giving them a chance to rewrite it through artistic performance, can lead to a positive <a href="http://www.dramanetwork.eu/file/educationresource_short.pdf">change in agency</a>: the young person feels in control of their story. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332676/original/file-20200505-83736-rw8k40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332676/original/file-20200505-83736-rw8k40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332676/original/file-20200505-83736-rw8k40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332676/original/file-20200505-83736-rw8k40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332676/original/file-20200505-83736-rw8k40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332676/original/file-20200505-83736-rw8k40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332676/original/file-20200505-83736-rw8k40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mayflower Theatre New Auditorium.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.mayflower.org.uk/">Mayflower Theatre</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A professional writer as mentor is key to this process. They can relate to the young person, writer to writer. This removes the often inhibiting teacher-student relationship.</p>
<p>Task completion is an important part of the journey. Many of the young people I have worked with have never finished anything, passed exams or received prizes. Following a journey from idea to product is empowering and can help the young person to understand the significance of their own life. </p>
<p>A large proportion of the cohort wrote autobiographically about issues falling under the spectrum of mental health. One writer wrote of teenage depression, another on autism, another a struggle with crippling lack of confidence as well as friendship struggles and alcohol abuse.</p>
<h2>New perspectives</h2>
<p>Playwriting gives a young person the opportunity to step outside themselves to look at their own story. It is a unique medium for empowering those who are vulnerable. The live performance element allows the writer to see how their art affects an audience. </p>
<p><a href="https://developingchild.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/The-Science-of-Neglect-The-Persistent-Absence-of-Responsive-Care-Disrupts-the-Developing-Brain.pdf">Research has found</a> that neural pathways in the brains of young people can be affected by long-term neglect. </p>
<p>However, positive experiences can allow the brain to re-wire. It is not just pharmaceutical drugs that can correct these changes in the brain, but environmental factors can as well, such as <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201687">empathy and support</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332682/original/file-20200505-83725-1754wez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332682/original/file-20200505-83725-1754wez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=301&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332682/original/file-20200505-83725-1754wez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=301&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332682/original/file-20200505-83725-1754wez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=301&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332682/original/file-20200505-83725-1754wez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332682/original/file-20200505-83725-1754wez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332682/original/file-20200505-83725-1754wez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Writing a play and seeing it performed can help young people take control of their story.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/close-shot-young-woman-writing-notes-524512270">Jacob Lund/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Previous negative experiences can be re-framed by “<a href="https://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/research/publications/books/2007/beingmoved.html">mirror neurons</a>” which allow new neural matrices in the brain to form. Mirror neurons allow us to learn from adults by mirroring their behaviour. These neurons then form complex systems – neural matrices – which link actions with emotions and ability. This is how we develop our responses and creativity. In cases of long term neglect, these matrices are damaged or not made.</p>
<p>My research focuses on this mirroring relationship, where the student unconsciously copies the positive actions of the mentor-writer.</p>
<p>Four out of six of the writers said they want to continue to write, and five said they wanted to stay in touch with the mentor. When asked about their subject choice for their play, one writer told me that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wanted my experience to be out there, for others, so they can take it or take bits of it if they want and add it to their own experiences… Without writing, I don’t know what would have happened to me. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Her play was a personal account of a struggle with a relationship and the damage it has wrought. </p>
<p>Another, student, writing about autism, commented that “I wanted to share or imagine, what it might be like to be locked in, so people can understand more about it.” Another participant wrote about a student who had always lacked confidence struggling to overcome this with the help of their peer group. </p>
<p>All six students stated that their self-confidence, both as a writer and a person, had increased as a result of the playwriting course.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/133846/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zoe Lewis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Creating a play and seeing it performed is an empowering journey.
Zoe Lewis, Playwright and PhD researcher in Education and Drama, University of Winchester
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/95855
2018-06-04T20:30:24Z
2018-06-04T20:30:24Z
When the cultural cringe abated: Australian drama in the 1970s
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219873/original/file-20180522-51105-f2dfd4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Happy and Holy: Barry Otto as Tockey, Ruth Cracknell as Cecilia McManus, Graham Rowe as Denny, Ron Hadrick as O'Halloran in a 1982 production by the Sydney Theatre Company.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer David Wilson. </span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our Great Australian Plays series, we nominate the best of Australian drama.</em></p>
<p>If Australian drama came of age <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-australian-plays-speaking-orstyrlian-in-rusty-bugles-69642">in the 1940s and 1950s</a>, in the 1970s it reached full maturity. More work by more playwrights by more companies for larger audiences: this is the basic narrative of the period. <a href="https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/browse/">The AusStage database</a> indicates that between 1970 and 1979, local productions of Australian plays more than doubled. And if the standard of that drama could be variable, there is no doubting the craft, intelligence and audacity of its peak achievements. </p>
<p>Looking at just a few plays from the 1970s, as I do here, does not give a real sense of their range and diversity, however. Nor does it suggest why an increase in the quantity of Australian drama changed how it was regarded qualitatively. The 1970s transformed both what Australian plays were, and what artists and audiences thought they could be. The future of the art form, not just its present reality, was altered during this crucial decade. </p>
<p>It also changed the way Australia drama was seen internationally. My very English father was appalled by the Royal Court production of Don’s Party that my very Australian mother dragged him to in 1975. But staging it in the temple of British playwriting demonstrated that the cultural cringe had abated. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empire_Writes_Back">The Empire was writing back to the Centre</a>; and writing differently to itself. </p>
<p>In a more extended examination of the drama of the period, I would certainly touch on John Romeril’s body of theatre work, especially <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/reading-australia/john-romeril/the-floating-world-by-john-romeril">The Floating World</a> (1974), which, along with Alan Seymour’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Day_of_the_Year">One Day of the Year</a> (1960), is one of the best plays about the social and psychological aftereffects of war. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219875/original/file-20180522-51141-163q6jn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219875/original/file-20180522-51141-163q6jn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219875/original/file-20180522-51141-163q6jn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219875/original/file-20180522-51141-163q6jn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219875/original/file-20180522-51141-163q6jn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219875/original/file-20180522-51141-163q6jn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219875/original/file-20180522-51141-163q6jn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219875/original/file-20180522-51141-163q6jn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Frederick Parslow as Les, Brian James as Robinson, Marion Edward as Irene in The Floating World performed at the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1982.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer David Parker.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In The Floating World, Les Harding, a blue-collar, World War II vet, is on a holiday cruise to Japan. Unable to escape his memories of forced labour as a POW on the infamous Burma-Thailand railroad, he hallucinates that the Malaysian waiter is a Japanese army officer. As the action unfolds, Les’s racism and sexism are the objects of both satire and sympathy. He plunges into a traumascape where past and present disastrously collide, while Romeril ticks his play through a dial of different styles from naturalism to vaudeville. </p>
<p>I would look, too, at the drama of Ron Blair, particularly his one-person play, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christian_Brothers">The Christian Brothers</a>, which I saw staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company with Peter Carroll in 2003 (Carroll premiered the play in 1975, thus performing it, on and off, for 28 years). </p>
<p>Blair presents audiences with an ageing Christian Brother teacher less-than-successfully managing a classroom of less-than-obedient schoolboys. Blending reminiscence, religious dogma, lingering affection and a sudden explosion of violence, the play pitch perfectly captures the repressed atmosphere of 1950s Catholic education.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aBFElBvIZns?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>I would examine <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_De_Groen">Alma de Groen’s</a> The Sweatproof Boy (1972), and its synergies with Joe Orton’s genre-defying <a href="http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/reviews/entertaining-mr-sloane-joe-orton">Entertaining Mr Sloane</a>. </p>
<p>And I would also discuss her shorter play, The Joss Adams Show (1972), one of the finest of its type I have read. The meta-theatrical format of the TV interview is a favoured one for 1970s playwrights. Joss Adams is (apparently) being questioned about her experiences as a young mum. Elegant, clinical and devastating, only at the end of the play does it become clear she is suffering post-natal depression. The bag at her feet contains the body of her dead baby. </p>
<h2>A lesser known stand out</h2>
<p>A perhaps lesser-known stand-out play of the era is John O’Donoghue’s realistic (but not entirely so) <a href="http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/reviews/happy-and-holy-occasion">A Happy and Holy Occasion</a> (1976). O’Donoghue’s work - rooted in Novocastrian history and experience - is representative of drama developed not in Australian capital cities, but in our regions. These remoter towns and localities have produced a rich parade of playwriting talent: Wollongong (Katharine Thompson), Geelong (Ross Mueller), Maitland (Nick Enright), Rockhampton (Angela Betzien), Yarloop, WA (Jack Davis) and many more. </p>
<p>The action of A Happy and Holy Occasion unfolds over a single evening in 1942, in a house in Mayfield West, a working class suburb of Newcastle. Christy O’Mahon, the 12-year old son of Mary and Denny, a steelworker, is about to leave home and enter the Minor Seminary in preparation for the priesthood. </p>
<p>To celebrate this apparently welcome event, a variety of people are invited to dinner: Tocky Keating, Denny’s tight-fisted mate and fellow migrant (“the gloomiest Irishman I ever met”); “Houses” O’Halloran, Mary’s unscrupulous, entrepreneurial Novocastrian father; Miss Siss, a religious heiress, from whom the family hope for a bequest; Father O’Gorman, a dissolute Irish priest starting to question his vocation; and Breda Mulcahy, a local barmaid, Mary’s best friend, whose sluttish reputation belies the fact that she is demonstrably the most generous and compassionate there. </p>
<p>Over the course of the night, a series of half-comic, half-tragic encounters leads to an escalating pattern of revelations and a storm of rage, disgust, recrimination and despair. Tocky and Mary attack one another with increasing viciousness. When it becomes clear Mary has feelings for Father O’Gorman, she is beaten first by her husband, then by Tocky. Miss Siss is revealed as a “great pharisee” and an oppressor of the poor. “Houses” is shown as sympathetic to the Fascist cause his country is desperately fighting, while O’Gorman, sliding into alcoholic stupor, cannot find the courage to speak out against co-opting a boy to a way of life whose values he seriously doubts. </p>
<p>To all this, Christy remains oblivious: a still centre of fragile innocence amidst the chaos of family destruction. His obliviousness has its equivalent in the adult realm. Hanging over the evening is the impending fall of Singapore – an event symbolizing the nadir of the war for the Allies and the moment of greatest vulnerability for Australia. The play ends, with Tocky and Denny insensible, and Breda cradling Christy in her arms, reciting the Sorrowful Mysteries. </p>
<h2>Breathtaking originality</h2>
<p>If scrupulous realism were all that A Happy and Holy Occasion offered, it would be triumph enough. However, it also contains a moment of breathtaking originality that, while unique to O’Donoghue’s play, is exemplary of the imaginative brilliance to be found in 1970s Australian drama as a whole. </p>
<p>Half way through Act II, the long-awaited 10 o’clock news announces Japanese troops are on the outskirts of Singapore. Then the radio fades and, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>CHRISTY rises and very formally and slowly, with biretta on head, walks to the right side of the darkened apron of the stage and takes up a position facing left. </p>
<p>Bells toll and Miss Siss stands opposite Christy. Together they name the dates and circumstances of each character’s death, who take their place in a line facing the audience: Tocky, dead from dysentery, in the New Guinea jungle; Breda, ‘carried out to sea with her lover, both of whom were swimming in the nude’; O’Gorman, ‘spiritually drowned’ by breaking his vow of chastity; Denny, ‘death by burning’, incinerated in a shower of molten chrome; Mary, ‘death by mental burning’, insane after Denny’s death; ‘Houses’, dead from a heart attack in a pub, ‘dying laughing without the benefit of the sacraments’; and finally Miss Siss, dead of old age at 99, leaving all her money to the church ‘for masses to be said for her soul. In perpetuity’. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>After each death is announced, the characters take up their rosary beads and pray. At the end of the sequence, they return to their former places, and the play continues as normal. </p>
<p>Here we see how a play can honour its form while breaking with the conditions that have hitherto constrained it, creating a sequence of action in an entirely different register. By doing so, it invites actors and audience to participate in a shared risk, raising the drama to a new level of intensity. </p>
<p>It’s a bravura piece of playwriting, a reminder of how flexible, ingenious and powerful stage drama can be. </p>
<p>Two final comments, closely related to each other, before leaving the 1970s. The first is that a list of plays and playwrights does not do justice to the other artists necessary to give drama proper stage life. Theatre is a collaborative medium, never more so than in this decade, when companies like the <a href="https://www.pramfactory.com/">Pram Factory</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_Theatre_Company">Nimrod</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=KCpEhrdarIMC&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142&dq=red+shed+theatre+adelaide&source=bl&ots=4vA5Ayb02k&sig=_EWOWQhwlgJJc1ZNsjYRs5j9Ffo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjk19W68YbbAhWCwrwKHUG7BzgQ6AEIXDAJ#v=onepage&q=red%20shed%20theatre%20adelaide&f=false">Troupe</a>, and <a href="http://lamama.com.au/">La Mama</a> provided environments where writers rubbed shoulders with actors, directors, designers, composers, and producers in sometimes tense, but more often productive intimacy. It is important, when celebrating the drama of our past, to remember the creative context in which it was realized. </p>
<h2>More revivals?</h2>
<p>A question I am often asked is why, if 1970s plays are so good, they aren’t revived more often. The answer is the same: that these plays were written for a particular creative context – indeed, often for particular artists – and without this context they are less accessible and less stage-able. </p>
<p>Australia is a country impatient of history. To suggest to a theatre company today that considerable effort needs to go into creating the right conditions for successfully reviving 1970s drama is to invite a sour look. </p>
<p>We’ll do it for Shakespeare, but not Steve Spears; for David Hare, but not Dorothy Hewett. This is slowly changing. Over the last 10 years, plays from the period have been successfully revived, at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre (Nimrod’s first home), for example. But there is still a long way to go.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95855/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The 1970s transformed Australian drama. It was a time of imaginative brilliance as the Empire wrote back.
Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/85698
2017-10-16T13:24:38Z
2017-10-16T13:24:38Z
Assassinating Katie Hopkins may be bad taste but theatre-goers may just love it
<p>Katie Hopkins, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/katie-hopkins-and-the-sun-when-the-unreadable-prints-the-unspeakable-40505">controversial British media commentator</a>, has become the subject of a new stage play guaranteed to inflame the public as much has her <a href="https://theconversation.com/katie-hopkins-proclaims-herself-the-jesus-of-the-outspoken-its-a-very-dangerous-message-78544">own extreme columns</a> do.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/oct/11/theatre-to-stage-musical-based-on-imaginary-death-of-katie-hopkins">Assassination of Katie Hopkins</a> musical is due to open in spring 2018 at Theatr Clywd in north Wales. Tucked away in the market town of Mold, Flintshire, one may not expect it to be the venue for such a topic, and yet Theatr Clwyd has <a href="http://www.dailypost.co.uk/whats-on/theatre-news/rhyl-murderer-ruth-ellis-story-12644097">long held a reputation</a> for excellent, thoughtful, and entertaining stage productions, often attracting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jul/08/toby-robertson">luminaries of British Theatre</a> to tread the boards there. </p>
<p>One can already hear the knives of public opinion being sharpened. The Twitterverse went into spontaneous combustion as those both for and against the controversial celebrity mouth piece etched the lines of battle into virtual sand. Of course, whether any of them will look up from their smartphones long enough to actually go see the musical in spring, is another matter. </p>
<p>I for one applaud writer Chris Bush, director James Grieve and artistic director Tamara Harvey for daring to provoke. This is part of theatre’s rich history – theatre is an art and art should provoke. In the late 1820s and early 1830s Daniel Auber’s opera <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/30/opera-on-the-barricades">La Muette de Portici</a> inspired not only the July Revolution in 1830s France, but also the establishment of an independent Belgian nation, from under the yoke of King William I’s Dutch kingdom. </p>
<p>Closer to home, on the streets of Dublin in 1907, there were riots after a performance of <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/1010/">The Playboy of the Western World</a> by John Millington Synge. The play’s plot centred around Christy Mahon who, on the run after murdering his father, is ironically turned into a local celebrity. The play was attacked at the time for a lack of moral decency – Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin and later president of Ireland, called it a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/16/theatre.samanthaellis">vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language</a>”. Yet The Playboy went on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/sep/23/playboy-western-world-old-vic">to be performed globally</a>, and is now studied by Irish school children as the master work of a major writer.</p>
<p>Moving forward to 1960s London, playwright Joe Orton, a working class, gay man had his breakout play, <a href="http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Plays3.html">Entertaining Mr Sloane</a>, which also used patricide as a theme. In it, Sloane murders Kemp, the elderly father of Kath and Ed, who are both sexually attracted to Sloane. The play of course was extremely controversial. One Telegraph reader complained “I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion”. The reader, one Edna Welthorpe, was actually an <a href="http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Life9.html">alter ego character invented by Orton</a>, a master of social and transmedia before such things existed. </p>
<p>Orton was a playwright with his finger on the pulse of British Society. He knew how to press buttons and get a reaction. Orton, who was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/from-the-archive-blog/2017/aug/09/joe-orton-death-archive-1967">brutally murdered</a> by his lover Kenneth Halliwell in 1967, has inspired many a writer since. It is hard to imagine that there would be a <a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/mark-ravenhill">Mark Ravenhill</a> without a Joe Orton. Ravenhill first came onto the scene with a play entitled <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-shopping-and-fucking-royal-court-london-1356460.html">Shopping and Fucking</a>, directed by Max Stafford-Clark in 1996, in which there were portrayals of male rape and perhaps the first use of the word “rimming” on the British stage. Outrage followed, but the play had a serious message about consumerism, and indeed the state of the nation. </p>
<p>Another controversial playwright at this time was Sarah Kane, whose play Blasted <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/young-playwright-blasted-for-brutalist-debut-work-1568794.html">was so controversial</a> it was debated on the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight. A middle-aged, bigoted, male journalist rapes an innocent young girl in a hotel room, a soldier then appears in the hotel room with a sniper rifle and we are transported into a different reality that is of war and inhumanity as jogtrot. Jack Tinker of the Daily Mail called it a “disgusting feast of filth”. Today it is considered as an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/jan/12/sarah-kane-blasted-was-dismissed-by-critics">incredibly important play</a> by a playwright who sadly left this world too soon. </p>
<p>I was also writing controversial plays in the 1990s: <a href="https://carolinefarrellwriter.com/2015/08/24/doing-it-with-passion-writers-in-ireland-series-len-collin/">Box</a> looked at two London runaways who find the diary of a British soldier who fell in love with a German soldier in the trenches of the World War I. It challenged male sexuality and, though it did attract some criticism, it was also named critics’ choice in Time Out and City Limits – a rare thing at the time.</p>
<p>Despite each of these plays causing a stir, the performances were well attended, and several have been revived in more recent years. While assassinating Katie Hopkins may seem like the perfect type of clickbait headline to encourage a new young audience to go to the theatre, the fact of the matter is that the stage has been home to this kind of content for centuries. Closed off from the world for a few hours, one can delve into the depths of the human psyche. It is one of the last places where a watcher is forced to form their own views of the performance before heading to the social media platforms beloved by the likes of Hopkins to praise or complain.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85698/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Len Collin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The stage is the perfect place to explore dark thoughts.
Len Collin, Senior Lecturer in Screenwriting and Media Production, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/76799
2017-05-03T05:38:53Z
2017-05-03T05:38:53Z
The great Australian plays: sex, poetry and The Chapel Perilous
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167631/original/file-20170503-4099-agoekw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Chapel Perilous follows the life of Sally Banner “a rebel in word and deed”.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/fishyone1/8657979960/in/photolist-ec5pNy-naFZMc-RzmMsq-8ASC8P-fz2Pbj-nXXRQL-i3miUc-T2MjjA-jRGc4F-vedzAc-gAmZhB-RBcfxJ-dRCtE5-4pApc-zqK5U-j2sQkt-fUfXdX-g1kmG6-5y9oZc-S1nmgH-RBceXL-3zmTpp-gQjAhM-fUoWep-ssu7-kP3E26-8AVGcA-SGeEv6-9SXBn4-g2un44-7LmuBk-anaTDB-2bKBuo-8LNZr7-8ASnKB-g1k43v-9dEUm7-foQ4vc-7WWrcX-aAd6GA-7BZuM4-g2tNZ5-8ZLFgh-87NKYX-p16LHe-eeYq3i-8ASDS8-aJwB78-7JNnzE-qC2vcZ">Flickr/Andrew Sutherland</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When she died in 2002, The Age hailed Dorothy Hewett as “<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/25/1030053009913.html">the grande dame of Australian literature</a>” and gave a thumbnail sketch of her remarkable life as poet, dramatist, novelist, Communist Party activist and serial lover. Calling her a free spirit doesn’t come close to capturing the turbulent, at times self-destructive energy that marked Hewitt’s relationships and her work.</p>
<p>In Wild Card (1990), an autobiography written at the prompting of another theatre maverick, Hal Porter, Hewett gave a taste of her feisty existence as a young woman working on the factory floor in the 1950s:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was sacked from the Alexandria Spinning Mills for being eight months pregnant, but before I left I managed two quixotic gestures. I stood up at the annual meeting of the Textile Workers’ Union and demanded equal pay for woman workers. There was a bit of furore, they moved a point of order, and that was the end of it. [And] I organized the Redfern Branch of the Communist Party to [copy] and distribute a bulletin called “Bobbin Up” outside the mill. The leading article began with Les Flood’s immortal words: “There’s a name for a man who lives off a woman”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is important to recall Hewett’s life when considering her work because no other Australian playwright has infused their plays with so much autobiographical matter, to the point where they become one, self-revelatory, expressive act.</p>
<h2>A very personal play</h2>
<p>Seeing or reading Hewett is a very personal encounter, a communicative exchange of great potency, intimacy and candour. Her passionate personality frequently got her into trouble with family, friends and colleagues. Such things pass without comment in other (usually male) writers. With Hewett, one feels, the world forgave neither her transgressions nor her virtues. She was held to higher account, often unreasonably so.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167668/original/file-20170503-4099-9exezk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167668/original/file-20170503-4099-9exezk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167668/original/file-20170503-4099-9exezk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167668/original/file-20170503-4099-9exezk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167668/original/file-20170503-4099-9exezk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167668/original/file-20170503-4099-9exezk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167668/original/file-20170503-4099-9exezk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167668/original/file-20170503-4099-9exezk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dorothy Hewett in 1965.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Western Australia archives.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hewitt was her own most withering critic. The creative pay-off was not only that she transmuted the tidal wave of a tumultuous life into art, but that she was searching and truthful in doing so. An absence of self-pity, self-justification and self-congratulation pushes her plays out of the confessional category, and turns them into brilliantly illuminated self-immolations.</p>
<p>The Chapel Perilous (1971), one of her earlier works, is an expressionist drama that follows the emotionally epic journey of Sally Banner “a rebel in word and deed” from young, uncompromising schoolgirl to older, still uncompromising thirty-something woman.</p>
<p>In no way is it naturalistic, though the narrative does have a chronological beginning, middle and end. The stage setting described at the start of the play hints at the progression of dream-like scenes to come:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Upstage against the cyclorama is the outline of a school chapel with a stained-glass window discovered later to contain a figure of Sally Banner. Three shallow steps lead to the chapel and … [i]n front … are three rostrums and an altar on a platform. Large masks of the Headmistress, the Canon and Sister Rose remain constant throughout the play, standing on the three rostrums and large enough to hide an actor behind each. Three loudspeakers are prominently placed. The three masked figures play the roles of judges of the action against the landscape of the profane chapel. Sometimes they play themselves, sometimes they step from behind the masks into the body of the play and become other characters.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Poetry on stage</h2>
<p>It is impossible to briefly summarise the plot of The Chapel Perilous, as its form is too disjunctive and unpredictable. But two things stand out. First, it is deeply, iridescently poetic. Songs, doggerel, hymns and dance numbers jostle with snatches of verse – some quotations, some Hewett’s own – to create an acoustic patchwork of heightened meaning.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167633/original/file-20170503-4102-1xa4r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167633/original/file-20170503-4102-1xa4r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167633/original/file-20170503-4102-1xa4r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167633/original/file-20170503-4102-1xa4r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167633/original/file-20170503-4102-1xa4r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167633/original/file-20170503-4102-1xa4r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167633/original/file-20170503-4102-1xa4r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167633/original/file-20170503-4102-1xa4r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Like her protagonist in The Chapel Perilous, Hewett spent her childhood in rural Western Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wheatbelt image from www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By approaching playwriting in this way, Hewett reconnects Australian drama with Australian poetry: with <a href="https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/mcauley-james">James McCauley</a>, <a href="https://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/special/mss/harris/">Max Harris</a>, <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/slessor-kenneth-adolf-11712">Kenneth Slessor</a> and above all <a href="https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/stewart-douglas">Douglas Stewart</a>, whose verse dramas Ned Kelly (1942) and Fire on the Snow (1944) gesture towards a marriage between the two art forms, where the spoken word achieves sacred power.</p>
<p>Here’s a sample of Hewett’s mix of alliterative deftness and vernacular force:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The voices of the AUTHORITY FIGURES come through the amplifier.</p>
<p>AMPLIFIER [HEADMISTRESS’s voice] Sally Banner was one of my girls who went on to university. Many of the old girls came back to see me. I waited but she didn’t come back. When France fell I cried before my class. Not one of them understood why.</p>
<p>[SISTER ROSA’s voice] Atheist, pacifist, communist, blasphemer, she whored her youth away and there was no peace in our time.</p>
<p>[CANON’s voice] I will give her a reference, because, as far as I know, she is a clean-living Christian girl.</p>
<p>… An ABC INTERVIEWER enters with a microphone.</p>
<p>INTERIVEWER: And everyone’s talking about Sally Banner’s grand slam: first, second and third in the Jindyworobak Poetry Competition. Mrs Banner, I believe Sally was wild – er, a live-wire in her university days?</p>
<p>MOTHER: Well, no more than most really. They were unsettling times. The Americans were here, lacing our daughters’ milk shakes with Spanish Fly. It turned their heads. We all worried about our daughters. What decent mother wouldn’t? [ASIDE] She was a real trollop. She’d lie down anywhere and do it like a dog. It was as if she wanted to punish us for something. Why, what had we done? We only loved and protected her. (Act 1)</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Symbolising the sexual revolution</h2>
<p>The second feature of The Chapel Perilous is the sexuality that flows through it from opening line to final moments like molten clinker. Nothing is directly shown and erotic talk is minimal. Yet despite this – or perhaps because of it – the pursuit, practice and passion of sex drenches the action of the play at every turn.</p>
<p>From Sally’s childhood in 1920s rural Western Australia, to her first boyfriends, swept away by World War II, to her days Sydneyside as a Communist Party organiser and straying wife, she is looking for sex, and the love that comes with the sex, and the sex that is love’s best expression and reward.</p>
<p>More than the many portrayals of male libido that can be found in other <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_New_Wave">New Wave plays</a>, Sally Banner symbolises the Sexual Revolution in its purest and most interesting form. For Sally, sex is rebellion, a quest for authentic human connection that is, alas, unmet by the creeps, shits, evaders, woman-haters and thugs she seems to fall in love with.</p>
<p>Men do not come out well from The Chapel Perilous. Women don’t come out much better either. Yet Sally outlives all the humiliations, betrayals and pratfalls, to emerge a girl of yearning heart, looking for love, hungry for life.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>SALLY: I passed my love on the street today, </p>
<p>He looked through my head and he looked away.</p>
<p>When I searched in the dust I could only find</p>
<p>A man with his lips and his eyes gone blind,</p>
<p>And all that we were, and all that we knew,</p>
<p>Has gone with the wry, dry dust that blew</p>
<p>O where has he gone? O where has he gone,</p>
<p>My love on whom the good sun shone? (Act II)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The fluidity, inventiveness and momentum of The Chapel Perilous is spectacular. There are five named parts and a chorus of unspecified size. Between them they enact dozens of characters and moments in Sally’s big river of a life. There is no rest, only change, and the end of the play is a temporary halt rather than a resolution. Sally still has so much more to give and to get.</p>
<p>Like <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/august-strindberg-21429601">August Strindberg</a>, a playwright she admired, Hewett treated her own life as an experiment. She was the opposite of a celebrity. She was a gifted poet who sought to express universal experience; or more precisely, to elevate her experience to a universal level, where it might burst forth in meter and image to touch other people, and in some way change them.</p>
<p>Bob Carr called her an authentic working class voice, one of the last Australian playwrights to do factory labour. Hewett fits no easy category. She was a feminist with few illusions about women, a one-time Communist with few illusions about men, and a lover with few illusions about love, either with men or women.</p>
<p>The Chapel Perilous, like Sally Banner herself, is a force of nature. That the play is not often revived is deeply regrettable given its richness and imaginative force. It cries out for the skills and resources of a modern director, someone who will interpret it with the right mixture of audacity and fidelity.</p>
<p>When that day comes Hewett will take her rightful place in the Australian repertoire as one of our most original and daring dramatic voices.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76799/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
No other Australian playwright has mined their own life as much as Dorothy Hewett. In this expressionist drama, she depicts a girl of yearning heart, looking for love and hungry for life.
Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/72956
2017-02-14T19:08:57Z
2017-02-14T19:08:57Z
The Great Australian Plays: The Front Room Boys and New Wave theatre
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156726/original/image-20170214-26003-kji9qg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The swinging sixties arrived in Australian theatre with a bang. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hwmobs/8571842844">Aussie~mobs/Flickr</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Fucken boong”. With these words Australian theatre entered the swinging sixties – eight years after the decade began. </p>
<p>The two profanities capture the spirit of rebellion that characterised a new generation of theatre artists. They are the last line of Alex Buzo’s play <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_and_Ahmed">Norm and Ahmed</a> (1968) and the actors who uttered them were <a href="http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=ltc">prosecuted for obscenity</a> when it was produced in Queensland and Victoria. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sV66Nln--NA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The full County Court turned up to assess Norm and Ahmed’s performance in Melbourne.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Only in retrospect does the police pursuit of stage drama look quaint. At the time, it was in deadly earnest, and in Australia the shadow of government censorship hung over international productions as varied as Jean-Claude van Italie’s America Hurrah! (1968), Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band (1969), and James Rado and Gerome Ragni’s musical Hair (1969).</p>
<p>The theatre of the forties and fifties was not without its confronting plays. Offensiveness was not invented in the sixties. What makes sixties drama noteworthy is that giving offence often seems to be its aim, as if offending the audience – the title of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offending_the_Audience">1966 play by Austrian writer Peter Handke</a> – is the chief purpose of theatre.</p>
<p>Alex Buzo, the author of Norm and Ahmed, went on to write a clutch of plays in similar style, including The Front Room Boys (1969). They are all cool, comic, and disturbing. They are also supremely self-possessed. Despite his youth – Buzo was only 24 when Norm and Ahmed premiered – and the lack of Australian theatre companies committed to Australian drama, these plays demonstrate an assurance of tone, a complexity of idea and a mastery of form that is truly breathtaking.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156727/original/image-20170214-25995-hsjf5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156727/original/image-20170214-25995-hsjf5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156727/original/image-20170214-25995-hsjf5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156727/original/image-20170214-25995-hsjf5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156727/original/image-20170214-25995-hsjf5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156727/original/image-20170214-25995-hsjf5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1046&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156727/original/image-20170214-25995-hsjf5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1046&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156727/original/image-20170214-25995-hsjf5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1046&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alex Buzo: his writing was cool, comic and disturbing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Emma Buzo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Where did it come from, this remarkable body of work? Where did the plays of Australian writers such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Hibberd">Jack Hibberd</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romeril">John Romeril</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ellis">Bob Ellis</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_De_Groen">Alma de Groen</a>, <a href="https://australianplays.org/playwright/CP-blasur">Ron Blair</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Hewett">Dorothy Hewett</a>, and <a href="http://www.timgooding.com.au/biography">Tim Gooding</a> come from? It’s as if they arrived by spaceship from another, more confident planet.</p>
<p>Gone are the over-worked literary allusions and rickety plot structures of earlier playwrights. In their place we find wit, precocity, and deftness of touch. The drama of this “new wave” of writers has a mercurial intelligence and an unselfconscious ease, as if plays don’t have to be arduously constructed but simply proffered forth, a native gift.</p>
<p>In 1971 the critic Katharine Brisbane and her scholar husband Philip Parsons began publishing this new Australian drama at the still-prolific <a href="http://www.currency.com.au/">Currency Press</a>. Its authors’ list grew rapidly in quantity and diversity, and today stands as a testament to, and resource for, this unique time.</p>
<p>There is more to theatre than written drama. But the plays of the 1960s and 1970s bear witness to the fact that not only did Australian theatre radically change during the period, but so did the country around it.</p>
<p>The Front Room Boys is set in a bog-standard corporate office in a non-specific Australian city, where a small group of put-upon middle management minions toil in meaningless servitude to grindingly minor administrative tasks. It’s both awful and awfully familiar. Here’s a taste of the dexterity and humour with which Buzo explores his theme – all of the male characters, by the way, have names ending in “o”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A day in January, Monday 9am. Lights up on THOMO at his desk. He is reading some reports. ROBBO enters.</p>
<p>ROBBO: G’day Thomo.</p>
<p>THOMO: G’day Robbo.</p>
<p>[ROBBO hangs up his coat, sits down and reads a report. GIBBO enters.]</p>
<p>GIBBO: G’day Thomo.</p>
<p>THOMO: G’day Gibbo.</p>
<p>[GIBBO hangs up his coat, sits down and reads a report. Presto enters.]</p>
<p>PRESTO: G’day Thomo.</p>
<p>THOMO: G’day Presto.</p>
<p>[PRESTO hangs up his coat, sits down and reads a report. JACKO enters.]</p>
<p>JACKO: G’day Thomo.</p>
<p>THOMO: G’day Jacko.</p>
<p>[JACKO hangs up his coat, sits down and reads a report. HENDO enters. He crosses the room and goes out by the back door.]</p>
<p>GIBBO: Hendo’s early.</p>
<p>JACKO: I don’t know why he bothers getting here on time. If I were one of the back room boys, you wouldn’t see me here before noon. I’d be down by the pool or out for a fang in the Jag. Or I’d be on the deck of a yacht with a bird in the raw.</p>
<p>GIBBO: Shows how much you know. Those back room boys work harder than any of us. They’re at it day and night, mate.</p>
<p>JACKO: Ar bulls. I reckon it’d be a pretty soft cop being a back room boy. Look at Hendo. He’s got it made. Look at us, we’re sweltering here on a stinking hot day while he can do whatever he likes. He could fly to Switzerland, go for a ski in the snow, sip a Campari at Chamonix, what a life! Look at that picture on the calendar there. That’s where the back room boys let their hair down.</p>
<p>ROBBO: Jeez, I wouldn’t mind being up that mountain today, either.</p>
<p>JACKO: We could sit out on the terrace and have Dubonnet by the Matterhorn.</p>
<p>ROBBO: A what?</p>
<p>THOMO: All right, you blokes, let’s get on with the work, eh?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Front Room Boys is comprised of twelve scenes spaced over a year – one scene per month. On the wall behind the desks where the characters work is a Swiss calendar, kindly provided by the senior management, “the back room boys”. While the front room swelters in unbearable summer heat, it displays images of cool mountain delight, and while it freezes in mid-winter, images of bucolic warmth.</p>
<p>As they pursue their <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Sisyphean">Sisyphean</a> labours, the men jostle, wheedle, dodge, and whinge. They are true-blue, dinky-di Aussies, “bloke[s] who do the right thing by a bloke they know is a bloke who’ll always do the right thing by a bloke”. On the surface they are egalitarian and easy-going. </p>
<p>Underneath, they are racist, sexist, shallow and cruel, preternaturally disposed to worship the hand that whips them. The more they are abused by the backroom boys, the more accustomed they become to being abused – and the more they abuse each other.</p>
<h2>A cognitive dissonance</h2>
<p>The Front Room Boys is unlike anything seen in Australian drama before. Its cyclical structure gives it a processional feel, almost like a religious drama. But its mocking irreverence runs directly counter to this. The result is a cognitive dissonance that is both punchy and fun – we feel we should know what’s going to happen next, given the archetypal characters and the ritualistic form, but the narrative is full of surprises.</p>
<p>A good example is Scene 7 – the mid-point of the play – where the characters act out a pantomime, The Sultan of Jodhpur, at the annual office revue. It’s a mad interpolation in an already mad play, but is written with such gusto, ingenuity and cheek that it goes off like a firecracker.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[GIBBO enters… wearing a bed sheet with colourful headpiece, and a beard. He has beads and ornaments strung around his neck and giant rings on every finger… A gong is heard and JACKO strides in L. full of confidence]</p>
<p>JACKO: Your esteemed excellency, I am your humble servant.</p>
<p>[Bows.]</p>
<p>GIBBO [regally, pursing his lips]: You may kiss my ring.</p>
<p>[JACKO kisses his ring.]</p>
<p>Arise, brave Prince Jacomo, and tell me, how have you fared? Have you performed your daring feats to win the hand of my daughter, the beauteous Princess Sunflower?</p>
<p>JACKO: I have, my liege, more or less.</p>
<p>GIBBO: Our noble ancient law, handed down by our fore-fathers, decrees that to win the hand of a princess, the suitor must perform three feats to prove his manhood. He must drink five pints of toddy juice, capture a Bengal tiger, and root three Moslem women, all of these feats being performed within one day. Have you done this brave Prince Jacomo?</p>
<p>JACKO: Uh, not exactly. You see, I drank five pints of toddy juice, captured a Moslem woman, and rooted three Bengal tigers.</p>
<p>GIBBO: Ah well, it’s the thought that counts. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It should be clear by now that New Wave drama was innovative not just in style and theme, but in its whole approach to the theatre experience. Yes, it is sometimes tasteless and offensive, but this is rarely the only thing it is. It has a charm born less of polish and craft than instinctive talent and a desire to be enjoyable. We laugh, even though we are appalled, and the two responses work together, so that the comedy doesn’t take us further away from the politics, but right into its heart. </p>
<p>In his introduction to The Front Room Boys, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Blundell">Graeme Blundell</a>, that ubiquitous New Wave apparatchik and the director prosecuted for performing Norm and Ahmed, wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The new dramatists are not aggressively chauvinistic. Their influences and models are drawn from a wide variety of sources. This is not new of course. What is different is that [they] seem to be closer than any before to that elusive combination of an Australian viewpoint with an eclectic theatrical approach.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/browse/">The AusStage database</a> lists few productions of The Front Room Boys after 1970, and this reflects the level of disconnection we have from our own cultural history, as well as the difficulty of reviving New Wave plays in an appropriate style and context. (How to recreate the spirit of liberation they sprang from?) </p>
<p>But perhaps the important thing to acknowledge is that New Wave playwrights booted Australian drama into a fresh and fruitful orbit and produced work that, if occasionally flawed, was also fresh, compelling and highly original. It is a significant theatrical legacy of which Australians can be rightly proud.</p>
<p><em>This article is part of an on-going series examining <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-great-australian-plays-33740">the great Australian plays</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72956/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The plays of Alex Buzo captured the spirit of rebellion of a new generation of theatre artists.
Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/72369
2017-02-03T03:44:06Z
2017-02-03T03:44:06Z
Joyous, comic and grim: the best new Indigenous playwrights
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155298/original/image-20170202-14451-k5wp59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Actors read a new Indigenous play at the Yellamundie Festival.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Jamie Williams courtesy of Sydney Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Yellamundie” is a Darug word for storyteller, and the name of a biennial play development festival for Indigenous Australian writers run in Sydney since 2013.</p>
<p>The Yellamundie Festival, an initiative of Moogahlin Performing Arts and this year part of the Sydney Festival, brings new, emerging and established Indigenous writers together with Indigenous actors, directors and dramaturgs (and the occasional eminent white dramaturg) to develop raw treatments, partial drafts and yarns into more substantial scripts.</p>
<p>Chosen from a national call, the submissions have to be in the early stages of writing and have not had workshopping or public readings previously. The six plays chosen in 2017 from a wide pool included work by new writers exploring the medium of theatre for the first time as well as new work from more experienced theatre practitioners. </p>
<p>The workshop process is over two weeks and culminates in a public reading of the script by a cast of professional Indigenous actors.</p>
<p>Directors and actors who were part of the workshop process read out the scripts before audiences of around 40 people in intimate performance spaces in Carriageworks. The dramaturgs sat in the audience. There was a fabulous supportive energy in the room. </p>
<p>One of the outstanding new playwrights revealed in readings was Henrietta Baird, an experienced dancer with a love of yarning. Her script is a one-woman show called The Weekend, in which the solo performer plays multiple women. It was performed by Angelina Penrith, with Eve Grace Mullaley as dramaturg and Liza-Mare Syron as director. </p>
<p>A beautifully told and sharply comic narrative, it tells of a woman dancer who returns to her career after having children. While on tour, she gets a frantic phone call from one of her sons saying their father went out four days ago, has not returned and they have no food. The play humorously depicts her return home and search for her husband as she discovers layers of his betrayal of her trust.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155301/original/image-20170202-14462-1routj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155301/original/image-20170202-14462-1routj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155301/original/image-20170202-14462-1routj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155301/original/image-20170202-14462-1routj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155301/original/image-20170202-14462-1routj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155301/original/image-20170202-14462-1routj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155301/original/image-20170202-14462-1routj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155301/original/image-20170202-14462-1routj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Most of the scripts read at the festival told personal stories.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Jamie Williams courtesy of Sydney Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The search takes place in Redfern, where she encounters other Aboriginal women and is confronted by her husband’s drug and prostitute-fuelled hidden life. Serious consequences are always on the verge of happening, such as when she naively carries another woman’s drug stash while they evade the police, but she escapes unscathed and a little wiser about herself. For Baird, the workshopping process was a way to move from verbatim yarning to playwriting.</p>
<p>Another joyous script presented was Bollywood Dreaming by Andrea Fernandez with Kyle Morrison as director and Liza-Mare Syron as dramaturg. As the title suggests, this story – about an Aboriginal man with Indian heritage who weds an Indian woman – is full of music and dance as well as charming humour. Fernandez handles the dialogue and the plot about the family banana farm and its economic challenges with a light touch. The cast, including Colin Kinchella, John Blair and Jorja Gillis, revelled in delivering a truly Bollywood-style show.</p>
<p>The other two scripts written by women, Coconut Woman by Maryanne Sam and A Little Piece of Ash by Megan Wilding, deal with different types of loss and grief. Sam’s script engages with the challenges of people who are part of the Torres Strait Islander diaspora going home and meeting strangers who are their family. </p>
<p>With the assistance of Andrea James as dramaturg, Kyle Morrison as director, and a fine sense of storytelling, Sam brings together people from very different backgrounds, revealing the tensions and challenges of finding mutual respect. Wilding, in a warm, sometimes humorous and sometimes poignant script, follows the journey of a young woman trying to deal with her mother’s death. Louise Corpus read the part of the dead mother with cheeky irony and gentle compassion.</p>
<p>The remaining two plays were Forty Nine Days a Week by Ken Canning and Some Secrets Should be Kept Secret by Glenn Shea. Canning’s piece is a grim text dealing with violence and racism in prisons and the brutality experienced by many Indigenous inmates. Nearly 30 years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, the need for prison reform is even more critical as the numbers of the dead increase with every passing year. Canning’s text is disturbingly topical. </p>
<p>Glenn Shea’s play is in the style of Australian gothic, with a strong sense of Aboriginal epistemologies. It is part of a set of four plays, each in a different style, that track points in the life of an Aboriginal man.</p>
<p>As well as the six readings of new Aboriginal work, the event included two international First Nation plays, Maria Gets a New Life by Cliff Cardinale from Turtle Island in Canada and Bless the Child by Hone Kouka from Aotearoa/New Zealand. There were also forums, humorous debates and the opportunity for Indigenous practitioners to network.</p>
<p>Most of the scripts read at the festival tell personal stories. Through the development process they move beyond the individual, or as Baird says, beyond a verbatim yarn, to another level of writing that uses art to reveal layers and resonances beyond the personal. </p>
<p>I look forward to seeing the next stage for these works. The playwrights will now attempt to find further development through theatre companies. I hope they will. </p>
<p>These are all Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander stories and in many ways specific to that experience, but they are not about issues that can be relegated under the heading of Aboriginal problems. Stories dealing with grief, violence, poverty or struggling to deal with family conflicts and tragedies have something important to say to everyone.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72369/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maryrose Casey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A development festival for Indigenous Australian playwrights showcased a range of stories: from the sharply comic tale of a woman hunting for her wayward husband to a powerful exploration of prison violence.
Maryrose Casey, Associate professor, Monash University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68434
2016-11-17T18:53:34Z
2016-11-17T18:53:34Z
Friday essay: the arts and our still-born national identity
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145935/original/image-20161115-13980-mecszn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"> Sydney Opera House during this year's Vivid Festival: now, more than ever, we need artists to tell us the truth.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tiborbkovacs/27560407680/">Tibor Kovacs/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The debate about culture in Australia typically follows a familiar pattern: a commentator laments declining cultural standards and narrowing opportunities and looks for someone to blame. The usual suspects scatter, leaving the artists to respond by pointing to inadequate funding and whining about their generally unappreciated status in contemporary society.</p>
<p>On a slow news day, this gives shock jocks the opportunity to whip up a frenzy about luvvie parasites expecting hard working Australians to support their incomprehensible and traitorous gibberish before the Minister says something about the need for Australian stories and everyone slumps back into their dark and resentful corners to binge watch Game of Thrones. Or more recently, with the politico not even bothering to do that because everyone knows all anybody cares about is the State of Origin anyhow.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the arts are cut, museums mothball whole galleries in the name of a non-existent efficiency dividend and artists flee overseas, joining the planeloads of scientists, technologists and innovators of all sorts being driven from the land by a Government seemingly indifferent to anything but digging holes in remote places and appeasing members of parliament who think the world is flat. Or should be.</p>
<p>Contrary to the Prime Minister’s favourite description of Australia as an <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-07/pm-malcolm-turnbull-unveils-$1-billion-innovation-program/7006952">innovative nation</a> bursting with bright ideas, the picture of the future currently emerging from the gloom of the Cabinet Room looks remarkably like one of those giant driverless trucks terrorising the outback of Western Australia to satisfy the insatiable Chinese appetite for Australian iron ore. Built overseas, needless to say, because Australians are incapable of producing anything more complex than a rock.</p>
<p>But is it true? Is our culture in decline? The facts seem irrefutable: a cut of $70 million – nearly a third of the Australia Council’s budget – imposed in 2015, and coming on the back of years of white-anting and neglect provoking the wholesale collapse of theatre companies and dance troupes across the country on the back of the continuing cuts of more than $50 million and downgrading of the film industry, despite it being able to demonstrate <a href="http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/newsroom/news/2016/mr-161115-screen-currency">adding $3 billion to the GDP</a>; as well as the gutting of visual arts organisations producing the loss of hundreds of jobs with an inevitable decline in the audience. </p>
<p>Yes, it’s had an impact, with fewer new Australian plays being produced, a smaller proportion of its films being seen and artists’ incomes collapsing to the point of unsustainability.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145940/original/image-20161115-13992-1lfw1q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145940/original/image-20161115-13992-1lfw1q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145940/original/image-20161115-13992-1lfw1q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145940/original/image-20161115-13992-1lfw1q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145940/original/image-20161115-13992-1lfw1q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145940/original/image-20161115-13992-1lfw1q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145940/original/image-20161115-13992-1lfw1q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145940/original/image-20161115-13992-1lfw1q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Visual arts organisations have been gutted.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/franz-josef/24549664310/">Franz Venhaus/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So why isn’t such a disaster more obvious? Annual Federal Government funding of the arts as administered by the Australia Council and Screen Australia amounts to less than $300 million (just over a half a kilometre of Sydney’s <a href="http://investment.infrastructure.gov.au/projects/ProjectDetails.aspx?Project_id=048726-12NSW-NP">West Connex motorway</a>). These are the arts as normally understood: orchestras, theatres, films, opera, dance, visual arts and literature. </p>
<p>By comparison, the Government spend on promoting its own programs in <a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2016/04/02/the-taxpayers-billions-spent-government-advertising/14595156003073">2015 topped $100 million</a>, including <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/taxpayers-charged-6-million-for-immigration-department-telemovie-20160325-gnqyr4.html">$6 million</a> for a feature film made by a self-confessed “propaganda merchant” aimed at dissuading refugees from becoming boat people. That is, while the Government is cutting back on the work of independent artists, it pursues its own political agenda through marketing that makes the Federal Government the third largest single advertiser in Australia, after Coles and Woolworths.</p>
<h2>Jingles and Anzacs</h2>
<p>Australia as a whole spent nearly $10 billion on advertising in 2015 employing more than half a million “creatives” – ten times the number of professional artists - to produce the images, music, performances and drama used to sell things to Australian consumers. So is it any wonder the comparatively paltry sums spent on making movies, putting plays on and getting books published is hardly even noticed when its gone? Because this is the way most Australians receive their art. </p>
<p>Not through theatres, concert halls and galleries, but on billboards, television commercials and radio jingles telling us how good the Government is and selling stuff. In the words of <a href="http://www.cci.edu.au/node/1457">academic Peter Higgs</a>, advertising’s products “touch the lives of almost every single Australian every day of the year. They are all around us – in our media, banking, health industries, in our work and recreation” and for many people it is the closest thing to art they ever get.</p>
<p>But that is not the end of the story. Any anthropologist will tell you the culture of a country consists of the values, institutions and practices that imbue its people with a sense of identity and difference.</p>
<p>From this perspective, the Army is an important cultural institution, justifying Anzac celebrations costing almost twice as much as the arts budget, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2015/nov/11/lavish-spending-first-world-war-commemorations-cloak-distasteful-reality">more than half a billion dollars</a>, and aimed at promoting values that in the hands of perhaps less constrained artists might have received a more thorough examination. Which, of course, was not the point.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145964/original/image-20161115-30744-2s6tl5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145964/original/image-20161115-30744-2s6tl5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145964/original/image-20161115-30744-2s6tl5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145964/original/image-20161115-30744-2s6tl5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145964/original/image-20161115-30744-2s6tl5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145964/original/image-20161115-30744-2s6tl5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145964/original/image-20161115-30744-2s6tl5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145964/original/image-20161115-30744-2s6tl5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anzac celebrations cost almost twice as much as the arts budget.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/72562013@N06/14007223725/">Chris Phutully/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The armed forces, the Churches, schools and universities, the banks, business organisations, the parties and media – from Clive Palmer to Rupert Murdoch - all the many different institutions all promoting their particular concerns and what it is to be a “good Australian”, or even “Australian” and all employing “creatives” to achieve that very specific and frequently dubious goal.</p>
<p>But of course, all that is obvious. Australia is a capitalist country whose capitalist values pervade even our ordinary language. Time is “money” that can be well or badly “spent” - “wasted”, “frittered away”, “gainfully employed.” And just as the language reflects the values of capitalism, so too the arts are expected to conform to its standards. </p>
<p>Art must “pay its way”, “prove its worth” by “putting bums on seats.” Art only has value insofar as it is a product that can be bought and sold. Artistic notions of the sacred, the strange and mysterious aspects of existence are irrelevant and useless to people whose only metric is dollars and cents. But in terms of dollars and cents, most of human life, from the birth of your first child to the meal you share with your family to the death of your father is absolutely worthless. </p>
<p>The only love that economics recognises is the sort you can buy in a brothel. But human life is not measured in dollars and cents except by slave-drivers and it is perhaps not coincidental that the rise of the neo-liberalism that now holds the world in its thrall has seen the return of slavery, even here in Australia.</p>
<p>Yes, there are <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/this-is-happening-in-australia-sydney-victim-of-slavery-speaks-out-20160407-go1bt7.html">slaves in Australia</a>. As well as hundreds of thousands of <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/10/14/asian-backpackers-especially-vulnerable-exploitation-fair-work-report">exploited workers on 417 temporary visas</a> being underpaid, sexually abused and threatened with deportation if they speak up. But you’d never guess that from Tourism Australia’s glossy promotions. In fact, you’d never guess that from anything the Government says at all.</p>
<p>Is it the role of art to expose such practices? Certainly, some of the greatest art historically has done exactly that, and the terrible injustices of our society, from the rape of children in detention on Manus Island to the murder of aboriginal people in police custody cry out for artistic expression, if only to give such ghastly crimes a place in our national consciousness and help us see ourselves for what we are in the face of the constant barrage of jolly and uplifting images we’re flattered with by people trying to sell us junk.</p>
<h2>Reflecting a society and its values</h2>
<p>But no, art is not required to be the conscience of a society, it’s just something any self respecting society might ask of its artists, along with all the other things we want our artists to do. Reflect our society and values, and in this reflecting, giving us the chance to reflect on ourselves and our society as well. And indeed, that was the function of drama in Ancient Greece, the rise of which coincided with the golden age of Greek democracy. </p>
<p>Theatre there was not a diversion or entertainment – it was not the bread and circuses it later became in the decaying Roman Empire - but on the contrary, was an opportunity for citizens to reflect on notable moral and political issues of the day and whose attendance was regarded as a crucial duty of citizenship, the neglect of which was punishable by its loss.</p>
<p>Theatre in particular, and art in general, were crucial to the political and social life of Athens at its height, when actors and playwrights were paid by the state to write and perform in dramas we still perform today, and painters and sculptors achieved heights not reached again for another 2000 years. And whose work was corrupted and finally destroyed by the same forces that destroyed its democracy, something which should be a warning to anyone who values their freedom.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146140/original/image-20161115-31148-1s73aqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146140/original/image-20161115-31148-1s73aqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146140/original/image-20161115-31148-1s73aqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146140/original/image-20161115-31148-1s73aqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146140/original/image-20161115-31148-1s73aqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146140/original/image-20161115-31148-1s73aqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146140/original/image-20161115-31148-1s73aqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146140/original/image-20161115-31148-1s73aqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Euripides: an influential tragedian.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1307109">Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But Athenian democracy seems a long way from our own pale shadow, and contemporary writers and artists would be bold to compare themselves to the Greeks. No, contemporary practice as encouraged by the various Ministers of the Arts we have seen over the years is closer to the bread and circuses of the later Romans - something to keep the people diverted, preferably spectacle - and this is perhaps appropriate, for in truth the Australia of my mothers and fathers is being eclipsed by something else, something stranger, nastier and altogether uglier. </p>
<p>For when my parents’ generation went to war, it was in the name of freedom and democracy and in the hope that their victory would be a victory over war itself, not merely the prequel to another war; but war in the hands of today’s politicians has become a way of life, something hardly even debated, but undertaken after a phone conversation with a great and powerful friend. </p>
<p>We are not a country anymore, we are a dispatch box receiving orders from overseas. And what does a dispatch box need art for? Or science? Or education? Or anything, really, other than a willingness to serve.</p>
<h2>Nationalism still-born</h2>
<p>If there is a crisis in culture, <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2016/october/1475244000/alison-croggon/culture-crisis">as Alison Croggon has recently asserted</a>, it is part of a much broader crisis, the crisis of our own nationalism, indeed the crisis of our national identity. </p>
<p>The wave of nationalism rising in the struggle against conscription and Australia’s involvement in the American war against Vietnam that brought the Whitlam Government to power in 1972 also brought Williamson, Romeril, Hewett, Moorhouse and all those other writers, performers and artists thrilled by the prospect of creating a genuinely Australian culture and making our own way in the world, and that collectively came to be seen as the new wave of Australian writing and culture. </p>
<p>It was in the optimism of this period that both the Australia Council and the Australian Film Commission were conceived and forged, but that optimism is now gone, long since swallowed by the realism of politicians who, unlike their New Zealand counterparts, have no faith in our ability to make it on our own and have strapped us as tightly as they possibly can to a country that seems firmly set on ensuring its own destruction. </p>
<p>And so, still-born, our nationalism has to make do with pallid myths of self sacrifice and chest-thumping assertions of our sporting prowess. So why would Australia need any art other than the art of self-promotion? And why would any Government want to pay for it?</p>
<p>But artists still come, because we share the same humanity that inspired the Greeks. Croggon is right: our culture is in crisis. It is a crisis cutting deep and hard across our whole nation, forcing us to confront some of the most basic questions we as a people could ask. </p>
<p>And it doesn’t stop with “how can we continue to sustain a critical community when nobody cares anymore?” – a question akin in my mind to sitting in the state room of the Titanic questioning the quality of the duck à l'orange – but begins with the question, Does Australia even exist anymore? and won’t stop till we get some answers to extract ourselves from the terrible night into which we’ve been plunged.</p>
<p>Our leaders have failed us, appallingly, grotesquely – across the whole gamut of concerns charging down on us we are met again and again by people not up to the challenge telling us there’s nothing wrong and we should go back to sleep. </p>
<p>But people going back to sleep now do so at their own and their children’s peril. For now is not the time to go back to sleep, but to wake and sit bolt upright, and the only people we can trust to wake us are the artists who have no vested interest in telling us anything but the truth.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68434/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Sewell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
There was once a sense of excitement about creating a genuinely Australian culture and making our own way in the world. What’s happened to that optimism?
Stephen Sewell, Head of Writing for Performance, National Institute of Dramatic Art
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68229
2016-11-09T19:06:14Z
2016-11-09T19:06:14Z
Ignore the doubters: here’s why Christopher Marlowe co-wrote Shakespeare’s Henry VI
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145111/original/image-20161108-16702-a4r84z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An artwork by James C. Christensen, which represents Shakespeare with characters from all of his plays.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tracyleephoto/3186046746/">Tracy Lee/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A new edition of Shakespeare’s works has identified Christopher Marlowe <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/23/christopher-marlowe-credited-as-one-of-shakespeares-co-writers">as a co-author</a>. The editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare believe that Marlowe collaborated in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of Henry VI. The conclusion was reached on the advice of an “Attribution Board” of three specialists in the field of literary authorship.</p>
<p>I was one of the members of this board. I first used computers in the late 1980s for attribution and have worked in this area ever since. Still, as I have discovered, a new Shakespeare attribution (or indeed a de-attribution – when a work by a noted author turns out to be written by someone else) – meets an interesting range of responses.</p>
<h2>The sceptics</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145112/original/image-20161108-20183-wtocyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145112/original/image-20161108-20183-wtocyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145112/original/image-20161108-20183-wtocyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145112/original/image-20161108-20183-wtocyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145112/original/image-20161108-20183-wtocyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145112/original/image-20161108-20183-wtocyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145112/original/image-20161108-20183-wtocyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145112/original/image-20161108-20183-wtocyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of a supposedly 21-year-old Christopher Marlowe in 1585.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marlowe-Portrait-1585.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>First, there are those who think that attribution – the process of finding an author for anonymous or disputed works – is itself misguided, because it doesn’t matter who wrote a play or an act or a scene. The work is interesting, or not, regardless of author. </p>
<p>Then there is the view that authors aren’t the most important creators of literary works. All authors borrow from a common stock of language, the genre of writing is all-important, and everyone in a given era or group shares so much in attitudes and expressions. In the case of Shakespeare, there is the added point that authors don’t seem to have mattered much then – plays were often printed with no author mentioned, or just mysterious initials.</p>
<p>Others think attribution, though important, is impossible. There is so much mutual influence, imitation, and even plagiarism that we can’t distinguish one author’s voice among all the noise of others.</p>
<p>A second often cited obstacle to reliable attribution is the fact that authors change their styles over their careers. There is early Shakespeare and late Shakespeare.</p>
<p>Plus the nature of drama is that the author doesn’t speak and creates all sorts of different voices, inevitably disguising his or her own style. Added to this are the problems of transmission. What happened between the author’s first hand-written version and the frail printed book that happens to have survived from the 1590s?</p>
<p>Last in this group of attribution sceptics are those who think “Shakespeare” is a fraud anyway – the plays were really written by a committee, or the Earl of Oxford, or Sir Henry Neville, or indeed Marlowe. </p>
<p>A second group is those who think that authorship attribution is important, and possible, but this particular one is wrong. There is a better candidate, they say, or the case is not properly conducted, so we must remain in doubt.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145113/original/image-20161109-16712-ql44hv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145113/original/image-20161109-16712-ql44hv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145113/original/image-20161109-16712-ql44hv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145113/original/image-20161109-16712-ql44hv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145113/original/image-20161109-16712-ql44hv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145113/original/image-20161109-16712-ql44hv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145113/original/image-20161109-16712-ql44hv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145113/original/image-20161109-16712-ql44hv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A modern reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, approximately 230m from the original site.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcusmeissner/9842586713/">Marcus Meissner</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Two new plays credited to the Bard</h2>
<p>Strange as it may seem after that litany of objections, Shakespeare attribution powers ahead and is now, with the new Oxford edition, changing how Shakespeare is read. </p>
<p>The edition includes 40 plays. Two new ones originally published anonymously, <a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/arden-faversham">Arden of Faversham</a> and<a href="http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/edwardIII.html"> Edward III</a>, have been added to the usual tally of 38. New research in the Authorship Companion, which is to be published alongside the edition, strengthens the case that Shakespeare wrote parts of these two plays. </p>
<p>Of these 40, 12 are listed as collaborations between Shakespeare and other writers. The edition also includes two sets of scenes Shakespeare added to existing plays, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Tragedy">The Spanish Tragedy</a> and <a href="https://www.playshakespeare.com/sir-thomas-more">Sir Thomas More</a>.</p>
<p>My view is that it does matter who wrote what. If we now know more about Shakespeare’s early collaborations, for instance, we can stop regarding unexpected styles in the plays as “apprentice work” and see them as simply a mixture of another writer.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145110/original/image-20161108-16721-2roc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145110/original/image-20161108-16721-2roc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145110/original/image-20161108-16721-2roc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145110/original/image-20161108-16721-2roc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145110/original/image-20161108-16721-2roc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145110/original/image-20161108-16721-2roc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145110/original/image-20161108-16721-2roc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145110/original/image-20161108-16721-2roc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first page from Henry VI, Part 1.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First-page-first-folio-1henry6.jpg">Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When we thought the poem A Funerall Elegie was Shakespeare’s, it was not only of intense interest in itself, but changed what “Shakespeare” is. Now that we know it is by Shakespeare’s fellow playwright <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3070371?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">John Ford</a>, there will be fewer people reading it, inevitably, and “Shakespeare” changes again. </p>
<p>On the question of internal variation cutting across the authorial voice, there are ways of testing this as a factor. We can set up an experiment to see whether with a given classifying system – a set of data, variables and procedures – we can tell Shakespeare’s writing from others despite the obstacles put in the way by the nature of drama, the influence of genres, and authors changing styles over their career. This testing generally shows that while the other factors do matter, they don’t drown out the voice of the author.</p>
<p>This self-testing aspect is the most reassuring part of attributing (say) parts of the three Henry VI plays to <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/christopher-marlowe-9399572">Marlowe</a>, the author of Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus and Edward II, who died at just 29. Using the same method, we can see whether when we treat parts of known Shakespeare and known Marlowe as anonymous we get a reliable attribution.</p>
<h2>How were the Henry VI plays written?</h2>
<p>There is a long tradition of authorship work on Shakespeare, going back to the 18th century, and many people around the world, in universities and outside them, involved. What has happened with the Henry VI plays is that older ideas that Shakespeare was influenced by Marlowe and closely imitated him gave way to suggestions that Marlowe wrote parts of the plays.</p>
<p>Probably the two playwrights were commissioned by a theatre company to write designated separate sections within a plot that was given them. In the first two parts, for instance, Marlowe’s work seems to have focused on the characters Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) and the rebel Jack Cade.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145109/original/image-20161108-16727-uh9d2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145109/original/image-20161108-16727-uh9d2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145109/original/image-20161108-16727-uh9d2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145109/original/image-20161108-16727-uh9d2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145109/original/image-20161108-16727-uh9d2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145109/original/image-20161108-16727-uh9d2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145109/original/image-20161108-16727-uh9d2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145109/original/image-20161108-16727-uh9d2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of King Henry VI.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Portrait Gallery/Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>An independent scholar, Tom Merriam, first argued this on the basis of Marlowe-like phrases in the first part of the play. My own work in a 2009 book supported this and added sections of the second part. Newer work on very rare phrases by John V Nance and Gary Taylor, and tests using networks of words by Gabriel Egan and others, have confirmed it. John Burrows, the doyen of computational stylistics, and I have a chapter in the Authorship Companion adding sections of Henry VI, Part 3, to the tally of Marlowe contributions. </p>
<p>Thus there is now a body of work published and forthcoming from the New Oxford Shakespeare team, which we believe is state of the art and as rigorous as we can make it. Nevertheless not everyone will be persuaded, and that is their right. </p>
<h2>But what about Thomas Kyd?</h2>
<p>For instance, <a href="https://theconversation.com/those-who-think-marlowe-co-wrote-plays-with-shakespeare-may-kyd-themselves-67622">a recent article</a> by Darren Freebury-Jones argues that it was Marlowe’s fellow dramatist Kyd who collaborated with Shakespeare on the first part of Henry VI, and Shakespeare alone who wrote the other two.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145114/original/image-20161109-16724-1tgxhqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145114/original/image-20161109-16724-1tgxhqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145114/original/image-20161109-16724-1tgxhqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145114/original/image-20161109-16724-1tgxhqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145114/original/image-20161109-16724-1tgxhqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145114/original/image-20161109-16724-1tgxhqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145114/original/image-20161109-16724-1tgxhqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145114/original/image-20161109-16724-1tgxhqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of William Shakespeare, believed to be painted by John Taylor.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare#/media/File:Shakespeare.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In specific criticisms of the Marlowe attribution work, Freebury-Jones wonders if individual words taken out of context are reliable for attribution, whether shared phrases need to be vetted to see if they are really evidence of a single mind at work, and whether the numbers of words and phrases can ever distinguish between other writers. </p>
<p>My answer would be that all these questions can be tested, and indeed have been, and that while there will never be complete certainty, we can show that there is a high degree of reliability. And of course, these doubts about reliability also apply to the work Freebury-Jones cites in favour of his alternative attributions. </p>
<p>Ultimately we have to return to the detailed work presented in published articles and books. By my count, Freebury-Jones mentions three experts other than himself who support his views on the authorship of the Henry VI plays. None of them has published their work on this topic in an article or a book as far as I am aware. </p>
<p>It’s a risk going out there with a Shakespeare attribution, but we do think that it matters who wrote what, that it’s possible to be pretty sure in some cases, and that we have done our due diligence in what we are proposing in the edition.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68229/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hugh Craig receives funding from the Australian Research Council which has supported the work mentioned in the article.</span></em></p>
Attributing a Shakespeare work to another writer attracts plenty of critics. But an attribution specialist says his team’s decision to name Christopher Marlowe as a co-author is based on state of the art research.
Hugh Craig, Professor of English, University of Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/63535
2016-08-05T01:09:36Z
2016-08-05T01:09:36Z
Raising chisel to stone, and making art
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133188/original/image-20160805-466-1cmj3zt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Ormsby/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The first Australian National Playwrights Centre (ANPC) was founded in 1973 – the age of bongs, thongs and social wrongs. Australian drama was by then well into its Biggest Renaissance Ever. The Pram Factory and Nimrod Theatre had been going for three years, La Mama for five. Whitlam had doubled the arts budget and “Nugget” Coombs, the first Chair of the Australia Council, was managing the ballooning expectations this gave rise to.</p>
<p>The year before, David Williamson’s The Removalists won the UK’s George Devine playwriting award. Three years before, Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed was in court in Victoria and Queensland <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1716724.htm">on obscenity charges</a>.</p>
<p>The drama of the period resembles the fashion of the period: confronting, emphatic, following norms of its own devising. It not only reflected the 1970s, it was a visceral expression of it, like cloche hats and pant suits. Fast, funny, rude and crafty, Australian playwriting helped drag Australia by the ears into the second half of the twentieth century.</p>
<p>Maybe it wasn’t quite that simple. Nevertheless, the ANPC and its successor, Playwriting Australia (PWA), founded in 2007, are driven by the memory of this golden era. It was a time when playwrights seemed to really matter.</p>
<p>For those who don’t know the theatre business well, PWA is a nationally-focused arts organisation dedicated to the development of Australian stage drama. “Development” is an anodyne word for a crucial part of the playmaking process that is invisible to the outside eye.</p>
<p>The achievements of the ANPC are many. Michael Gow’s The Kid (1983) was first assisted there, as were Richard Barrett’s The Heartbreak Kid (1985), Alma de Groen’s The Rivers of China (1986), Gordon Graham’s The Boys (1990), Dallas Winmar’s Aliwa (1999), Stevie Rogers’ Ray’s Tempest (2004), Patricia Cornelius’ The Berry Man (2009), and Phil Kavanagh’s Deluge (2015). But these outcomes get lost in what comes later: the kudos of stage production and the glitz of opening night. It’s a thankless job. When PWA is doing well, no one talks about it much.</p>
<p>Each year, PWA run a National Play Festival in a different city. In a country that remains a collation of individual states fighting over everything from road costs to education curricula, PWA’s national embrace is key to its impact. It is hard to think of Australian theatre artists gathering together on any similar occasion except awards nights.</p>
<p>The play festivals follow a similar format – a public showcase of four to six new Australian plays in rehearsed readings with a series of industry-only discussions. They run for a fortnight, and include workshops, rehearsals and four days of public performances. Showcased plays are curated from ones that Playwriting Australia has developed through its script workshop program.</p>
<p>With 102 artists involved, <a href="http://www.pwa.org.au/npf16-homepage/">this year’s Play Festival</a>, held in Melbourne last week was one of the largest. It was also gender balanced and culturally diverse. Seven of the 13 writers were non-Anglo, and 15 of the 25-strong acting company were Indigenous or from culturally diverse backgrounds.</p>
<p>The social representativeness of PWA’s activities is self-conscious, but a useful reply to the winner’s mentality that has gripped Australia like a fever. We’re supposed to be a multicultural nation. PWA actively reflects this aspiration.</p>
<p>Traditionally, the Play Festival opens with a keynote address by a theatre elder. In previous years Joanna Murray-Smith and Andrew Bovell have delivered what, in effect, have been State of the (playwriting) Nation orations. This time, it was <a href="http://www.pwa.org.au/michael-gows-keynote-address/">Michael Gow</a>.
.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133189/original/image-20160805-478-z8h4sp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133189/original/image-20160805-478-z8h4sp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133189/original/image-20160805-478-z8h4sp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133189/original/image-20160805-478-z8h4sp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133189/original/image-20160805-478-z8h4sp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133189/original/image-20160805-478-z8h4sp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133189/original/image-20160805-478-z8h4sp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133189/original/image-20160805-478-z8h4sp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Williamson with his wife Kristin in 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lisa French/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, there was a buy-one-get-one-free deal in a speech by David Williamson at a dinner for seventy playwrights hosted by the co-founder of Playbox (now the Malthouse) Theatre, Carrillo Gantner and his wife, Ziyan Gantner.</p>
<p>Characteristically, the ex-thermodynamics lecturer didn’t pull his punches, calling Australian playwriting <a href="https://dailyreview.com.au/david-williamsons-advice-write-like-tv-writer/46547/">“an endangered species”</a> in comparison to television drama and independent film. In the guts of his philippic, however, was a lucid articulation of the role of the playwright:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The great ability of our sharpest playwrights is that they have an extraordinary ear for the social and political realities of the moment, and for the direction of the trends into the future. At their best they can articulate, before the rest of us, what is going wrong or right with our society and why. It’s a hugely important source of information about ourselves and if we kill it off… then we are killing off possibly the most exciting and penetrating truths about ourselves. Truths that we sorely need.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At a guess, I would say that few people would disagree with this position. As the world goes to hell in a handbasket, the role of stage drama in raising to consciousness the social and emotional verities of our times is inarguably central.</p>
<p>What is less clear is how to do it. Writing a play is not like sewing a pair of trousers. The theme of this year’s Play Festival was “craft”, which is a term with two sides to it. On the one hand, it suggests competence, skill, stuff that is reliably made. On the other, it stands in opposition to “art” as comparatively quotidian and uninspired.</p>
<p>Somewhere in the tension between these two words lies the work of the playwright. With the short block of unfurnished time that modern audiences allow, they must fill the unforgiving minutes with drama that is watchable, meaningful, intelligible and fun.</p>
<p>But again, how? The answer is: with great difficulty. Writing drama is really hard. The risks are enormous, the opportunities few. PWA is therefore an important part of the inspiration pipeline. Not simply a service provider, it must be an Archimedean point of self-understanding for the profession as a whole.</p>
<p>And it is. Unheralded and often unnoticed, PWA promotes not only the practical skills playwriting requires, but the values that inform them. This was beautifully expressed in a recent speech by <a href="https://drama.washington.edu/people/todd-london">Todd London, one-time Artistic Director of New York’s New Dramatists</a>, where he presented eight “lessons learnt” from working with artists in a service capacity. The one I like best is London’s last: We are Always Starting Over.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The artist always starts from scratch. Not just raising the chisel to the stone, but making or mining the damn stone, whacking at it, shaping it, cracking it down the middle. Then back to the mines… Every year brings the same cycle of deadlines, the reiteration of this selection process and that program… It’s Sisyphus all over again… I learnt how to deal with it from artists and my service colleagues… We need fellow travellers, writers groups, drinking buddies, salons, shared studios…. “communities of spirit”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Arguably, PWA incorporates all of these things, and if the winds of reform are to stand a chance of warming the cold neglect of Australian playwriting, it will be in part through its efforts and care.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63535/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The first Australian National Playwrights Centre (ANPC) was founded in 1973 – the age of bongs, thongs and social wrongs. Australian drama was by then well into its Biggest Renaissance Ever. The Pram Factory…
Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/63529
2016-08-05T00:36:25Z
2016-08-05T00:36:25Z
One of Marlowe’s finest plays roars into the 21st century
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133066/original/image-20160804-493-r3ekwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"> Ned, played by Johnny Carr and Mortimer (Marco Chiappi) in Edward II.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>While the rest of the world is marking the <a href="http://shakespeare400.unimelb.edu.au/">400th anniversary</a> of William Shakespeare’s death, Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre is turning to Shakespeare’s Other: the bad boy of Elizabethan drama, <a href="http://www.marlowesmightyline.org/">Christopher Marlowe</a>.</p>
<p>Marlowe’s plays are as outrageous as his life was said to be: <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tamburlaine-the-Great">Tamburlaine</a> burns the Koran on stage, Faustus sells his soul to the devil, the Jew of Malta poisons a convent of nuns, and Edward II neglects his wife and kingdom by doting on his male lover, the “basely born” Piers Gaveston.</p>
<p>Edward II (c.1592) is a play about the intersection of the personal and the political; about leadership and the monarchy as well as favouritism and homosexuality. Writer Anthony Weigh and director Matthew Lutton have set out to breathe fresh life into an Elizabethan history play that has already seen radical adaptations at the hands of Bertolt Brecht (1923) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101798/">Derek Jarman</a> (1991).</p>
<p>Through a rapid series of “<a href="https://issuu.com/malthouse/docs/12e2_program_online">fractured ‘scenelets’</a>”, their boundaries demarcated by the sound of a knife being sharpened, we see Ned (Edward II, played by Johnny Carr) in love with a commoner, Piers Gaveston (played by Paul Ashcroft), and out of love with his wife, Sib (Queen Isabella, played by Belinda McClory). She takes a lover of her own, the Machiavellian Mortimer (played by Marco Chiappi), who is here – like Piers – from humble origins, but has served the king all his life.</p>
<p>The lab-like set, replete with museum artefacts and document cameras, offers a nod to the genre of Marlowe’s play; its significance as a “monument” to Ned’s “decadence” becoming apparent only in the final scenes. </p>
<p>A young boy, the future Edward III, plays a choric function, itemising significant and symbolic objects on the display tables and thereby forecasting the subsequent focus of the plot. With the exception of the mise-en-scène, this adaptation largely eschews history in order to accentuate the political and psychological dimensions of Marlowe’s play.</p>
<p>Carr’s Ned doesn’t care for politics: with flagrant disregard for his public office, he wears the crown during an otherwise entirely naked sex scene with Piers. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133068/original/image-20160804-478-bb5m4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133068/original/image-20160804-478-bb5m4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133068/original/image-20160804-478-bb5m4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133068/original/image-20160804-478-bb5m4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133068/original/image-20160804-478-bb5m4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133068/original/image-20160804-478-bb5m4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133068/original/image-20160804-478-bb5m4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The king (Johnny Carr) and his lover, Piers (Paul Ashcroft).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Caligula appointing his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitatus">horse as a consul</a>, Ned sends “a fucking pony” to France as an English diplomat, thereby jeopardising “stability”, “normalcy”, and “the status quo”. Ned is instead attracted to the “authenticity” of ordinary people, and fawns on his lover, Piers. But as Piers is told by Mortimer, Ned has a “destiny”; he is singular, not like the common people.</p>
<p>Politics is all that Mortimer cares about. He asks the young boy Edward, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why do we have a king? What would it be like without one?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Without a king to bind the kingdom together, he implies, there would be chaos. This Mortimer is attracted to the institution of the monarchy but distinguishes between the office bearers; like Ned, he too can separate the body politic from the body natural, but his blind loyalty to the institution (like Ned’s investment in the personal) proves his undoing.</p>
<p>Marlowe’s “basely born” Piers is romanticised here, recounting how he “slept rough” by the river in his youth, as part of a gang. The people love Ned as “the people’s prince” precisely because of Piers. Far from objecting to the homosexual relationship, the people are initially pleased that “one of their own” (a commoner) has been welcomed into the monarchy.</p>
<p>Weigh’s portrayal of the lovers’ relationship in these terms is especially welcome inasmuch as the suggestion of the homosexual relationship between Edward and Piers being destructive is so easy to overstate: <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=rSgVjgZTP64C&q=politically+and+morally%2C+the+power-hungry+nobles+and+the+queen%E2%80%99s+adultery+with+Mortimer+are+as+destabilizing+as+anything+tin+Edward%E2%80%99s+relationship+with+his+favourite#v=onepage&q=politically%20and%20morally&f=false">Stephen Orgel</a> has observed of Marlowe’s play that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>both politically and morally, the power-hungry nobles and the queen’s adultery with Mortimer are as destabilizing as anything in Edward’s relationship with his favourite.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Instead of identifying Ned’s sexuality as the cause of his fall, Weigh has described being struck by its very “unremarkableness"– the objections to his lover having more to do with class than gender. </p>
<p>To this end, Weigh’s lovers are granted a beautiful fantasy where Marlowe’s Edward, resigned to the knowledge that Piers will be murdered, is tragically deprived of the opportunity to see his lover one last time. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133067/original/image-20160804-470-1k0qhlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133067/original/image-20160804-470-1k0qhlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133067/original/image-20160804-470-1k0qhlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133067/original/image-20160804-470-1k0qhlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133067/original/image-20160804-470-1k0qhlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133067/original/image-20160804-470-1k0qhlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/133067/original/image-20160804-470-1k0qhlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The king, right, and Piers: they are not entirely likeable.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a genuinely poignant exchange, Ned tells his son that Piers has to go away, but that they will all go to the seaside together for a holiday, "like a family”. </p>
<p>“Not like”, Piers corrects him: “A family”. </p>
<p>McClory’s wonderfully cold and injured Sib, whose position is compromised by virtue of being most directly affected by Ned’s new love, represents the most vocal critic of the king’s homosexuality: “I’m a better man than you’ll ever be” she tells Ned, before accusing him of “killing yourself over some skank”.</p>
<p>The turning point of the play occurs when Ned humiliates and fires Mortimer after years of loyal service to the monarchy. Marco Chiappi’s brilliantly delivered monologue as the ejected Mortimer, recounting his fall from grace, provides a centre for the fractured scenelets of the play.</p>
<p>Describing an encounter with an ordinary family, Mortimer ruminates on how the “greatest shifts in history begin in the mind”, and we witness the transformation of popular opinion that once favoured Piers but now recognises that “he’s sort of taken over” the king. Mob violence is imminent as Piers is to learn what happens “when you get between the people and their king”.</p>
<p>This is a moving and thoughtful production; brilliantly written and cleverly executed. It resists the temptation to overcorrect by making Ned and Piers entirely likeable – their petulance, and appalling treatment of others whilst in power, remains troubling – and it brings one of Marlowe’s finest plays roaring into the 21st century with urgency.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/edward-ii">Edward II</a> is on at the Malthouse until August 21</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63529/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McInnis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A new production of Edward II by the ‘bad boy of Elizabethan drama’ breathes fresh life into the play, accentuating the story’s political and psychological dimensions.
David McInnis, Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/41509
2015-05-14T05:23:58Z
2015-05-14T05:23:58Z
Shakespeare’s Double Falsehood? Alas, that’s neither true nor false
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81319/original/image-20150512-31451-1ua567c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The pantheon of the Bard's plays is now larger by one – or so the headlines would have you believe. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">George</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is easy to imagine from <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/13/shakespeare-unmasked-by-pronouns.html">the recent headlines</a> declaring a lost Shakespeare play to have been found that lovers of the Bard’s work are rejoicing. </p>
<p>The pantheon of great plays is now larger by one. Yet this is one occasion on which the phrase “don’t believe the headlines” may prove particularly apt. In April, two researchers from the University of Texas at Austin <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/08/0956797614566658.abstract">published an article</a> in the online journal Psychological Science, outlining the use of a number of computational tests to determine whether William Shakespeare was the author of a play called Double Falsehood. </p>
<p>Headlines do, of course, stretch the truth, so it is important to start by pointing out that Ryan L. Boyd and James W. Pennebaker make no attempt to claim that they have “found” a lost play, as some headlines have proclaimed. As the authors point out from the start of their article, when <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/590534/Lewis-Theobald">Lewis Theobald</a> published Double Falsehood in 1728, he claimed to have based this play on three manuscripts that were in his possession – all, he acknowledged, were by Shakespeare.</p>
<p>So there is no lost play that recent computer research has “found”. The play has been readily available for almost three centuries. The manuscripts were lost, though, apparently in a fire. Since the original Globe Theatre <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-globe-theater-burns-down">burned down in 1613</a>, fire has been a particularly voracious destroyer of such manuscripts, and has been blamed on numerous occasions since for the loss of materials in Shakespeare’s own hand. </p>
<p>Before the conspiracy theorists raise a question of the convenience that Shakespeare’s works have been lost to fire, it is worth mentioning that the original manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51496.The_Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde">The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</a>(1886) was deliberately destroyed by the author in his home fireplace, and fire was also responsible for the loss of the vast majority of the works of antiquity, housed as they were in the Library of Alexandria at the time that it was burned to the ground. </p>
<p>Whether there ever were any manuscripts cannot be known for sure, but their absence has prompted generations of scholars to ask if Theobald’s play could indeed have been based on Shakespearean originals. Enter Boyd and Pennebaker … and their computer.</p>
<h2>Word sets</h2>
<p>The research involved using computational analysis of word sets in Double Falsehood, which was then compared with the same analysis of all of the plays known to have been written by Theobald, by Shakespeare, and by <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/john-fletcher-9297122">John Fletcher</a> – a playwright who collaborated with Shakespeare on two of the last plays he (or they) wrote and who therefore may also have had a hand in any other late play that we might want to attribute to Shakespeare. </p>
<p>Five types of word classes or categories were tested, each using three different computational methods (so there were 15 different tests for each play), and the results compared for tests on the five Acts of Double Falsehood (so, 75 different sets of results for comparison). </p>
<p>The results varied. </p>
<p>In 39 out of 45 tests on the first three Acts, Shakespeare comes out on top as the closest match. In the last two Acts, though, Shakespeare is closest on only 11 out of the 30 tests. Taking the play as a whole, their test seems to indicate that Shakespeare is by far the strongest candidate of the three, but the data is not always on the side of Shakespeare all of the time. In fact, only one test out of the 75 produces a 100% result – a “low-base-rate tells” test of Act 3 produces a 100% match to the same rates present in Theobald’s other plays. </p>
<p>So what does this research tell us? </p>
<p>As it currently stands, the answer is: nothing that scholars did not already strongly suspect. Have they proven these suspicions to be true? No. There are two unknowns in the research, each of which is trying to prove the other: on the one hand, the researchers want to identify the author of Double Falsehood; on the other, as they explain in their conclusion, they want to test whether computational methods are accurate in generating a “psychological signature” of an individual in his or her writing. </p>
<p>The problem here is that we cannot independently verify that the psychological signature they attribute to Shakespeare is in fact his — we simply don’t know enough about him outside of his writing. </p>
<p>Yet as the headlines reveal, there is a hunger in the wider public for the facts in the case of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, so researchers need to tread carefully when suggesting that they have arrived at a solution. </p>
<p>Given the broad cultural significance of Shakespeare’s plays, it does matter that scholars treat the authorship question seriously. Boyd and Pennebaker’s research takes an each-way bet, proving nothing – but headline writers have twisted this bet into a very public double falsehood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41509/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laurie Johnson is affiliated with the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA), the International Shakespeare Association (ISA), and the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), as well as being an Associate Professor in English and Cultural Studies with research and teaching interests in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies.</span></em></p>
You’d be forgiven for thinking Double Falsehood was recently “found” and confirmed as being by Shakespeare. But that’s not what the researchers behind the computational tests actually said. So what’s up?
Laurie Johnson, Associate Professor in English Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Queensland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/40161
2015-05-11T20:06:43Z
2015-05-11T20:06:43Z
Australian plays: how to persuade a nation to question its own soul?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79919/original/image-20150430-30705-mmuqxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Onstage at the JC Williamson Theatre Royal in Sydney in 1935. Are we treating our playwrights any better than we did then?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is a long-read essay, the fourth in a series on playwriting and drama by Julian Meyrick. Read Part one <a href="https://theconversation.com/need-a-stage-coach-why-some-plays-work-and-others-dont-39363">here</a>, Part two <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-get-those-two-hours-back-drama-works-as-time-unfolds-39687">here</a>, and Part three <a href="https://theconversation.com/playwriting-doesnt-get-better-or-worse-but-it-does-evolve-40162">here</a>.</em></p>
<p>Telling the story of playwriting in four articles is like trying to fit an elephant into a bodystocking. Go to any library and browse the drama shelf. The variety of plays in even a modest collection is mind-blowing. Add film and TV scripts into the mix and the range expands further. </p>
<p>So making generalisations about playwriting invites “what-about-ism”. </p>
<p>Say “Australian drama has done poorly since Federation”, for example, and you’ll get a barrage of counter-examples. What about Katharine Susan Pritchard’s <a href="http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C263358">Brumby Innes</a> (1927)? Or Sumner Locke-Elliot’s <a href="http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C399004">Rusty Bugles</a> (1948)? Or Ray Lawler’s <a href="http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C204052">Summer of the Seventeenth Doll</a> (1955)? </p>
<p>What about the plays of Patrick White, Dorothy Hewett, David Williamson, John Romeril, Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves, Joanna Murray-Smith, Patricia Cornelius and so on?</p>
<p>There is no doubt that Australia has produced, and continues to produce, exceptional playwrights. But in judging a nation’s drama it is not the exceptions that count.</p>
<p>It is the quality of its next-best plays that is the crucial indicator, for three reasons. First, because exceptional drama is rare, even for exceptional playwrights. Second, because exceptional drama cannot be routinely manufactured, only allowed for. Third, because exceptional drama comes from the general culture and it is the health of this that determines how many exceptional plays there will be.</p>
<p>Buying a better car won’t buy you better traffic. What matters is not the commanding heights of playwriting but the state of the sector overall.</p>
<h2>What we know about Australian drama</h2>
<p>Perhaps the first thing to say about the history of Australian drama is how thin it is. </p>
<p>After Gough Whitlam doubled the federal arts budget in 1973, the number of Australian plays produced increased, but sporadically, and with ongoing debate about their place and value. What other country of comparable wealth and education has looked on its own drama in the same contingent way as Australia? As if it were an optional extra – like a second national anthem or free kerbside parking?</p>
<p>The second thing to observe is how fuddled the understanding of playwriting remains in our over-connected, under-reflective country; how it is too often framed as a quill-pen skill in comparison with visual, digi-media and choreographic technologies. </p>
<p>Not everyone thinks like this. But it is undoubtedly true that in recent years playwriting has been defined <em>outside</em> notions of art-form innovation. This was signalled by the decision of the Australia Council in 2009 to provide Theatre Board assessors with just a five-page extract of all submitted scripts in grant applications. </p>
<p>When a country stops reading its plays, it stops relating to its playwrights. And while the Council’s decision was motivated by important strategic concerns – to give equal weight to hybrid art projects that mainstream companies were unlikely to support – it has had fateful consequences. </p>
<p>It also echoes a past pattern of chronic mismanagement. This has been well-chronicled by historians such as Leslie Rees, Peter Fitzpatrick, Peter Holloway, Michelle Arrow, and John McCallum. Their accounts vary in particulars but not in general thrust. <a href="http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A17165">Fitzpatrick</a> calls Australian drama “a history of beginnings”, so often has it been cast back into a pool of primal neglect.</p>
<h2>The fragility of our drama</h2>
<p>What makes the position of Australian playwriting so fragile? </p>
<p>Partly, economics. Australia has a sizeable population, but it is geographically dispersed, making it difficult for plays to reach a national audience. Touring circuits exist, but costs are high, and drama that goes on the road has to have broad appeal, or a small cast, or both.</p>
<p>To boot, there is a lack of national thinking around playwright development, the fact that states’ interests determine the style and level of support in different parts of the country. The level of cooperation between Australian theatre companies on a production level is good, and has been since 1988, the year the last English director of a state theatre, Alan Edwards of the Queensland Theatre Company, retired. The level of cooperation in respect of playwright development is virtually nil.</p>
<p>But economics and industry structure are not the whole story. The history of Australian playwriting is punctuated by instances of savage rejection that raise questions about whether the country understands the role of drama <em>per se</em>. </p>
<h2>The case of Patrick White</h2>
<p>The best example – and there are many to choose from – is <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/white-patrick-victor-14925">Patrick White</a>. His first four plays – The Ham Funeral, Season at Sarsaparilla, A Cheery Soul and Night on Bald Mountain – were produced in the early 1960s. </p>
<p>Each was a bitter struggle. Two were rejected by the Adelaide Festival, one nearly sent the Melbourne Theatre Company broke. Examining White’s correspondence last year I was blown away by the general ill-will towards his “modern” plays with their multiple storylines and changing locations.</p>
<p>A published letter in Theatregoer (3/1, March 1963:7) from a “Mrs Queensland” about The Ham Funeral – now regarded as one the great works in the Australian drama canon – gives the typical adverse reaction: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>One scene forced several women to leave the theatre. It made me queasy in the stomach, and utterly disgusted. The rest of the play was long-winded, unintelligible and boring […] </p>
<p>One must like this rubbish, it seems, to be deemed “cultured”. Nor has this play been the only one thrust, during the past few years, on a long-suffering public. Most Australian plays we have had to endure professionally […] have been of the same calibre. Usually incomprehensible […] with sex in its crudest form, and violence predominating. </p>
<p>Despite statements otherwise, such plays have been a failure from an audience point of view, and also financially. Yet they continued to be produced. Why? One can only conclude that some power behind all this wants Australian theatregoers to dislike their own drama, and so demand overseas imports. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>What caused this hostility, which also reflects a lack of understanding about how drama “works”? </p>
<p>A major reason was the dominance of <a href="https://www.nla.gov.au/prompt/jc-williamson-theatres">JC Williamson</a>, one of the most successful theatre businesses in entertainment history. At one point, after its merger with the Tait brothers in 1920, “the Firm” owned most of the theatres, cinemas and music halls in Australia, as well as controlling what went into them. </p>
<p>For more than a hundred years it programmed largely commercial fare, lightweight and crowd-pleasing. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">JC Williamson Theatre production, 1936.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASLNSW_35427_JC_Williamson_Ltd.jpg">Sam Hood/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is no Australian equivalent to Ireland’s Abbey Theatre or the UK’s Royal Court (the nearest thing are the doomed Pioneer Players). No foundational playwrights comparable to Henrik Ibsen, WB Yeats or George Bernard Shaw. While overseas, playwriting was progressing in form and function, in Australia it remained an anodyne tinsel-wrapped import, valued for spectacle, profit, and cultural cachet. </p>
<p>Playwriting occupies a weak position in Australian culture because its historical role is not to be good, but to be acceptable. The commercial theatre ethos that went unchallenged for so long bequeathed it a legacy of timidity, superficiality and bosh. </p>
<p>And this legacy dies very, very, hard. </p>
<p>When I came to Australian in 1987 I saw three shows in my first month: Michael Gow’s Europe, Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age and a performance piece by Wollongong’s Swamp Art. </p>
<p>I had lived in the UK, Germany and the US – three diverse theatre cultures. Yet I had seen nothing like this work, which reflected a unique sensibility. I had no word to describe what that was, so I thought it simply “Australian”.</p>
<p>I started talking about what I had seen, what had got me so excited. But I soon discovered there was no common understanding of these plays’ value, no agreement about where they fitted in, what an “Australian” sensibility meant, or how it expressed itself in drama. </p>
<p>I could fill a book with my experiences since then of Australia’s mishandling of playwrights, its overweening under-confidence in respect of its own drama. It has repeatedly struck me that our playwrights are hobbled at the deepest level by a collective expectation their work should reflect what most people already think, that they should create a drama of confirmation. </p>
<p>Australia may be a country capable of dealing with challenge, criticism and conflict. But it does not particularly want these qualities in its plays.</p>
<p>What is lost by this self-defeating attitude? How to persuade a nation to accept the questioning of its own soul? For this is the source and substance of all true drama, the reason for the public attention it elicits. </p>
<p>In these four articles, I have tried to show the intellectual and emotional depth of playwriting. It is a technology as elegant as any mathematical formula, as insightful as any social theory, as mysterious as any philosophical conundrum.</p>
<p>Because drama surrounds us from the day we become aware of the world to day we depart it, we forget what a miracle it is, what an unmatched vehicle for the transmission of complex human experience. </p>
<p>Shakespeare was a great playwright because he discerned the greatness of the art form at his disposal, and exploited it to the full. When such a process of discovery is entrained, a society is not simply consuming drama as an entertainment product. It is relating to it as a means of self-understanding. </p>
<p>How often have we witnessed on stage, TV or in the cinema, moments when we think “that is just so”, when the truth of the world is given to us in profound, accessible miniature? There are things that can <em>only</em> be found in drama. There are stories, characters, images, problems, ideas, feelings, that <em>only</em> drama can “transluminate”, in the peculiar term of Polish director <a href="http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/siryan/academy/theatres/grotowski,%20jerzy.htm">Jerzy Grotowski</a>. </p>
<p>Now that Australia has lost its monocular cultural views, it must renovate its crabbed attitude to drama – an attitude that keeps it in wilful ignorance of playwriting as a technology – and let its dramatists speak their mind, so it can know its mind. It must let go of the view that playscripts are akin to Biedermeier furniture and recognise that dramatic writing is integral to innovation in the three keys mediums of theatre, film and television.</p>
<p>It must recognise that now it is a modern country it needs a modern attitude to drama. And central to the health of this is the role of the playwright.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>This is a long-read essay, the fourth in a series on playwriting and drama by Julian Meyrick. Read Part one <a href="https://theconversation.com/need-a-stage-coach-why-some-plays-work-and-others-dont-39363">here</a>, Part two <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-get-those-two-hours-back-drama-works-as-time-unfolds-39687">here</a>, and Part three <a href="https://theconversation.com/playwriting-doesnt-get-better-or-worse-but-it-does-evolve-40162">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40161/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Playwriting occupies a weak position in Australian culture because its historical role is not to be “good”, but to be socially acceptable. We need now to take a modern attitude to drama.
Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/39363
2015-04-08T20:03:02Z
2015-04-08T20:03:02Z
Need a stage coach? Why some plays work, and others don’t
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77302/original/image-20150408-18735-z37nzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We know whether a play such as Andrew Bovell's Secret River works onstage – but can we explain its effect?
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Heidrun Löhr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We all know whether a given play, film or TV drama “works” or not, but it’s often difficult to pinpoint why. This is the first of four articles in which I will try and cast playwriting in a broader light than is usually the case. </p>
<p>Ordinarily playwriting is a matter for “tips” or for critical review – best-practice advice from the producers’ perspective or final judgement from the consumers’. </p>
<p>This kind of talk is useful. But it rarely penetrates to the core of the subject or articulates the significant values it embodies. It often lacks a historical dimension and/ or is insufficient in its technical grasp.</p>
<p>Playwriting is a technology. Just as electric lighting or computer projection are technologies, so is the use of the written word as a means of shaping dramatic “moments”.</p>
<p>In the first millennium BCE the ancient Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, Levantine linear, itself taken from Iron Age Proto-Canaanite. They introduced vowel signs and reversed the flow of inscription, running their sentences – like the one you’re reading now – from left to right. </p>
<p>This reformed approach became the basis for all subsequent European alphabets. The term for the act of writing – <em>γραμμός</em> (in Latin scribio) – expanded to refer to its correlate products. The word “script” retains shades of this complex history, even in the digital era. As if letters had a mysterious agency, like the inventors of runes believed, containing within them the charge of our disruptive imaginations. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76422/original/image-20150330-25095-1snlafa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76422/original/image-20150330-25095-1snlafa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76422/original/image-20150330-25095-1snlafa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76422/original/image-20150330-25095-1snlafa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76422/original/image-20150330-25095-1snlafa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76422/original/image-20150330-25095-1snlafa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76422/original/image-20150330-25095-1snlafa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76422/original/image-20150330-25095-1snlafa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Production shot from David Williamson’s Soulmates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Dean Lewins</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Socrates thought <em>γραμμός</em> dangerous and argued for its suppression. But by the 5th century BCE writing was a ubiquitous part of Mediterranean life, handy for all sorts of religious, commercial and philosophical purposes (we know Socrates’ opinions because his pupil, Plato, wrote them down). </p>
<p>In Athens it was used to record the work of victors in annual play competitions, that their achievements might be remembered and there would be no dispute about who had won.</p>
<h2>Play it again</h2>
<p>At what point did the Greeks realise what had been performed once could be performed again? That the technology of playwriting allowed the past to return in sensory immediacy? No doubt there was some sort of proto-drama before this but writing supercharged the art-form with the force of an emergent literary expertise. </p>
<p>Has this innovation ever been surpassed? </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77304/original/image-20150408-18758-1i4etex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77304/original/image-20150408-18758-1i4etex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77304/original/image-20150408-18758-1i4etex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77304/original/image-20150408-18758-1i4etex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77304/original/image-20150408-18758-1i4etex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77304/original/image-20150408-18758-1i4etex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77304/original/image-20150408-18758-1i4etex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77304/original/image-20150408-18758-1i4etex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Louis Bouwmeester as Oedipus in a Dutch production of Oedipus the King c. 1896.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When we pick up a copy of Medea or Oedipus The King we engage in an act of a time travel that shoots us back to thoughts and feelings first faced 2,500 years ago. Many things about ancient Greece are unknown to us or unintelligible. But when an actor cries out <em>αἰαῖ αἰαῖ, δύστανος ἐγώ</em> (“woe, woe is me, whither am I born?”) history collapses in an ardent transmigration of souls. </p>
<p>The introduction of written language into live performance was more than an addition to its existing skillset of dance, music and the choral ode. It was a radical escalation of its presence and power, forging a new representation of human experience. Theatre became dramatic, even as the written word took on viral life, via the acting conventions that sprang up around the technology of playwriting. </p>
<p>This was not really a shift from an oral to a written culture, since the spoken word was still the focus of the poet’s craft. It was a new balance between elements such that language could be harnessed as a capital resource. </p>
<p>Every time a drama is presented we engage in the same miraculous inter-temporal act. </p>
<p>What was dead lives again, and will continue to live long after we are dead. Every play contains an infinity of response, freed simply by the desire of artists and audiences to engage with it. </p>
<h2>The basics</h2>
<p>In all developed countries today drama is a major mode of expression. On stage and screen, it irradiates our lives with its tropes and techniques. The Greeks infused playwriting with basic parameters. These may not be universal but they are certainly robust. </p>
<p>Not every drama has “a story” in the way Aristotle insisted was needed. All display qualities of narrative tension. Not every drama has “characters” in the classical sense or “dialogue” in a conventional one. All contain points of emotional accrual and communicate using language-like means, be this visual image, acoustic vibration or choreographic gesture. </p>
<p>The technology of playwriting changes not only the formal possibilities of theatre but also its social function. </p>
<p>Theatre goes from “being something”, a social ritual, to “saying something”, a creative act. It becomes an intervention, a source of critical knowledge. </p>
<p>It also becomes a threat. After Euripides wrote The Trojan Women, with its implied criticism of Athenian warmongering, he was exiled to Salamis. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77303/original/image-20150408-18711-1a4x0i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77303/original/image-20150408-18711-1a4x0i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77303/original/image-20150408-18711-1a4x0i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77303/original/image-20150408-18711-1a4x0i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77303/original/image-20150408-18711-1a4x0i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77303/original/image-20150408-18711-1a4x0i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77303/original/image-20150408-18711-1a4x0i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77303/original/image-20150408-18711-1a4x0i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Production shot from Kill the Messenger, by Nakkiah Lui.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brett Boardman/ Belvoir St</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The history of playwriting is punctuated with repression, punishment and overt control by political authorities looking at it with baleful eyes. It is good to remember that stage censorship in Australia stopped only in the 1970s and the laws pertaining to it have never been officially revoked.</p>
<p>In my next article I will look at Eugene O’Neill’s <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400141h.html">Mourning Becomes Electra</a> (1931), an American play. After this, I will examine Duncan Graham’s <a href="http://www.adelaidefringe.com.au/talkfringe-events/cut-by-duncan-graham">Cut</a>, an Australian play written in 2011. An old play and a new one. </p>
<p>My perspective will be dramaturgical rather than literary. I will look at what makes these plays “work”; or under what circumstances they will “work”. </p>
<p>In my final article, I will take the insights of this comparative exercise into a historical overview of Australian stage drama.</p>
<p>Why do this? </p>
<p>First, because it is always interesting to know how things tick, and plays are more like car engines than one might imagine. </p>
<p>It’s a craft. You learn it. You do it. You learn it some more. Given talent and application, eventually you do it well. But writing drama is a hard road. Even the best playwrights have produced very few masterpieces.</p>
<p>Second, because Australia is a country that has under-achieved in this art form. </p>
<p>Given our wealth, diversity and level of education, we have not produced the substantial body of dramatic work one might expect. Our film industry is sporadic. Our television drama is forever collapsing into soap. Our memorable stage plays are few. </p>
<p>In 1968, the editor of Oz Magazine, Richard Walsh wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If, as we are continually being told, the Muses are currently undergoing a Renaissance in Australia, Drama appears at this stage to be the last of the famous nontuplets to be delivered and with the lowest birthweight.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite the achievements of Australian film, television and theatre since the 1960s, Walsh’s words still ring uncomfortably true. </p>
<p>As a dramaturge and director I have been working with playwrights for more than 30 years. I have commissioned and developed drama for both small companies and large, have advised agencies on their support for new plays, and worked with writers of very different stylistic hue. </p>
<p>I add to this a knowledge of past Australian drama drawn from my job as a theatre historian, from examining the plays others artists have chosen to stage.</p>
<p>John McCallum in his wonderful book <a href="http://www.currency.com.au/product_detail.aspx?productid=1872">Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century</a> says plays are “the bones and stones of our theatre”. Whether as historical trace, repertoire choice, adaptation object, or aspirational project, the written play is a major component in stage, screen and television drama. I call it “the device that turns information into experience”. </p>
<p>Contemporary Australia needs a better grasp of playwriting so that playwriting can better represent contemporary Australia. Over the next few weeks I hope to show both how this can be done, and why it is so important.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39363/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Anyone who has seen a play can tell you whether it “works” or not – but very few people can tell you exactly why. We all need a better grasp of this. Why? So that playwriting can better represent contemporary Australia.
Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.