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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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?
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.
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.