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Articles on Playwriting

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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. Photographer David Wilson.

When the cultural cringe abated: Australian drama in the 1970s

The 1970s transformed Australian drama. It was a time of imaginative brilliance as the Empire wrote back.
The Chapel Perilous follows the life of Sally Banner “a rebel in word and deed”. Flickr/Andrew Sutherland

The great Australian plays: sex, poetry and The Chapel Perilous

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.
Actors read a new Indigenous play at the Yellamundie Festival. © Jamie Williams courtesy of Sydney Festival

Joyous, comic and grim: the best new Indigenous playwrights

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.
Sydney Opera House during this year’s Vivid Festival: now, more than ever, we need artists to tell us the truth. Tibor Kovacs/Flickr

Friday essay: the arts and our still-born national identity

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?
Joel Ormsby/flickr

Raising chisel to stone, and making art

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…
Ned, played by Johnny Carr and Mortimer (Marco Chiappi) in Edward II. Pia Johnson

One of Marlowe’s finest plays roars into the 21st century

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.
The pantheon of the Bard’s plays is now larger by one – or so the headlines would have you believe. George

Shakespeare’s Double Falsehood? Alas, that’s neither true nor false

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?
Onstage at the JC Williamson Theatre Royal in Sydney in 1935. Are we treating our playwrights any better than we did then? Wikimedia Commons

Australian plays: how to persuade a nation to question its own soul?

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.
We know whether a play such as Andrew Bovell’s Secret River works onstage – but can we explain its effect? AAP Image/Heidrun Löhr

Need a stage coach? Why some plays work, and others don’t

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.

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