Forty years since Fame showed the vulnerability of performing arts students, we can still do more to protect them. As we resume physical contact, we can use performance to renegotiate safe intimacy.
Pericles Funeral Oration on the Greek 50 Drachmai 1955 Banknote.
Shutterstock
Thucydides’ description of the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC is one of the great passages of Greek literature. It focusses on the social response, both of those who died and those who survived.
Susie Porter as Marie and Kate Jenkinson as Allie in Wentworth. The show’s drama revolves around a women’s prison.
Fremantle Media Australia/Xinger Xanger Photograph
In the popular Australian TV series Wentworth, the setting of a women’s prison is a pressure-cooker for drama. The setting also allows for greater representation of diverse female characters.
Documentary play drawing on drama classrooms from England to Taiwan tells the story of global youth. From Left: Aldrin Bundoc, Zorana Sadiq, Amaka Umeh, Loretta Yu, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Liisa Repo-Martell. And in the foreground: Emilio Viera.
Aleksander Antonijevic/Project Humanity/Crow’s Theatre
A study that showed youth in five global cities lose hope as they grow into adulthood was turned into an elegant and beautiful documentary play with a plea to listen to the urgent calls of youth.
Long a repressed language, the Scots tongue is experiencing a cultural resurgence thanks to popular drama and storytelling.
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.
The BBC’s dark drama reveals just how thin the veneer of middle-class respectability can be.
Gregg Henry portrays President Donald Trump in the role of Caesar in the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of ‘Julius Caesar,’ in New York City.
Joan Marcus/The Public Theater via AP
Some have denounced the New York Public Theater for encouraging violence against President Trump. But the play does just the opposite, warning of the pitfalls of political assassination.
In 1955 two plays – The Torrents and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll – burst into Australian theatre. Funny and tragic in deeply Australian ways, they marked a new horizon of creative possibility.
‘Molly? Molly? MOLLY?’ Tony Barry as Keghead in Rusty Bugles.
ABC/National Film and Sound Archive
The best Australian play ever written is revolutionary in its treatment of plot, character and language. It has a weary, sardonic perspective on war and an unheroic worldview.
‘I suppose that, as I’m 50, Molly is absolutely my demographic: I was nine when Countdown began and 23 when it ended, and I was a devotee for most of that time – a devotee who was often disgusted …’