Cirrus@Austlit

'In 2007, the most-produced playwright in Australia was William Shakespeare. This is as it had ever been: Julian Meyrick goes so far as to claim that Shakespeare's work "forms part of the structural unconscious of the country's resident imagination" ("Shakespeare" 2). In 2019, though, the most-produced playwright across the ten largest professional theatre companies constituting the Australian mainstage was Nakkiah Lui, a Gamillaroi and Tones Strait Islander woman who could rightly claim in her Twitter bio to be "more produced than Shakespeare." Three of Lui's plays were produced on the mainstage around the country that year - Black is the New White, Blackie Blackie Brown: The Traditional Owner of Death and How to Rule the World - versus none of Shakespeare's, absent for the first time in the period that we are investigating.1 In Contemporary Australian Playwriting, we ask what has happened both on stage and off to generate this remarkable change. The Australia outside the theatre was in flux during this period, dominated by political instability and global economic and environmental crisis. We take the period from 2007 to 2020 as focus for this study, encapsulating as these years do a definitive turning and forced end point in Australian socio-political and cultural life. ' (Introduction)