Cirrus@Austlit

'Thirty years ago Margot Mason, pioneer of the 1970s Women's Liberation movement and fearless academic, wrote her groundbreaking work and numerous best-sellers followed. Now she has writer's block. Molly, an unannounced visitor and committed fan of Margot and her work, offers a potential solution - until Molly produces a gun and calmly informs Margot that she intends to kill her because she blames her for warping her mother's mind and ruining her life with her hit book The Cerebral Vagina.

'Joanna Murray-Smith's deliciously wicked comedy deftly walks the tightrope between satire and farce proving the female of the species is not only deadlier, but funnier than the male.

This play 'was inspired by Germaine Greer's experience of being held captive in her country house in Essex in 2000'. (Publisher's blurb)

'Citizens is set at the dividing wall of an unspecified war-torn country where a series of unconnected exchanges between ordinary people transpire as they go about their day-to-day lives. A picture of life is revealed in the fragments of the interchanges between vulnerable people where the human spirit is carefully probed and laid bare.

'Soldiers is set in an air force hangar in Sydney, where family members gather to receive the bodies of their sons, brothers, husbands and friends lost in a conflict that they may not have supported.'

Source: Production blurbs (Kings Cross Theatre production).

'On an expectant stage - a dreamscape of an Australian backyard - five actors tease out the story of a father and daughter. They question each other, they watch each other, they confess, they draw each other along. By the end of the story, modern life has been engulfed in fire, and a tale of pure love has become a tragedy of leadership and sacrifice.

'Love Me Tender is a play of beauty and emotional power. Inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, Tom Holloway has orchestrated a thrilling vision of contemporary Australia drawn from our experiences of the Black Saturday bushfires, of raunch culture and pre-teen sexuality, and of our domestic rituals. This is exquisite writing about our fears and expectations of fathers, about the extremities of love, and about the need for action when the world comes undone.'

Source: Belvoir Street Theatre website, http://www.belvoir.com.au/
Sighted: 22/09/2009

Three landmark plays from the renaissance of Australian playwriting: 'White with Wire Wheels' was the first play to examine the insecurity inherent in the male culture of women and cars; 'Dimboola', a Rabelaisian account of a country wedding; Monk O'Neill, of 'A Stretch of the Imagination' has become an archetype of Australian character.

"When the cold August wind abated in its final sigh of emergence from the lean, hard winter months into springtime, the People emerged from the cold, and often leaky shanties, and old discarded car-bodies, which were their home, to gather together their few ragged possessions and tie them in bundles ready for traveling to the cherry orchards, often many hundreds of miles away. Many would travel by bicycle with their swags swinging crazily from the frames; many traveled in old tattered caravans drawn by horses; many just walked beside the caravans through the red sandhill and mallee country, while the more daring 'jumped the rattler', the slow old steam train that chugged across the land.

Wherever the people gathered there too was a spirit of revival, of intense relief, for the "cherry season" meant a temporary release from near starvation. In a good season it could mean some old debts would be repaid. It meant food and toys for the children for the forthcoming Christmas season and, above all, it meant some independence, some freedom, from under the crucifying heels of the local police and the white 'station' managers; an escape from the refugee camps called 'Aboriginal Reserves'. The cherry season was the time for hope, for meeting old friends and relatives, for laughing and for making love. The Cherry Pickers tells it all.' Source: http://blackwebs.photoaccess.org.au/~kevingilbert/books/books.html (Sighted: 12/4/2009).

'This is a proud milestone in Australian theatre history; a contemporary Indigenous performance text from the highly acclaimed Kooemba Jdarra. Appropriating western forms whilst using traditional storytelling, it gives emotional insight into Murri life. This one-woman show follows the journey of an Aboriginal ‘Everywoman’ as she tells poignant and humorous stories of grief and reconciliation. A powerful, demanding and culturally profound text, The 7 Stages of Grieving is a celebration of Indigenous survival, an invitation to grieve publicly, a time to exorcize pain. It has a universal theme told through the personal experiences of one incredible character.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Playlab).

'Ruben Guthrie is on fire. At only 29, he is Creative Director of a cutting edge advertising agency, lives with his Czech supermodel fiancé and drinks like he invented it. Ruben seems invincible, until one fated evening when he drinks so much vodka he thinks he can fly. Before Ruben knows it his fiancé has left him, his Mum is escorting him to AA meetings and his bottomless schooner of confidence has all but drained away. For the first time in his life, Ruben Guthrie is alone.'

Source: www.belvoir.com.au
Sighted: 22/04/2008

'A rather ocker, white Australian male encounters a well-mannered Pakistani student with revolutionary ambitions in a Sydney park at midnight. Buzo creates an image of race prejudice as a profoundly irrational force in the behaviour of ordinary Australians.' (Publication summary)

'It begins with a miracle. On a rainy day in Alice Springs in 2039 a fish falls like manna from heaven to bless the reunion of a father with his long lost son. Perhaps it's a sign that the pattern of betrayal and abandonment that began on another rainy day in London in 1959 will come to an end.

'Who'll stop the rain? Andrew Bovell's award-winning When the Rain Stops Falling is powerful storytelling in which the voices of our past echo into our future.' (Publisher's blurb)