Cirrus@Austlit

For at least the first half of the twentieth century, Australian playwrights were not held in high regard by their compatriots. Popular opinion was summed up by fictional theatre manager M.J. Field in Frank A. Russell’s novel The Ashes of Achievement (1920):

‘I’ve got a play,’ commenced Philip, plunging.
Field jumped from his chair, hands spread out in defence.
‘Help!’ he yelped. ‘Anything but that. Not a bloody play, I ask you.’
‘What are you frightened of?’ he asked, when Field had resumed his seat.
‘I’ll tell you, Lee, on the understanding it goes no further. Australians can’t write plays; there you have it in a nutshell.’ (Introduction)

'Berlin, by Joanna Murray-Smith, is an intense, very wordy, imperfectly plotted, but nonetheless stylish play. ‘Stylish’ is a strange word to describe a play about young love sabotaged by tragic secrets and the legacy of the Holocaust. Shouldn’t it also be ‘heart-breaking’, ‘harrowing’, or at least ‘poignant’? Perhaps, but ‘stylish’ is the right word for a play – a thriller, in fact – that is also a swiftly argued essay on the difficulties faced by sensitive and ethical individuals who want to free themselves from the snares of history to make a new future.' (Introduction)

'Has a whimsical conceit ever been inflated to such mammoth proportions? In his third novel, Australian writer Chris Flynn proposes that the remains of once-living creatures acquire a special sentience after they’ve been disinterred. They can observe what goes on around them and communicate with other nearby fossils. And so in 2007, in a warehouse in Manhattan, we find an American mastodon narrating the adventure of his life and afterlife for the edification of a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar.'  (Introduction)

'Throughout the 19th century it was common practice for well-to-do British families to dispose of their more debauched, debt-prone or dissipated scions by sending them off to the colonies. A typical specimen was Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known as Plorn, the youngest and most hapless of Charles and Catherine’s 10 children. Having failed to distinguish himself in anything more elevated than the interpretation of cricket scorecards, Plorn was peremptorily dispatched to the Australian outback, which his famous father believed would induce him to focus his energies and efforts. He was not even 16 when he disembarked in Melbourne in 1868.' (Introduction)

'Seven years ago, Harvard professor and resurrection biologist George Church made headlines around the world when he announced that we already have the technical know-how to bring back Neanderthals, and that nothing wanted but an “extremely adventurous female human” to act as surrogate mother. Donna Mazza’s second novel takes us into the mind of just such a female, although the woman at the heart of Mazza’s story seems less motivated by the adventure of science than an impossible craving to sacrifice her humanity.' (Introduction)

'Andrew McGahan’s first novel was not, in fact, Praise, that best-selling classic of Australian dirty realism. According to a Sydney Morning Herald interview from 2011, his first book-length fiction was actually a thriller in the style of Stephen King that was never published.' (Introduction)

'Luke Carman, you ask? I imagine him up there on his mountain at the end of the line where it’s always the proverbial dark and stormy night, languishing in a monkish cell, tap, tap, tapping away at a block of old acrimony as he dreams up his revenges.'  (Introduction)

'The London-based literary agent Ed Victor once said to the writer Susan Johnson that he’d never come across a people more insecure about their relationship with their homeland than Australians – except, of course, the Russians. So perhaps it makes sense that an Australian should tell this story of a Jewish Russian émigré struggling to reinvent herself while missing what was best about the old country.' (Introduction)

'You enter the hedge maze planted with lilly pilly shrubs. Dead end follows dead end as each twist and turn yields more of the same. You begin to get weary. And then there’s something remarkable. Right at the end of the labyrinth, waiting like an oracle or a punchline that baffles comprehension, you discover a live zebra calmly grazing, absolutely content and unexpected.'  (Introduction)

'There is something more than a little ersatz about Three Little Words, the latest play by Joanna Murray-Smith. It has all the usual parts, but it doesn’t feel like a real play.'  (Introduction)

'The question for theatre-makers is: how to make the stage new? How can theatre escape what is already given? 'The painter does not paint on an empty canvas', write Deleuze and Guattari, 'and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished clich s that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision'. We might say that the stage, too, no less than the canvas and the page, is full of clich s, pre-established rhythms of characterisation and plotting, in dialogue and gesture, setting and design, which crowd on to every stage and ghost every performance. Based on a viewing of a recently restored archival recording, this article offers the example of the 1979 Sydney Theatre Company production of Patrick White's A Cheery Soul. Sweeping aside White's detailed stage directions and placing the character of Miss Docker in an abstract but atmospheric landscape, the production carried its audience into a world that baffled naturalistic conventions of meaning and connection, broke with clich and successfully created something new for the Australian theatre.'