Cirrus@Austlit

'Ray Lawler, who died this week at 103, was one of the artists responsible for establishing the first non-commercial repertory theatre in Australia – the Union Repertory Theatre Company, now Melbourne Theatre Company – and the writer of its best-known play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.'

'The potency of drama in the development of our national story has been greatly under appreciated, argues Professor Julian Meyrick in his new book Australia in 50 Plays.' 

'Christopher Johnston's play should be the theatre event of the year, with a long tour ahead of it, argues Julian Meyrick.'

(Introduction)

'Australia in 50 Plays is Julian Meyrick‘s lively and accessible account of the remarkable relationship between our national drama and our national life, examining fifty outstanding plays of diverse content and style that have appeared in the 120 years since Federation.

'Energetic, entertaining and original, Meyrick shows the key contribution drama has made to the development of modern Australia through its role in the major issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the impact of two world wars, the ravages of the Great Depression, the changing role of women, the gradual acknowledgement of First Nation’s culture, the social liberation of the 1970s, and the economic rationalism of the 1990s.

'It argues for an expansive idea of ‘nationhood’ as a key driver of debate in the political, social and cultural challenges that face contemporary Australia, while exploring the surprising links between our drama, our history and our collective life.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In 1943, Dolia Ribush, a Russian-speaking Latvian theatre director of medium height and considerable charm, made an illegal trip to Sydney from Melbourne — interstate travel at that time, as during Covid-19, being restricted.'  (Introduction)

'Fourteen months after it was announced, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts has handed down its report, “Sculpting A National Cultural Plan”, on Australia’s cultural and creative industries and institutions.' (Introduction)

'Most people with an interest in art and culture in Australia believe it is in deep crisis, and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t think the crisis predated the pandemic. COVID-19 has smashed every sector involved in live events and on-site attendance. But art and culture stand out as receiving little government sympathy and less support.' (Introduction)

'The decision to merge the Department of Communications and the Arts with Transport, Infrastructure and Regional development (dropping the “Arts” entirely) ends a year in which Australian politics has been deeply confused over its genre.' (Introduction)

'How to review a play whose relationship with matters of fact is so serious and politically culpable it overwhelms the critical distinctions that might normally be used to judge it?' 

'Too often, cultural leaders and policy makers want to chase the perfect metric for activities whose real worth lies in our own personal experience. The major problem facing Australian culture today is demonstrating its value - to governments, the business sector, and the public in general.

'When did culture become a number? When did the books, paintings, poems, plays, songs, films, games, art installations, clothes, and the objects that fill our daily lives become a matter of statistical measurement? When did experience become data?

'This book intervenes in an important debate about the public value of culture that has become stranded between the hard heads (where the arts are just another industry) and the soft hearts (for whom they are too precious to bear dispassionate analysis).

'It argues that our concept of value has been distorted and dismembered by political forces and methodological confusions, and this has a dire effect on the way we assess culture.  Proceeding via concrete examples, it explores the major tensions in contemporary evaluation strategies, and puts forward practical solutions to the current metric madness. 

'The time is ripe to find a better way to value our culture - by finding a better way to talk about it.'  (Publication summary)

'If Australian drama came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, in the 1970s it reached full maturity. More work by more playwrights by more companies for larger audiences: this is the basic narrative of the period. The AusStage database indicates that between 1970 and 1979, local productions of Australian plays more than doubled. And if the standard of that drama could be variable, there is no doubting the craft, intelligence and audacity of its peak achievements.' (Introduction)

'In the introduction to her seminal book Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre, Mary Rose Casey observes:

Indigenous Australian activists and artist have consistently utilised the potential for theatre… to create different frames… of Indigenous Australians… In a show like Basically Black (1972), the “gaze” as an expression of racial objectification was returned… Following this work, writers such as Robert Merritt, Kevin Gilbert, Gerry Bostock and Jack Davis individually and collectively altered the range of representations of Indigenous Australians in Australian theatres and writing. In doing so, they increased awareness of issues affecting Indigenous people and related those issues to [them] as human beings.

Indigenous Australian culture is one of the oldest on the planet, stretching back thousands of years. Indigenous engagement with colonially derived theatre is of shorter duration, and it is only in the last 50 years that Indigenous playwrights, in the European sense, have emerged. Robert Merritt, author of The Cake Man, is one of this cohort. Written in 1975, his play comes after Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers (1971) but before Jack Davis’s No Sugar(1985)'. (Introduction)

'In Australian Theatre after the New Wave, Julian Meyrick charts the history of three ground-breaking Australian theatre companies, the Paris Theatre (1978), the Hunter Valley Theatre (1976-94) and Anthill Theatre (1980-94). In the years following the controversial dismissal of Gough Whitlam's Labor government in 1975, these 'alternative' theatres struggled to survive in an increasingly adverse economic environment. Drawing on interviews and archival sources, including Australia Council files and correspondence, the book examines the funding structures in which the companies operated, and the impact of the cultural policies of the period. It analyses the changing relationship between the artist and the State, the rise of a managerial ethos of `accountability', and the growing dominance of government in the fate of the nation's theatre. In doing so, it shows the historical roots of many of the problems facing Australian theatre today.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.