Cirrus@Austlit

'Contemporary Australian Playwriting provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwriting is taking in the twenty-first century.

'In 2007, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was William Shakespeare. In 2019, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was Nakkiah Lui, a Gamilaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman. This book explores what has happened both on stage and off to generate this remarkable change. As writers of colour, queer writers, and gender diverse writers are produced on the mainstage in larger numbers, they bring new critical directions to the twenty-first century Australian stage. At a politically turbulent time when national identity is fractured, this book examines the ways in which Australia’s leading playwrights have interrogated, problematised, and tried to make sense of the nation. Tracing contemporary trends, the book takes a thematic approach to the re-evaluation of the nation that is dramatized in key Australian plays.

'Each chapter is accompanied by a duologue between two of the playwrights whose work has been analysed, to provide a dual perspective of theory and practice.' (Publication summary)

''I’m not abandoning my principles; I’m coming here to apply them.'

'1971. The height of the Cold War. The Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia is opening up to Western tourism after breaking away from the Soviet Bloc. Branislav and Valentina Radovic have been compelled to design a hotel complex for the government after forging a reputation for designing ultra-modern concrete structures, triggering their lofty utopian political and architectural ideals.

'Present-day. New York City. A talented Australian environmental architect, Natalia Silverman, has been asked to join the team designing New York’s ‘Big U’ – the sea wall mitigation project that will cradle Manhattan’s financial district from rising sea levels. But building a sea wall around the world’s iconic home of big business, is forcing her to ask herself; is she really saving New York, or just working for the bad guys?

'Brutal Utopias examines the intersection between lofty ideals and realpolitik, and the search for perfection in a world that is tilting imminently toward chaos.'

Source: Playlab Theatre.

'Take a cruise to the other side of the apocalypse!

'A collection of some of the world’s wealthiest ‘preppers’ are cruising to New Babylon to escape climate catastrophe. If environmental cataclysm is getting you down, join us on board!

'All is not necessarily what it may seem on this voyage to the promised land, but remember whatever happens: we’re all in this together!'

Source: Brown's Mart.

'Joh for PM launches this July at Brisbane Powerhouse to take Queenslanders on a musical romp through the life of ex-Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the Queensland icon who set state politics alight.

'The musical comedy satirizes the bizarre events that occurred in Australian politics during the Bjelke-Petersen reign. Set at a fundraiser for Joh in 1987, audiences will want to sing along to original tunes such as Pumpkin Scone Diplomacy, Feeding the Chooks and the most catchy political song ever, Joh for PM.

'Bjelke Petersen was Queensland’s longest serving, longest-lived, most quotable Premier. He was one of the best-known and most controversial political figures of 20th century Australia. Award-winning playwright Stephen Carleton (The Narcissist, The Turquoise Elephant, Bastard Territory) and Broadway composer Paul Hodge (Clinton: The Musical) have taken inspiration from these historic events to create one of the best musicals to come out of Queensland.

'This toe-tapping, hilarious cautionary tale will resonate with Queenslanders who lived through the Joh era, as well as those who are yet to learn about this colourful time in our State’s history. Join us for a laugh, a joke and a bloody good time. ' (Production summary)

'Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultural Atlas of Australia, a database-driven interactive digital map that can be used to identify patterns of representation in Australia’s cultural landscape, the book presents an integrated perspective on the translation of space across narrative forms and pioneers new ways of seeing and understanding landscape. It offers fresh insights on cultural topography and spatial history by examining the technical and conceptual challenges of georeferencing fictional and fictionalized places in narratives. Among the items discussed are Wake in Fright, a novel by Kenneth Cook, adapted iconically to the screen and recently onto the stage; the Australian North as a mythic space; spatial and temporal narrative shifts in retellings of the story of Alexander Pearce, a convict who gained notoriety for resorting to cannibalism after escaping from a remote Tasmanian penal colony; travel narratives and road movies set in Western Australia; and the challenges and spatial politics of mapping spaces for which there are no coordinates.' (Publication summary)

'Russell’s ghosts were kind of at rest. He was at peace with it all, even the fact that he didn't know who his biological father was. His mother, Lois, disappeared when he was eight, leaving him to be raised by Neville, a stalwart of the no-nonsense Regional Right.

'It’s Darwin, 2001, and Russell and his partner Alistair have transformed Russell’s childhood home into the ‘Tectonic Plate’; ‘hip urban café and art gallery by day, queer cabaret dive by night’.

'When three separate events over the course of two weeks start to churn things up, the ghosts from Russell’s past begin to intrude on his present and he embarks on a quest to determine his identity.

'The search transports him back to the bohemian world of his childhood; Darwin, 1975, and beyond to his conception; PNG, 1967, where bored ex-TAA hostie, Lois, has tired of Neville’s conservatism and joined the ‘Moresby Arts Theatre’, where she soon starts courting liaisons with members of the community positioned more dangerously at its anarchic edges.

'To a soundtrack of Suzi Quatro, Shirley Bassey and Nana Mouskouri, Russell pieces together the events leading to that fateful night when his favourite Abba record was broken and everything else fell apart.' (Production summary)

The Turquoise Elephant is a bitingly-funny absurdist work, depicting the chaos of a future world rapidly succumbing to climate change. As the environmental disaster unfolds, three generations of women from a privileged political family watch on - from their hermetically sealed, temperature controlled home. But just how safe are they? It's a play about contrasts: grotesque privilege and dispossession, sanity and insanity, hope and fatalism.

Source: ABC Radio National. Interview with Stephen Carleton available here.

'It is 1899 and only the resolve of Lady Constance Drinkwater has kept the Far North Queensland settlement of Somerset from crumbling. Beset by storms, ill-luck and a mysterious disease that has killed all but two of Constance’s children, it is the arrival of strangers - anthropologist Professor Cornelius Crabbe and his companion, Mr Hop Lee - that sets in motion the final catastrophic days of Somerset.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.