Cirrus@Austlit

Play with music.

Set in Australia between 1787 to 1883 (Act 1) and 1883 to the present day (Act 2) Some Of My Best Friends Are Women is a collaborative effort between Leonard and Thérèse Radic. The play, which also marks Thérèse Radic's first venture into theatrical writing, was inspired by their research into Australian theatre during the 1975 International Women's Year. One particular aspect they focused on was the neglect of Australian women on the Australian stage.

Designed for a cast of five or six, the play is described by its authors as an anthology of writings, speeches, songs and documents by or about Australian women. The play compiles this scrapbook of the history of women while at the same time defying theatrical stereotyping. The Radics have included a whole host of characters, including the 'damned whores of Parramatta's Female factory, the currency lasses, Caroline Chisolm's God's police, the forgotten diarists, the suffragettes, the madams, and the modern campaigner's for equality' (Age 17 July 1976, p2).

The musical element requires all characters to sing, as well as at least one male and one female to be capable of playing a guitar and/or other instrument. Much of the musical material is made up of well-known traditional songs.

Play with music.

Written by Tim Robertson and several 'ghost' writers from the Australian Performing Group, Mary Shelley and the Monsters is described by its author as 'a scatty and hallucinant reverie about the life and times of Mary Shelley' the narrative focuses on Mary's creation of Frankenstein and a North Italian holiday that ended with her husband's death by drowning." In his foreword to the Yakandandah publication, writes further : 'It is a musical fantasy... the Romantic Glorification of the Imagination and Death undermined by the sex-war and physical dissolution. [It is] an attempt to spin a web between Goya and Gertrude Stein. As a performance piece its sine qua non is an ensemble of open, acrobatic, musical clowns of a poetic bent, with a taste for the macabre and an impulse to excess' (p5). Leonard Radic has also described the play as 'stylistically erratic, lurching from burlesque to opera and back again to pantomime or melodrama with a hint of Dada, some phallus play and a hearty scene of grand guignol thrown in for good measure at the end' (Age 27 March 1975, p2).

The dramatic action is set in a murky grotto, which turns out to be a Shelley Museum in Rome, the story line essentially looks at Shelley's relationship with the male monsters in her life - husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and her father William Godwin.