Cirrus@Austlit

Surveys post-war theatrical productions of plays which articulate men's experiences at war and back home. '...this article explores the propagation of gender anxieties in performance during the post-war period of suburban expansion. In contrast with more recent productions which have sought to celebrate the survival, ingenuity and achievements of Australian men at war, productions from the post-war period were less overtly nationalistic and less assertively masculinist. ... post-war productions celebrated less the heroism of men at war than the nostalgia of their returning home' (3).

The aims of this article are 'to highlight two little-known Australian plays of the late 1950s', 'to examine their young leading men, both misfits', and 'in some sense to queer these two plays' (20). 'Linking these two plays is the display of both young men's bodies which ... is in emulation of American drama and film of the 1950s... (20).

The article examines the features of masculinity as they appear in three plays from the 1950s set in rural Australia - an environment conventionally regarded as a place of authenticy for men - and discusses the uses to which these depictions of masculinity are put. The aims of the article are in part dramaturgical: 'to think about the relationship between the scripts of the plays and the time in which they were first performed, and to ask questions about how these plays worked in relation to changing possibilities for the performance of gender' (38).

Discusses some of the dramatic shifts in identity representation and interrogation that have taken place in performance-based texts, focusing on Christine Reid's The Belle of Belfast City (1989) and Louis Nowra's Radiance (1993).

'In Darwin, community performances and postcolonial issues intersect vibrantly to create a form of what Barbara Harlow has termed "resistance literature," genres that rewrite history form the bottom and that counter the attempted erasures of official historiographies. Such Foucaldian amnesias have been vividly contested in recent years by indigenous performances of dance and drama that inscribe histories by painting their images onto dancing, singing and acting bodies in order to remember. These performances resist official forgettings, both of the cultural losses caused by enforced resettlement in "Ngapa: Rainstorm Dreaming", and of the extent of World War II Japanese raids in the "Bombing of Darwin". Performed respectively by the Lajamanu community with Darwin's Tracksdance and the Tiwi Island Dancers, these indigenous productions kept alive in Top End memory histories that were curiously suppressed in Darwin museum display and public memorials.' Source: www.adsa.edu.au/ (Sighted 07/01/2009).