Cirrus@Austlit

'Set in the staff room of an all-girl school, 'Morning Sacrifice' interrogates the stifling sexual morality of post-War Australia. The all female cast are divided by the conflict between a waning Victorian sensibility and the sexual freedom of the coming age.

'The play is a powerful critique of how women’s sexuality was controlled by law, and hostility between women formed a barrier to emancipation.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'Setting her action in a large hospital, Miss Blewett has undertaken no simple task in dealing with nursing from both its practical and psychological aspects, complicated in two cases by individual emotional strains. The play covers the hours of one hectic night in the hospital, in which the emotional preoccupations of several of the staff intrude on their professional duties' ('Australian Play' Argus 10 March 1941, 6).

Characters

SISTER MURPHY of the day staff at St. Agnes’

PROBATIONER

SISTER RANKIN (FRANCES)

NURSE RUTH SINCLAIR 3^rd Year

NURSE JEAN SPARROW 1^st Year

NURSE WILLIAMS 1^st Year

NURSE PATSY CURTIN Junior

NURSE SMITH

NURSE ROBERTS

RUSSEL KEANE A Patient

DR. ANGUS MACREADY Resident Doctor at the Hospital

MRS. LEILA CLAYTON A patient

THE MATRON

DR. RICHARD CLAYTON

A dramatisation of "the political awakening of a guilt stricken bourgeois woman, married to a wealthy capitalist engineer, who has a Communist brother who oversees her enlightenment, and wins her love." 

Source: Nicole Moore, "The Burdens Twain or Not Forgetting Yourself: The Writing of Betty Roland's Life," Hecate 18, no. 1 (1992): 6.