metamorphosis into a tree, the drought breaks, washing away the foun- dations of white civilization based there. This apocalyptic flood is per- haps the end result of the nuclear testing. The rain washes away the dust, which remains outside the natural order of things, and is essentially the residue of white civilization. In Wongar's writing, for example in the poem "The Dust", dust is not an element from which anything can be created. At the end of Karan, the river cleanses and the land slowly greens, and the scars left behind by white men are gradually healed.

ELIZABETH PERKINS

DRAMA ROUNDUP

Clem Gorman, A Fortunate Life (adapted from the novel of A.B. Facey). Sydney: Currency Press and Harvest Theatre Company, South Austra- lia, 1987. Leslie Rees, A History of Australian Drama, Vol. 2 "Austral- ian Drama 1970-1985." Revised and enlarged. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1987. Michael Gow, Away. Sydney: Currency Press and Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1986. Daniel Keene, Cho Cho San. Sydney: Currency Press, Playbox and Company B, Belvoir Street, Sydney, 1987. Jim McNeil, Collected Plays. Australian Dramatists Ser- ies. Sydney: Currency Press, 1986. Stephen Sewell, Dreams in an Empty City. Sydney: Currency Press and State Theatre Company of South Australia, 1986. David Williamson, Emerald City. Sydney: Currency Press, 1987. Gordon Francis, God's Best Country. Sydney: Currency Press and Western Australian Theatre Company, 1987. Heather Nimmo, The Hope. Sydney: Currency Press and Playbox Theatre Com- pany, Melbourne, 1987. Steele Rudd, In Australia, or The Old Selection. Edited by Richard Fotheringham. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987. John Cousins, The Inspector (adapted from Gogol's The Government Inspector). Sydney: Currency Press and Harvest Theatre Company, South Australia, 1987. Patricia Cornelius, Lilly and May. Sydney: Currency Press and Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1987. Louis Nowra, edited by Veronica Kelly. Australian Playwrights Monograph Series, General editor, Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1987. Rosemary John, Luck of the Draw. Sydney: Cur- rency Press and Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1986. Dymphna Cusack, Morning Sacrifice. Sydney: Currency Press and Grif- fin Theatre Company, 1986. Jack Davis, No Sugar. Sydney: Currency Press, 1986. Barry Dickins, Royboys. Sydney: Currency Press, 1987. Tony Strachan, State of Shock. Sydney: Currency Press, Playbox and

97 Company B, Belvoir Street, Sydney, 1986. Richard Beynon, Summer Shadows. Currency Press and Spoleto Melbourne Festival, 1986.

A muster of play texts, issued from Currency Press over twelve months, shows again the strengths of this indefatigible publishing house and the value of its co-operative policy with the Theatre Compan- ies, representing here all the States except Queensland. Queensland is rescued from oblivion once again by editors Veronica Kelly and Richard Fotheringham of the University of Queensland, and general editor Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt of Griffith University. Two eminent drama critics and editors, Kelly and Fotheringham also initiated Australasian Drama Studies, a substantial, scholarly and lively journal which has regularly appeared twice yearly since October 1981, and which offers its subscribers a series of free play texts. Veron- ica Kelly's Introduction to the monograph of Louis Nowra is an in for- mative and thoughtful summary of the present achievements of a play- wright and novelist who, her argument convincingly suggests, is "one of the most exciting living dramatists." Kelly's Introduction in itself sketches out "the territory of Australian dramatic criticism, its con- cerns, assumptions and debates", a task which she points out is under- taken by the book in greater detail. Since one of Nowra's earliest preoccupations has been the way in which human consciousness is constructed through language and is reflected in the language used by others, and the way the individual is made by the surrounding culture, Nowra's plays, his novel The Misery of Beauty (1976) and his compila- tion The Cheated(1979), are of special interest to psycho-linguists who might normally ignore dramatic texts as a field of concern. This, however, is peripheral to Nowra's achievement as a stage dramatist who has contributed to that dimension of Australian theatre which could be called "operatic", his own word, rather than "stage realistic", or the "filmic" dimension, exploited, for example by David Williamson. A fourteen page Autobiography by Nowra included in the monograph is a fascinating private account, which supplies background to some of the plays without in any way explaining the creative imagina- tion and theatrical craftsmanship that go into their making. Nowra also speaks in his lecture, reproduced from Australian Literary Studies, "Inner Voices and the First Coil", explaining his concept of his themes as "developing like a spiral"; in an interview with Jim Davidson from Meanjin; and in a video interview with Veronica Kelly. Director Rex Cramphorn and academics Veronica Kelly, Brian Kiernan, Gareth Griffiths, John McCallum and Peter Fitzpatrick con- tribute articles collected from earlier sources, providing almost as com-

98 prehensive an overview of Nowra's work as is possible at this stage. His work emerges as an impressive, unique achievement, rich in thematic significance and pre-eminently theatrical. This monograph is the first in a projected series edited by Zuber- Skerritt, which will include Patrick White, Jack Hibberd, Stephen Sewell, Dorothy Hewett, and a shorter monograph on David William- son to complement Peter Fitzpatrick's study published by Methuen. The series is fully referenced, with chronological lists of theatre works and a bibliography, and accompanied by photographs of stage productions. A series of videos, Australian Playwrights Speaking, is also available as a companion resource, compiled by Zuber-Skerritt at Griffith University. Among the most interesting of the play texts issued by Currency, all of which have something to recommend them as outlines at least of a stage performance, are Stephen Sewell's Dreams in An Empty City, Jack Davis's No Sugar and Patricia Cornelius's two-women piece, Lilly and May. Some widely acclaimed stage successes like Williamson's Emerald City, Gorman's adaptation of A.B. Facey's A Fortunate Life, and Gow's Away, are provocative reading in that although they are undeniably well written, it is not always easy to see in the script, even when foreseeing the inherent possibilities of stage projection, the qualities that brought audiences to their feet. That could be better expressed, perhaps, by saying that a script reading can reveal what these qualities are, without finding them demanding dramatically. Yet the fact that in Townsville many of the first-night audience of Away were apparently disconcerted by its mixture of comedy and seriousness, although they loved the production, indicates that the play has too much complexity to allow a facile audience response. Audiences, in the main, love and need warmth, something with which they can "identify", especially if this something does not really mirror their own lives, something not too unlike the better type of TV family soapie. A script which combines this with good roles for actors can hardly fail to be a box-office success. Only seldom will the audience reach beyond its grasp to respond whole-heartedly to theatre that attempts to do more than add zest to its melancholy and grace to its dreams. The theatre exists for its audiences, but it is the theatre itself that must persuade the audience to venture further in exploring the possibilities of theatre. Sewell's Dreams in An Empty City is an ambitious play in theme and construction, involving some forty or more characters in a two-act play comprising a Prologue and forty-three scenes. Its theme is the gross, greedy, corrupt and ruthless financial structure set up by the giant banking companies and capitalists who control the economic welfare of the modern state. Yet a careful reading of history suggests that contem- porary greed for power through money is merely a growth out of the past. Sewell establishes an allegory of two rival mediaeval war lords fighting for power, with hirelings and shepherds as their pawns, to indicate the essential shape of the struggle between the financier Simon Wilson and the business man Derek Wiesland, who sell lives more lightly than they would sell a hundred dollars worth of stock. The play is pushed beyond a Marxist analysis into a spiritual dimension, without straining the normal bounds of human psychology, by interweaving a Christian allegory, in which the disposable pawn, Chris, is an ex-priest turned actor, who is beaten and murdered on Good Friday, as the money-lenders' temple is rent in a full-scale financial crash. The detailed Christian allegory, which involves a play within the play, perhaps unne- cessarily complicates what is already a rich examination of the contem- porary financial world and of human psychology, but it is interesting to follow Sewell's ambitious attempt to mix the Marxist and Christian analysis. Jack Davis's No Sugar is an historically accurate fictionalized account of the manipulation and abuse of Aborigines in Western Aus- tralia during the "smooth the dying pillow" policy of the twenties and thirties. The play's four acts trace the struggles of the Millimurra family to survive with dignity as they are uprooted and harassed by well- meaning and vicious Government employees. Its great success overseas and in Australia not only testifies to the essential depth of the play, but also indicates how much better than polemic against the oppressor is the dramatization of the courage and dignity of the oppressed. Davis is a consummate playwright, showing a steady perfection of his chosen mode of episodic realism from Kullark (1979) and The Dreamers (1983). Although No Sugar is not particularly innovative in theme or design, it is innovative in its perfectly balanced and complex dialogue strategies. White and Aboriginal history - power, ignorance, inno- cence, oppression, loss, hopelessness, homelessness and betrayal - are summed up in three lines of dialogue: Sergeant: I've got warrants here for the arrest and apprehension of all of youse. Milly: What for? We ain't done nothin'. Sergeant: I never said you did. You're bein' transferred, every native in Northam's goin'! It is against hopelessness that No Sugar makes its stand.

100 Lilly and May by Patricia Cornelius is a well-written, economical script, with two female actors assisted by a Music Man, whose role is multiple and ambiguous. Not overtly feminist, aggressively radical, markedly comic or poignant, Cornelius's play speaks for the street- dwellers everywhere. It is a fine-drawn script for a stage performance that might seem to go nowhere in particular, but adds up to something delicate and disturbing. Summer Shadows, a family tribute by Richard Beynon, is a nostal- gic, Long Day's Journey Into Night kind of script that would succeed very well in a theatre where actors and audience have a penchant for well- written realism. Another competently realistic play is Rosemary John's Luck of the Draw, which joins Rob George's Sandy Lee Live at Nui Dat (1981) as another Australian play about Vietnam and its legacy for Australian and Vietnamese participants and their families. Heather Nimmo's The Hope takes its title from the name of an old Western Australian mining-town on the verge of another boom, which attracts the newly married Michael and Bet. In the end, it is Bet who wants to stay and who feels she has come to terms with the arid environment, and Michael who fears it will destroy them as it has destroyed others. The dialogue is economical, the speeches brief and terse, imaging the aridity and sparseness, and the toughness needed to survive them. Other titles in this series of texts will be reviewed more fully in the next issue of LiNQ. This will allow the variety of present Australian stage writing to be seen in diverse plays like Francis's God's Best Country, a dramatic confrontation in the isolated far north-west between a cattle man and the Aboriginal Development Commission, Barry Dickins' nostalgic celebration of Melbourne football, Royboys, and adaptations like Cousins' script from Gogol, and Daniel Keene's rewriting and transformation of Madame Butterfly under the title, Cho Cho San. The Aboriginal concern is also dramatized in Tony Strachan's State of Shock, based on the story of Alwyn Peter, a Queensland Aborigine charged with murder in 1979 and later released on parole. The re-printing of Dymphna Cusack's Morning Sacrifice has inter- esting implications for reader-reception theory, while Richard Fothe- ringham's edition of Steele Rudd's The Old Selection, described as possibly his best play, is an example of the successes of painstaking research in uncovering a hitherto unperformed text. A complete edition of Jim McNeil's prison plays is a welcome re-issue of these thought- provoking theatrical scripts from a tragic and gifted writer. An account of the work of Australia's first drama and theatre historian, Leslie Rees, will accompany a review of his recent update of the two volume History of Australian Drama.

101