Playing Australia explores the insights and challenges that Australian theatre can offer the international theatre community. Collectively, the essays in this book ask what Australian drama is, has been, and might be, both to Australians and non-Australians, when it is performed in national and international arenas. Playing Australia ranges widely in its discussions and includes analysis of Australian practitioners playing away from home; playing with Australian stereotypes; and the relationship between play, culture, politics and national identity.
Topics addressed in this diverse collection include: whiteness, otherness and negotiations of Aboriginal and Asian identities; Australian school and college drama; the discourse of Australian professional theatre magazines: Aboriginal Shakespeare; Australian drama and Australian cricket; the marketing of Australianness in Germany; the international successes of Tap Dogs and Cloudstreet. New histories of Australian theatre are offered and practitioners whose careers are reconsidered in detail include high wire-walker Ella Zuila, playwright May Holt, suffrage worker and playwright Inez Bensusan, classicist Gilbert Murray, and commercial playwright Haddon Chambers.
With contributions from authors as diverse as Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington and leading post-colonial critic Helen Gilbert, and interview discussion with Cate Blanchett and Tap Dogs producer Wayne Harrison, Playing Australia seeks to pay tribute to the complexities of Australian theatre experiences, to reassess Australian theatre as a significant force in the international arena and to challenge traditional thinking on what Australian theatre can be.
Recenzijos
"Susan [ Bradley Smith] and Elizabeth [ Schafer] are to be heartily congratulated on their scholarship, dedication and skill in putting together this work, a highly important addition to the scholarship of the Australian theatre." Larry Buttrose
"a highly insightful re-evaluation of cultural relations between Britain an Australia [ ] this superbly edited collection will serve the research needs of theatre and postcolonial literature scholars alike. It will undoubtedly prove a reference work in Australian theatre research for years to come." - in: Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature (June 2006)
Foreword by the Series Editor Acknowledgments Contributors
List of photographs
Susan BRADLEY SMITH and Elizabeth SCHAFER: Introduction
I. Playing Australia to Australia
1. Helen GILBERT: Millennial blues: racism, nationalism and the legacy of
empire
2. Susan CROFT: A new untravelled region in herself: women's school plays
in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia
3. Julian MEYRICK: Sightlines and bloodlines: the influence of British
theatre on Australia in the post-1945 era
4. Elizabeth SCHAFER: Reconciliation Shakespeare? Aboriginal presence in
Australian Shakespeare production
II. Playing Australia abroad: colonial enactments
5. Petra TAIT: The Australian Marvels: wire-walkers, Ella Zuila and George
Loyal, and geographies of circus gender body identity
6. Katherine NEWEY: When is an Australian playwright not an Australian
playwright? The case of May Holt
7. Elizabeth SCHAFER: A tale of two Australians: Haddon Chambers, Gilbert
Murray and the imperial London stage
8. Susan BRADLEY-SMITH: Inez Bensusan, suffrage theatres nice colonial girl
III. Playing Australia abroad: the late twentieth century
9. Michael BILLINGTON: Cricket and theatre: Australians observed
10. Richard CAVE: What price a global culture? (or can you hope to clone a
Tap Dog?)
11. Margaret HAMILTON: International fault-lines: directions in contemporary
Australian performance and the new millennium
12. Susan BRADLEY SMITH: Rhetoric, reconciliation and other national
pastimes: showcasing contemporary Australian theatre in London
13. Playing Australia in the theatre: an interview with Cate Blanchett
Index
Elizabeth Schafer is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies. She is co-editor of Australian Womens Drama, and has published widely on Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, including MsDirecting Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Theatre, Shakespeare in Production: The Taming of the Shrew.
Susan Bradley Smith is senior lecturer in English at South Bank University, London. She is co-author (as Pfisterer) of Playing With Ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the Suffrage to the Sixties, and editor of the anthology Tremendous Worlds: Australian Womens Drama, 1890-1960. Griefbox, a collection of her own plays, was published in 2001.
