School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Start date: 2003 × End date: 2003 × Author: Varney, Denise × Type: Journal (Paginated) ×

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    White-out: theatre as an agent of border patrol
    VARNEY, DENISE ( 2003)
    In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman’s 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.
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    The desire to affirm and challenge: an interview with Hannie Rayson
    VARNEY, DENISE ( 2003-04)
    Hannie Rayson is one of Australia’s leading playwrights whose career spans more than twenty years. Her first major success, Hotel Sorrento (Playbox Melbourne, 1990), won that year’s Green Room Award for Best Play as well as the Australian Writer’s Guild Award. In 1994 Richard Franklin filmed it in association with the Australian Film Finance Commission, and both the playscript (revised and reprinted in 2002) and the film as video are regularly prescribed for secondary and tertiary courses. A decade later, Life After George (MTC, 2000) broke box office records for the Melbourne Theatre Company and, amongst its many awards, was the first Australian play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Award. One could say that after Rayson’s nomination playwriting in Australia had finally been admitted to the Australian literary mainstream.