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    Art War ‘44: documentary theatre from an Australian culture war
    MONAGHAN, PAUL ( 2005)
    On page four of the Sydney Morning Herald, 24th October 1944, two seemingly unrelated news items were reported. The first, CHALLENGED ART PRIZE – Court Hearing Begins, reported the commencement on the previous day of the legal challenge to William Dobell’s victory the year before in the Archibald competition for portrait painting. In what is now a well-known case, Dobell had entered a ‘portrait’ of fellow portrait painter and friend, Joshua Smith. Lower down the page, and to the left, was another important headline: LIBERAL PARTY APPROVED. Some days earlier, the same paper had reported that, if all relevant parties agreed, the title United Australia Party would disappear and all non-Labour opposition parties (except for the Country Party) would unite under a new name, The Australian Liberal Party. Here, on the same page, was notice of two events that proved to be more than incidentally linked, and which served as the basis of a theatrical production called Art War ’44, performed in the Open Stage, University of Melbourne in October 1999. I devised, directed, and co-created the work with third and fourth year undergraduate students in Theatre Studies from the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne, who also performed the piece. This work preceded by several years a similar theatrical treatment of the Dobell trial, entitled Art on Trial, written by Robert Smith and performed early in 2002. There is an intriguing confluence of events, themes, forces and people that swirl around – before, during and after - the Dobell trial, and others that resonated in a particular way in Art War '44. The human agents in this confluence (as I interpreted and 'reconstructed' it) include Sir Robert Menzies, Sir Garfield Barwick, Sir John Kerr, and John Howard, as well as William Dobell and Joshua Smith. Other significant facets include the birth of the Australian Liberal Party and of the Australian Academy of Art, and the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ art movements in Australia. Australia’s Constitutional Monarchy, the sacking of the Whitlam Labour Government in 1975, and the Republic Referendum in 1999 (one week after the performance season of the show) all make an appearance. Of course, not all of these figures and events were involved directly. But there are a number of fascinating connections between them that provided excellent material for a work of ‘documentary theatre’ (especially one created and performed in the spirit and exaggerated style of Dobell’s painting of Joshua Smith).In this paper, I briefly examine some of the trial’s more ‘theatrical’ elements (a detailed account of the trial can be found, for example, in Adams, 1983: 92-224 and Gleeson, 1964: 115-144) and aspects of its wider social, political and cultural contexts. I will also call to witness those later events involving both the people and the themes of the trial mentioned above, and detail how all these factors were structured into our work of ‘documentary theatre.’ This paper, then, is an analysis of aspects of the ‘dramaturgy’ of a work of documentary theatre. The term ‘dramaturgy’ is slippery, but here is taken to mean ‘the relation between the means of expression (the narrative material, stage space and time, formal organisation) and the vision of the world to be expressed’ (Helbo, 1991: 2). Dramaturgy, by combining ideological and aesthetic structures, involves active choices about what is included in the work, when, in what way, and the interpretive frameworks that are set up by these choices for a particular set of audiences.
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    Medea in Australia: responses to Greek tragedy in contemporary Australian theatre
    MONAGHAN, PAUL ( 2006)
    In this article I briefly examine three productions of Medea that reflect some of the dominant responses to Greek tragedy in Australia during the past twenty years. I experienced these productions at first hand in Melbourne between 1984 to 1993 – some were also performed elsewhere. To avoid preconceptions of theatrical forms I call these styles ‘hysterical/realistic’, ‘body theatre’, and ‘opera-theatre’. I have expanded my analysis of these performances more recently through archival research in preparation for a much larger project on the reception of Greek tragedy in Australia from the beginning of European settlement late in the eighteenth century to the present. Of all the extant Greek tragedies, Medea appears to have received the most attention here. As I argue in another paper that focuses on the 2005 Indigenous Australian production (Black Medea, in preparation) a number of Australian productions and adaptations of Greek tragedy invite a scathing postcolonial critique. Here I simply analyse some of the trends that the three productions of Medea illustrate. Each of them deserves a fuller analysis than is possible here.