Theatre

Australian Melodrama: Eighty Years of Popular Theatre by Eric Irvin

June 1982, no. 41

Mary Lord reviews 'Australian Melodrama' by Eric Irvin

It seems that going to the theatre has always been a popular activity with Australians. Popular theatre during the period covered by this book (1834–1914) staged a remarkable variety of Australian plays: operettas, melodramas, burlesques, sensation plays, and extravaganzas. On Our Selection, the first play to be called ‘Australian through and through’, opened to an audience of more than a thousand and achieved tremendous popularity.

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Factory Tested

by Mary Lord •

May 1981, no. 30

Playlab Press is an offshoot of the Queensland Playwrights Laboratory which has the aim of assisting playwrights in the development of their craft through workshopping, production and possible publication of playscripts. It seems to be, with one exception, very much a regional enterprise and all the more admirable for it. The quality and number of these scripts culled, one assumes, from a much larger number of scripts submitted for selection, suggests a wealth of unpublished and unperformed theatrical material in the rest of Australia waiting for local groups as enterprising as the Queensland Playrights Laboratory.

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Travelling North by David Williamson

by Mary Lord •

August 1980, no. 23

Mary Lord reviews 'Travelling North' by David Williamson

Is there life after fifty? David Williamson’s newest play wittily affirms that love, adventure, and increasing self-knowledge are not the exclusive preserves of the young. Frank, seventy-five, retired engineer and ex-communist, is no spring chicken but neither is he ‘defunct in the physical area’.

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