At least as far back as 2002, playwright Andrew Bovell was advocating for more diversity on Australia's main stages: 'I see the same actors,' he told Hilary Glow in an interview for her book Power Plays (2007), '[and] they are invariably white and Anglo-Saxon, and I am not satisfied with that as a portrayal of our culture.'

Fourteen years later, in his new play – his first original stage work, discounting his adaptation of Kate Grenville's The Secret River for the 2013 Sydney Festival, since When the Rain Stops Falling (2008) – one more predominately white, Anglo-Saxon family populates the stage.

To note this is not to indulge in snarkiness, nor to single out Bovell from his peers, but to lament the enduring gulf between words and actions that characterises the dearth of cultural and ethnic diversity on Australian stages. You would be hard-pressed to find a playwright – or director or critic for that matter –in Australia who would disavow the need for greater plurality of faces and bodies in our theatre. But there they are again, you think as the house lights go down and another group of white, middle-class characters enumerate their familiar woes. Nobody's really to blame, you think, and anyway it's a universal story so it applies to everybody, no matter where they come from, or what they look like.