Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

Issues for the Noughties: New plays by Australian women playwrights

Inside 2000: Elegy by Jodie Gallagher; So Wet by Samantha Bews; Like a Metaphor by Gabrielle Macdonald; Baby X by Campion Decent; Violet Inc. by Pam Leversha. Currency Press in Association with Playbox, 2000, pb., $15.95, 220 pp.

Nightfall by Joanna Murray-Smith. Currency Press in Association with Playbox, 2000, $15.95, 48 pp.

Reviewed by Maryrose Casey

Despite the shadow of past attitudes defining “real plays” as those written by Anglo males, a number of plays by women have claimed their place among the most successful work produced by major theatre companies in the last few years. Plays such as Beatrix Christian's Fred, Elizabeth Coleman's Secret Bridesmaid's Business and Hannie Rayson's Life after George. However, a new collection of plays, Inside 2000, suggests that younger women writers must negotiate more than gender issues in the challenge to have their work programmed. One of the elements that appear to contribute to the acceptance or rejection of work seems to be tied to how familiar or acceptable the attitudes and premises of the work are to members of the baby-boomer generation.

When Mark Davis' Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism was first published in 1997 exploring the near monopoly of baby-boomer ideals and assumptions among Australia's cultural decision-makers, the response was virulent. In a sense there was nothing new in the basic premises of Davis' argument. It is traditional for each generation to struggle for space and with the legacies of previous generations. However, it often appears as if the centrality of the boomer voice has not diminished. The idea of a silenced inter-generation, younger than the boomers and older than the boomers' children, seems to have been relegated back into the inconceivable basket. The concerns of the aging boomer generation continue to dominate; daily there seem to be articles in the newspapers discussing “what life is like at fifty”. The artistic work exploring the legacy of this post-boomer experience is there. But it is rarely given a hearing on the main stages in theatre.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that, currently, theatre in Australia offers fewer and fewer opportunities for the production of new Australian work. The decreases in funding have led to fewer productions with many of the major companies extending their limited funding by arranging co-productions with each other. Where once playwrights could have submitted their work to companies in every state for inclusion in their separate seasons, now co-productions mean that seasons overlap and shrink. Recently, Playbox Theatre Company in Melbourne experimented with a way to bridge the difficulties facing playwrights and to establish space within the season for alternative voices. This experiment was called Inside 2000 and acted as a short season within the Playbox season; five new works by Australian playwrights were played in a style of repertory over five weeks. Four of these were by younger women: Elegy by Jodi Gallagher, So Wet by Samantha Bews, Like a Metaphor by Gabrielle Macdonald, and Violet Inc. by Pam Leversha.

Among the reasons stated publicly for staging this season was that the work was regarded as constituting “bolder choices and genuinely dangerous and surprising theatre”. These terms of promotion raise the question: what makes this work “dangerous” or “surprising”? Some of these texts could easily be programmed in the main season; certainly in terms of form and structure they are neither dangerous nor bold. The answer must then be in the content and the sensibility they express. Since in a range of different ways these works explore the cultural legacy of the boomers and the impact on those who followed, presumably this is at least part of what constitutes the “dangerous” quality.

Gallagher's Elegy is explicitly focused on the legacy of the baby-boomers. Elegy alternates between dirty realist drama and lyrical mysticism. The overt focus of the narrative is on two sisters, Melanie and Alice, living on the edge in St Kilda, and on Melanie's death. Through a structure that mirrors the circular nature of memory and experience, the text allows us to share splinters of Alice's struggle with grief and her search for meaning through the experiences of her sister and mother, Susan. Alice has been described by one reviewer as “one half cool, agoraphobic siren, one half scared witless of a twin like crippling identification (with her dead sister Melanie)”.

In the scene from the past interwoven with the present we discover Melanie roams the street, while Alice hides inside. Both sisters are restricted to half-lives, limiting each other's choices rather than complementing them. Susan, the mother, is described in the character notes as an “unreconstructed hippie”, operating with “a lack of responsibility disguised as self reliance, a belief that she will always be young and daring” and that aging does not apply to her. She demands that her daughters treat her as a contemporary. Susan is a study of many baby-boomer assumptions followed through without review. One of the results for her daughters, as Melanie remarks, is that she taught them to “believe in nothing or everything which is just as bad”.

Samantha Bews' So Wet, explores a similar line. The struggle to “be what you want to be, do what you want to do”, as the lyrics of songs in the 1960s advised, is followed through implicitly in the text. The protagonist, Silv, is a young woman attempting to live successfully in the corporate environment as an assertive and sexual young woman. She has chosen to be bold, outspoken, and dynamic. The result, in the structureless world of Silv's life, is a frantic search for sensation to close out her growing sense of loss and failure.

The characters bumble through a big night out, through parties and moments of distress, determined to have a good time. Silv is selfish, shallow and superficial. The only time she reveals vulnerability is when she addresses the Geisha, a Japanese dress in a shop window. Searching for guidance, she chooses a symbol that is all surface and artifice. Juxtaposed to Silv's frantic rush are the moments where her “real” life is presented to the audience. Men she knows from work talk about her as untrustworthy. Virginia, her replacement, is a suitable person, a proper woman, who is going to be married soon and is a safe choice. Only Silv's friend Anna who accepts her weaknesses emerges as a likable character.

The choices offered for ways in which the modern young woman can live her life are frustratingly restrictive. The result for Silv is failure and a reckless disregard for others that is often bleak and aggravating. Both Elegy and So Wet explore in very different ways a search for meaning in a world proclaimed as having no limits, but offering the women characters no access. In Violet Inc. Leversha explores similar messages from a different perspective.

Violet Inc. is two linked short plays, Seeing Violet and Tunnel Vision, narrating two perspectives of the same people at different times. Violet Inc. is an examination of the impact of the processes of aging on idealistic and ambitious young people. The text shares with Elegy a questioning of the grip of an older generation - the boomers - on the younger generations. Seeing Violet gives us a story about an artist couple in the 1960s, Violet and High, sequestered in the Dandenongs. They are revered as counter-culture icons by a younger couple, Isabel and Ivan. When Violet dies suddenly, she reappears to give advice to Isabel who has replaced her as Hugh's lover. Meanwhile, the younger man, Ivan, has gone to London to further his work as an artist. In Tunnel Vision, set thirty years later, what was avant-garde in one generation is now assimilated into the mainstream. Ivan and Isabel now operate their own myths about themselves and their past.

These plays, with the others in the collection, such as Campion Decent's Baby X ( a comedy about two lesbians who ask a gay male friend to act as sperm donor) express lives and sensibilities that are not usually seen on main stages, except when ghettoised as “issue” plays. In contrast, Joanna Murray-Smith's Nightfall, produced by Playbox as part of it main season in November 1999, whilst it considers a breach between parents and child, does not interrogate generational values outside the specific parent/child relationship.

In Nightfall, Emily and Edward Kingsley are waiting to see their daughter for the first time since she left without a word seven years earlier. The doorbell rings and instead of their daughter, on the doorstep is another woman. This stranger, Kate, declares that it is her task to “make the process safe” for the daughter, Cora, to see them. Murray-Smith manipulates language use as a way of exploring the levels of non-communication and appearances. The narrative explores the Kingsleys' relationship with a ruthless honesty, with the character of Kate acting as a device to focus the stripping away of their illusions of success and respectability.

In Nightfall, the voices we hear are the parents'; the daughter is discussed within the image of the child/adolescent. Likewise, in Hannie Rayson's Life After George, the women are either over fifty, or twenty. The life experience and choices of women in between those ages is not represented. This gap in programming and publication not only ghettoises the sensibilities of artists and their expression, it also ghettoises their potential audience.

Maryrose Casey is a Melbourne reviewer.

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

Issues for the Noughties: New plays by Australian women playwrights Inside 2000: Elegy by Jodie Gallagher; So Wet by Samantha Bews; Like a Metaphor by Gabrielle Macdonald; Baby X by Campion Decent; Violet Inc. by Pam Leversha. Currency Press in Association with Playbox, 2000, pb., $15.95, 220 pp. Nightfall by Joanna Murray-Smith. Currency Press in Association with Playbox, 2000, $15.95, 48 pp. Reviewed by Maryrose Casey Despite the shadow of past attitudes defining “real plays” as those written by Anglo males, a number of plays by women have claimed their place among the most successful work produced by major theatre companies in the last few years. Plays such as Beatrix Christian's Fred, Elizabeth Coleman's Secret Bridesmaid's Business and Hannie Rayson's Life after George. However, a new collection of plays, Inside 2000, suggests that younger women writers must negotiate more than gender issues in the challenge to have their work programmed. One of the elements that appear to contribute to the acceptance or rejection of work seems to be tied to how familiar or acceptable the attitudes and premises of the work are to members of the baby-boomer generation. When Mark Davis' Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism was first published in 1997 exploring the near monopoly of baby-boomer ideals and assumptions among Australia's cultural decision-makers, the response was virulent. In a sense there was nothing new in the basic premises of Davis' argument. It is traditional for each generation to struggle for space and with the legacies of previous generations. However, it often appears as if the centrality of the boomer voice has not diminished. The idea of a silenced inter-generation, younger than the boomers and older than the boomers' children, seems to have been relegated back into the inconceivable basket. The concerns of the aging boomer generation continue to dominate; daily there seem to be articles in the newspapers discussing “what life is like at fifty”. The artistic work exploring the legacy of this post-boomer experience is there. But it is rarely given a hearing on the main stages in theatre. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that, currently, theatre in Australia offers fewer and fewer opportunities for the production of new Australian work. The decreases in funding have led to fewer productions with many of the major companies extending their limited funding by arranging co-productions with each other. Where once playwrights could have submitted their work to companies in every state for inclusion in their separate seasons, now co-productions mean that seasons overlap and shrink. Recently, Playbox Theatre Company in Melbourne experimented with a way to bridge the difficulties facing playwrights and to establish space within the season for alternative voices. This experiment was called Inside 2000 and acted as a short season within the Playbox season; five new works by Australian playwrights were played in a style of repertory over five weeks. Four of these were by younger women: Elegy by Jodi Gallagher, So Wet by Samantha Bews, Like a Metaphor by Gabrielle Macdonald, and Violet Inc. by Pam Leversha. Among the reasons stated publicly for staging this season was that the work was regarded as constituting “bolder choices and genuinely dangerous and surprising theatre”. These terms of promotion raise the question: what makes this work “dangerous” or “surprising”? Some of these texts could easily be programmed in the main season; certainly in terms of form and structure they are neither dangerous nor bold. The answer must then be in the content and the sensibility they express. Since in a range of different ways these works explore the cultural legacy of the boomers and the impact on those who followed, presumably this is at least part of what constitutes the “dangerous” quality. Gallagher's Elegy is explicitly focused on the legacy of the baby-boomers. Elegy alternates between dirty realist drama and lyrical mysticism. The overt focus of the narrative is on two sisters, Melanie and Alice, living on the edge in St Kilda, and on Melanie's death. Through a structure that mirrors the circular nature of memory and experience, the text allows us to share splinters of Alice's struggle with grief and her search for meaning through the experiences of her sister and mother, Susan. Alice has been described by one reviewer as “one half cool, agoraphobic siren, one half scared witless of a twin like crippling identification (with her dead sister Melanie)”. In the scene from the past interwoven with the present we discover Melanie roams the street, while Alice hides inside. Both sisters are restricted to half-lives, limiting each other's choices rather than complementing them. Susan, the mother, is described in the character notes as an “unreconstructed hippie”, operating with “a lack of responsibility disguised as self reliance, a belief that she will always be young and daring” and that aging does not apply to her. She demands that her daughters treat her as a contemporary. Susan is a study of many baby-boomer assumptions followed through without review. One of the results for her daughters, as Melanie remarks, is that she taught them to “believe in nothing or everything which is just as bad”. Samantha Bews' So Wet, explores a similar line. The struggle to “be what you want to be, do what you want to do”, as the lyrics of songs in the 1960s advised, is followed through implicitly in the text. The protagonist, Silv, is a young woman attempting to live successfully in the corporate environment as an assertive and sexual young woman. She has chosen to be bold, outspoken, and dynamic. The result, in the structureless world of Silv's life, is a frantic search for sensation to close out her growing sense of loss and failure. The characters bumble through a big night out, through parties and moments of distress, determined to have a good time. Silv is selfish, shallow and superficial. The only time she reveals vulnerability is when she addresses the Geisha, a Japanese dress in a shop window. Searching for guidance, she chooses a symbol that is all surface and artifice. Juxtaposed to Silv's frantic rush are the moments where her “real” life is presented to the audience. Men she knows from work talk about her as untrustworthy. Virginia, her replacement, is a suitable person, a proper woman, who is going to be married soon and is a safe choice. Only Silv's friend Anna who accepts her weaknesses emerges as a likable character. The choices offered for ways in which the modern young woman can live her life are frustratingly restrictive. The result for Silv is failure and a reckless disregard for others that is often bleak and aggravating. Both Elegy and So Wet explore in very different ways a search for meaning in a world proclaimed as having no limits, but offering the women characters no access. In Violet Inc. Leversha explores similar messages from a different perspective. Violet Inc. is two linked short plays, Seeing Violet and Tunnel Vision, narrating two perspectives of the same people at different times. Violet Inc. is an examination of the impact of the processes of aging on idealistic and ambitious young people. The text shares with Elegy a questioning of the grip of an older generation - the boomers - on the younger generations. Seeing Violet gives us a story about an artist couple in the 1960s, Violet and High, sequestered in the Dandenongs. They are revered as counter-culture icons by a younger couple, Isabel and Ivan. When Violet dies suddenly, she reappears to give advice to Isabel who has replaced her as Hugh's lover. Meanwhile, the younger man, Ivan, has gone to London to further his work as an artist. In Tunnel Vision, set thirty years later, what was avant-garde in one generation is now assimilated into the mainstream. Ivan and Isabel now operate their own myths about themselves and their past. These plays, with the others in the collection, such as Campion Decent's Baby X ( a comedy about two lesbians who ask a gay male friend to act as sperm donor) express lives and sensibilities that are not usually seen on main stages, except when ghettoised as “issue” plays. In contrast, Joanna Murray-Smith's Nightfall, produced by Playbox as part of it main season in November 1999, whilst it considers a breach between parents and child, does not interrogate generational values outside the specific parent/child relationship. In Nightfall, Emily and Edward Kingsley are waiting to see their daughter for the first time since she left without a word seven years earlier. The doorbell rings and instead of their daughter, on the doorstep is another woman. This stranger, Kate, declares that it is her task to “make the process safe” for the daughter, Cora, to see them. Murray-Smith manipulates language use as a way of exploring the levels of non-communication and appearances. The narrative explores the Kingsleys' relationship with a ruthless honesty, with the character of Kate acting as a device to focus the stripping away of their illusions of success and respectability. In Nightfall, the voices we hear are the parents'; the daughter is discussed within the image of the child/adolescent. Likewise, in Hannie Rayson's Life After George, the women are either over fifty, or twenty. The life experience and choices of women in between those ages is not represented. This gap in programming and publication not only ghettoises the sensibilities of artists and their expression, it also ghettoises their potential audience. Maryrose Casey is a Melbourne reviewer.