Two volumes of the Currency Press “Modern Drama”series edited , and including an introduction by Katherine Brisbane, from which the following precis are taken.

Shipwreck by Douglas Stewart

Stewart was well known, both as a poet writing in the classic mode and for his radio plays:  Fire on the Snow (1941), Ned Kelly (1942), The Golden Lover (1943) and Shipwreck (1949).

The play tells the story of the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia, wrecked off the West Australian coast in 1629 and the murderous mutiny/insurrection that followed. Brisbane writes the play ‘represents the end of the poetic classicism he had advocated both as a writer and an editor,but he blazed a trail towards a visionary theatre which writers like Patrick White and Dorothy Hewett soon followed.

Sky Without Birds by Oriel Gray

Gray, who wrote mainly for the stage and television  was a political activist, influenced by the American agit-prop and social-realist theatre movements. In plays like Had We But World Enough (1948) Sky Without Birds (1952) Burst of Summer (1960) she wrote ‘domestic dramas with themes selected to expose prejudice or racism’.

This play, set in a remote railway siding on the edge of the desert deals in part with the then quite common ambivalence towards the many European refugees entering Australia under post-war immigration schemes.

Night of the Ding Dong by Ralph Peterson

Peterson was a skilled comedy writer. Given that’ Australia’s middle  class theatre tradition had been almost entirely British many such talents sought success in the United Kingdom, Peterson worked for the BBC in the 1950’s and had two stage plays produced there, Night of the Ding Dong in 1954′.

The plays 1870 setting, still in the shadow of the Crimean War, uses the then popular fears of a Russian Invasion to make fun of Australia’s provincialism.

The Day Before Tomorrow by Ric Throssell

For Throssell, an upbringing with ‘a Communist, literary, mother and a war-hero father was followed by a career in the Department of External Affairs. A leading actor and director for the Canberra Repertory for which he wrote several plays, spending a term at Australia’s Embassy  in Moscow in the 1940’s. Though listed as “a person of interest” in the 1954-55 Petrov Commission he was exonerated, later giving himself over to performance and writing’. The Day Before Tomorrow produced in 1956, is a bleak look at the price of a family’s survival in a world devastated by nuclear weapons.

Plays of the 60’s Vol  1 

Burst of Summer by Oriel Gray

Gray, who wrote mainly for the stage and television was a political activist, influenced by the American agit-prop and social-realist theatre movements. In plays like Had We But World Enough (1948) Sky Without Birds (1952) Burst of Summer (1960) she wrote ‘domestic dramas with themes selected to expose prejudice or racism’.

The play’s connections lie chiefly in the contemporary American theatre, in the steamy heat of Tennessee Williams and the moral issues of Arthur Miller and William Inge.

In structure the play is typical of its time. A two-act play with one main set and a theme of domestic confrontation ending in violence. What drives the play is Oriel Gray’s social conscience. The characters are themselves, but they are also responsible for the society they have made; and there is an inevitability about the passage of events.

The Well by Jack McKinney

After service in WW1 McKinney wrote: radio serial The Noonans, Crucible  a novel drawn from his war-time experiences, short stories,plays  The Well (1960) and Down in That Poor Country. 

The derivation of The Well is entirely Australian.  As his inspiration McKinney has Steele Rudds country comedy, On our Selection, neither the plot, nor the characters are complex.  Like Rudd’s work it examines and exploits the slow rhythms of speech employed by isolated people, used to monotony.  McKinneys absorption is with the language, with creating , as he told Leslie Rees, “semi-literate, near articulate characters…presented with truth”.

The Season at Sarsaparilla by Patrick White

White’s stellar career began as a playwright. His works include The Ham Funeral(1961), A Cheery Soul(1963),  Signal Driver(1982), and Shepherd on the Rocks(1987). He reached a wider audience with his novels, notably Voss, Riders in the Chariot and The Tree of Man, receiving a Nobel Prize for Literature, and returned to writing for the stage with this play in 1962.

Like McKinney his interests were in liberating Australian stage-writing from the ‘cultural cringe’ then smothering it. He described this play as a “charade of suburbia, a play of shadows rather than substance”, offering a eulogy to what had been damned as the greatest obstacle to an Australian culture- the inarticulate Australian voice.

The Promised Woman by Theodore Patrikareas

Patrikareas  emigrated in 1958 to Australia and wrote prolifically: plays including Mnistires( The Pretenders),O Theos apo tin Afstralia (The Uncle from Australia) and Dihasmeni (The Divided Heart), poems, stories and journalism about Greek-Australian relations, continuing this work on his return to Greece in 1973.

The Promised Woman (1963), his first produced play skilfully conveys all the emotions familiar to the emigrant: the driven nature of most of the men, the oppression of the women, the defection of the children. Originally written and performed in Greek it was translated into English as a successful filmscript The Promised Woman (1974), and subsequently performed onstage at Sidetrack Theatre, Marrackville in 2000.