Plays of the 50’s

Description

Publisher, journalist and theatre critic Katherine Brisbane edited the Currency Modern Drama Series.

For Plays of The Fifties Volume 1  Brisbane selected four plays:  Shipwreck by classicist poet Douglas Stewart, socio-political activist Oriel Gray’s Sky Without Birds, experienced radio and television writer Ralph Peterersen’s Shavian farce Night of the Ding Dong, and actor turned diplomat Ric Throssell’s, The Day Before Tomorrow.

Stewart uses the story the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia, wrecked off the Western Australian coast in 1629, and of the survivors and perpetrators of the mutinous behaviour that followed.  Gray chooses a railway outpost “on the  edge of the desert where the train tracks finish”, for her slice of outback life drama. Late Victorian  Adelaide, alive with rumours of an impending though improbable Russian invasion is the setting for  Peterson’s comedy while Throssell interrogates family relationships and conventional morality in a post nuclear war suburban world.

In her introduction Brisbane states that the authors in this volume are the precursors of an Australian theatre beginning to be heard in the post war period, and that their work has helped create the groundswell that led to public demand for our own Australian theatre.