Playing Australia : : Australian theatre and the international stage / / Elizabeth Schafer, Susan Bradley Smith.

• Superior document: Australian Playwrights ; 9
• VerfasserIn: Schafer, Elizabeth,; Bradley Smith, Susan,
• TeilnehmendeR: Bradley Smith, Susan,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden : : Brill,, [2003]; ©2003
• Year of Publication: 2003
• Language: English
• Series: Australian Playwrights ; 9.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

Playing Australia explores the insights and challenges that Australian theatre can offer the international theatre community. Collectively, the essays in this book ask what Australian drama is, has been, and might be, both to Australians and non-Australians, when it is performed in national and international arenas. Playing Australia ranges widely in its discussions and includes analysis of Australian practitioners playing away from home; playing with Australian stereotypes; and the relationship between play, culture, politics and national identity. Topics addressed in this diverse collection include: whiteness, otherness and negotiations of Aboriginal and Asian identities; Australian school and college drama; the discourse of Australian professional theatre magazines: Aboriginal Shakespeare; Australian drama and Australian cricket; the marketing of Australianness in Germany; the international successes of Tap Dogs and Cloudstreet . New histories of Australian theatre are offered and practitioners whose careers are reconsidered in detail include high wire-walker Ella Zuila, playwright May Holt, suffrage worker and playwright Inez Bensusan, classicist Gilbert Murray, and commercial playwright Haddon Chambers. With contributions from authors as diverse as Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington and leading post-colonial critic Helen Gilbert, and interview discussion with Cate Blanchett and Tap Dogs producer Wayne Harrison, Playing Australia seeks to pay tribute to the complexities of Australian theatre experiences, to reassess Australian theatre as a significant force in the international arena and to challenge traditional thinking on what Australian theatre can be.

Table of Contents

Foreword by the Series Editor Acknowledgments Contributors -- List of photographs -- Susan BRADLEY SMITH and Elizabeth SCHAFER: Introduction -- I. Playing Australia to Australia -- 1. Helen GILBERT: Millennial blues: racism, nationalism and the legacy of empire -- 2. Susan CROFT: 'A new untravelled region in herself': women's school plays in late -- nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia -- 3. Julian MEYRICK: Sightlines and bloodlines: the influence of British theatre on Australia in the post-1945 era -- 4. Elizabeth SCHAFER: Reconciliation Shakespeare? Aboriginal presence in Australian Shakespeare production -- II. Playing Australia abroad: colonial enactments -- 5. Petra TAIT: 'The Australian Marvels': wire-walkers, Ella Zuila and George Loyal, and geographies of circus gender body identity -- 6. Katherine NEWEY: When is an Australian playwright not an Australian playwright? The case of May Holt -- 7. Elizabeth SCHAFER: A tale of two Australians: Haddon Chambers, Gilbert Murray and the imperial London stage -- 8. Susan BRADLEY-SMITH: Inez Bensusan, suffrage theatre's nice colonial girl -- III. Playing Australia abroad: the late twentieth century -- 9. Michael BILLINGTON: Cricket and theatre: Australians observed -- 10. Richard CAVE: What price a global culture? (or can you hope to clone a Tap Dog?) -- 11. Margaret HAMILTON: International fault-lines: directions in contemporary Australian performance and the new millennium -- 12. Susan BRADLEY SMITH: Rhetoric, reconciliation and other national pastimes: showcasing contemporary Australian theatre in London -- 13. Playing Australia in the theatre: an interview with Cate Blanchett -- Index.