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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.
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Elizabeth Schafer is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies. She is co-editor of
Australian Women's Drama, and has published widely on Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, including
MsDirecting Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Theatre, Shakespeare in Production: 'The Taming of the Shrew'.
Susan Bradley Smith is senior lecturer in English at South Bank University, London. She is co-author (as Pfisterer) of
Playing With Ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the Suffrage to the Sixties, and editor of the anthology
Tremendous Worlds: Australian Women's Drama, 1890-1960. Griefbox, a collection of her own plays, was published in 2001.
