Author Description

After 'the doll' traces a quarter of a century of Australian writing for the stage, through periods of rejoicing at the long-awaited birth of a significant national drama and periods of doubt that such a thing would ever happen. It is primarily the story of particular plays and playwrights, but it is told in a way that seeks to place them in appropriate critical and social perspectives.Much of the discussion is concerned with the changing images of national identity which the plays reflect, and with the recurrent problem of evolving a stage language at once recognizable Australian and theatrically rich and interesting. the emphasis is determined by the concerns of most of the plays themselves: After 'the doll' provides terms in which these preoccupations might be distinguished and contrasted. It starts with Ray Lawler's Summer of the seventeenth doll, as the one play which, in its success, established some variations on those patterns, and departures from them, in the 'new wave' of the late nineteen-sixties, and its aftermath.