Modern Australian Drama: Haunted by the Past

Abstract

Australian drama is a drama of the modern era and is modelled on the European realist form. As a dramatic form it is primarily constituted around the figure of the playwright, the written dramatic text and the theatrical performance of the text. Its evolution as a national drama has occurred as European themes, language, character and setting are replaced with local character, situation and voice. By the 1960s, scenography and performance style came to reflect Australian locations, culture and voices. In the twenty-first century, a further change is discernible in dramatic texts that radically alter the temporality of modern drama to interrogate the unresolved, perhaps irreconcilable, consequences of the past and to think more critically about the co-presence of past, present and future. The plays discussed in this chapter, Holy Day (2001) and When the Rain Stops Falling (2009) by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell, are but two of a larger body of dramatic works from different playwrights that might equally belong to this category. Bovell’s plays are chosen, however, for their historicized, epic representations of European settlement and hence lend themselves to the reflexive modernities that parallel the rise of more liquid forms discussed in later chapters. Reflexive modernity is understood here as creative practice that opposes a colonizing, imperialist modernity from the perspective of a more contemporary liquid modernity that bears its legacy.