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When Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, it was primarily for his novels. Less well recognised is the significance of White’s dramatic literature and his involvement in the theatre. This article offers a new analysis of White’s first notable breakthrough into theatre and drama, The Ham Funeral, which he wrote in postwar London and which was produced in Adelaide in 1961. This article argues that a modernist idiom of 20th-century Australian drama can be found in this play that laid the groundwork for a poetics of language, image and theatricality. The play’s aesthetic modernism is found primarily in the blend of expressionist and surrealist elements, the poetic language, the alienated creative subject and the representation of sexuality and the unconscious. White’s thematics also become political, concerned with power, masculinity and gendered assumptions about rationality and emotion, poetry and the body. Having lived in London during the interwar years, White was also part of the networks that included Australian-born artists, and he was exposed to influences from visual arts as well as theatre. Of these, the artist William Dobell was central to the genesis of The Ham Funeral, as was the Polish-born modernist artist S. Ostoja-Kotkowski, who was critical to the design of the brooding expressionist set that set the standard for subsequent stage realisations of the play.

In the early twenty-first century, when the environment, climate change, degraded ecosystems and species loss are urgent global problems (IPCC, 2014), the politics of human progress and its effects on land, climate and species are a major concern for modernity's governments, sciences, arts and humanities. Theatre that considers itself socially and politically engaged will increasingly give priority to an ecological consciousness of the human in relation to the non- human just as it has for socialist, feminist, race and sexual politics.

This article uses historical-ecological insights for a re-reading of two little-known mid-twentieth-century Australian plays, Oriel Gray’s The Torrents and Eunice Hanger’s Flood, which highlight developments relevant to the environmental disasters of today. In particular, the article focuses on the significance of key cultural assumptions embedded in the texts – and a revival of The Torrents in 2019 – including those to do with land use in a period of accelerating development. This approach offers new insights into the dominance of mining, irrigation, and dam-building activities within the Australian ethos, landscape, and economy. One of these insights is the framing of development as progressive. The article thus also examines how development projected as progressive takes place amid the continuing denial of prior occupation of the land by First Nations peoples and of knowledge systems developed over thousands of years. The intersectional settler-colonialist-ecocritical approach here seeks to capture the compounding ecosystem that is modern Australian theatre and its critique. The intention is not to apply revisionist critiques of 1950s plays but to explore the historical relationship between humans, colonialism, and the physical environment over time. Denise Varney is Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research is in modern and contemporary theatre and performance, with published work in the areas of ecocriticism, feminism, and Australian theatre. Her most recent book is Patrick White’s Theatre: Australian Modernism on Stage 1960–2018 (Sydney University Press, 2021).

This article investigates live performance in the broad geo-historical context of the Anthropocene, a contested term in recent scholarship, but one that offers a breadth of focus on human relations with its coexistent non-human other. These interrelations are examined through a range of theatrical and non-theatrical genres and sites from the Australian parliament's coal theatrics to exemplary performances by Indigenous companies Bangarra Dance Theatre and Marrugeku. It sets the scene with a visit to the Curtain Tree in the rainforests of north Queensland, Australia, arguing that the vitality and display of its root system models a special kind of reciprocity between the performative elements of the environment and the environmental elements of theatre and performance. This is traced through recent short-run immersive works, Hanna Cormick's Mermaid (2020) and Melinda Hetzel and Company's Conservatory (2020), and a rereading of a canonical Australian drama, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

In the last five years, two innovative revivals of Patrick White's early plays and at least three conferences in Australia and overseas have refocused critical interest on Australia's only Nobel Laureate in LiteratureIn 2012, the Adelaide Festival of Arts and the State Theatre Company of South Australia staged a contemporary gothic-punk-carnivalesque inspired production of White's early expressionist play The Ham Funeral, first performed in 1961Festival director, Paul Grabowski, noted that the inclusion of a new production of the play in the programme both celebrated the centenary of the writer's birth and redressed its infamous rejection by the 1960 Festival BoardThe 2012 Ham Funeral follows the acclaimed Sydney Theatre Company (STC) 2007-08 revival of White's next play, Season at Sarsaparilla, first performed in 1962STC associate director Benedict Andrews remediates the work, the first of White's plays to be set in suburban Australia, for the sensibilities of the twenty-first century in a stylish, well-funded production for contemporary audiencesThese productions point to new interest in White's theatre that is also evident in recent conferences and scholarly publications.

Climate change was the defining issue in the 2022 Australian federal election. As a new administration takes power, all sectors, including the performing arts, need to keep up the pressure. An iconic moment of “coal theatrics” in Parliament House, so labeled by the Australian media, stands in contrast to artistic performances that continue to put pressure on the framers of political and cultural policy.

Story-telling, autobiography, documentary and musical theatre are some of the ways in which Indigenous artists and theatre companies critique decades of invasion, dispossession, misrepresentation and silencing. Since the 1960s, Indigenous theatre and performance have represented diverse urban and regional perspectives on important historical and contemporary issues - especially the Stolen Generation, deaths in custody and land rights. These issues relate to the forced removal of \"light-skinned\" Aboriginal children from their families from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, the disproportionate number of Indigenous deaths in police custody relative to the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, and Indigenous claims for the recognition of prior occupation of the land and the award of Native Title. More recently, the impact of British nuclear testing at Maralinga in outback South Australia is explored in a new work, Ngapartji Ngapartji, that situates Indigenous experience within the wider context of the bombing of Hiroshima and the Cold War-led nuclear arms race of the 1950s and 1960s. Maryrose Casey and Helena Grehan have published thoughtful and challenging essays on the new political and aesthetic terrain uncovered in this performance. Ngapartji Ngapartji's linking of Maralinga and Hiroshima signifies a shift from a national to a more global perspective that is also reflected in the multi-cultural characters and cast. Critiques of the policies and practices of successive state and national governments give way in this work to a more international perspective reflecting the globalising forces of the contemporary era. The recent engagement with the global intensifies in two new Indigenous works at the 2010 Adelaide Festival: Tony Briggs' The Sapphires, a multi-cultural cast play which tells the story of an Indigenous \"Motown\" singing group that entertains the troops in Vietnam in the late 1960s, and Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu [Wrong Skin], which deals with global entertainment culture including hip-hop and Bollywood. By drawing out the global influences in Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu [Wrong Skin], this article discusses the issues of modernity, digital media, globalisation and identity in contemporary Indigenous theatre that look beyond the nation to the new horizons of the global.

An accomplished dancer, acrobat, and physical theatre performer, Hanna Cormick became ill in 2014 with a trifecta of rare genetic conditions that make her severely allergic to pollutants in the air — smoke, detergents, and food particles — and her bones and internal organs prone to dislocation. In January 2020, during Australia’s summer of unprecedented bushfires, Cormick staged The Mermaid , risking her life to make a performance about the climate emergency and how we are all vulnerable bodies at risk in a changing environment.

Radical Visions 1968-2008: The Impact of the Sixties on Australian Drama is about a generation of Australian playwrights who came of age in the sixties. This important book shows how international trends in youth radicalism and cultural change at the time contributed to the rise of interest in alternative theatre and drama in a number of locations. It follows the career of Australia's major playwrights -- Alma De Groen, Jenny Kemp, Richard Murphet, John Romeril, Stephen Sewell and David Williamson -- whose early plays were first performed at La Mama and the Pram Factory theatres in Melbourne in the sixties and seventies and who continue to make new work. The book's dual purpose is to examine the impact of the sixties on playwriting and update the scholarship on the contemporary works with close readings of the plays of the nineties and the first decade of the twenty-first century. By analysing the recent plays, the book traces the continuing impact of left wing politics and cultural change on Australian theatre and society.