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The Chapel Perilous
''The Chapel Perilous'', Dorothy Hewett's third full-length play, was written in 1970. The play is Expressionist in style, where the theatrical spectacle dominates the plot. It introduces Sally Banner, a picaresque heroine moving without success through a search for love and freedom, while oppressed by authority figures and disappointed by unsatisfactory lovers. She is, in brief succession, a defiant schoolgirl, a promiscuous wartime student, a Communist, a suburban de facto, and a well-known poet. It is recognised as Hewett's best play. Characters The eleven principal characters are played by five actors. They are * Sally Banner: - A poet, aged 16 to 61, rebellious and self-absorbed * Michael: - Her lover, aged 17 to 40s. Rough, demanding and cruel * Authority Figure I:- "The Headmistress": an Englishwoman with intellect and dignity - “The Mother”: ages from middle-age to senility. Neurotic and overbearing * Authority Figure II:- “The Canon”: ageing, weak and hypocr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dorothy Hewett
Dorothy Coade Hewett (21 May 1923 – 25 August 2002) was an Australian playwright, poet and author, and a romantic feminist icon. In writing and in her life, Hewett was an experimenter. As her circumstances and beliefs changed, she progressed through different literary styles: Modernist poetry, modernism, socialist realism, Expressionism (theatre), expressionism and ''List of avant-garde artists, avant garde''. She was a member of the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, which informed her work during that period. In her lifetime she had 22 plays performed, and she published nine collections of poetry, three novels and many other prose works. There have been four anthologies of her poetry. She received many awards and has been frequently included in Australian literature syllabuses at schools and universities. She was regularly interviewed by the media in her later years, and was often embroiled in controversy, even after her death. Early life and education Do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Waste Land
''The Waste Land'' is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's ''The Criterion'' and in the United States in the November issue of ''The Dial''. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and the Sanskrit mantra " Shantih shantih shantih". Eliot's poem combines the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Dante's ''Divine Comedy'', as well as Shakespeare, Buddhism, and the Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Feminist Plays
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male point of view and that women are treated unjustly in these societies. Efforts to change this include fighting against gender stereotypes and improving educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women. Feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women's rights, including the right to vote, run for public office, work, earn equal pay, own property, receive education, enter contracts, have equal rights within marriage, and maternity leave. Feminists have also worked to ensure access to contraception, legal abortions, and social integration and to protect women and girls from rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. Changes in female dress standards and acceptable physical activities ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian Plays
Theatre of Australia refers to the history of the performing arts in Australia, or produced by Australians. There are theatrical and dramatic aspects to a number of Indigenous Australian ceremonies such as the corroboree. During its colonial period, Australian theatrical arts were generally linked to the broader traditions of English literature and to British and Irish theatre. Australian literature and theatrical artists (including Aboriginal as well as Anglo-Celtic and multicultural migrant Australians) have over the last two centuries introduced the culture of Australia and the character of a new continent to the world stage. Individuals who have contributed to theatre in Australia and internationally include Sir Robert Helpmann, Dame Joan Sutherland, Barry Humphries, David Williamson, Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Judy Davis, Jim Sharman, Tim Minchin and Baz Luhrmann. Notable theatrical institutions include the Sydney Opera House, and the National Institute of Dramatic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1971 Plays
* The year 1971 had three partial solar eclipses (February 25, July 22 and August 20) and two total lunar eclipses (February 10, and August 6). The world population increased by 2.1% this year, the highest increase in history. Events January * January 2 – 66 people are killed and over 200 injured during a crush in Glasgow, Scotland. * January 5 – The first ever One Day International cricket match is played between Australia and England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. * January 8 – Tupamaros kidnap Geoffrey Jackson, British ambassador to Uruguay, in Montevideo, keeping him captive until September. * January 9 – Uruguayan president Jorge Pacheco Areco demands emergency powers for 90 days due to kidnappings, and receives them the next day. * January 12 – The landmark United States television sitcom ''All in the Family'', starring Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker, debuts on CBS. * January 14 – Seventy Brazilian political prisoners are re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radio Drama
Radio drama (or audio drama, audio play, radio play, radio theatre, or audio theatre) is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story: "It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension." Radio drama includes plays specifically written for radio, docudrama, dramatized works of fiction, as well as plays originally written for the theatre, including musical theatre, and opera. Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s radio drama began losing its audience. However, it remains popular in much of the world. Recordings of OTR ( old-time radio) survive today in the audio archives of collectors, libraries and museums, as well ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carole Ferrier
Carole Ferrier is an Australian feminist academic. She is Professor#Most other English-speaking countries, Professor in English Literature, English at the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. She has many published works about feminism, socialism, literature and culture. She has been the editor of the radical feminist academic journal ''Hecate (journal), Hecate'' since its inception in 1975. Early life Ferrier was awarded a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours degree#Honours degrees and academic distinctions, Honours in London, and a PhD in New Zealand, at the University of Auckland. The title of her doctoral thesis was ''The earlier poetry of D. H. Lawrence: a variorum text, comprising all extant incunabula and published poems up to and including the year 1919''. Ferrier helped establish the International Socialist Tendency in Australia in the 1970s, and was a prominent activist in various democratic rights struggles in Queensland fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anne Summers
Anne Summers AO (born 12 March 1945) is an Australian writer and columnist, best known as a leading feminist, editor and publisher. She was formerly First Assistant Secretary of the Office of the Status of Women in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Early life Born Ann Fairhurst Cooper in Deniliquin, New South Wales in 1945, the oldest of the six children of AHF and EF Cooper,Herd, Margaret (ed.), ''Who's Who in Australia'', 2002, 38 edn, Crown Content, Melbourne, 2002 Summers grew up in a strict Catholic household in Adelaide, South Australia, and was educated at a Catholic school in Adelaide. In her autobiography, she writes that her father (an aviation instructor) was an alcoholic and that she had a difficult relationship with her mother. Leaving school at 17, Summers left home to take up a position in a bank in Melbourne. She then worked as a bookshop assistant until 1964 when she returned to Adelaide, enrolling at the University of Adelaide in 1965 in an art ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer (; born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the radical feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England. Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, ''The Female Eunuch'' (1970), made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, it offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women were forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfil male fantasies of what being a woman entailed. Greer's subsequent work has focused o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patrick White
Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) was a British-born Australian writer who published 12 novels, three short-story collections, and eight plays, from 1935 to 1987. White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative vantage points and stream of consciousness techniques. In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature", as it says in the Swedish Academy's citation, the only Australian to have been awarded the prize.J. M. Coetzee won the award in 2003 as a South African citizen, before he became an Australian citizen in 2006. White was also the inaugural recipient of the Miles Franklin Award. Childhood and adolescence White was born in Knightsbridge, London, to Victor Martindale White and Ruth (née Withycombe), both Australians, in their apartment overlooking Hyde Park, London on 28 May 1912. His family returned to Sydney, Aust ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epic Theatre
Epic theatre (german: episches Theater) is a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners who responded to the political climate of the time through the creation of new political dramas. Epic theatre is not meant to refer to the scale or the scope of the work, but rather to the form that it takes. Epic theatre emphasizes the audience's perspective and reaction to the piece through a variety of techniques that deliberately cause them to individually engage in a different way. The purpose of epic theatre is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to see their world as it is. History The term " epic theatre" comes from Erwin Piscator who coined it during his first year as director of Berlin's Volksbühne (1924–27).Wiles (1980). Piscator aimed to encourage playwrights to address issues related to "contemporary existence." This new subject matter would ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communist Party Of Australia
The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), known as the Australian Communist Party (ACP) from 1944 to 1951, was an Australian political party founded in 1920. The party existed until roughly 1991, with its membership and influence having been in a steady decline since its peak in 1945. Like most communist parties in the west, the party was heavily involved in the labour movement and the trade unions. Its membership, popularity and influence grew significantly during most of the interwar period before reaching its climax in 1945, where the party achieved a membership of slightly above 22,000 members. Although the party did not achieve a federal MP, Fred Paterson was elected to the Parliament of Queensland (for Bowen) at the 1944 state election. He won re-election in 1947 before the seat was abolished. The party also held office in over a dozen local government areas across New South Wales and Queensland. After nineteen years of activity, the CPA was formally banned on 15 Jun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
