Contemporary
Australian Theatre and
Drama
By Aimee Karas
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Contemporary Australian theatre and drama refers to Australian produced theatre
which challenges the conventions, forms and styles of traditional theatre in order to engage
and inform the audience with the social and personal concerns of the characters on stage.
Jane Harrison’s Stolen and Matt Cameron’s Ruby Moon are two plays that challenge
the conventions and styles of traditional theatre. Both playwrights use the characters social
and personal concerns to engage the audience, using unconventional styles of theatre to help
them understand.
The play Stolen by Jane Harrison tells the stories of five different Aboriginal children
forcibly removed from their families and affected by the assimilation policy that took place
during the 20th century. The characters they portray are the archetypes for the wider
Aboriginal community, including their stories.
Harrison addresses issues of abuse, including physical, sexual and mental; the loss of
identity and culture forced upon the Indigenous community and of grief; both resolved and
unresolved.
Stolen challenges the conventions set out by traditional plays. From the first moment
in which the characters step out onto the stage, they directly address the audience and
communicate their story to people in the audience. This engages the audience straight away;
not only are they forced to watch the characters speak to them, but they are also forced to
react when the characters speak directly to them. Each character reveals a small piece of
themselves whilst communicating with the audience.
Throughout the play, direct address is used to engage the audience in the personal and
social concerns of the characters. In the scene “Adult Flashes”, the audience is subjected to
key lines that are used throughout the play to connect ideas and issues together. We relate
straight away with the character of Shirley who says “Eh! I’m gonna be a grandmother!”
and then continues later in the scene to explain “You hold a new baby again – and I had
two of my own – and it’s you that feels vulnerable. Kate, I held you once in my arms and
I didn’t get to hold you for another twenty-five years.”
The audience is engaged immediately with the character of Shirley and want to
further their understanding of her personal and social concerns. As the play progresses and
comes to a close, the audience understands that Shirley represents the cycle of the Stolen
generations, and the struggle to find the children taken. Her son’s abduction mirrors hers with
the rain and the black car, these features being a symbol of being taken.
Because the play revolves around the characters as children, Harrison uses children’s
songs as symbols of innocence and childhood, and then changes the context of the song to
add subtext. In the scenes “Unspoken Abuse”, the children play the patty cake game whilst
questioning Ruby about her previous trips shown in “Line Up 1 and 2”. Whilst the children
play this, the audience’s understanding of Ruby’s treatment changes, and the song becomes a
symbol for a loss of innocence and faith in the system.
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This can also be said for the scene “Cleaning Routine 2”. As the children dance
around to the tune of ‘Happy Little Vegemite’s’, the audience understands that the song is
implicating that the children have no control or choice in their future. In our class workshop
of this scene, we developed our understanding of the scene while singing the song by
following the stage directions set in the script.
As we sung the words “Because we love to work like slaves, we all adore to work
like slaves, it puts a rose in every cheek” we used the directions and pretended to be
slapped after the word cheek, which changed the context of the words. This was a powerful
technique as the song engages the audience with its childishness and then shocks them into
understanding the literal meaning behind the words they sing with the direct violence shown
onstage.
Repetition is used throughout the play to connect and link ideas and the characters
social and personal concerns. The character of Ruby has several key lines that she repeats to
link her child self with the deranged character the Australian government created through
years of abuse and neglect from the government, such as “Where are you?” which indicates
her struggle with the loss of her family and culture.
This quote is repeated several times throughout the play and repeated in her final
scene when she is reunited with her family, but is in such a mental state that she cannot
connect with the family she lost. By repeating key character lines, the audience is engaged
and makes connections between the effects being taken had on Ruby as child.
This can also be said for the character of Jimmy. In the scene “Adult Flashes”, Jimmy
sets the audience up for the attitude held by his character by beginning with “I’m finally
gunna meet my mother.” this being said in a foreboding tone. The audience cannot make
connections with this until further on in the play when Jimmy and his mother are packing
presents in the scene “What Do You Do?”.
This scene sets the audience up for a reunion of mother and child, and crushes this
hope when Jimmy’s mother dies on stage. Jimmy, unaware that he will never meet his mother
repeats his first line with hope rather than with grief.
His line is repeated a final time in the last scene “Sandy at the End of the Road”, and
after watching Jimmy commit suicide in a previous scene, the audience understands that he
will finally be reunited with his mother through death – the only place where nothing can part
them.
The repetition of these lines, said with different contexts, helps the audience
understand Jimmy’s motivations and desires of life and engages the audience by forcing them
to watch Jimmy’s struggle to find and reunite with his family.
The play Ruby Moon written by Matt Cameron addresses similar issues of identity,
abuse and mental health; however Cameron has used these broad themes and shaped them so
that the audience begins to question certain aspects of Australian culture. Cameron wrote
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Ruby Moon at a time when Australian culture was changing, much like contemporary
Australian theatre and drama.
Cameron manipulates Australia’s fear of child abduction and couples it with suburban
paranoia to create a thrilling, tense play that makes the audience question the identity of both
Australia and their inner most selves by using only two actors to play multiple roles.
By using this unconventional style, Cameron engages the audience by showing them
how many characters can share the same qualities, but still be completely different people to
the original source.
The audience is unable to separate the character of Sylvie from the character of
Veronica or Dawn because they have seen the same actress play the role of Sylvie. Neither
can they separate the character of Ray from Sid or Sonny Jim, thus this makes the audience
question the identities of all characters.
This can also be examined as a questioning of the identity of Australia. For many
years, Australia has attempted to isolate its culture and identity from that of Britain, however
has not been able to completely distinguish itself from the Motherland. This engages the
audience by forcing them to question their own identity.
The play uses the structure of a fairy tale to create a story-like form, using Absurdist
themes to heighten the audience’s reactions and levels of engagement. This is also done with
the use of silence throughout the play to either create or expose tension.
From the very beginning of the play, the character of Ray asks his distraught wife
Sylvie for the kiss that never comes. “These nights are getting colder, I swear… Do I get a
kiss?” this exposes the cracks within their relationship and exposes the thick layer of tension
that exists in that household.
The use of silence is also used to cast suspicion upon characters. When Ray and
Sylvie bring in the Ruby mannequin in Scene Two, the character of Ray is thrown into
suspicion when he rips the arm off the Ruby mannequin, which is symbolic of the child Ruby.
The silence on stage crackles with tension when he brutally rips the arm off the doll.
The audience begins to question whether he had a part in Ruby’s abduction as well as
question the true identity of Ray. This suspicion is heightened when he tells Sylvie,
“Nothing. It fell off. It’s okay baby.”
Throughout the play there a references to the story of Red Riding Hood by Dulcie,
what with Ruby Moon wearing a red dress, being an innocent child and disappearing whilst
visiting her grandmother. “How does the story end, Raymond? With the little girl and the
wolf? Does it end well?” The audience sees the connections between the stories and
understands the subtext of what Dulcie is trying to say; there is no happy ending.
Even the voice of Ruby sets the audience up for an Absurdist style play, when she
begins the play by whispering “It begins like a fairy tale.” The audience applies this to their
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understanding of the characters and recognises how the horror of losing a child can begin a
cycle of events, much like the loss of a child.
The family begins a set pattern of how they live their everyday lives, searching for the
child, questioning neighbours, and even questioning themselves. This can also be applied for
the social and personal concerns of the characters in Harrison’s Stolen. Shirley, Jimmy and
Anne all search for that missing family figuring, asking questions about the past and present
to find that missing link.
Sylvie herself refers to their life as being like a story at the end of the play, while
forcing Ray to read from their book. She refuses to allow the story to end how it does, “Don’t
let it end like that Ray… It can’t end like that”. The character of Carl is almost similar to
that of a mad scientist from a children’s story, although to adults her represents the guilty
conscience in us all. This engages the audience to follow the ideas and conventions of a fairy
tale.
The characters of Sylvie and Ray are used to communicate the personal concerns of
families who are struggling with grief within the family unit. Ray represents the parent who
wants to move on, put the past behind them and recreate their life, whilst Sylvie represents
the polar opposite; she is so anchored in her grief that she cannot bear to move on with life
until she is reunited with her child.
As well as this, Sylvie and Ray’s neighbours represent both the characters and
Australia’s social concerns about who our neighbours truly are. Cameron comments on how,
although we know the names of our neighbours, we don’t truly know the intentions or the
real character behind the closed door.
The character of Sid is representative of the fear of paedophilia in our community and
how society judges those who seem different or strange. “She played with me.” He says,
which can have different connotations depending on how the audience perceives him.
Dawn Berger is the grotesque parody of the self-conscious teenager who strives for
perfection, whose actions make her seem mysteriously dangerous, bordering on obsessive. “I
miss babysitting for you… Where I had Ruby all to myself.”
Sonny Jim can most certainly be compared to the war heroes from generic American
military action movies, one who both simultaneously loves and hates his mother, going so far
as to say “I’d like to have her put down.” These characters all reveal their traits and force
the audience to question their innocence relating to Ruby Moon’s abduction and what they
may be hiding from either Ray, Sylvie or the audience.
The plays Stolen and Ruby Moon both address issues of grief and identity as well as
other key issues by challenging contemporary Australian drama conventions, styles and form
in order to engage and inform the audience about the social and personal concerns of the
characters. By giving the audience something to understand and take away from the
performances of the play, both Harrison and Cameron have engaged the audience through
dramatic form, style and convention.
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