A Dusty Hoard of Unloved Plays

All Australian plays are rubbish, apart from those which are underrated and underplayed. But which are which?

The website australianplays.org, operated by the Australian Script Centre, promotes, publishes and sells play scripts. Funded by the Tasmanian, New South Wales and Commonwealth governments, it holds 2225 scripts by 909 playwrights. It’s a glossy treasure trove—or a hoarders’ palace. It promotes itself as “The definitive online destination for quality Australian playwriting. Featuring the combined catalogues of Australia’s leading theatrical publishers.” Many of the works have been published under its own imprint as PDF files, while orders for physical books from the publishers it showcases are forwarded to them to arrange delivery.

The Australian Script Centre has been collecting plays since 1979. Its archive holds performed and unperformed and never-will-be-performed texts: “Scripts are accepted into the catalogue after a rigorous selection process; all are production-ready and many have won or been shortlisted for major awards.” Play texts or drafts are not “production-ready” if the text has not gone through a rehearsal period and been presented on stage. The “rigorous selection process” and publishing should include basic professional editing, but they don’t. Each PDF text includes a note stating that it is an “unedited manuscript as provided to us by the playwright. We distribute in good faith; however it may contain layout inconsistencies or typographic errors.”

For a fee, subscribers are able to read many of the online texts, and there is a useful extract button which allows the opening pages to be read online for free. The site offers copy and production licensing assistance—which seems to consist of simply passing on production requests. There is no indication of which of its plays are currently being performed, or where. This essential intrusion of reality would be the simplest means of promoting the site’s validity, and assessing the real assistance it gives playwrights.

There is an immense amount of work here, some good and some not, and probably most will never be read. Nineteenth-century photographic negatives were printed on glass. They are a fragile historic artefact. When a San Francisco photographic studio closed down, the poet Joaquin Miller bought twenty thousand of them. He liked flowers more than photography, or history, and needed the glass for his conservatory. “One by one in the bath of chemicals,” he said. “And now they’re all gone—just plain panes of glass letting God’s sunshine in on my roses.” And some of God’s sunshine is just what australianplays.org desperately needs.

The website, which probably seemed a good idea to arts bureaucrats, is an example of how arts funding works in practice. Open australianplays.org and you will find an attractive, expensive homepage. At the top of the page is a large dominating display frame with three changing images. Today, on the first day of March, the principal graphic is advertising a special offer which finished at the end of January. This subsidised arts body employs a staff of four, and has an eight-person board, which includes three playwrights. For the whole of February the pleasing photo of colourful streamers, taken from the 2018 Sydney Festival poster, has been offering site visitors the possibility of reading, for free, three plays that were presented in the festival. Click through to accept the offer and you find it expired over a month ago.

Australianplays.org also produced eight videos promoting theatrical events during the festival. Online since early January, the number of views each has had ranges from eleven to 108. No one is interested, not even their own staff and directors, who obviously haven’t all bothered to view all the videos. And surely neither have bureaucrats who work in the government organisations which fund the website. And if they are not interested, neither is the public.

The second image which slides into view promotes a commissioned essay by Darwin-based playwright Mary Anne Butler. The graphic is a black-and-white photo of the author, her laptop, a dog and a van. The essay is an interesting observation on the problems a regional writer has in getting performed. In her case theatre companies in Ireland, through contacts she has made herself, are more interested in her plays than their counterparts in Australia. Butler won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for drama in 2016 and was then turned down by an un-named theatre company—everyone in the theatre business is afraid of naming names:

The play to them was immaterial. I was the unsellable product, rather than my work. I’m female. I’m middle-aged. I’m based regionally. Is there a trifecta less appealing than that in Australian theatre today?

A middle-aged white male author, wherever he lives, might answer her question in the affirmative. This is a realistic and important essay. Only three people have joined the online discussion—one is her sister.

The third image is the attractive cover for the not-yet-published script of Picnic at Hanging Rock adapted from Joan Lindsay’s novel by Tom Wright. Here is a successful Australian play which has also been performed overseas. The play was a co-production between the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne and Black Swan State Theatre Company in Perth. It was first performed in Melbourne and then Perth in 2016, played in Edinburgh in 2017 (the book blurb calls this its “European premiere”), was revived in Melbourne this year before transferring to the Barbican in London. It seems to be a successful Australian play. Except.

The first Perth and Melbourne seasons were typically short and took place because of an exchange agreement between the theatres. The famed Edinburgh season of the eighty-five-minute play was only two weeks. The revival in Melbourne ran for a week and the cast transferred to the Barbican for five performances, four evening and one matinee—a success only possible with a wasteful grant of $20,000 from Creative Victoria.

Another play, about the same length as Wright’s, was revived early this year, Yasmina Reza’s popular French play Art. Twenty-four years after its premiere it is on again in Paris. It’s been updated: francs have turned to euros. They say, whether true or not, that on its first appearance before an audience the actors were astounded to find that people were laughing, they hadn’t realised it was a comedy. That first Paris production ran for eighteen months. After opening in London, with a translation by Christopher Hampton, it occupied the stage there for eight years. In New York it played for 600 performances. We have seen it in typically short seasons in our subsidised theatres. If Reza had suffered the misfortune of being a playwright in this country and had the good fortune of having her play accepted by the gatekeepers, it would have pleased audiences for several weeks, picked up some good reviews—like everything else—and then been forgotten, unless it was taken up by the educational market. Probably a play about three non-indigenous men and a white painting would never have made it onto a stage in the first place.

Wright’s adaptation of Picnic received outstanding local and UK reviews, but it has been treated as a basket case, a one-off novelty from the colonies. To make an impact overseas it didn’t need unwilling taxpayer charity, it needed the chance to grow into a hit play enjoying a long Australian run. Promoted as a solid success, as guaranteed by the support of ticket-buying audiences, it might have made it into equally long runs in international theatres. Now, it may be too late. Later this year a locally-made six-part miniseries of the book will be on television; it has already been bought by Amazon. In a few months this surfeit of Picnic will make an expensive theatre ticket look uninteresting, and poor value for money.

Continuing on exploring the main page, there are photographs spruiking five newly-listed scripts. The first is Alice in Wonderland, by the essay writer Mary Anne Butler. Her new play was performed in Sydney in January this year. Being female, middle-aged and based regionally did not seem to bar her from having her play produced and published. It’s a feminist Alice and the australianplays.org video of Sydney Festival director Enoch Wesley discussing the production, which had a young Aboriginal actress in the title role, has been viewed eleven times since going online at the beginning of January.

The remaining four newly-listed plays are PDF texts published by australianplays.org themselves.

Caravan by Donald MacDonald was first performed in 1983: “Five best friends, nudging forty and hating it, take their first holiday together in a caravan.” A popular and widely played comedy, it is probably unknown and ignored by elitist theatre audiences. It is vulgar, crude and funny—with the charm of an English seaside postcard. Feminists would take to Twitter. It is a full-length script—they can’t write them like this any more—and in its almost hundred pages not once does the author use the obscenities that are mandatory in contemporary plays. Its pre-Weinstein physical sexuality has probably made it, at least temporarily, unplayable. Unlike other plays on the site Caravan is successful. It is widely played by community groups and has toured in the UK. The author, who is an actor and playwright, is not even included in the website’s alphabetical list of authors.

Did I say this site is subsidised and has a paid staff? Did I say some of the directors are playwrights? Did I say no one is interested? This play text has been published without anyone bothering to proofread it.

The problem is evident in the very first line of the play: “The interior of PARKES and Penny ROBINSON=S caravan.” All apostrophes in the script have been replaced with equal symbols so that you get text like this: PENNY: “I=ll have a surfie while I=m here.”

This is a bawdy play with stage directions that read like a subversive attack on the New Morality:

“He tries to grab her right breast” (this comes just after he has grabbed her left breast). “She hits him away. PENNY and RODNEY are very bored. They=ve seen this behaviour before.”

Seven lines further on:

“PARKES pulls his shorts down and flashes his bottom. MONICA, PENNY and RODNEY find it completely unappealing.”

Catapult by Lachlan Philpott was first performed in 2004 and is about “queer parenting”. The Hope Song by Janet Brown, first performed in October 2017, is a play for “raising awareness into mental health issues”. Hurt by Catherine McKinnon, first performed in 2016: “We exist, for a time, in a fluid space, new thoughts form about what it means to live and die, about what it means to love and hate.”

Australianplays.org is dealing with a massive hoard of plays, and finding your way around is daunting. To help users, various lists or collections are available. The main page highlights three of them with attractive images. The first, for the Sydney Festival, again with the same colourful artwork, promotes the expired festival and expired special offer. The second image advertises the National Play Festival 2016, but without a functioning link behind the illustration. The third is for Red Door plays, the site’s own imprint for PDF or eBook format scripts. Currently there are twenty-four plays offered.

Plays can be submitted for publication by australianplays.org directly through the site. Royalties are paid on sales, and paid annually “if a playwright’s accrued total has reached $15 or more. If $15 is not reached in one year, the amount accrues into the next year.” A flaw in the publishing presentation is that the texts do not reveal whether the play has been previously performed or not.

An indication of what is being sold comes in a section called “Most Popular” which lists five texts. Only one of them is for a new book, presumably all of them are here because of educational orders. The age of the plays, and their themes, suggests a dusty museum.

First performed 2003: Children of the Black Skirt by Angela Betzien. “A gothic fairytale for young people … Three lost children discover an abandoned orphanage in the bush and learn a history of Australia through the spirits of children who lived there, from convict times, through to World War Two, the Stolen Generation [sic] and beyond.” The Currency Press book comes with teaching notes.

First performed 2014: Black Diggers by Tom Wright. “Shunned and downtrodden in their own country—and in fact banned by their own government from serving in the military—Aboriginal men stepped up to enlist. Undaunted these bold souls took up arms to defend the free world in its time of greatest need.”

First performed 2016 and only published at the beginning of 2018: Picnic at Hanging Rock adapted by Tom Wright. The play’s inclusion on the Most Popular list is probably because it has been selected for the VCE Theatre Studies Playlist in 2018.

First performed 2003: Falling Petals by Ben Ellis. Recommended for schools and tertiary study. “This is a confronting parable of human existence; it is tough, aggressive theatre played at a high-decibel, frequent-coarse-language intensity” (Age).

First performed 1955: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (new edition) by Ray Lawler. This Currency Press edition of the 1955 play was published in 2012. Surely here because of educational orders.

To go further into the site there is a search engine which helps locate plays by title, category, publisher, target audience, length and cast size. There is an A–Z listing of playwrights. “Collections” breaks the plays into more manageable categories. “Production Rights” explains the process of obtaining rights to perform plays listed on the site. Given the frightful “adaptations” inflicted on classic plays in subsidised theatres this note tastes sweetly: “No alterations may be made to a script without first obtaining permission from the playwright or his/her agent.”

Australianplays.org has been making videos and operating a YouTube channel since 2009. It offers 162 professional-looking films of theatre talks and interviews with some of the country’s leading theatre-makers. Only six have received over a thousand views—many are below a hundred. Elsewhere on YouTube a video featuring the Australian cast of Matilda the Musical has had 87,654 views. That video was put online by the non-subsidised theatre magazine Stage Whispers. Their YouTube channel has over 2400 subscribers; australianplays.org, which sells the plays of 909 living and dead playwrights, has 202 subscribers. Given the role the site sees itself playing in providing plays and resources for education and community theatre these are extraordinarily low numbers. State funding cannot buy an audience for the second-rate.

At the beginning of My Brother Jack George Johnston wrote of his Melbourne suburban childhood home. It was littered with walking sticks, crutches, artificial limbs and always at least one wheelchair—the detritus of the wrecked men his mother nursed in the army hospital after the end of the First World War. He could have been describing the cultural disarray of australianplays.org.

A single good-looking, and unsubsidised, volume of Best Plays published annually, chosen from new plays performed all around the country, would be more interesting than this poorly functioning and unnecessarily subsidised website. Playwrights may be pleased to have their otherwise forgotten texts preserved but an edited volume of plays would find what australianplays.org lacks—readers. A book of Best Plays might also open the way for what so many of these writers need—future performances.