The Dolls' Revolution
Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination
by Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney,
with chapters from Maryrose Casey and Laura Ginters
Drawing on the title of the ground-breaking Australian play of the 1950s, Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, this provocative new study is the first full-length detailed study of the work of prominent women playwrights - Jenny Kemp, Hannie Rayson, Joanna Murray-Smith, Katherine Thomson, Jane Harrison, Leah Purcell, Odette Best and Beatrix Christian. It proposes that these women artists have created ‘the dolls’ revolution’, a theatrical revolution whose effects reach beyond theatre and drama to the cultural imagination itself.
The Dolls’ Revolution pays tribute to a ‘catalytic event’ that took place whose effects have changed the face of Australian theatre. This was the inaugural season of the Playbox Theatre Company in 1990 in which five out of the eight plays were written by woman. Set against ‘the new wave’ of Australian drama in the 1960s and 70s, which gave prominence to male writers in a largely masculine theatre culture, the dolls’ revolution examines how women have quietly stormed the main stages of the nation’s theatres. During the subsequent decades, women playwrights have ceased to write in a feminist ghetto and have become the mainstream, transforming it from within.
In an era of globalization, conservative politics and troubled race relations, these writers speak about the experience and concerns of many Australians. Indeed they are highly tuned to the nuances of public and private lives in a rapidly changing Australian culture.
Published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, $39.95. For review copies please contact: Nick Walker or Shawn Low, phone: +61 3 9654 0250 or email Nick Walker.
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