Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

healthy theatre industry could grow in the 60s and 70s - the era traditionally seen as the 'birth' of an
Australian theatre culture.
Reading into the texts using feminist deconstructive methods, the authors interrogate the plays for their
underlying meanings or messages that may be superficially obscured (sometimes purposefully) because
of the political and social contexts in which they were written. In Playing with Ideas Pfisterer and
Picket do what Miles Franklin hoped critics would do when reading her plays, 'to see the underside or
innerness of what I write.' And this is an important point to make about the work of many of these
playwrights - that the period was, largely, not a time of overt feminism (at least not after the vote was
won). The methods the writers employed to explore issues around the desires for individual and
political autonomy and greater economic independence were frequently written in palimpsest upon the
page/stage. Women's agency in economic, family, cultural and sexual terms is analysed through the
ways these themes are represented in the plays that explore both the potential for women to become
fully actualised individuals and the reasons they do not.
The conservative era in which these playwrights worked, and against which they often struggled, is
mirrored in the conservative and often unreflective synopses by the theatre historian Campbell Howard
(and his assistant, Colin Kenny), whose invaluable work in collecting Australian plays of the 1920s to
the 1950s has not been ignored by Pfisterer and Pickett. The Index to the Campbell Howard collection
(published in 1993) provides brief synopses written by Howard and Kenny of the plays in the
collection. These synopses, however, undermine the potential value of the plays for contemporary
readers and researchers by their frequent misreading of the themes and subject matter. The Index,
which should give a good first access point to the plays, also contains some very value-laden comments
that often miss the point of the playwrights' work. Pfisterer and Pickett sometimes use these
interpretations (which were often the first critical accounts, albeit brief and unreliable) to highlight the
distorted reading of the plays, and to show the conservatism that the women playwrights faced, both at
the time of writing and later.
Of particular interest is the chapter 'Stages of Subversion: Experiments with Dramatic Form.' Its
interpretation of the subversive uses to which the playwrights put the convention of realism in plays
containing a 'message' (often covertly feminist) through the dramaturgy employed in stage directions is
absorbing. The readings of Miles Franklin, Marjorie McLeod and Millicent Armstrong's plays are
excellent; I think, however, that the authors have been a little too generous towards Dulcie Deamer's
'morality plays.' It's my opinion that, although she may have been crowned Queen of Bohemia in 1926,
Deamer soon 'repented' of her party-girl ways and, by the early 30s, was a staid and rather religious
woman. Her morality tales certainly belong to the later period. She does, nevertheless, remain a
fascinating individual as do many of the women of these times and these plays.
'Brave Red Witches', Chapter 5, covers the rise of socialist consciousness during the 1930s to the
1950s, and explores the impact that involvement in the various writers' and cultural organisations
sponsored by the Communist Party had on their work and lives. The freedom to write drama for
assured performance by the New Theatre League offered many playwrights the opportunity of seeing
their work on the stage but, due to Australia's conservatism and rightist leanings, it also closed off
opportunities for work in the mainstream theatres, often for the remainder of their professional lives.
Some of the writers involved in the New Theatre were committed and signed up communists; others
were motivated by humanist principles, feminism and pacificism, and didn't ever become CPA
members. Quite a few went to Russia and other Eastern Bloc countries as feted guests, and this
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