Australian Plays of the 50s

Shipwreck by Douglas Stewart & Sky Without Birds by Oriel Gray & Night of the Ding Dong by Ralph Peterson & The Day Before Tomorrow by Ric Throssell Shipwreck ~ Douglas Stewart

Stewart, best known as a poet, was also a masterful verse dramatist. His 1951 play Shipwreck recreates the infamous mutiny that occurred after the Dutch ship Batavia foundered off the northwest Australian coast in 1629

It is a complex and literary play which depicts with sympathy the anarchic mutineers Cornelius, Huyssen and Seevanck

M10,F5

Sky Without Birds ~ Oriel Gray

A three-act drama from 1950 dealing with isolation and prejudice against postwar immigrants set on a Nullarbor Plain railway siding

Written the year Gray left the Communist party, Sky Without Birds is the first play she wrote rebutting party beliefs and giving primacy to individual morality. Nevertheless, Gray retained her concern for the underprivileged

M7,F2

The Night of the Ding-Dong ~ Ralph Peterson

Ralph Peterson's second play, dating from 1954, is a comedy set in Adelaide at the time of the Crimean War, when the locals feared a Russian invasion

M4,F4

The Day Before Tomorrow ~ Ric Throssell

Anti-nuclear-war play from 1956 about a family of survivors following a nuclear war

"Erects a small cairn to the indestructibility of the human spirit" ~ Scotsman, 1960

M8,F2