Critical Celebrations: Metatheatre in Australian Drama of the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

This thesis is a study of the importance of metatheatrical strategies in Australian drama from 1979 to the present. While some attention has been paid previously to the use of metatheatrical techniques, in the work of individual playwrights such as Louis Nowra for example, there has been no study which foregrounds metatheatre as a distinctive dimension of Australian playwriting and playmaking in the last forty years. Applying arguments about metatheatre by scholars such as Hornby, Fisher and Greiner, Feldman and Boireau, the thesis argues for the importance of a distinctively Australian metatheatre that is multivalent in its capacity to illuminate the wider social, cultural and artistic contexts in which Australian drama has been produced. Adapting Hornby’s arguments about the value of considering metatheatre holistically, the study deploys a range of critical approaches, combining textual and production analysis, archival research, interviews and reflections gained from the researcher’s presence at rehearsals and as an audience member/participant in productions. Using these techniques, the study analyses four plays and their Australian productions, identifying them as vital to Australian metatheatre. These include: Dorothy Hewett’s The Man from Mukinupin (1979), Louis Nowra’s hitherto unexamined Royal Show (1982), Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1988) and a recent metatheatrical work, Peta Murray’s epic celebration of women’s theatre, Things That Fall Over: an (anti-)musical of a novel inside a reading of a play, with footnotes, and oratorio as coda (2014). Through these four detailed case studies, the thesis demonstrates the ways in which metatheatre has been used to generate powerful elements of critique, particularly of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations during times of national “celebration” such as the Bicentenary of 1988. It argues that metatheatre is a strategy for comment on the marginalisation of Indigenous people and on the position of women as creative writers, as well as a self-reflexive mechanism via which Australian theatre is able to celebrate its own (meta)theatrical heritage. Situating these canonical and lesser-known plays in relationship to each other and their respective production histories illuminates the particular effectiveness of metatheatre in Australian drama in holding social and cultural critique in powerful tension with the affirmation of theatre as cause and vehicle for celebration.