Plays of the 60s: Volume 3

A Refined Look at Existence by Rodney Milgate is an ironic comedy drama which reworks Euripides' The Bacchae, set in a NSW country town. Daring in form, this was possibly the earliest play to capture the emotional turbulence that characterised the 1960s. Chicago, Chicago by John Romeril reflects the rebellious new political awareness that spread during the tumultuous years of the late 1960s. Burke's Company by Bill Reed looks at the blindness of European exploiters, like Robert Burke, who failed to manage his company and refused to acknowledge Aboriginal offers of salvation. Burke's dream is to conquer the land by traversing it from south to north. He wants his exploits gloriously recorded in Wills' writings. A play about the moneyed class, for whom discipline is a tool of survival not always placed in the safest hands. The Front Room Boys by Alex Buzo dramatises the predicament of office workers as it displays the author's preoccupation with language. One of his aims, he tells us in his playwright's note, 'was to recreate the rhythms of actual speech as well as to record and preserve the vivid expressions which you could hear everywhere except in the media or on the stage.'