LOUIS NOWRA (Australian Playwrights Monograph Series) by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

1 These words are spoken to Ren6 by the blind Indian Chactas at the beginning of ‘le Récit’ of Chateaubriand’s ‘Atala’ (Fernand Letessier (1962) [ed.] Atala, Rene, les Aventures du Dernier Abencérage. Paris: Gamier Frères, 43). In this story the foster-father of Chactas, and the natural father of the half-Indian heroine who has been raised in his faith, is called Lopez.

A parabolic reading of Nowra’s ‘emblematic theatre’ displays its close concern with direct and indirect reflections of Australian realities. In Visions, and subsequently in Inside the Island, European self-styled aristocrats -actually arriviste bourgeois posing as oracles of all that is finest - attempt to impose ‘culture’ on a semi-backward country; its landscape, ‘exotic’ animals, intractable nature and ‘savage’ inhabitants. The relevance is clear, not only to white post-colonial history but to the present and future of our Aboriginal peoples, upon whom land-rape and tutelage continue to be inflicted. The abstracted scenario of Visions reflects white settlement in Australia and the subsequent ambivalent subordinate cultural and political relationship with England. Australia has gradually found its own voice and identity, yet the lures of what is held up as the ‘real’, civilised centre of the world remain strong. Australia’s consciousness of its own interests and identity has long been partially obscured and dispersed by the assumed prestige and coherence of metropolitan culture, and our own ruling caste, for their part, find it an advantageous manoeuvre to wield the totems of a self-selected - in practice elitist - European ‘past’ in order to legitimate its own political exploitations. The parables of Inner Voices and Visions show us, as partial partakers of European civilisation and history, how colonialism can operate. In broad poetic terms, we see something of ourselves in the mirror.

Nowra’s next play, Inside the Island, takes us at last directly into our own interior, and the themes of power, culture, blood guilt, nightmare and the rape of the land emerge as clear, confident statements firmly tied to the specifics of our own historical experience. The broadening out of the themes of the ‘first coil’ prepares for this achievement. Nowra’s method of ‘detachment’, of approaching his complex themes through the many-faceted reflections of dramatic parable and poetic imagery, is advanced and developed initially in the plays culminating in Visions, itself a starting point for the next cycle of dramatic explorations of the contemporary Australian predicament.

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