In 1986, Peter Gill, the then director of the National Theatre Studio, sent a group of young actors to interview their seniors about speaking on stage. The transcripts provide fascinating insights into the theatre of the past, but they also show how little has changed: the actor’s primary tools are still the body and voice. Actors interviewed include Harry Andrews, Alec Guinness, Rex Harrison, Robert Stephens and Margaret Tyzack, with notes from John Gielgud. Peter Gill provides an introduction.

In a series of bold, unsparing polemics, world renowned philosopher A. C. Grayling tackles these questions head on, exposing the dangerous unreason he sees at the heart of religious faith and highlighting the urgent need we have to reject it in all its forms, without compromise. In its place, he argues for a set of values based on reason, reflection and sympathy, taking his cue from the great ethical tradition of western philosophy.

Against All Gods is part of Oberon's Masters Series of good-value and attractively presented hardbacks on key themes within the theatre written by leading lights in each subject.

‘A wonderful read: I feel like I've been excavated and carbon dated.’ Graeme Blundell

One of the seminal films of the 1970s, Alvin Purple depicts Alvin’s struggles with his irresistibility to women—from his school days and time as a waterbed salesman to his short-lived career as a sex therapist. The ‘definitive ocker comedy’, Alvin Purple survived a critical mauling and went on to become the most commercially successful Australian film of the 1970s.

Catharine Lumby takes a fresh look at the film, the social and political era in which it was made and the forces that fuelled its success. She revisits claims that the movie is little more than an exercise in sexploitation and argues that the film is far more complex than its detractors have allowed.

See other titles in Currency's Australian Screen Classics Series.


Interviews and reviews:
To read our author interview with Catharine Lumby, click here.

Read an extract of Alvin Purple (pdf)

An extract of Catharine Lumby's critique has also been published in the Australian. To read, click here.

To read Philip O'Brien's article for the Canberra Times, click here.

'this admirably lucid and wide-ranging study ... is another feather in the cap of a generally provocative series.' Brian McFarlane, Senses of Cinema. To read the article, click here.

Lolly Susi’s interviews with performer and teacher George Hall are a unique insight into the mind of a great all-round theatre practitioner.

George Hall trained at Old Vic Theatre School and worked as an actor at the Old Vic, in regional theatre, on radio, television and film. He has worked in cabaret, as writer, composer, performer and director. He has composed scores for the Old Vic, RSC, and plays for film and television. George was director of the Acting Course at Central School of Speech and Drama for many years. He is currently on the staff of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Including photographs from George Hall’s time teaching and on stage, An Untidy Career is full of revealing thoughts regarding the theatre and acting industries.

An Untidy Career is part of  Oberon's Masters Series of good-value and attractively presented hardbacks on key themes within the theatre written by leading lights in each subject.

Apprenticeship is Peter Gill’s potent recollection of the changing theatrical landscape of the 1960s and his journey from being a young actor to becoming a world-renowned director and playwright. Using his recently re-discovered 1962 diary, he recalls being in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, as part of the first RSC London season, and how this experience began to develop his own ideas of what theatre might be.
   
Gill explores his reaction to that apprenticeship in the context of young directors training today. An experience the diary shows to have been at times "baffling and exhilarating and sometimes frankly awful", it nevertheless produces an evocative portrait of post war British theatre and the profound impact of the work of Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble on theatre and on Gill's own subsequent work.
   
Apprenticeship is also, in part, the story of a young actor trying to understand what the theatre is and, in the process, moving towards becoming a director.

A playwright whose work is appreciated on a global scale, Athol Fugard’s plays have done more to document and provide a cultural commentary on Apartheid-era South Africa than any other writer in the last century. Using mostly migrant workers and township dwellers, and staging guerrilla-raid productions in black areas, Fugard frequently came into conflict with the government, forcing him to take his work overseas. Consequently, powerful plays such as The Blood Knot, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, and Master Harold... and the boys came to broadcast the inequities of the Apartheid-era to the world. Fugard’s work retains an insistent influence, and is studied and performed the world over.
   
Alan Shelley’s study is an accessible but profound analysis of the man, his work and its influence, the social injustices that drive him, and the lives of those who people his remarkable plays.

OUT OF STOCK. REPRINTING.

A fictionalised account of a true incident—the grounding of British Airways Flight 149 at Kuwait International Airport during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990—Black Box 149 explores the impact of war and terror on the lives of civilians. Written as an intense psychological and emotional journey, the play explores secrets, betrayal and guilt, and how the personal is impacted by the political.

Lauded by many as one of the most powerful Australian films made in the past 20 years, Rowan Woods’ stunning debut feature The Boys touched off a storm of media controversy upon its release in 1998.

The film evoked vivid memories of the 1986 rape and murder of a young Sydney woman named Anita Cobby. Although Woods’ film was fictional, The Boys remains inextricably connected to its real-life counterpart in the minds of many viewers.

But that connection is only part of the story behind the making of The Boys. In this thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, Andrew Frost contextualises the major thematic concerns of the film into the broader context of social anxieties about violence, crime and morality.

Frost chronicles his own personal journey with the film and its makers from art school to the underground Super 8 filmmaking scene of Sydney in the mid-1980s, from the early short films of director Woods to the multiple award-winning The Boys. Frost discovers new aspects of The Boys even today and wonders if its stinging moral message has been heard among the clamour of
everyday suburban life.

To read an extract from The Boys  go to this PDF

This is  the 10th title in the Australian Screen Classics series.