Historical plays

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Antigone
$18.14 ex GST
$19.95 inc GST

Antigone

Currency Classics

Sophocles (adapted by Eamon Flack)
‘What a great piece of theatre! The adaptation by Eamon Flack retains the power of the original, while making it not so much up to date, as timeless.’ ArtsHub

Polyneices and Eteocles, two brothers leading opposite sides in Thebes’ civil war, have both been killed in battle. Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, has declared that Eteocles will be honored and Polyneices disgraced. The rebel brother’s body will not be sanctified by holy rites, and will lay unburied to become the food of carrion animals. Defying Creon’s edict Antigone buries her brother and in so doing unleashes a terrible tragedy.

Antigone is part of a new series,  CURRENCY CLASSICS, a series of Australian adaptations of classic plays.

To read an extract from Antigone go to this PDF

CAST: 4F 4M

Currency Press | 978-0-86819-880-4 | PB
Babes in the Wood
$17.23 ex GST
$18.95 inc GST

Babes in the Wood

Tom Wright
Once upon a time, two children wander too far from home. They meet a colourful caravanserai of colonial pantomimics and are caught up in the hysterical performance of truculent and disreputable tales—tales to give a nation nightmares. Wright has hunted through our rich heritage of original Australian pantomimes to create this triumph of rhyme over reason. The result is part salute to a lost tradition, part banner to the future.
Cast : 3M, 4F
Performance Rights : Currency Press
Currency Press | 978-0-86819-709-8 | PB
Burke's Company
$29.95 ex GST
$32.95 inc GST

Burke's Company

Bill Reed
Burke's Company is a 'play of disillusion', writes Katharine Brisbane, which looks at 'the blindness of European exploiters like Robert O'Hara Burke who failed to manage his company or listen to their voices; and refused to acknowledge the Aborigines' offers of salvation. Burke's dream is to conquer the land, by traversing it from south to north. He wants their exploits gloriously recorded in Wills' writings. A play about class—in this case the moneyed class—for whom discipline is a tool of survival not always placed in the safest hands.'

Published in Plays of the 60s Volume 3

Cast : 9M
Performance Rights : Currency Press
Currency Press | 978-0-86819-562-9 | PB
Cosi
$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST

Cosi

The play

Louis Nowra

Nowra’s vibrant play is set inside a psychiatric institution where Lewis, a university student, has been employed to direct a show. He becomes emotionally involved with his patients-cum-actors as his operatic production lurches forward and anti-Vietnam protests rage outside.

Winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Drama.

‘Nowra has written a terrific play about theatre, madness, illusion, sanity, life: it’s a big, splendidly Australian epic’ Frank Gauntlett, Telegraph Mirror

‘Nowra’s generous humour ... offers up a world of the most extraordinary, ordinary people; and a hilarious situation-comedy, to boot’ Angela Bennie, Sydney Morning Herald

Nowra later adapted his play for the screen, and the screenplay of Cosi is also available.

Cast : 5M, 3F
Performance Rights : HLA Management Pty Ltd www.hlamanagement.com.au
Currency Press | 978-0-86819-403-5 | PB
Cyrano
$24.50 ex GST
$26.95 inc GST

Cyrano

Edmond Rostand

This unique adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classic play Cyrano de Bergerac is set in 1930s India, where Cyrano pursues his love for Roxanne in an Asian setting.

Translated by Ranjit Bolt; adapted by Jatinder Verma.

Oberon Books | 978-1-89979-100-2 | AUSTRALIA/NZ | PB
Damage
$29.95 ex GST
$32.95 inc GST

Damage

Jonah, The Floating World, The Lost Weekend, Top End

John Romeril
This collection, introduced by John McCallum, includes three previously unpublished works: Jonah, a Brechtian musical reinvention of Louis Stone's novel of the same name; Top End, a political drama set in Darwin during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and Lost Weekend which takes a class-based look at 'Australianess'. They are published together with Romeril's best-known play, The Floating World, the story of a returned serviceman's descent into madness on a cruise ship bound for Japan.

Romeril's writing conveys the immediacy of the times that stems from his beginnings as an agitprop writer, but he focuses on everyday lives. The plays in Damage explore the twentieth century stresses and strains, the damage we do and the damage done to us.
Currency Press | 978-0-86819-876-7 | PB
Death of Long Pig
$26.32 ex GST
$28.95 inc GST

Death of Long Pig

Nigel Planer
Based on the curious fact that the Scottish Presbyterian Robert Louis Stevenson and the hedonistic Paul Gauguin both ended their days on the South Sea Islands within a few years of each other, Nigel Planer’s play compares and contrasts the very different, but oddly similar lives they were living in their respective tropical paradises.
Nick Hern  | 978-1-84842-041-0 | PB
Dracula
$26.32 ex GST
$28.95 inc GST

Dracula

Liz Lochhead
‘This powerful and poetic version… shrugs off all those fanged Hammer spoofs and restores real tragedy to Bram Stoker’s tale’
Guardian

The fabled figures of Jonathan Harker, the archetypal innocent abroad, Mina Westerman, his anxious fiancé, Renfield, Van Helsing and, of course, Count Dracula himself are brought brilliantly to life (or the undead) in this adaptation for the stage which sticks refreshingly close to Bram Stoker’s original while grounding the whole story in a believable reality.
Cast : Cast: 5M, 4F; doubling possible
Nick Hern  | 978-1-84842-029-8 | Australia/NZ | PB
Jane My Love
$29.95 ex GST
$32.95 inc GST

Jane My Love

Catherine Shepherd

Sir John Franklin, governor of Tasmania and his wife, Jane, are passionately in love. They are determined to dramatically change the colonial outpost, from which Sir Franklin is later dismissed. Was Jane the real reason Franklin’s reforms were rejected?

Published in Tremendous Worlds: Australian Women's Drama 1890–1960.

Cast : 12M, 10F
Performance Rights : Currency Press
Currency Press | 978-0-86819-576-6 | PB
Legend of King O’Malley, The
$29.95 ex GST
$32.95 inc GST

Legend of King O’Malley, The

Michael Boddy & Bob Ellis

A landmark play when it was first produced in 1970, The Legend of King O'Malley draws on vaudeville traditions to create a larrikin form from which the Australian New Wave theatre took its direction. The underlying story is based on a real life Texan idealist who became a member of two Australian parliaments and was defeated in 1917 for opposing conscription.

The play begins with a prairie revival meeting and takes a journey of adventure and hardship, culminating in a satirical view of federal parliament as a bunch of clowns. Beyond the irreverence, Australian myths can be glimpsed in the portrait of the lonely outsider and farseeing idealist in conflict with conservative pragmatists.

Published in Plays of the 70s Volume 1

Cast : 3M, 3F, plus extras
Performance Rights : Currency Press
Currency Press | 978-0-86819-548-3 | PB
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