Sewell’s passionate examination of the way political power can corrupt the individual and society at large is now published in a radically revised edition following its revival at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney in 1995.

 

Awards

• 1985 NSW Premier's Literary Award - Play Award

 

Based on the controversial stage play by Gordon Graham, The Boys is an unflinching analysis of the violence that lurks in Australian society. 

Returning home from prison, Brett sets about re-establishing control over his wayward brothers as he searches for an act the three brothers can participate in jointly, and thereby violate norms.

It Just Stopped

A savage comedy of manners, It Just Stopped explores our relationship to art, globalisation, death, technology, America, Campari, cardboard boxes and slavery. Sewell’s play is funny and shocking in turn. It holds the mirror up to the things we value today and asks the questions: what will we value the day the world just stops, and what would we be willing to trade for our own survival?

Review
To describe Stephen Sewell's dark comedy as a cautionary tale does it scant justice, given the anger and apocalyptic vision driving its mayhem and fun. It Just Stopped is a whimsical, argumentative, satirical and deeply serious play—among Sewell’s finest. - Bryce Hallett, Sydney Morning Herald


Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America

Written with searing passion and dazzling momentum, Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America reverberates with the aftershocks of September 11. With compelling drive and theatrical daring, we are swept from cocktails at the Guggenheim to the hungry vacuum of Ground Zero. Stephen Sewell demands answers to some of the most urgent questions of our times. Where is the line between patriotism and nationalism? What happens when the Land of the Free makes such uncompromising statements as: ‘You’re either with us or against us’?

Review
Sewell's play is both fictionally gripping and politically stimulating, with its echoes of Kafka, Oleanna and Pakula's The Parallax View… - Michael Billington, The Guardian (UK)

The Sick Room unites three generations of a family under the one roof to care for the terminally ill teenager, Kate. As Kate faces impending death, the other family members also find themselves confronting their own lives.

 

Set in Russia in 1927 against the background of unrest at the dawn of Stalinism, Traitors charts the triumph of paranoia and betrayal over truth and innocence, as it simultaneously examines conflicts between the personal and the political.