First produced in
1977 at the Nimrod (now Belvoir) Downstairs theatre, Louis
Nowra’s Inner Voices was
written in the middle of the ‘New Wave’ period of Australian playwriting.
Loosely defined as the late-1960s to the early-1980s, the ‘New Wave’ had
similar flourishes in all other sectors of the performing arts and society,
including film, literature, and music, and sought to bring a distinctly
Australian sensibility to their work, as well as an experimentalism borrowed
from European theatre, in a bid to distinguish themselves from the inherent
Britishness that had been previously maintained. By the late 1970s, “the
visionary enthusiasm and common sense of purpose that had characterised the New
Wave were wearing off,” as John McCallum writes in Belonging.
Out of the growing sense of disillusionment with the lack of unifying
cohesiveness amongst their output, came Stephen Sewell and Louis Nowra, whose
work was more political, less noticeably Australian, and “more cinematic in
dramaturgy.” It is from this context, that Inner
Voices springs, and Nowra’s interests and influences are as eclectic as his
exploitation of genre and style.
While we may now
be open to the definition of what constitutes an Australian play, in the early
1980s it was still a point of contention that a play set overseas was not inherently
Australian. Looking at Nowra’s Inner
Voices today – forty years after it first appeared, in something of a
mainstage revival – we can see that it is very much an Australian play,
irrespective of the fact it is set in eighteenth century Russia
