Nowra or never: Don’t Look Away’s Inner Voices

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. “The first of Nowra’s plays to attract wide attention,” Inner Voices is the story of a young prince, Ivan, who has been locked away in a prison for years, knowing only his name. Following the death of his mother Catherine the Great, Ivan is installed as a puppet-tsar by opportunistic advisers who want power for themselves. But as Ivan’s taste for power and savagery grows, so too do the troubles enveloping his kingdom, until Ivan achieves a savage retribution and comes into his own world.

All that glitters is not gold: Sport for Jove’s The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice is a famously thorny play. Usually called a comedy, it has a dark side to it which cannot be ignored. While it does encompass many scenes of focused around the idea of love or marriage as is wont in a Shakespearean comedy (comedies, after all, end with marriage), Antonio the titular merchant is accosted by Shylock, a money-lender, because he defaulted on the loan of 3,000 ducats and is thus required to pay the bond – the infamous pound of flesh.

Band of brothers: Bell Shakespeare’s Henry V

Synonymous with British patriotism, Shakespeare’s Henry V is a play full of contradictions and ambiguities, powerful rhetoric and hollow promises, and is the concluding statement in an epic double-tetralogy of ‘History’ plays. Written in 1599, it came at a time when English theatres were rife with war dramas celebrating England’s success on the battlefield and ocean. On one hand, Henry V plays to the audience hungry for another war play – a “tribute to English courage, underdog spirit and a blessing of its current exploit in Ireland” – while simultaneously undermining these nationalistic associations, with “acts of cruelty we struggle to forgive… and an epilogue that makes the whole jolly rumble seem pointless in the first place.” Damien Ryan’s production of Henry V for Bell Shakespeare, on its last leg of a six-month national tour, plays with these ideas and more and gives us a harrowing piece of theatre about war, sacrifice and leadership which stands head, shoulders and torso above the rest.