Modern Theatre Drama Analysis

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Contemporary Australian Theatre and Drama By Aimee Contemporary Australian theatre and drama refers to Australian produced theatre which challenges the conventions, forms and styles of traditional theatre in order to engage and inform the audience with the social and personal concerns of the characters on stage. Jane Harrison’s Stolen and Matt Cameron’s Ruby Moon are two plays that challenge the conventions and styles of traditional theatre. Both playwrights use the characters social and personal concerns to engage the audience, using unconventional styles of theatre to help them understand. The play Stolen by Jane Harrison tells the stories of five different Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families and affected by the…show more content…
In the scenes “Unspoken Abuse”, the children play the patty cake game whilst questioning Ruby about her previous trips shown in “Line Up 1 and 2”. Whilst the children play this, the audience’s understanding of Ruby’s treatment changes, and the song becomes a symbol for a loss of innocence and faith in the system. This can also be said for the scene “Cleaning Routine 2”. As the children dance around to the tune of ‘Happy Little Vegemite’s’, the audience understands that the song is implicating that the children have no control or choice in their future. In our class workshop of this scene, we developed our understanding of the scene while singing the song by following the stage directions set in the script. As we sung the words “Because we love to work like slaves, we all adore to work like slaves, it puts a rose in every cheek” we used the directions and pretended to be slapped after the word cheek, which changed the context of the words. This was a powerful technique as the song engages the audience with its childishness and then shocks them into understanding the literal meaning behind the words they sing with the direct violence shown…show more content…
The repetition of these lines, said with different contexts, helps the audience understand Jimmy’s motivations and desires of life and engages the audience by forcing them to watch Jimmy’s struggle to find and reunite with his family. The play Ruby Moon written by Matt Cameron addresses similar issues of identity, abuse and mental health; however Cameron has used these broad themes and shaped them so that the audience begins to question certain aspects of Australian culture. Cameron wrote Ruby Moon at a time when Australian culture was changing, much like contemporary Australian theatre and drama. Cameron manipulates Australia’s fear of child abduction and couples it with suburban paranoia to create a thrilling, tense play that makes the audience question the identity of both Australia and their inner most selves by using only two actors to play multiple

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