Smashing Temples: Cultural Symptoms of the 1980s in Australian Mainstage Comedy and Farce

Abstract

In his commentary on Nick Enright's 1989 farce Daylight Saving, Peter Fitzpatrick observes that "A number of things have conspired to ensure that life isn’t easy for the Australian playwright." Nationalist traditions of criticism, he discerns, "[confer] privilege on those kinds of theatre which most suit the idiom, ... a process which condemns some plays to the margins of a lopsided national dramatic tradition.” This has generic and stylistic implications, since the various mutations of boulevard comedy — romantic comedy, comedy of manners, and bedroom farce — tend to become marginalised in academic criticism as not sufficiently serious to offer themselves as allegories by which the Australian community can "mean" to itself. Cultural negotiation can be as crucially at stake in a new contemporary playas in a "classic" with an accumulated corpus of critical and performance readings; and genre no less than theme has political implications, variable and strategic though these may be at any historic moment or site.