Drama
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Contemporary Indigenous Plays by Jane Harrison et al
Common Module Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Common Module: English Standard, English Advanced and English Studies
- Texts and Human Experiences
- Drama
Harrison, Jane, Rainbow’s End
Set in the 1950s in the northern Victorian area of Shepparton and Mooroopna, Rainbow’s End by Jane Harrison creates a “thought-provoking and emotionally powerful” (The Age) snapshot of a Koori family to dramatise the struggle for decent housing, meaningful education, jobs and community acceptance.
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Namatjira & Ngapartji Ngapartji: Two plays by Scott Rankin
Close Study of Literature Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module B
- Close Study of Literature
- Drama
Namatjira and Ngapartji Ngapartji go right to the heart of the intersection between Indigenous and non-Indigenous experience. These stories of family, friendship, land, myth, life and death are contextualised within the social and political framework of their times. They resonate universally, yet at the same time capture unique moments in Australian history and experience. Namatjira tells the moving story of Albert Namatjira (1902–1959). Namatjira was Australia’s most famous Indigenous watercolour artist and the first to achieve commercial success, but his story is hardly known. Albert Namatjira’s story resonates today as strongly as it did 50 years ago, providing a lens through which we can see the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians both in the past and the present. Taking its name from the Pitjantjatjara concept of exchange and reciprocity, Ngapartji Ngapartji―co-created with Trevor Jamieson―is a deeply affecting experience of Indigenous history. Exploring themes of dispossession and displacement from country, home and family, the play tells the story of a Pitjantjatjara family forcibly moved off their lands to make way for the testing of British atomic bombs at Maralinga.
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Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts by George Bernard Shaw
Drama Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw’s feminist views. In Shaw’s hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his ‘creation’ has a mind of her own.
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Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah by Alana Valentine
Drama Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
What do you do when you profoundly disagree with someone you love? Wearing a hijab is a touchstone of religious identity, but it is also imbued with a complex array of historical and contemporary meanings. The cultural meaning of the hijab has become a wedge between generations. At the heart of Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah is the relationship between an aunt and her niece. Both devout Muslims, the younger woman wants to put on a headscarf, the older woman tries to dissuade her. For Aunt Sarrinah, the hijab represents a world from which she has escaped; for her niece, Shafana, it is a personal statement of renewed faith.
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Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler
Drama Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
Ray Lawler’s revised script (2012) of his (and Australia’s) most famous play, in which two larrikin cane cutters and their women awaken to middle-age. The impact of The Doll cannot be overstated. Its success both here and abroad was quickly recognised as a defining moment in Australian theatre history.
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The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts by Arthur Miller
Common Module Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Common Module: English Standard, English Advanced and English Studies
- Texts and Human Experiences
- Drama
Arthur Miller’s classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 – ‘one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history’ – and the McCarthyism which gripped America in the 1950s. The story of how the small community of Salem is stirred into madness by superstition, paranoia and malice, culminating in a violent climax, is a savage attack on the evils of mindless persecution and the terrifying power of false accusations.
