Noëlle and Hilary have recently been involved in a digital project with Currency Press. Along with playwrights Van Badham, Wesley Enoch, John Harding, Finegan Kruckemeyer, Andrea James, Kate Mulvany, Melissa Reeves and Alana Valentine, we were invited to respond to ten classic Australian plays, ranging across time from Lawler's 'The Doll' to Bovell's 'Secret River'. Noëlle was given the wonderful Dorothy Hewitt's 'The Chapel Perilous', and Hilary felt very fortunate to score Michael Gow's beloved 'Away'.
Cue the Chorus is a new series from Currency Press in association with the Copyright Agency Limited.
You can download all the titles free of charge here. It's available in all file formats, so you can read them anywhere, anytime.
As an industry, we are aware of the importance of an Australian canon. In order to stand on the shoulders of giants, it's helpful to know where we've come from, what's been before. (As an aside, in the current debate about the under-representation of women playwrights on our stages, it's interesting to note that there was a veritable plethora of women writing for theatre through the '20s, '30s and '40s in Australia. Why is this not general knowledge? Partly to do with the fact that in the ephemeral artform that is theatre, posterity depends on publication... but that's another blog-post.)
So, kudos to Currency (and a special shout-out to the mastermind behind this project, Toby Leon) for honouring the notion of a canon, and for breathing new life into it courtesy of living, working playwrights.
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