Quick questions on Louis Nowra and contemporary Australian theatre: HSC Drama core

Born Sydney, 1950. Grew up in Melbourne. Self-taught after leaving school early. First plays were performed at the Nimrod in Sydney from 1977.

Inner Voices (Nimrod, 1977). A historical drama set in Russia about the Tsarevich Ivan VI, the eighteenth-century child Tsar who was imprisoned and isolated from infancy. The play uses fragmented scenes and stylised staging to dramatise institutional cruelty.

Cosi (Belvoir Street, 1992). A young university graduate (Lewis Riley) is hired to direct a production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte in a Sydney mental institution in 1971, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War moratorium. The play is comic in register but takes the residents' inner lives seriously. The 1996 film (directed by Mark Joffe, screenplay by Nowra) reached a wide audience and Cosi is now a high school English staple.

Nowra has continued to write across television, opera and stage. His memoir The Twelfth of Never (1999) and The Boyce Trilogy (2003 to 2008) consolidate his position. He has not produced a single late masterpiece comparable to The Golden Age or Cosi, but his ongoing output sustains his presence in the institutional theatre.

Extreme or marginal settings. Eighteenth-century Russian palaces, nineteenth-century Paraguay, a Sydney psychiatric institution, a remote Tasmanian valley, an Aboriginal family in mourning. Nowra is interested in spaces outside the suburban middle class.

Nowra is part of a wider 1980s and 1990s strand of Australian playwriting that moved beyond the New Wave's vernacular politics. Other figures of this strand include:

If your Australian Drama and Theatre pairing includes the 1980s and 1990s alongside an earlier movement, Nowra is likely to be one of the central playwrights. Cosi in particular is widely studied. Strong essays place Nowra against both the New Wave (which he came up alongside) and the contemporary Indigenous theatre that emerged after his early work.

A historical drama set in Russia about the Tsarevich Ivan VI, the eighteenth-century child Tsar who was imprisoned and isolated from infancy. The play uses fragmented scenes and stylised staging to dramatise institutional cruelty.

Set in nineteenth-century Paraguay during the dictatorship of Francisco Solano Lopez. A study of dictatorial power and its dependence on grand visions.

Both for Nimrod and then Sydney. The Golden Age is one of Nowra's best-regarded plays: a lost community of Tasmanian convict descendants is discovered in the bush in 1939, and the play follows their reintegration. The play asks who the genuine Australians are and what civilisation costs.

A young university graduate (Lewis Riley) is hired to direct a production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte in a Sydney mental institution in 1971, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War moratorium. The play is comic in register but takes the residents' inner lives seriously. The 1996 film (directed by Mark Joffe, screenplay by Nowra) reached a wide audience and Cosi is now a high school English staple.

Three Aboriginal sisters return to their family home for their mother's funeral. The play examines what they cannot say to each other about their history. Radiance won the 1995 NSW Premier's Literary Award and was filmed by Rachel Perkins in 1998.

Continued range of subject and form.

Eighteenth-century Russian palaces, nineteenth-century Paraguay, a Sydney psychiatric institution, a remote Tasmanian valley, an Aboriginal family in mourning. Nowra is interested in spaces outside the suburban middle class.

Many Nowra plays examine the way institutions (palaces, dictatorships, psychiatric hospitals, colonial systems, families) exercise cruelty on their inmates.