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

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.

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.

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

Nowra uses fragmented scenes, direct address, stylised tableau, and theatrical artifice. The plays are written for the stage, not as filmed naturalism.

Cosi is funny but does not pretend the residents' suffering is not real. Nowra holds comic and tragic registers together more often than Williamson does.

Visions, The Golden Age, Cosi, and others examine the role of the artist or visionary inside institutions. Nowra is a self-aware playwright; his characters often speak about what theatre and art are for.