Louis Nowra and the development of Australian theatre beyond the New Wave, including Inner Voices (1977), Visions (1978), Cosi (1992), Radiance (1993) and the wider 1980s and 1990s playwriting

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to know Louis Nowra as a playwright, his major works across four decades, and his contribution to the strand of Australian theatre that is darker, more European-influenced, and less vernacular than the Williamson tradition. Strong answers identify specific plays and place them in the wider Australian theatrical movement.

The answer

Louis Nowra

Born Sydney, 1950. Grew up in Melbourne. Self-taught after leaving school early. First plays were performed at the Nimrod in Sydney from 1977. Nowra has written for stage, screen, opera and television across his career; he is one of the most formally versatile of Australian playwrights.

The early Nowra, 1977 to 1985

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.

Visions (Nimrod, 1978)

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

Inside the Island (1981) and The Golden Age (1985)

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.

These early plays established Nowra's interest in extreme historical and geographical settings, in institutional cruelty, and in non-naturalistic theatrical form. The vernacular Pram Factory comedy of Williamson and Hibberd was not Nowra's territory.

The mid-career Nowra, 1990 to 2000

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.

Cosi sits between two Australian traditions. The vernacular comic register is Williamson's; the interest in marginal communities and institutional structure is Nowra's. The play is a bridge.

Radiance (Belvoir Street, 1993). 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.

Radiance was a substantial step in the mainstream institutional uptake of Aboriginal-focused stories by non-Indigenous playwrights, although it has also been read critically by Indigenous writers who note the limits of Nowra's authorial position. Nowra subsequently wrote The Boyce Trilogy (Boyce in the early 2000s).

Sumer of the Aliens (1989), Crow (1994), The Incorruptible (1995). Continued range of subject and form.

The late Nowra

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.

Nowra's method

Five recurring features:

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.

Institutional cruelty

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

Non-naturalistic dramatic form

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

Comic register that does not soften

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.

Interest in vision, art, and the artist

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.

Nowra and the wider 1980s and 1990s

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:

• Michael Gow. Away (1986), one of the most-produced Australian plays of the late twentieth century. A three-family beach holiday at Christmas 1967 against the Vietnam War.
• Hannie Rayson. Hotel Sorrento (1990), Inheritance (2003), Two Brothers (2005). Domestic and political plays with a more recognisable middle-Australia tone than Nowra, but with sharper political edges than Williamson.
• Andrew Bovell. Speaking in Tongues (1996), When the Rain Stops Falling (2008), Things I Know to Be True (2016). Non-linear time, multiple settings, family across generations. Bovell is the most formally adventurous of his cohort.
• Stephen Sewell. The Blind Giant Is Dancing (1983), Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America (2003). Bigger-canvas political theatre.

The 1990s also saw the arrival of Indigenous Australian theatre as a mainstream institutional force (Enoch and Mailman's The 7 Stages of Grieving, 1995; Harrison's Stolen, 1998), which broadened the repertoire decisively.

Why Nowra matters for HSC

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.