Susan Bradley Smith

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Biographical note:  Susan Bradley Smith is a London-based writer and academic, with an international reputation as a historian of women’s theatre, Australian theatre, and postcolonial literature. Griefbox, a collection of her own plays, was published in 2001. She is co-author (as Pfisterer) of Playing With Ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the Suffrage to the Sixties, editor of the anthology Tremendous Worlds: Australian Women’s Drama, 1890-1960, and has co-edited Playing Australia: Australian Theatre on the World Stage, to be published in 2003. Her currently research project is called Unbecoming: Fidelity and Betrayal in Twentieth Century English Drama. She teaches in the Department of English at London South Bank University.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857172
ISBN-10:  187685717X
ISBN-13:  9781876857172
Author:  Susan Bradley Smith
Title:  Griefbox and Other Plays
Series:  Salt Modern Drama
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTGH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-01
Extent:  216pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  324 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.95
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Griefbox is a cutting-edge collection of six contemporary Australian plays written with wit, precision, and great humour by poet, playwright, and theatre historian, Susan Bradley Smith. The plays roam across intellectual and geographical landscapes as diverse as the 73 bus traversing north London, Sydney’s charmed harbourside and its dark underbelly, Michigan’s Great Lakes, and the unspeakable horizons of outback Australia. The characters variously love money, cricket, revenge, the beach, sex, politics, escape, money, sex, business, fighting, sex, and even love. The plays have recognisable naturalistic settings but are populated with characters possessing poetic possibilities that slip in and out of realism as they try to grapple with the very real problems that exercise their day-to-day lives. Incest, unemployment, suicide, infidelity, the Vietnam War, black history and white occupation in rural Australia, racism, motherhood, abortion, and the search for and loss of love are just some of the themes that occupy this collection of unforgettable plays. Susan Bradley Smith is the kind of feminist writer who knows her fin de siecle from her ‘fin de shark’ and devotes her creative energies to patrolling the troubled waters that men and women find themselves in in contemporary life. Her plays provide a dramatic space for different worlds to emerge, and they are almost impossible to leave behind once you enter them: this is the theatre of transformation at its confessional best.

Table of contents:
Griefbox
The Bitch Trilogy
Filth and glamour
Unbidden
Perpetual
Providence
Moss

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From Filth and glamour

Scene 1
hope’s bedroom at their property, about 45 km from town. hope is making preparations for her farewell party and her mother is packing suitcases.

DESTINY
You’re such an ungrateful child Hope. You’re just plain bloody selfish. What about me? Didja eva stop ta think? You’ve been a little bitch to me all you bloomin’ life so I don’t see why you should change now. In the middle of the shearing! Couldn’t you at least have picked a better time? /

HOPE
/I can’t help when uni starts Mum I’m not the boss of the world.

DESTINY
Scholarship or no scholarship lassie some things are more important in life. Family. Obligations. Responsibility. The Farm. The farm, lord knows what will happen to the farm what with your father being the biggest bludger in the world and always begging your Uncle Luke for more money and I can’t be expected to hold things together forever on my own you know. Selfish. What you’ll do, missy, oh I know exactly what you’ll do, you’ll get to that la-di-da Sydney University place you little tart and you’ll root around till your heart’s content and then you’ll come home anyway and marry poor Henry who’s been pining after you like a dog this last summer and all this education rubbish, what good will it do you then? Mathematics teacher my fat arse, you’ll have a party for four years, without a care for all my hardships, then come back and you’ll be too stuck up to even talk to the stupid hairdresser/

HOPE
/Mum it’s a bonded scholarship I won’t be coming back I have to go where the Department of Education sends me when I’m finished. I’ve explained this to you a million times.

DESTINY
And as if that scholarship will be enough. You’ll be asking your Uncle Luke for money left right and bloody centre by the way change of plans Luke’s driving you into the pub tonight, your Dad and I will be in later.
At the mention of this change of plans, luke appears in the bedroom, and hope freezes in her preparations. destiny can not see him. During the following, he removes his clothes and beckons hope, who responds.

DESTINY
Now don’t you start. You can’t expect Dad to miss the end of the cricket just on account of a silly farewell party. Honestly Hope you think you’d take better care of your things, sew a few buttons on now and again. No one will be taking care of little miss lazy slut in the big smoke will they now? And you’ll miss your friends. And your Dad. And Katie, and Uncle Luke. You’ll probably never see your Grandma again, what about that? And you’ll lose Henry, mark my words.

DESTINY stops packing and speaks to the audience. LUKE and HOPE fuck.

Once upon a time there were two brothers, between them they had the biggest properties in the district. A girl couldn’t have done better for herself. It really didn’t seem to matter which one I married. Frank was always the talker, but Luke was the stud. Whoahee! The times we had. But I did the right thing, the sensible choice. I was very happy with Frank. I must admit, Vietnam proved to be a bit of a hiccup, in the fidelity stakes, I mean what’s a young girl meant to do for a bit a fun when your man’s away and all you have for company is a nosy nipper like her? Luke. He was a great help in running the property. He helped me keep all the important machinery well lubricated.