BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 01-Nov-01 | ISBN: 187685717X | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 216pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

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.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Griefbox; The Bitch Trilogy; Filth and glamour; Unbidden; Perpetual; Providence; Moss

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Susan Bradley Smith began her writing life as a music and theatre journalist in Sydney and later London. Since then she has published extensively as a theatre and literary historian. Her first collection of poems, Marmalade Exile, was described as ‘Plath unleashed’. She lives at the beach with her husband and three of their children, and teaches in the English Department at La Trobe University, Melbourne.