Alex Buzo

(1944-2006), born Sydney, the son of an Albanian civil engineer and an Australian mother, was brought up and educated in Armidale, NSW, and at the International School in Geneva. He graduated from the University of NSW in 1965. The play which first brought Buzo to national notice was Norm and Ahmed (first produced in 1968, published 1969), largely because of the prosecutions for obscenity that followed its productions in Brisbane and Melbourne. 'The Revolt' (1967), his first play, remains unpublished. Norm and Ahmed was followed by the comedy Rooted (q.v., 1969; published 1973), the first of his plays to receive overseas productions, The Front Room Boys (q.v., 1969; published 1970), and The Roy Murphy Show (1971, published 1973), a farce which draws on the clichés and familiar rituals of a television football panel for its hilarious effects. In 1972-73 Buzo was resident playwright with the Melbourne Theatre Company and during this time produced Macquarie (1972, published 1971), his first historical drama and his first serious study of a complex individual; Tom (1972, published 1975); and 'Batman's Beach Head' (1973), a free adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. He was awarded the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal in 1972 for Tom and Macquarie. His next play, Coralie Lansdowne Says No (q.v., 1974), was followed by Martello Towers (1976), Makassar Reef (1978, published 1979), 'Vicki Madison Clocks Out' (1979), Big River (1980, published 1985), 'Duff' (1981), The Marginal Farm (1983, published 1985), 'Sting Ray' (1988) and 'Shellcove Road' (1989). Buzo has also written plays for radio and has contributed to film and television scripts.

An inveterate collector of solecisms, malapropisms, tautologies and mixed metaphors and an acute recorder of social stereotypes and their transitions, Buzo has published a series of satirical collections and analyses: Tautology (1980), and its successor, Tautology Too (1981), are compilations of attributed verbal redundancies; Glancing Blows: Life and Language in Australia (1987) and The Young Person's Guide to the Theatre and Almost Everything Else (1988) mingle witty cultural comment, analysis of verbal habits, idiosyncrasies and traditions and autobiography; Meet the New Class (1981), dedicated to 'Bali and vulnerability', explores the languages and attitudes of the 'New Class people', those born post-1945 who have been 'over-educated to a new level of discontent'. The sporting world has provided Buzo with much of his farcical material and in The Longest Game (1990), edited with Jamie Grant, he pays tribute to the Australian passion for cricket. Buzo has drawn on the same resources of parody and verbal wit in his two novels The Search for Harry Allway (1988) and Prue Flies North (1991). A series in that both have the same heroine, they combine social satire, detective fiction and picaresque adventure.

Buzo's plays were first seen as similar to those of David Williamson in their satiric treatment of Australian society although concentrating on Sydney's mores rather than Melbourne's. In his early work the focus is more on the dehumanising characteristics of the society that oppresses its individuals than on the individuals themselves, whether it is general Australian society as in Norm and Ahmed or the world of a large corporation as in The Front Room Boys. In plays such as Rooted, Tom, Coralie Lansdowne Says No and Martello Towers, he has been seen as wittily exposing the hollowness of the new generation of educated, prosperous and permissive Australians. Buzo has frequently stressed, however, that his plays are fiction not documentary sociology, and his later work in particular reveals a concern with the human predicament that is universal and existential, and only incidentally Australian. Nearly all his main characters, however witty their dialogue and comic their situation, are engaged in a serious struggle to find purpose, value and stability in an alien, amoral and meaningless world. Macquarie, which centres on Macquarie's career as governor of NSW from 1810 to 1822, explores the impact of a corrupt society on the ideals of a liberal humanist; Martello Towers, ostensibly a light, witty comedy of manners, describes the renewed marital commitment of Edward and Jennifer Martello in the face of generally fragmented, 'free' and tenuous relationships; Makassar Reef, set in the torpid, tropical port of Ujung Padang, explores the search for stability in love, the ennui, shifting bonds and compromises that life forces on an odd but representative assortment of people. Often admired for their verbal brilliance and their satiric wit, Buzo's plays also depend heavily on a more serious subtext, which is both romantic and sad and demands sensitive skills on the part of actor and producer. This characteristic is even more marked in his latest plays, Big River and The Marginal Farm. Big River is set in Australia of 1900 and The Marginal Farm in Fiji of the 1950s and 1960s, but both are penetrating studies of the experience of radical transition, and reminiscent of Chekhov in their suggestions of subtextual action. A subtle stylist with a strong sense of structural balance, Buzo is both traditional and innovative in his approach, a mix which some of his critics have found difficult to accept. John McCallum's Buzo (1987) is a critical study of his work for the stage.

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