Louis Nowra

(1950- ) was born in Melbourne and studied English at La Trobe University without taking a degree. Best known as a playwright, he has published Albert Names Edward in Five Plays for Radio (1975), ed. Alrene Sykes, Inner Voices (1977), Visions (1979), two plays published together, Inside the Island and The Precious Woman (1981), Sunrise (1983), The Song Room in Seven One-Act Plays (1983) ed. Rodney Fisher, The Golden Age (1985) Capricornia (1988), from the novel by Xavier Herbert, Così (1992) and The Temple (1993). His other plays include 'Kiss the One-Eyed Priest' (1973), 'Sleezee' (1977), 'The Death of Joe Orton' (1980), 'Spellbound' (1982), 'Prince of Homburg' (1982), 'Royal Show' (1982), 'Byzantine Flowers' (1990), 'Summer of the Aliens', and 'Radiance'. He has also translated and adapted European plays, such as La Dame aux Camellias and Cyrano de Bergerac, and written operas, film scripts, and plays for radio and television. His television play 'Displaced Persons' (1985) had a wide impact and was followed by 'Hunger' (1986) and 'The Lizard King' (1987). Nowra is also attracted by fiction and has published two novels, The Misery of Beauty (1976), which won the fourth Angus & Robertson fellowship, and Palu (1987). The Cheated (1979), a collection of newspaper reports of personal catastrophes or tragedies, reflects his interest in extreme situations. Louis Nowra, ed. Veronica Kelly (1987) includes interviews with Nowra and critical articles on his work. Nowra won the Canada/Australia Literary Award in 1994.

Sometimes classed with Stephen Sewell as representing a second wave of Australian drama, Nowra is like Sewell in his interest in black comedy, gothic passions and an epic style of theatre which studies individuals in broad historical and political contexts. Nowra is concerned more with exploring timeless questions about human motivation, aspirations and interdependence than with re-creating a specific Australian environment, although most of his dramatic situations are analogical reflections of Australia history. Fascinated by post-colonial contexts in particular and their resonances for Australia, he frequently implies the repressed presence of the Aboriginal experience within the Australian cultural consciousness. Inside the Island, Sunrise, The Golden Age and Capricornia have recognisable Australian settings; Inner Voices takes place in Russia of 1794, Visions in Paraguay of the 1860s, The Precious Woman in China of the 1920s, Così in a Melbourne mental institution and a suburban backyard. In all his plays, however, the external setting is less important than the inner one, 'the landscape of the mind'. The structure of his stage plays, usually composed of succinct, visually striking emblematic scenes, partly determines his characteristic Brechtian effect of simultaneous engagement and detachment. Both Albert Names Edward and Inner Voices deal with the experiences of abnormally isolated and unformed young men: Edward, who suffers from total amnesia, presents himself as a tabula rasa to an older man, Albert, and becomes, finally, Albert's mental replica; the central protagonist of Inner Voices is Ivan, the 24-year-old claimant to the Russian throne, whom Catherine II has kept imprisoned since infancy and who, at the beginning of the play, knows only his own name. In both plays Nowra is preoccupied with the power of language as an instrument of domination and as a means of interpreting and defining the world. For Ivan, the search for subjective and objective knowledge is fatally conditioned by the warped structure of his 'education' at the hands of his tyrannical instructor and 'liberator', Mirovich. The close of the play sees him in almost the same situation that he was in at the beginning; trapped in his palace/prison, he is surrounded by the indecipherable voices of his followers, whose tongues he has had removed. Visions, where the scope of the action is social and national, dealing with the fates of President Lopez of Paraguay and his wife Eliza Lynch, a one-time Paris courtesan, concentrates more on the inner lives of the dominators than of the victims. Both, however, emerge as fatally corruptible by half-truths masquerading as absolutes. The Golden Age, often described as his most accomplished achievement, concerns the discovery of a White tribe living in total isolation in the Tasmanian wilderness. The remnants of a group of convicts and prospectors, the tribe had evolved an individual culture and language which appears superficially alien to the two young professional men who discover them in 1939 while bushwalking. Returning the tribe to 'civilisation' at the brink of the Second World War and narrating both their rapid demise and the horrors of war, allows Nowra to contrast barren modernity and a more organic, 'natural' way of living. The opposition is not a simplistic one, however, but a complex exploration of issues Nowra had considered in his earlier work, the challenge of the irrational and uncultivated to perceptions of what is 'real' and valuable, the shallowness of Australia's transplanted culture and the destructiveness of imperial patterns of oppression. The play's close with a promise of unity between the one survivor of the tribe, Betsheb, and Francis, one of their discoverers, is a tentative gesture of hope, undercut by warnings implicit in the Greek theatrical fragments which act as a frame for the main play.

Nowra's novels are concerned with the same unsettling issues as his plays. The Misery of Beauty, narrated by a physical grotesque christened Frogman, and assistant to a magician, Earl, who is both dominating and dependent, deals with the unique experience of the excluded, isolated individual. Palu, set mainly in Papua New Guinea, is narrated by the wife of the crazed president of the country as she awaits execution. In her division between a primal, exotic culture and an acquired, Western one, Palu challenges both ways of knowing the world.

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