Towards an Australian Drama, By Leslie Rees. (Angus & Robertson.
18s.) THE progress and setbacks of Australian drama from the late eighteenth century to the present day have been thoughtfully surveyed in this book. The early chapters are colour- ful and are enlivened by the gusto of the nineteenth-century melodramas and the men who wrote• and played in them. In the delightfully trenchant newspaper criticism of the day, one drama is described as "an agony in six convulsive fits with a prologue and several corpses."
In the theatre in Australia there has been, and still ;is, what a writer of the Eighties called "an unworthy prejudice" against the production of local plays. Before the advent of broadcasting, Little Theatres kept drama alive. Radio has stimulated dramatists and given them an opportunity to produce some notable works, at least one of which, Douglas Stewart's The Fire on the Snow, is memorable; but the Little Theatres are still almost the only groups that offer the life blood of performance to Australian dramatists.
Leslie Rees gives at times the impression of an almost painfully diligent search for an Australian tradition and a drama which epitomises the national life of the country. The necessity for such a search is regrettable; these qualities should grow and bloom naturally, and, in drama, the living theatre is their rightful soil and an audience their
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