ABSTRACT
The mixed critical response to the premiere production of Louis Nowra’s 1980 play, Inside the Island, could hardly have foreshadowed its author’s subsequent rise to become one of only a handful of contemporary Australian playwrights known and respected internationally. Since the mid-1970s, Nowra has penned more than thirty original stage dramas as well as translating a number of European texts for performance. His astonishingly rich oeuvre also includes various radio plays and opera libretti, several film and television scripts, three novels and sundry other works. How Nowra, born in 1950 to working-class parents living in an outer-Melbourne housing-commission estate, has progressed to the forefront of Australian theatre is a story best conveyed by his memoir, The Twelfth of Never (1999), a revealing account of his unconventional and sometimes painful upbringing. Suffice it to say here that his imagistic theatre, while only occasionally autobiographical, nevertheless bears the stamp of his turbulent background in oblique and complex ways, especially through its fascination with the emotional power of a physical landscape and the indelible pain of human suffering.
