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This study analyses the role of the family as a metaphorical, thematic and structural device within the field of recent Australian drama. The family, as presented by Australian dramatists, is fragmented and incoherent. The impossibility to forge coherence is linked directly to the circumstances of contemporary Australia’s genesis as a colonial and postcolonial society, and the subsequent encouragement of a monolithic national culture through the conscious and unconscious suppression of alternative voices and histories. As a site of hierarchical power, the family supplies a convenient trope for the justification of particular paradigms of cultural dominance. At the same time, however, family is also a potent source of identity, and therefore becomes an important site of cultural recuperation as well. Consequently, it is a central assumption of this thesis that the familial context, as deployed by Australian dramatists, is both ambivalent and politically freighted. Performance plays a critical role in ‘liberating’ occluded and pathologised subjectivities from ideological exile and challenging embedded power structures. By its very nature, performance resists conscription into the totalising project that aims to validate the dominant culture’s hegemonic position. By embodying and reclaiming experience, all performance becomes political to some extent, and therefore intrinsically subversive; the resultant enactment of alternative histories not only serves to interrogate the hegemonic culture, but also empowers those ‘communities of silence’ rendered powerless under its discursive weight. The notion of family carries with it numerous attendant images including those of ‘home’ and ‘the child’. The fragmentary nature of the Australian dramatic family both complicates, and is complicated by, notions of home. So too do issues of familial succession and national capital surface to problematise concepts of childhood and establish it as a site of deep social and cultural anxiety. While this study is primarily concerned with the broader topic of family in recent Australian drama, it is the recurring figure of the child as the focus of the family, along with connected concepts of home and nation – family’s discursive parallel – that ultimately provides this study’s unifying thrust. This study covers the approximate period from 1975 to 2005, from the commencement of what is often termed the ‘New Wave’ of Australian drama, when smaller local companies and emerging dramatists began to gain an artistic credibility and popularity that would influence the conception and reception of subsequent drama. Some twenty-three works are considered in depth in this study, spread across four specific foci that contextualise the family thematic: ‘big house’ drama, which encompasses plays by Alex Buzo, Louis Nowra, Stephen Sewell and Beatrix Christian; Aboriginal theatre, which includes works by Robert Merritt, Jack Davis, Jane Harrison, Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, and Scott Rankin and Leah Purcell; the drama of abject and appropriated youth, which examines selected works by Matt Cameron, Alison Lyssa, Michael Gow and Nick Enright; and the theatre of the displaced, which focuses on plays by Tes Lyssiotis, Ben Ellis and Christine Evans, as well as ‘autobiographical’ stories written and performed by Dina Panozzo and Anna Yen and ‘verbatim’ pieces dramatised by the activist theatre companies Sidetrack and version 1.0. The works considered in this study therefore represent a range of performance styles, forms and methodologies, in keeping with the overall dramatic tenor of the period.

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This Master's thesis is dedicated to the analysis of Tom Stoppard's plays. It analyses their main themes, protagonists and modern and postmodern literary devices that Stoppard used when creating his plays. The theoretical part briefly introduces postmodernism and some of its major characteristics. It further focuses on the theatre of the absurd. In the practical part, Tom Stoppard's plays are then analysed from different angles. The major areas constitute mainly Stoppard's modern and postmodern literary devices, the themes of his plays and their division. The part of this thesis dedicated to themes also discusses the characters of the plays. Key Words: Stoppard, postmodernism, theatre of the absurd, plays

This thesis questions how sub-disciplines in theatre and performance negotiate ‘sitespecificity’ as an aesthetic practice and tool of urban governance that ‘sees’ and ‘performs’ social housing estates. As a practice that, predominantly, takes place beyond conventional performance spaces, applied theatre might be a paradigmatic form of socially engaged sitespecific activity. However, scholarship on the ‘social turn’ more readily cites Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’, or Bishop and Jackson’s critiques of ‘social practice’, which emerged in gallery and visual arts contexts. The ‘social turn’ poses problems for scholarly relations between ‘social practice’, ‘applied theatre’, the cultural economy and urban governance. I draw on socio-legal scholar Valverde’s ‘seeing like a city’, theatre scholar McKinnie’s ‘performing like a city’ and cultural economy as a theoretical framework, developing McKinnie’s concerns with ‘cultural equity’, and Harvey’s use of ‘fixed capital’ and ‘consumption fund’ in my analysis of relations between cultural and social realms. Consequently, this project hopes to contribute to an emerging area of research between socio-legal urbanism and performance studies, complicating ‘site-specificity’ as a descriptive category. Over five chapters I analyse site-specific works about estates staged in Lambeth and Southwark (inner-city London boroughs) since 2008. First, I examine relations between site-specificity and estate regeneration: the representations of overhead walkways in Delahay’s The Westbridge (2011) and Cotterrell’s Slipstream (2011) and the estate as ‘ruin’ in two Artangel interventions, Seizure (2008) and Pyramid (n.d.). I then shift to issues raised by legal and social boundaries in governance; I examine SLG’s partnerships with a neighbouring estate and ‘issue-based’ plays in two examples of theatre for young people. The final chapter draws out the project’s wider thematic concerns: the aesthetic implications of pedagogy and funding bodies on imaginings of site. This project calls attention to the complex cultural, socio-legal and economic structures that shape our cities, and the degrees to which they might be repurposed or re-imagined.

Scenovaizdžių maketai ir kostiumų eskizai. / Scenographic models and sketches of costumes.