Broadly speaking, the Australian theatre sector does not have a strong culture of remounting and reviving works. For every Switzerland by Joanna Murray Smith, produced several times by different state companies, there are scores of new plays which are staged once and never seen again. While some recent plays have been revived – Angus Cerini’s The Bleeding Tree, Patricia Cornelius’ SHIT, Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife – too many recent plays vanish all too quickly.Â
Playwright Tommy Murphy, whose 2005 work Strangers in Between opens in Sydney this week following an earlier Melbourne season, describes this situation as a ‘real deficiency’.
