Australian women playwrights: the sacrifice of Oriel Gray

Australian Women Playwrights: the Sacrifice of Oriel Gray argues that multi-award winning left-wing Australian playwright Oriel Gray was sacrificed in 1955 by and for the dominant discourse in one symbolic act of “violence”. It investigates contributing elements and circumstances that may have worked together and separately to create and maintain Gray’s liminal status in the theatre world, despite her significant achievements, for more than half a century, and asks how it has been possible for Gray and her considerable body of work to be “forgotten” again and again. It also seeks to examine the manner in which Gray as an outsider/stranger/artist depicted sacrifice and expressed liminality in her work, and argues that Gray’s position provided her a particular point of view. The artwork at the centre of the thesis is the play script Oriel, structured by a dialogue between two Australian playwrights: ‘Oriel’ from the mid-twentieth century, and modern-day playwright, ‘Moss’. As a secondary task, both artwork and dissertation speculate on what effect the forgetting of Gray and her work may have had on the situation for women playwrights today, focusing particularly on contemporary multi-award winning left-wing Melbourne playwright, Patricia Cornelius. With reference to psychoanalysis, sociology and anthropology, using a feminist lens and a synthesized practice-as-research methodology, this thesis highlights Gray as an innovative, important playwright, and argues that she was sacrificed precisely because of her significance.