Louis Nowra, 'Radiance' (Sydney: Currency Press, 1993)

Louis Nowra wrote 'Radiance' especially for the three actors who performed it in the play’s premier season at Belvoir Street Theatre in September 1993. And the Currency Press playscript / programme produced for that season foregrounds these three performers – Rachael Maza, Lydia Miller and Rhoda Roberts – in such a way that the usual distinction between dramatis personae and the actors who play them is considerably diminished. Both the blurb on the back cover and Nowra’s introduction emphasise this special relationship between text and actors, but it is the front cover shot which particularly reflects the conjunction between the two. Rather than depicting a scene from performance, or a ‘graphic’ suggesting something of the play’s thematic content, the front cover of Radiance features the three actors in a posed promotional shot. Arms joined warmly, lovingly, about each other’s waist, bodies turned away from but faces towards the camera, it is the actors we see, not their characters. It’s a very joyful image; they’re positively beaming. Radiant. They look as if they could really be the three half-sisters they portray, except that such moments of blithe sorority are just about non-existent in the play.

'The black hole of our history' : a conversation with Louis Nowra

This is an edited version of an interview recorded for Canadian Theatre Review in 1992. By that time Nowra had established a reputation as one of Australia's foremost playwrights. Part of the generation which succeeded the New Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nowra became known for a stylistic inventiveness which placed him outside the tradition of realist playwriting in Australia. The international outlook in his early plays, and the fact that he was not exclusively preoccupied with Australian settings and subject matter, was often a focal point in critical accounts of his work. In this interview Nowra discusses his 'internationalism', and a range of topics including the playwriting process; the presence of landscape in his plays; and the autobiographical elements in his work.

In the shadow of the enlightenment : Le Corbusier, Le Faisceau and Georges Valois

On 9 January 1927 Le Corbusier materialised on the front cover of the Faisceau journal edited by Georges Valois Le Nouveau Siècle which printed the single-point perspective of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin and an extract from the architect’s discourse in Urbanisme. In May Le Corbusier presented slides of his urban designs at a fascist rally. These facts have been known ever since the late 1980s when studies emerged in art history that situated Le Corbusier’s philosophy in relation to the birth of twentieth-century fascism in France—an elision in the dominant reading of Le Corbusier’s philosophy, as a project of social utopianism, whose received genealogy is Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Le Corbusier participated with the first group in France to call itself fascist, Valois’s militant Faisceau des Combattants et Producteurs, the “Blue Shirts,” inspired by the Italian “Fasci” of Mussolini. Thanks to Mark Antliff, we know the Faisceau did not misappropriate Le Corbusier’s plans, in some remote quasi-symbolic sense, rather Valois’s organisation was premised on the redesign of Paris based on Le Corbusier’s schematic designs. Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme was considered the “prodigious” model for the fascist state Valois called La Cité Française – after his mentor the anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel. Valois stated that Le Corbusier’s architectural concepts were “an expression of our profoundest thoughts,” the Faisceau, who “saw their own thought materialized” on the pages of Le Corbusier’s plans. The question I pose is, In what sense is Le Corbusier’s plan a complete representation of La Cité? For Valois, the fascist city “represents the collective will of La Cité” invoking Enlightenment philosophy, operative in Sorel, namely Rousseau, for whom the notion of “collective will” is linked to the idea of political representation: to ‘stand in’ for someone or a group of subjects i.e. the majority vote. The figures in Voisin are not empty abstractions but the result of “the will” of the “combatant-producers” who build the town. Yet, the paradox in anarcho-syndicalist anti-enlightenment thought – and one that became a problem for Le Corbusier – is precisely that of authority and representation. In Le Corbusier’s plan, the “morality of the producers” and “the master” (the transcendent authority that hovers above La Cité) is lattened into a single picture plane, thereby abolishing representation. I argue that La Cité pushed to the limits of formal abstraction by Le Corbusier thereby reverts to the Enlightenment myth it first opposed, what Theodor Adorno would call the dialectic of enlightenment.

Constructing the Architext : Georges Perec's life a user's manual

Mitchell critiques Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual, which articulates compellingly the confluence of literature and architecture studies that emerged in the late twentieth century. He argues the Perec's novel diverges from this tradition, for, rather than being a search for origins and true expression, Life a User's Manual denies the very possibility of originality. He adds that Perec's architext is de-constructive and ironic.