Don's Party and the AV Jennings type 15 home

Australian housing underwent a watershed when 1960s mass-produced houses slowly started subscribing to a new aesthetic of continuous living spaces, known as the ‘open plan’ home. This created a new landscape for Australian playwrights to observe and explore in their work when representing domesticity on the stage. Instead of representing a single room of the house on the stage, plays such as ‘Don’s Party’, started to work with a number of openly connected spaces bound by doorways to private sections of the house or to specific outdoor areas. In representing this dialectic between interior and the exterior, private and public spaces in the home, the continuous spaces of the AV Jennings house in ‘Don’s Party’ acted to blur these conditions creating an outer interior. These connected spaces became the place for an outward performance on the family’s interiority, while simultaneously presenting a boundary to an inner interior in the offstage spaces of the home. This paper focuses on the play 'Don's Party' by David Williamson and how the spatial arrangements of the AV Jennings home, in which it was set, influenced the playwright. The research includes a textual analysis of the play, biographical research and interviews with the playwright alongside an analysis of the spatial arrangements of AV Jennings houses.

Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein pumping water outdoors; Ascona, Switzerland. Portraits Women

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Studio portrait of Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein. Portraits Women

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Portrait of Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein as an infant. Portraits Children

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Studio portrait of Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein; Ascone, Switzerland. Portraits Women

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Outdoor portrait of Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein with her husband Hans Bernkopf; Paris, France. Portraits Couples

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Profile view of bust of Henriette Gottschalk nee Rothschild by Ellen Bernkopf (Colmar) nee Catzenstein.

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Portrait of Franz Catzenstein and his little sister Ellen. Portraits Children

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Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein working on a sculpture Portraits Women

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"Dancing Lady" sculpture by Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein Artworks

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Sculptures by Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein in the home of her daughter Yael Arnold; Waldstetten.

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Sculptures by Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein Artworks

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Bust of Henriette Gottschalk nee Rothschild by Ellen Bernkopf (Colmar) nee Catzenstein.

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Sculpture by Ellen Bernkopf nee Catzenstein in the home of her daughter Yael Arnold; Waldstetten Artworks

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Cover of the book "Reise durch die Provence 1928" that celebrates the trip through Provence taken by Ellen Catzenstein, Mara Matthiesen and Gerda Rotermund.

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