Class act : Melbourne Workers Theatre, 1987-2007

Celebrates the company's artistic achievements and successes over the last two decades through interviews, essays and high quality images of key productions, and recounts its history, its evolving relationship with the embattled trade union movement, and its on-going engagement with working class, indigenous and migrant communities.

'Class' and political theatre : the case of Melbourne workers theatre

Traditionally, class has been an important category of identity in discussions of political theatre. However, in recent years the concept has fallen out of favour, partly because of changes in the forces and relations of capitalist production. The conventional Marxist use of the term, which defined an individual's class position in relation to the position they occupied in the capitalist production process, seemed anachronistic in an era of globalization. Moreover, the rise of identity politics, queer theory, feminism, and post-colonialism have proffered alternative categories of identity that have displaced class as the primary marker of self. Glenn D'Cruz reconsiders the role of class in the cultural life of Australia by examining the recent work of Melbourne Workers Theatre, a theatre company devoted to promoting class-consciousness, in relation to John Frow's more recent re-conceptualization of class. He looks specifically at two of the company's plays, the award-winning Who's Afraid of the Working Class? and The Waiting Room, with reference to Frow's work on class, arguing that these productions articulate a more complex and sophisticated understanding of class and its relation to politics of race and gender today.

Book review : Class act : Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987 - 2007

The article reviews the book "Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987-2007," edited by Glenn D'Cruz.

Voices of dissent in the age of emperor Kennett

Celebrates the company's artistic achievements and successes over the last two decades through interviews, essays and high quality images of key productions, and recounts its history, its evolving relationship with the embattled trade union movement, and its on-going engagement with working class, indigenous and migrant communities.

Inventing the Origin of Theatre History: The Modern Uses of Juba II's 'teatriké historia'

Documentary video in post-dramatic theatre : We built this city and Hamletmachine

This paper analyses the status and function of documentary footage in two recent productions: Melbourne Workers Theatre’s We Built This City and a Deakin University student production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine.

Writing theatre history – The mainstream approach and alternatives

Main questions: 1. How to deal with the beginnings of theatre? 2. Do we have to consider a “second birth of theatre” in the Middle Ages? 3. What influences do media have on writing theatre histories?

Theatre History and Historiography Ethics, Evidence and Truth

This collection of essays is the first time a group of theatre historians have come together to consider the challenge of applying ethical thinking to attempts to truthfully represent the past. Topics include the life of the celebrated Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, the little-known records of hitherto forgotten women involved in Victorian theatre, amateur theatricals enjoyed by the British army in colonial India, the loss of a pioneering arts centre for African and Caribbean culture, performance art in Wales and present-day community arts in Northern Ireland. While confronting such difficult issues as the instability of evidence and the unreliability of memory, the contributors offer fresh perspectives and innovative strategies for fulfilling their ethical responsibility to the lived experience of the past.

Letter to a dead playwright : daily grind, Vicki Reynolds and archive fever, part 2

'Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word "archive",' observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever, a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) the Melbourne Workers Theatre archive, which is part of the ARC funded AusStage project. It does so with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterises as an 'irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement' (91). In short, the paper uses Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias I have enountered while working on the AusStage project. The paper pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitised Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. It also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which 'opens out of the future' thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed.

Letter to a dead playwright : daily grind, Vicki Reynolds, and archive fever

’Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”,’ observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) an archive for the Melbourne Workers Theatre, to form part of the AusStage digital archive which records information on live performance in Australia. Glenn D'Cruz's paper juxtaposes two disparate but connected registers of writing: an open letter to a deceased Australian playwright, Vicki Reynolds, and a critical reflection on the politics of the archive with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterizes as an ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’. Using Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology, and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias he encountered while working on the project, D’Cruz pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitized Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. He also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which ‘opens out of the future’, thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed. Glenn D’Cruz teaches at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Midnight's Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007).