The Convict Theatres of Early Australia 1788-1840 by Robert Jordan |HCDJ|

The first theatrical performance in Australia — a 1788 convict staging of George Farquhar's play The Recruiting Officer at Sydney Cove, to mark King George III's birthday — later inspired Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Our Country's Good. Robert Jordan, Foundation Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle and later Professor of Drama at UNSW, spent years combing British and colonial newspapers, court records and logbooks to uncover the real story of Australia's first forty years of theatre — organised not by nostalgic soldiers and settlers, as long believed, but by convicts themselves. The book traces theatre in Sydney and on Norfolk Island through to 1840, including Robert Sidaway's Sydney playhouse and the theatres at Emu Plains, and includes a substantial appendix of biographies covering 42 convicts and soldiers known to have been active in these early theatres.

See Related Products below for more early Australian convict history — order two or more titles together and we'll combine postage into one parcel. Many more of our Tasmanian titles are yet to be listed online — see our full catalogues at justtassiebooks.com/catalogues.html.

BOOK DETAILS

• Hardcover book with dustjacket
• Published 2002. Now out of print.
• 369-pages, indexed

CONDITION

Used but generally very good condition.

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