Australia has the Great Australian Play just like America has the American Dream and England has the Great British Bake-Off. These iconic stories endure as myths of national identity and minimised imperialism that keep the masses rallying around idealised, constructed figures of power and triumph. But pretty soon the truth will crawl out from where it’s been buried to wreck havoc on the artists and audiences still buying into the centuries-old lie.
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Tom arrives at a rural farmhouse with the expectations of an uncomfortable but predictable encounter with his deceased partner’s family. His presence, though, unravels a long string of lies and secrecy stretching from William’s childhood into their relationship, right up until he died. Perhaps even more unexpected, though, is what Tom learns about himself deep in the muck of the farm.
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Maybe if you watch a lot of British crime dramas then you’ve wondered to yourself how you would react if you were the person fated to discover a dead body. Or you’ve mused about how the “woman walking her dog” or “bicyclist” is doing now after their discovery aired on the nightly news. For one person, that moment was the end of the story, for everyone else, it’s the beginning.
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This year will mark five years since the Australian Marriage Postal Survey in which the government took a plebiscite of all Australian citizens to gauge support of legalising same-sex marriage. It was a deeply traumatic time for the LGBTQIA+ community as the debate of their rights was put on a national stage and explicitly inserted into their everyday interactions with neighbours, coworkers, and family.
Continue reading →Before many people were forced to turn their homes into their workplaces during 2020, office politics were likely a dull daily normality. But, with some distance, how ordinary were they? Well, Actually Productions used the space of the global pandemic to closely examine how inequality and sexism manifest in office microaggressions and not-so-funny colleague banter.
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Night Writes 