How do Australian plays create images on the stage to create a powerful

experience for the audience?

Contemporary Australian plays, like “Stolen” by Jane Harrison, aim to represent prevalent
issues in Australian society through their use of dramatic techniques, in order to create powerful
moments that move the audience, make them consider different perspectives, and even start
political change. To create these moments, plays will often manipulate the multiple elements of
drama and fabricate ‘images’. In a workshop activity, my group was tasked with realising the
opening moments of the play, scenes “Arriving” and half of “Adult Flashes”. The opening
moments of the play aim to discomfort and confuse the audience and set an uneasy tone. Our
group started the performance with the house lights up, and each actor walking out at different
intervals. Once on stage, we walked around the space, looking at the audience as well as our
environment. This immediately confuses the audience, as breaking the fourth wall to this extent
is not extremely common. At this moment we are using the, very Brechtian, technique of
acknowledging ourselves as actors to draw the audience’s focus to the political problems we
address in the play. Following this, when all the actors were on stage, we slowly began to morph
into our characters and began speaking like them, improvising dialogue about family and home.
We did so at an increasing rate, with each actor overlapping another’s dialogue. The rising
commotion of this cacophony of voices, in conjunction with random paths of movement creates
a feeling of chaos that would directly contrast our next moment. As each character says their
respective line in “Adult Flashes”, we moved directly upstage, evenly spaced in a horizontal line,
next to a row of beds. Once we all reach their respective beds, there is a moment of silence as
each character looks out at the audience before the scene ends. This extremely choreographed
moment created an image of order and control, which was accentuated by the sharp
juxtaposition of the chaos in the moment before. The themes of order and government control in
the play “Stolen” are central to understanding the plight and hardships of the characters,
ultimately moving the audience to acknowledge the cultural issues embedded in Harrison’s
piece.