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    Burke's Company
    Burke's Company
    Burke's Company
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Burke's Company

    By Bill Reed

    ()

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    About this ebook

    ‘... the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty are even more pervasively embodied in the plays of Alexander Buzo, Thomas Keneally and Bill Reed. In Buzo’s case it is Absurdism which is especially apparent; in Keneally and Reed, Artaudian ‘myth’ and language-in-space...

    ‘It was Reed in Burke’s Company who pioneered Artaudian techniques in a play of stature. If the play is given imaginative production, it powerfully exemplifies one of Artaud’s most famous metaphors. The figures on stage will suggest universal human victims burning at the stake, signaling through the flames.’

    Professor Dennis Carroll
    Contemporary Australian Theatre, Currency Press
    -----------------

    This is a reprint of one of the most successful award-winning plays of Bill Reed. Over the years it has been performed both on the professional and amateur stages around Australia and overseas, and published by Heinemann Educational and also in Currency Press's ‘Plays of the 60s’.

    Bill Reed has been involved in drama and publishing most of his existence in Australia, Britain, Canada and the Subcontinent. He has written nine professionally-produced plays and thirteen novels, including ‘1001 Lankan Nights, book 1 and 2’. He has won national awards for drama, short stories and novels. He now lives mostly in Sri Lanka.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBill Reed
    Release dateApr 1, 2015
    ISBN9780994280572
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      Book preview

      Burke's Company - Bill Reed

      This reprint published in all formats independently by Reed Independent, 2015, Melbourne, Australia

      First published under ISBN 0858590387 by Heinemann Educational Australia Pry Ltd in 1969 and first reprint in 1973.

      Included in Plays of the 60s, published by Currency Press 1998

      Smashwords edition

      Available from the author’s page at Smashwords.com, as well as all major online retail outlets, including book shops as:

      paperback: ISBN13-9780994280565

      ebook: ISBN13-9780994280572

      Cover: Jack Larkin

      Copyright Bill Reed 2015

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

      Creator: Reed, Bill, 1939-author.

      Title: Burke’s Company / Bill Reed.

      ISBN: 9780994280565 (paperback)

      Subjects: Burke and Wills—exploration—Australian drama.

      Dewey Number: A823.3

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

      Creator: Reed, Bill, 1939-author.

      Title: Burke’s Company / Bill Reed.

      ISBN: 9780994280572 (ebook)

      Subjects: Burke and Wills—exploration—Australian drama.

      Dewey Number: A823.3

      dedicated to the trudge

      Contents

      Preface

      Historical Notes

      First Staging

      Characters

      Act One, scene 1

      Act One, scene 2

      Act Two

      works by Bill Reed

      about the author

      PREFACE

      by Professor Dennis Carroll

      (from his ‘Contemporary Australian Theatre’, Currency Press, 1995)

      In the mid 1960s, the influence of the Theatre of the Absurd and the writings of Artaud began to make themselves felt in Australia. Of course some of the influence is discernible in the work of White and Hewett, especially in the parody of certain kinds of bureaucratic language and in the creation of mocking or sinister verbal liturgies. But the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty are even more pervasively embodied in the plays of Alexander Buzo, Thomas Keneally and Bill Reed. In Buzo’s case it is Absurdism which is especially apparent; in Keneally and Reed, Artaudian ‘myth’ and language-in-space.

      Basically, the Theatre of the Absurd playwrights used mild Surrealistic techniques to create existential allegories. Martin Esslin, who coined the term ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, finds its philosophical foundation in Camus’ 1942 essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphos’, in which Camus characterizes as absurd the condition of man adrift in a meaningless universe, cut off from the roots in the past and the promise of life to come. Artaud’s published theory, of course, precedes the Theatre of the Absurd movement, but his influence coincides with and follows it and he takes the philosophical and theatrical implications of the movement further into the heart of darkness. If the Absurdists tended to concur with the existential belief that there is no God and that man’s actions are alone what give his life a ‘meaning’, Artaud believed that the spirits which rule the universe are dark and malignant and the Theatre of Cruelty was a means to make the audience aware of it – not through their intellect and rational perceptions but by means of ‘their organisms’, like ‘the snake charmer’s subjects’. By ‘cruelty’ he meant extreme rigour of action on stage, which would be effected through myth, allegory and his devices of language-in-space. The Theatre of Cruelty would be a ‘theatre in which violent physical images crush and hypnotise the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by ‘a whirlwind of higher forces’…

      … For Artaud allegory became a ritualized action through a language-in-space which largely dispensed with rational verbal communication and there was an effort through the means to create modern myths. Language-in-space involved an alteration of normal representational delivery. Words were altered to make their sound conform more closely to their semantic meaning, or sometimes used as sounds quite separated from it…

      -----------------

      … Bill Reed’s Burke’s Company has been called ‘the first Australian historical play to ‘assimilate the Brechtian technical lessons without any obvious sense of embarrassment’ but it is more interesting for its Artaudian ‘ritualised’ action and language-in-space. History is not used here for its factual or documentary illuminations; unimportant details have been pared away and Reed has created a powerful allegory of men locked in battle with natural forces – a myth embedded in the ‘collective unconscious’ of Australianist traditions. The play was Reed’s first to be staged and he was abroad when George Ogilvie directed it for the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1968.

      The play is based on the tragic 1860 expedition of Burke and Wills. The first explorers to cross the continent from South to North, on the way back they suffered flukes of misfortune which led to their attenuated deaths in the desert through malnutrition. The play begins with the discoveries of their bodies by a search party. King, the third member of the advance party, is found barely alive, and the play then evolves from the delirium of his memories and the guilt-ridden imagination of Brahe, the man who was supposed to wait for the advance party to return to base at Cooper’s Creek and failed to do so. The playwright makes careful use of a pedal point of the confrontation of these two men at the rescue camp sick-bed after the tragedy. The Brechtian epic structure of the play undergoes an Artaudian sea change not only because of the shifting time-space locations of the desert trek but because of the obsessive time shifts through guilt and delirium. The scenes mesh together to form a frightening ceremonial of exhaustive indecision, fateful irony, forced endurance and final agony.

      To invest the action with a ceremonial

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