An Australian play that feels perpetually under-discussed despite helping to shape the intellectual and feminist theatre landscape around it. 

First staged in the late 1980s, the play folds together psychiatric realism, literary haunting and metafiction through a conversation between contemporary women and the spectral presence of Katherine Mansfield. Gurdjieff drifts through it too — mysticism, manipulation and artistic authority becoming tangled together in questions of autonomy, genius and psychological control.

It is theatrical, but deeply essayistic beneath the surface: concerned with who gets to narrate suffering, what happens when intellectual women are institutionalised as “mad,” and how artistic identity can become both liberation and trap. Reading it now, it feels strangely adjacent to later autofiction and feminist experimental writing, especially in its collapsing of biography, performance and interior fracture. The dialogue moves with the compressed intensity of poetry rather than realism.

Currency Press edition reprinted 2005 of Alma De Groen’s 1988 play. Very good second-hand condition with clean interior and light shelf wear only; binding tight and uncreased. A strong reading copy of an increasingly hard-to-find Australian feminist theatre text.