Cosi

ENGLISH NOTES-COSI

Orientating activities
Who is Louis Nowra?
  * Louis Nowra has established himself in the forefront of Australian theatre both in cultural prestige and, increasingly, commercial success
  * Nowra has over this vigorous period sustained a prolific output and is even now only in mid-career. His theatre has both charted national concerns and challenged main stage aesthetic practices
  * The crisis of a settler nation- Aboriginal dispossession, and Australia’s involvement in imperial wars from the Western Front to Vietnam- are expressed in plays of comic energy and disturbing potency
  * The Golden Age (1985) confirmed Nowra as our foremost dramatic non-naturalist and anatomist of the complex interconnections and cross- identifications of Australian colonised and colonisers
  * Cosi, Nowra’s   most celebratory play cannibalising aristocratic culture, is perversely set in a 1970s Melbourne madhouse
  * Towards evil and suffering, of which his plays show many examples, Nowra’s detachment likewise, precludes easy horror and easy judgements alike. The urbane poise of the high comic vision is celebrated amidst the improvisational chaos of Cosi wherein obssessional and over-medicated asylum inmates rehearse and produce Mozart’s opera
  * Nowra’s early characters are typically the oppressed, the underdog, the racially marginalised and the mentally damaged. His theatre explores the rich and frightening ‘jungle’ of the human mind: its wilful intensity, its blinding visions, its creative adaptability, its terrors, suffering and its durability
  * Such plays deal with survivors of post – colonial Australia’s legacies of class inequality, imperial racism, indigenous dispossession and the cultural displacements and hybridisations of a multicultural migrant society

THE MORATORIUM, 1970: SAVE OUR SONS
  * A Gallup poll in August 1969 showed that 55 per cent of people favoured bringing Australian troops home and 40 per cent favoured them...