During a recent visit to Australia, Irish theatre director Thomas Conway asked a provocative question about the apparent lack of an established and identifiable Australian theatrical canon.
‘It seems you struggle to name what is a dramatic canon, whereas in Ireland we know the phases through which the drama has developed, from Boucicault to Synge to O’Casey to Friel and Tom Murphy right into the present in Martin McDonagh and Enda Walsh and Marina Carr and so forth,’ said Conway, the Literary Manager of Galway’s Druid Theatre Company and a lecturer in Contemporary Theatre at the National University of Ireland.
