A Very Good Year

A Very Good Year is a 1980 Australian play by Bob Ellis. It was set in the last two weeks of the 1970s and Ellis called it his farewell to "the Whitlam decade".[1]

A Very Good Year
Written byBob Ellis
Directed byMick Rodger
CharactersBob Ellis
Francis James
Les Murray
Gough Whitlam
Date premieredDecember 9, 1908 (1908-12-09)
Place premieredStables Theatre, Sydney
Original languageEnglish
SubjectGough Whitlam
Genrecomedy with music

The play was heavily autobiographical. A reviewer from the Sydney Morning Herald called it "a flop".[2]

According to one account the play "explores some of the preoccupations at the start of the 1980s, including Nostradamus, embassy kidnappings, and the women's movement."[3] Ellis said "it is set in Palm Beach in those perculiar two weeks last Christmas when bushfires were surrounding Sydney, the sky was dark and apocalyptic, Tito's death seemed to make a Russian invasion of Yugoslavia likely; meanwhile they were really invading Afghanistan, there was the hostage crisis and there were cheerful headlines saying 'Countdown to World War III'. It's quite apocalyptic, and very funny and there are lots of songs."[4]

He also called it "in part a memorial to Whitlam, and in part a threnody to dreams foregone, and in part a look at the technological holocaust that was overwhelming the world."[5]

Ellis later said the play "was badly done at the time but which at least still exists on paper."[6]

Premise

At Palm Beach, a writer whose wife and child are away entertains a girl from the public service and is visited by a poet friend. A female journalist who aborted her baby to the writer also visits.

References
  1. "Larrikins in the Stables". Sydney Morning Herald. 16 August 1980. p. 19.
  2. Robinson, Harry (14 December 1980). "Barbs from Heaven Miss Their Target". Sydney Morning Herald. p. 72.
  3. "In brief". The Sydney Morning Herald. 27 November 1980. p. 12.
  4. Wight, Louisa (9 December 1980). "Bob Ellis". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 8.
  5. Ellis, Bob (1983). The things we did last summer : an election journal. p. 18.
  6. Martyn, Shona (5 September 1987). "Bob Ellis Why I'm a Failure". The Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend. p. 20.


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