Lachlan Philpott: Plays One

Lachlan Philpott

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786824172
• eBook ISBN: 9781786824189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Three plays by multi-award-winning Australian writer Lachlan Philpott, including M. Rock, Little Emperors, and The Trouble with Harry. M. Rock is based on a true story about the enduring joys of music, dancing and self-discovery, and charts the fortunes of 18-year-old Tracey and her grandmother Mabel. Little Emperors: 'Little Emperor Syndrome' is a term used to describe the behavioural time-bomb created by China's One Child Policy. Set in both Melbourne and Beijing, and weaving between Mandarin and English, Little Emperors deals with a single family as they attempt to negotiate the troubled waters of their shared history, one that includes a hidden second child, forced separation, and deep wells of regret and shame. The Trouble with Harry: Harry Crawford and his wife Annie seem happy enough. Together they lead quiet, unexceptional lives in the suburbs of 1920s Sydney, working and raising a child. But when Josephine arrives at the door, it sets in train a series of events that will result in an astounding revelation. A disorienting tale of deception and enigma which poses an essential, human question: can we ever really know what lies in the heart and mind of someone else?

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRYFor Mark

This play is inspired by interpretations of the life of Eugenia Falleni. Falleni lived much of her life as Harry Crawford. Falleni was convicted of the murder of ‘her wife’ Annie Birkett in Sydney in 1920.

‘Falleni’s story provides an opportunity to consider the depiction and treatment of one working-class, Italian-Australian manwoman in the 1920s… Falleni’s wives were depicted as innocent victims, thus maintaining a heterosexual narrative. The refusal to conceive the possibility that Falleni’s wives may have known him to be a woman and desired her as a man-woman was “not a failure to know, but a refusal to know” and speaks of the threat of both lesbian desire and cross-gender identification, and of their power to disrupt heterosexuality and the male/ female gender binary.’

Ruth Ford, ‘The Man-Woman Murderer’: Sex Fraud, Sexual Inversion and the Unmentionable ‘Article’ in 1920s Australia Gender & History, Vol.12 No.1 April 2000, pp. 158–196.

‘When in middle age, she finally established an intimate connection, she was forced by her social circumstances and the strict moral confines of her day to maintain her deep secret from almost everyone, including her beloved’

Mark Tedeschi, Eugenia p. 13.

‘There is evidence to support almost any interpretation.’

Rebecca Edmunds...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction by Tim Byrne
• M. Rock
• The Trouble with Harry
• Little Emperors