Falling Petals

Ben Ellis

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781921429767
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Something strange is happening in the country town of Hollow—a mysterious syndrome that seems to strike only the young. The town is quarantined, schools are closed and fences go up. Guards patrol new enforced borders, but amongst the townsfolk denial runs deep. Part science-fiction, part satire, Falling Petals is a darkly humorous fable about the consequences of a culture of disposable youth that blasts the urban/rural fissure open.

FALLING PETALS

BEN ELLIS

Currency Press, Sydney

Ben Ellis is a Gippsland-born playwright and columnist, whose previous plays include Eclipses, Select Committee for Imagining a Certain Maritime Incident, 360 Positions in a One Night Stand (co-writer), Loading Zone, Outpatients, Post Felicity (winner of the 2001 Malcolm Robertson Prize), Falling Petals (winner of the 2003 Australian National Playwrights’ Centre / New Dramatists Award, and shortlisted for a 2004 NSW Premier’s Literary Play Award), These People (shortlisted for the 2004 NSW Premier’s Literary Award: Community Relations Commission Award) and an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Falling Ashes

John McCallum

This is a play from the front line of a new generation war. As a baby-boomer parent I’m not too happy with everything it has to say but it is extraordinarily powerful and its parable is alarmingly believable.

A generation that received a free liberal education decided to charge their children for training for jobs that kept disappearing. A generation brought up in a Keynesian world in which governments tried to regulate the conditions under which people could be exploited suddenly abandoned their children to wolves. A generation that celebrated the ideals of personal liberation, freedom and community created a world that they then allowed to be taken over by rapacious corporations. This is the world that Phil, Tania and Sally face so desperately in this play.

One of the hardest things for me is to watch Phil and Tania, the protofascist children who are the core of the play’s story. These hard, cynical victims of the ’90s have learned their lessons well: look out for yourself, jump through the hoops, crawl through sewers if necessary to do what you’ve been told you have to do in order to get what you’ve been told you ought to want. Everything they have been taught is bullshit—from the ‘Mindpower’ motivational programs to the new economics. They happily watch other children die, they torture their friend Sally when she gets sick, they have sex only because it helps them drill into their tightly-focussed minds a few of the rudimentary catchcries of the new orthodoxy that has ruined their community.

Ellis’s other plays explore this bitter new generational crisis. In Post Felicity a baby-boomer couple are completely unable to acknowledge, let alone understand or care about, the disappearance of their daughter. Not even her death is enough to bring her to their lapsed attention. With the help of a mysterious employer they casually and brutally invent a new story for her and then dismiss her from their lives.

In These People, Ellis’s response to the refugee scaremongering of the early 2000s, a traditional Australian family tries to deal with their fear of the aliens who are detained behind razor wire at the nearby detention centre. The Daughter of the family, writing an essay for school, captures the insanity of the world she is being raised in...