Margaret Hamilton

Hayloft's Thyestes: Adapting Seneca for the Australian Stage and Context

This essay examines The Hayloft Project’s theatre production Thyestes, first performed at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne in 2010. It takes as its starting point public criticism of the practice of adaptation as a derivative form. Contrary to this position, the essay applies recent theorizations of theatre as a hypermedium in order to argue that adaptation is an integral, structural component of theatre rather than simply an intertextual, representational strategy. In doing so, it positions Brechtian approaches to the medium as a historical precedent through which to consider the dramaturgical strategies at work in the production, and it extrapolates on Walter Benjamin’s idea of citation as a formative interruption to critique scholarly conceptions of the practice as a “second,” palimpsestic form. The essay thus extends the discussion of adaptation beyond the language of alteration and re-creation. Finally, it explores the misapprehensions that result from reading adaptation purely in representational terms in its discussion of adaptation in an Australian context.

'Citizens of fate': Blood, disease and the question of mortality in Sadness by William Yang

William Yang’s performance Sadness challenges essentialised categories of identification by juxtaposing tales of his Chinese-Australian family with the journey of friends from his community dying of AIDS-related complications and infection. In doing so, Yang foregrounds the threat of mortality that attempts to stabilise identity politics for the ‘nation’. In the age of global media Yang resists multi-modal approaches to his medium to reclaim the theatrical space of narration. As a consequence, Yang’s Sadness affords an opportunity to rethink the imperatives intrinsic to the classification of social subjects in terms of racial, sexual and reproductive practices, and the relationship of the citizen-body to modes of cultural representation.