Terror on stage

Perpetrators of terror, torture and war spin language into sophistries, cloak power in illusions and enact a theatre of dismemberment upon their victims and the earth. How might a make-believe art subvert those actions on its stage? Drawing on Anne Ubersfeld's repudiation of "naturalistic realism" for the "passivity" it induces, Joanne Tompkin's study of Australian cultural production that "unsettles" the nation's raced and anxious surface, and Heiner Müller's notion of a performed image generating explosive, border-crossing force, this thesis investigates how two contemporary Australian tragedies and the writer's own playscript may "unsettle" received space and subjectivity, while lighting selfhoods and landscapes that violent power seeks to conceal.