Oriel Gray - Career

Career

From 1937 to 1949 Gray wrote and acted for the Sydney New Theatre, and it was here that her first play Lawson, a play based on the short stories of Henry Lawson, was performed in 1943. The Sydney New Theatre had the reputation of being left wing and avant garde and was modeled on the new radical and political theatre movement in the United States.

In 1942 Gray was appointed as the first paid Australian playwright-in-residence. She was commissioned to write a weekly radio segment for the New Theatre on 2KY.

In reviewing plays, L. L. Woolacott, critic and editor of the Sydney Triad magazine, described Gray as "one of the most significant and talented Australian playwrights whose work has so far been produced here".

The 1955 award by the Playwrights' Advisory Board for best play was given jointly to Gray's play The Torrents and to Ray Lawler's play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Gray's play, with its themes of "feminism and the saving of the environment", did not have popular appeal in a very conservative era, and there was only one amateur performance recorded. It was not published until 1988 and did not have a proper release until 1996 at the Adelaide Festival of Arts. In the sixties the play was turned into a light-hearted musical, called A Bit O' Petticoat, with music composed by Peter Pinne.

Gray's play Burst of Summer won the 1959 J. C. Williamson Theatre Guild Competition. The play explores the racial tensions that erupt in a small town when a young Aboriginal girl gains brief notability as a film actress. This story is based on real events when Charles Chauvel's film Jedda made known the Aboriginal actor Ngarla Kunoth, who played the title role.