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BABES IN THE WOOD

$5.40$15.00

Or, Do You Know Where Your Kids are Tonight?,
Or, The Alarming and Cautionary Tale of Australian Purity Defil'd

The splendid and terrible tale of the Antipodean Babes in the Wood.

How two native-born Australians, still wrapped in the robes of childhood, through the vagaries of Nature, found themselves lost in
The Unforgiving Bush.
Prey to the ICY FINGERS OF DEATH
The Horrors of the IMAGINATION
And the corruption of flesh and mind;
Their WONDERFUL RECOVERY
Chang'd and metamorphos'd, as if
BORN ANEW
After a dark night's sleep in this
ANCIENT AND SEPULCHRAL LAND {{PlayboxLogo}}

  • pseudo-colonial pantomime
  • 60
  • 8 total
  • 3 female identifying, 5 male identifying
  • history
  • 18+
  • adult
  • Australian Script Centre


  • MONOLOGUES
  • LINKS & DOWNLOADS
  • PRODUCTION HISTORY

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Avaricia

Gender Unspecified | 60+ | 3 to 5 minutes
Starts on page 1

EXTRACT: Avaricia is a Panto Dame Welcome [insert place-name here] to a night that shall CHANGE YOUR LIVES. It has been some years since last this poor, tattered troupe of mine ventured this far beyond the end of the line, out to where a tree is but a memory, and the only crop is dust. So much as changed since last we grace this...fine marquee you so all welcomingly erect behind your least repelling grog shanty.


Jack

Male | 20s | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 39

EXTRACT: Yes, nature restores itself, even after the worst fire, in the midst of life we are in death, but also in this desolation, life endures. And, as these boughs and branches shall sprout again with new fresh growth, so shall we start again. A new beginning, a new crop, stronger and bolder, shall spring from the fecund, ash-enriched soil.


Avaricia

Gender Unspecified | 60+ | 3 to 5 minutes
Starts on page 24

EXTRACT: Avaricia is a Panto Dame Well, let's be brutally honest, it was like a sea of excrement and the only organisms that made it and pulled through were the ultimate little Australian battlers, who were able to adapt their little battling hearts and rise to the surface, floating serene and as the excrement came to sort of...form a land mass. Now this is a long time ago, mind and while the rest of the earth was in a sort of metaphysical realm if chaos, the lucky country was born destined IN ITS VERY GEOLOGY to be a land apart from the worries of the world. Australia, you little beauty!


REVIEW: BABES IN THE WOOD BY TOM WRIGHT

KATE HERBERT, 26 NOVEMBER 2003

"Tom Wright's pseudo-colonial panto, Babes in the Woods, is a rollicking good night. The audience came out smiling- a good sign."

ARTICLE: FORGET POLITE DRAMA, LET'S STRETCH THE IMAGINATION

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, 2 DECEMBER 2003

""The idea," says Wright, "was to see if we could reproduce a 1902 pantomime, so I spent a lot of time in the rare books collection at the State Library. I soon realised our ideas about pantomime are based on those vapid 1960s versions, but colonial panto was far more interesting. It was political, transgressive, titillating, irrational and magical.""

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