In surveying the territory 'New Zealand drama' for a literary journal, I have followed my predecessors in attending first to the most 'literary' form of our theatre: that is, scripts that, through publication in book form or registration with Playmarket, are available for professional or amateur groups to perform, making the theatrical modifications they may but accepting and advancing that script which was conceived and written as a 'play'. But if I had gone no further than that, and constructed a fence around those plays that are obviously plays, I would have missed two of the most exciting theatrical events of these two years: the touring productions by Inside Out Theatre of Les Enfants (Mike Mizrahi and Marie Adams, 'inspired by Jean Cocteau') (1) and by a temporarily enlarged Front Lawn: Don McGlashan and Harry Sinclair with Jennifer Ward-Lealand in The One That Got Away. It's nearly a truism that eccentricity (like the Devil) is more interesting, that it's the most lively beasts that jump the corral. There are other boundaries, too, of course, within the 'play' category--between naturalism, or 'illusionism', and its enemies, (2) between the textual and the physical, between the propagandist's and the entertainer's aims. Our playwrights are crossing and re-crossing these invisible boundaries all the time, but that doesn't mean they're not aware they are there. It might be supposed that the most radically 'experimental' plays are to be found outside the constraints of the established theatres. But within the corral, it has also been acknowledged, there is a wide range of forms and styles to demonstrate the theatre's accommodation of interesting eccentricity. (3)
