This essay documents and analyses the work of actor Maggie Dence, exploring her early training with Doris Fitton and her early success playing Mavis Bramston in the iconic television series 'The Mavis Bramston Show'. The essay examines Dence's career on stage and television over more than 50 years, focusing on her many comic roles as well as her contribution to Kingswood Country and the television adaptation of Nevil Shute's 'A Town Like Alice'. The essay also focuses on Dence's recent performance in the popular new Australian play 'Seventeen' and her own approach to this and other particularly demanding theatrical roles.

This case study of Tony Sheldon considers how an actor develops versatility in emotional delivery and the capacity to work in all theatre genres. Sheldon is one of Australia's best known and most successful stage actors. He has appeared in Shakespearean drama, cabaret, musical theatre and contemporary plays written by Australian, British and American playwrights. He is one of a sizeable group of Australian actors of his generation to have learned to act 'on the job' with directors and other actors rather than undertaking formal qualifications in an institution or studio. This article examines Sheldon's experience of learning to act, drawing on a life interview with the actor. It considers the opportunities and the difficulties Sheldon experienced in his early career in relation to boundary blurring and self-belief, trauma, directorial rehearsal styles, typecasting, comic acting in partnership and managing one's character in long seasons. The article explores some of the problems that the actor has overcome, the importance of specific directors in his development, and the dynamics of informal training in the context of an overall ecology of theatre over half a century.

This essay documents and analyses the work of internationally acclaimed actor Jacki Weaver, examining her early career on stage and on television and analyzing key performances in her career over fifty years. Weaver is one of the most successful Australian actors of all generations, and yet most of her career has taken place on the mainstages of Australian theatre. This essay focuses on the distinctive contribution Weaver has made to Australian theatre, Australian acting and in recent years to international cinema.

In 'Worlds Within', Vilashini Cooppan challenges the idea that the movement of global capital acts as a homogenising force, arguing for the significance of the 'cultural and psychic' connections it engenders, which operate variously with, against and beyond the flow of capital (3). This is important as a way of linking our understanding of individual lives to national life. Australian literature and particularly Australian theatre are located in and connected to world literature in many important and unexplored ways. Yet some significant contributions to this placement, this series of connections with world literature and theatre, are as yet undocumented. This essay seeks to address a gap in the understanding of modern theatre in Australia and its direct connections with European and American theatre. It explores the ways in which the actors Hayes Gordon (1920-1999), Zika Nester (1928-2014) and Henri Szeps (born 1943) lived out, and in Szeps's case continue to live out, what Cooppan calls 'twinned identifications and doubled dreams' (4). Cooppan does not accept that globalisation is a 'heterogenising' force in which national cultures are transcended, instead charting a 'politics of relationality' in which the national and the global are dual ideas held in balance though subject to change (4). This is a useful idea for understanding any nation, including Australia.

'The One Day of the Year' is one of the most provocative plays ever staged in Australia, and was banned for fear of offending members of the Returned Services League. A panel of judges had chosen the play to be performed at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1960. But before rehearsals commenced the board of governors of the festival banned it, believing the content to be insensitive to returned servicemen. The decision to ban the play aroused considerable controversy and an amateur group defiantly staged it in a suburban hall in Adelaide several months after the festival, with some funding from the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. It was a success and a Sydney production followed. The first professional production of 'The One Day of the Year' opened on 26 April 1961 at the Palace Theatre in Sydney after bomb threats kept the cast out of the theatre for 24 hours.

This essay documents and analyses the work of actor Elspeth Ballantyne and her career on stage and on television. Ballantyne trained at NIDA in the first graduating class, worked for many years on stage and became a household name when she played Meg in Prisoner (for eight years), a television series of immense popularity that is now regarded as a cult classic internationally. The essay reflects on the contribution of Ballantyne to the profession and its significance for actors in Australia.

This essay documents and analyses the work of New Zealand-born John Clarke as an actor and writer. It explores Clarke's genesis and background as a sketch writer and his work on radio, television and film in New Zealand and in Australia. The essay focuses on the ways in which Clarke has transformed sketch comedy on television and on his contribution to the democratic project of satire in Australia over several decades.

This essay documents and analyses the work of actor, writer and director Tony Sheldon. It offers an extended discussion of Sheldon's life as a child star on television and his training on the job with many stage directors including John Bell and Terence Clarke, his development as a lead in musical theatre and his international success in a range of musical theatre productions. The essay offers an account of the distinctive contribution of Sheldon to theatre as a working actor who learned from directors and other actors rather than in a studio or training program.

John Clarke delighted audiences with his satire for many years. He was both a writer and an actor, but in many ways, particularly in his early years, he was a reluctant actor. This article examines the development of Clarke’s unique approach to performing and his solution to the problem of establishing a direct connection with an audience. It explores Clarke’s development as a performer and writer from his beginnings in university revue in New Zealand in the 1960s, his association with Barry Humphries and others in London during the early 1970s, and his work in Australia from 1977 until his death in 2017. This article charts Clarke’s distinctive contribution to Australian comic drama as writer and performer in The Games (1998-2000) and in Clarke and Dawe (1989-2017). Drawing on numerous interviews the author conducted with Clarke between 2008 and 2017, it also investigates the unique ways in which Clarke prepared for comic performance, and his approach to collaboration with other writers and performers on scripts for television and in film.