| A Very Good Year | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Bob Ellis |
| Directed by | Mick Rodger |
| Characters | Bob Ellis Francis James Les Murray Gough Whitlam |
| Date premiered | December 9, 1908 |
| Place premiered | Stables Theatre, Sydney |
| Original language | English |
| Subject | Gough Whitlam |
| Genre | comedy with music |
A Very Good Year is a 1980 Australian play by Bob Ellis. It was set in the last two weeks of the 1970s and Ellis called it his farewell to "the Whitlam decade".[1]
The play was heavily autobiographical. A reviewer from the Sydney Morning Herald called it "a flop".[2]
According to one account the play "explores some of the preoccupations at the start of the 1980s, including Nostradamus, embassy kidnappings, and the women's movement."[3] Ellis said "it is set in Palm Beach in those perculiar two weeks last Christmas when bushfires were surrounding Sydney, the sky was dark and apocalyptic, Tito's death seemed to make a Russian invasion of Yugoslavia likely; meanwhile they were really invading Afghanistan, there was the hostage crisis and there were cheerful headlines saying 'Countdown to World War III'. It's quite apocalyptic, and very funny and there are lots of songs."[4]
He also called it "in part a memorial to Whitlam, and in part a threnody to dreams foregone, and in part a look at the technological holocaust that was overwhelming the world."[5]
Ellis later said the play "was badly done at the time but which at least still exists on paper."[6]
At Palm Beach, a writer whose wife and child are away entertains a girl from the public service and is visited by a poet friend. A female journalist who aborted her baby to the writer also visits.