COLONIAL EXPERIENCE

Acclaimed by the Sydney Morning Herald at its premiere in 1868 as 'the most successful colonial play produced on the Sydney boards', Walter Cooper's second play was notable for local colour and for integrating familiar colonial types into a comedy of Australian manners.

The miserly Matthew Grudge is attempting to swindle his nephew and marry his heiress niece to his jackeroo son. His plans are complicated by the wily Captain Versatile Fluent, an Irish fortune hunter, and eventually foiled by his clerk, the faithful Peter Shrivel. A sub-plot involves the merry baiting of a pair of new chums in search of 'colonial experience'. The play has been revived several times since it was published in 1979.

Edited by Eric Irvin.