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Holy Day

Playwright: Andrew Bovell
Year: 2001
Type: Play
Edition: State Theatre Company of SA, 2001. Currency, 2001.

Synopsis

Holy Day is a disquieting story of trust and truth, innocence and faith, set in the mid-nineteenth century on the white frontier. When a white woman arrives at an isolated traveller's rest with a chilling story of a murdered husband and stolen baby, the tenuous peace is disturbed and retribution sought. The only witness to the crime is a native woman, who neither protests her innocence nor implicates others of guilt. From the award winning playwright Andrew Bovell comes this chilling story of suspense in which the truth has the power to both illuminate and destroy innocence. - Publisher's synopsis

Narrative Locations

"The White Frontier", Flinders and Outback, South Australia  
Location notes:

Holy Day is set on 'the white frontier', during the mid-nineteenth century. The lack of specificity for this setting is deliberate- playwright Andrew Bovell intended the story to function as "an allegory so that it speaks to our history as a poetic idea rather than a specific event within our history.To locate it in time and place would require a fidelity to historical fact." (correspondence between Stephen Carleton and Andrew Bovell.)

Coordinates have been given for north of the Flinders Ranges, as Bovell has stated that this suits the type of place Holy Day represents: semi-arid interior regions far removed from significant bodies of water. [It is made clear that the setting is far removed from ocean through the character Obedience's repeated questioning about the colour of the sea]. These coordinates are not specific and merely suggestive, as Bovell states that "to specify it as having taken place anywhere is problematic".

The action of the play moves between a few separate locations: the mission station, the halfway house The Traveller's Rest, Thomas Wakefield's farm, and the waterhole. However, only one broader location has been placed on the map, as the specifics of these individual locations are less important to the play than the broader landscape - the empty and unforgiving frontier of white settlement. 

Quotes

Black clouds loom over a vast desert plain. Lightening cuts the sky on the horizon. Thunder rumbles in the distance.

A woman stands on a rise looking over the plain below.

(p. 'Opening' page 1)


NORA: The storm has past but we're still here. Look at it. Endless fucking plain. Soon a thousand flowers will bloom. It's a bastard to trick us like that. To make us forget what easy death lies out there.

(p. Act 1, scene 3, page 12)


ELIZABETH: You thought my husband was a zealot.

WAKEFIELD: I thought he misunderstood the country he had come to, that's all. The fact that he has wandered into the desert alone would prove that.

(p. Act 1, scene 8, page 27)





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