Shoulder the Sky

Shoulder the Sky is an Australian stage play by Dymphna Cusackabout canteen workers in Newcastle that was adapted for radio in 1945.^[1][2]

Shoulder the Sky
Written by	Dymphna Cusack
Date premiered	6 July 1951
Place premiered	Belsen Recreation Hall, Darwin
Original language	English
Setting	Newcastle army canteen

Ad in the Northern Standard 6 July 1951

History

The play was written under the title They Also Serve. This won an "additional prize" in a 1945 competition held by the Playwrights' Advisory Board (first prize was Sons of the Morning, second was Positions Vacant while "highly commended" were Portrait of a Gentleman and The Gentle Warrior.)^[3]

Leslie Rees said the play "making a somewhat dangerous virtue of formlessness, has wit and bite and passion."^[4] He later called it "a trenchant, plotless, constantly unfolding view of the emotional and physical conditions brought by the war to our cities" adding:

There are Saroyanesque characters—drunks, outcasts, lost souls—as well as ordinary soldiers and girls. There are cynical-sentimental attitudes, forceful criticisms of the maladjustments of life, bitterness, mordancy, and despair, matched by optimism and faith in ordinary people. A long queue of characters jostle each other, make love, revile, drink, are sick and sorry, find the worst or best in themselves and in one another. Through it all the author seems to be pressing home the truth that the private muddle and turbulence produced by war on the home front is far from pretty, in fact ruthless and anti-social.^[5]

Radio version

The play was adapted for ABC radio in 1945 under the title Shoulder the Sky.^[6]

Publication

The play was published in 1950 in a collection of Cusack's plays.^[7][8] The Adelaide News said "the speeches are "stagey"."^[9] The Adeladie Advertiser wrote the play "takes life from the wartime atmosphere of its setting, a factor which also contributes a pleasant variety of characteri sation and character-types. This play... has... more strength damatically, because it moves quietly."^[10]

Production history

The stage play appears to have been first performed on stage in Darwin in 1951.^[11] The Northern Standard wrote "Combining both tragedy and comedy, the script is packed with pungent and witty dialogue and the characters are forthright in their utterances."^[12]

Leslie Rees wrte plays like Shoulder the Sky "reflecting common feelings and experiences engendered by the war, needed immediate stage presentation, and in other countries would have received it. The uncertainty of having such plays taken up at once by an adult stage partly explains why so few topical plays are written in Australia and why so many playwrights prefer to express their strong ideas and feelings more generally through historical plays."^[13]