[Review of] Janis Balodis, "The Ghosts Trilogy" (Too Young For Ghosts; No Going Back; My Father's Father) Sydney: Currency Press, 1997

Abstract

This is a landmark publication, although its appearance will probably excite less interest than it should. For despite the originality of these plays (and perhaps because of it), despite their technical daring and sometimes stunning theatricality, they have encountered deeply ambivalent responses from readers, audiences, critics and potential producers. The first, best and best-known work in the trilogy, Too Young For Ghosts, was commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company in 1981. Its central device - and that of the trilogy as a whole - is to counterpoint the experiences of a group of Latvian emigrés in post-war Northern Queensland with those of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt in the same landscape some hundred years earlier. Too Young For Ghosts has to be regarded as one of the major achievements of modern Australian drama, a work of exceptional craftsmanship and extraordinary imagination. The significance of the trilogy as a whole is harder to gauge.