Early New Zealand Women on Stage: The Surviving Plays of Violet Targuse

"It is not hard to decide who is the best-known New Zealand playwright—among the women at any rate," wrote an Australian women's magazine in 1936: Violet Targuse.The New Zealand Herald praised her in 1935 as New Zealand's "most successful writer of one-act plays," while in the twenty-first century she has been described as "probably New Zealand's most successful and least acclaimed one-act playwright."Violet Targuse was a pioneering—and successful—New Zealand playwright in the 1930s. She won multiple playwriting awards, and her plays have been performed around New Zealand, as well as in Australia, England, Spain, Portugal, and Wales. Yet her contribution to the expansion of theatrical roles for women on the New Zealand stage and the maturing of New Zealand’s unique theatrical path, is far too frequently overlooked.This volume seeks to change that. For the first time, it brings together all of Targuse’s currently known surviving plays—two of which have never before been published, and one of which has never been published in New Zealand. An introductory chapter outlines Targuse’s biography, and traces the reaction to her work from the 1930s through to the twenty-first century. Read more