Inner Voices / Albert Names Edward (PLAYS)

These two plays first brought Louis Nowra to public attention as a playwright, and now published together in a revised edition, vividly demonstrate his early preoccupation with isolation and the exercise of power through the imagination. Both plays' central characters are held prisoner by men whose ignorance is matched only by their ambition. In Inner Voices the son of Catherine the Great, locked away since childhood, is set upon the throne of Russia knowing only his name (1 act, 10 men, 3 women, extras) . In Albert Names Edward, a black comedy about an amnesiac who takes shelter with an urban hermit, the world they enter is that of Mickey Spillane (1 act, 2 men) .