The Playmaker (SIGNED)
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Signed
In the raw, unforgiving wilderness of colonial New South Wales in 1789, a young Royal Marine lieutenant named Ralph Clark receives an extraordinary commission: to stage a theatrical performance of The Recruiting Officer using a cast of convicts transported to the ends of the earth. The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally is a richly imagined historical novel that chronicles this audacious cultural experiment at the very edge of the known world, where the boundaries between performer and criminal, captor and captive, begin to dissolve beneath the harsh Australian sun. Keneally, best known for Schindler's Ark, brings his formidable gifts for moral complexity and historical authenticity to bear on this remarkable true episode, using theatre as a lens through which to examine questions of freedom, redemption, and human dignity. The novel illuminates how art can pierce the armour of even the most brutal social hierarchies, and asks whether performance itself is an act of liberation or merely another form of control. Rich in period detail and psychological depth, The Playmaker leaves the reader wondering whether Ralph Clark's convicts were truly performing for their captors — or quietly staging a revolution of the soul.
Author: Thomas Keneally
Format: Hardback
Published: 1987, Hodder & Stoughton
Genre: Historical fiction
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Signed
In the raw, unforgiving wilderness of colonial New South Wales in 1789, a young Royal Marine lieutenant named Ralph Clark receives an extraordinary commission: to stage a theatrical performance of The Recruiting Officer using a cast of convicts transported to the ends of the earth. The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally is a richly imagined historical novel that chronicles this audacious cultural experiment at the very edge of the known world, where the boundaries between performer and criminal, captor and captive, begin to dissolve beneath the harsh Australian sun. Keneally, best known for Schindler's Ark, brings his formidable gifts for moral complexity and historical authenticity to bear on this remarkable true episode, using theatre as a lens through which to examine questions of freedom, redemption, and human dignity. The novel illuminates how art can pierce the armour of even the most brutal social hierarchies, and asks whether performance itself is an act of liberation or merely another form of control. Rich in period detail and psychological depth, The Playmaker leaves the reader wondering whether Ralph Clark's convicts were truly performing for their captors — or quietly staging a revolution of the soul.