Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender

Abstract Australian dramatist Tom Holloway’s adaptations of ancient tragedy reflect both the way that dramatists can structure scripts with an ‘open dramaturgy’ that provides directors with the opportunity to realize text through postdramatic strategies, and the way that the classics can be used to investigate the Australian psyche. The 2010 première production of Love Me Tender, Holloway’s Iphigenia at Aulis reinvention, situated the tragedy in an Australian bushfire season, and reinvented it in the form of unattributed lines on a page. The absence of characters is a postdramatic strategy, and in performance numerous other postdramatic techniques were added to the script to create an affective, image-driven investigation into the theme of sacrifice. Chapter 3 argues that Love Me Tender embodies a politics of form, and that the play compounds an investigation into the idea of sacrifice with a focus upon societal tensions surrounding pre-teen sexuality and raunch culture. It suggests that Love Me Tender provides a key example not only of the way that this new dramaturgical style can be realized through postdramatic performance, but also of the political use of the classics in postdramatic theatre.