Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly

In Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly, a collection of four plays by one of Australia’s most fearless playwrights, Patricia Cornelius displays all her skill, wit, beauty and anger, and serves them up like a still beating heart on a chipped plate.


Cornelius’s signature grungy poetic style is at its finest in the early play Love, a brutally beautiful journey into the emotional core of three broken souls in a broken world. In SLUT, a short, sharp stab into the heart of internalised misogyny, Cornelius explores the life and perceived crimes of Lolita, a schoolgirl whose sexual confidence both frightens and fascinates her peers. In The Club takes us into the adrenalin-fuelled, macho-pumped world of professional footballers and its intersection with slut-shaming and issues of consent. And in the sweeping, Lorca-inspired The House of Bernadette, the family of women left behind after the death of a patriarch is a goldmine of female desire, sexual repression, and individual compromise. 


[Her work] channels the power of resisting received literary tradition in order to open up a space where the lives of characters on the margins can become vessels of universal truths.—Windham-Campbell Award judges


For a study guide for The House of Bernardette from Melbourne Theatre Company https://mtc-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/File/10115.pdf