Squatter

Paperback

First published 1988; reprinted 1990, 1995

Squatter takes place in and around the estate of Carnegie, on the Canterbury Plains, in 1894. It is a time of change. The new middle class is in the ascendancy; the Liberal government is attempting to force the breakup into smaller farms of the large feudal estates…

But Squatter is not like most historical plays. Evading the limits of conventional stage naturalism, it is a rich mix of theatrical spectacle, larger than life character and vivid, deliberately anachronistic language which will entertain and provoke.

‘A great raw brute of a play which grabs our colonial past by the scruff of the neck and gives it a hefty boot in the pants.’
—Peter Calder, New Zealand Herald