Last, few, words.

Norm and Ahmed and Rooted (first performed in 1968 and 1969) are the two earliest plays of a playwright who has established himself as one of the most gifted of that younger generation of Australian writers attracted to the theatre in the late 1960s and 1970s. Alexander Buzo has now had a dozen plays—on a wide range of contemporary themes—performed by the main professional companies and little theatres throughout Australia, and many of them have been performed outside Australia (in England and the United States) as well.

Yet his work has not been without its detractors. His verbal flair and comic vitality, and his capacity for sharply-edged social comment, have been generally acknowledged; but he has also been criticised as deficient in skills of construction and characterisation. The ending of Norm and Ahmed, for example—on which so much of the play’s effect depends—has been seen as arbitrary, insufficiently motivated by anything that occurs earlier in the play. And Bentley, the protagonist of Rooted, has been seen as an inadequate characterisation. A more realistic presentation, it has been argued, might have made him less helpless and passive, less willing to acquiesce in his own humiliation and defeat.

Alex Buzo . com
Norm and Ahmed . com