The Touch Of Silk

At its premiere performance by the Melbourne Repertory Theatre in 1928, this poignant drama of Jeanne, a French war-bride and her shell-shocked husband battling the hardship and prejudices of an isolated farming community, was acclaimed as ''a vein of gold'' and ''the pattern of great drama''. One critic proclaimed that Australian drama had at last been born. Though written at a time when a national drama was the dream of a tiny minority, the play, like its high-spirited heroine, has survived and gained new dimensions, both as a portrait of rural life in the 1920s and as a reminder that Australia has been peopled by immigrants from the world''s disasters who have countered the tyrannies of distance, climate and memory, each in their own way, with their own tools of survival.