Rusty Bugles

Rusty Bugles
Written by	Sumner Locke Elliott
Date premiered	1948
Original language	English
Setting	Northern Territory during World War II

Rusty Bugles
Directed by	Alan Burke
Written by	John Warwick
Based on	play by Sumner Locke Elliott
Production company	ABC
Distributed by	ABC
Release date	23 June 1965
Running time	75 mins
Country	Australia
Language	English

Rusty Bugles
Directed by	John Matthews
Produced by	Alan Burke
Written by	Sumner Locke Elliott
Based on	play by Sumner Locke Elliott
Starring	Serge Lazareff Graham Rouse Ian Gilmour
Production company	ABC
Distributed by	ABC
Release date	1981
Running time	75 mins
Country	Australia
Language	English

Rusty Bugles was a controversial Australian play written by Sumner Locke Elliott in 1948. It toured extensively throughout Australia between 1948–1949 and was threatened with closure by the New South Wales Chief Secretary's Office for obscenity.

It was first produced by Doris Fitton and Sydney's Independent Theatre company on 14 October 1948, and advertised as an "army comedy documentary". The announcement of its ban was made by J. M. Baddeley, Chief Secretary and acting Premier of New South Wales, on 22 October but after initially defying the ban, Doris Fitton avoided a forced closure by commissioning a rewrite from the author.

The Independent Theatre took the play, after an unprecedented 20-week run in New South Wales, to reopen The King's Theatre, Melbourne. Meanwhile, another company was playing "Rusty Bugles" at Killara, New South Wales, so it was the first Australian play to run simultaneously in two states. The words that were the subject of the ban gradually reappeared; no legal action was ever taken, though rewrites were demanded in different states.

At the end of its record six-month run in Melbourne, the production transferred to Adelaide, then returned to Sydney at The Tatler. But now critics were writing that it was being played for laughs, with the swearing self-conscious rather than part of the patois.

The publisher of the play, Currency Press, quotes Elliott as saying that Rusty Bugles was 'a documentary... Not strictly a play... it has no plot in the accepted sense'. Elliott did not foresee that shortly after this, the genre of the theatre of the absurd would be established as a 'legitimate' dramatic form where plot and the delineation of character are less important than the insight offered into the implicit drama of most human interactions.

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