Alana Valentine's "Nucleus" teachers' review

Brief description and distinctive features

Synopsis of Nucleus

There are two characters in this play: Dr Gabriel Hulst and Dr Cassie Logart. Gabriel is a nuclear engineer who emigrated to Australia in the 1960s “when Australia was interested in building (uranium) enrichment plants” and when John Gorton became Prime Minister in January 1968 he was “in favour of having a nuclear power station in Jervis Bay.” Gabriel opens the play with a long monologue where he establishes his antipathy towards Cassie and acknowledges they have known each other since the 1970s. Cassie is an anti-nuclear campaigner who is passionately against most of what Gabriel works for and believes in. But there is more to their relationship than ideological polarity and this provides an interesting twist to the narrative and provides dramatic tension. Valentine powerfully explores the human cost in what director, Andrea James calls “two love-struck enemies.”

Alana Valentine is an extraordinarily prolific creator who has written more than 20 plays and worked in creating films, television, dance and opera. Alana has won many awards nationally and in the international world of theatre and writing.  It is worth students accessing her website to see the versatility and breadth of Alana’s work.

Distinctive features of Nucleus

• Nucleus is short at 44 pages which allows coverage of the play and its key ideas and distinctive features in about two weeks of lessons.
• There are only two characters who speak a combination of sustained monologues and shorter interactions of dialogue.
• There is significant factual detail in the dialogue which has been part of Valentine’s extensive research, including an historical perspective on Australia’s journey with nuclear issues, the science of nuclear fission and the medical effects of using nuclear power.
• The denouement is unexpected and lays bare human frailty and vulnerability.
• It is a contemporary text: Nucleus was first published in 2025 and was performed in February-March 2025 as a collaboration between the Griffin Theatre Company and the Seymour Centre. 
• The theatre program can be accessed at Griffin Theatre. The program provides interesting material on the production including notes from the director, Andrea James. 
• There are 8 short Acts: 3 scenes in Act I and the other seven comprise a single scene.
• Settings are indicated in the beginning of the script as: A dream, A memory. A bar. A pool. A room. 
• Sometimes the scene changes are used to delineate the monologues from the sustained dialogue.

Ways to use Nucleus in the classroom

In 2024 Mission Australia surveyed 17,480 young people to learn about the issues which affected them most. The second most significant issue was climate change and the environment where 27% identified it as one of the most important issues in Australia. Access the website for more details.

Alana Valentine has certainly tapped into this anxiety about climate change and the environment. Nucleus also challenges her audience to consider what happens when someone you love or is close to has startlingly different views on such issues as the impact of government policy, science and the development of alternative power supplies like nuclear energy.

This play has several possibilities for Year 11 students. 

It could feature as a core text in Reading to Write or in a suite of plays by Alana Valentine where students explore contemporary attitudes and values through drama. 

In a Reading to Write unit a range of different texts in different forms could be used to explore different representations of challenging environmental issues. 

Texts could include:

A range of editorial cartoons by talented creatives like Kathy Wilcox and David Pope. Identify the key issue and analyse the specific visual features.

A range of speeches to explore purpose, audience and specific language features; for example Tim Winton, Severn Suzuki, Greta Thunberg, Tim Minchin

Nucleus as a focus text 

Picture books which explore environmental concerns as in The Dream of the Thyalcine, Fox, Cicada

Download the full report from Mission Australia to provide a research base for the exploration. 

A close focus on the text as drama 

Susan Hoddinott, a friend and colleague, has written extensively on the importance of treating drama texts differently from prose:

“Teaching Drama can be one of the most daunting, yet one of the most rewarding experiences, for an English teacher. Drama is one of the oldest literary forms. It has a discreet body of knowledge that spans 2,500 years. It has its own terminology.  It is closely linked to poetry as, like poetry, it springs from the very origins of story-telling and the oral tradition. 

The understanding of the form and features strengthen a student’s understanding of how theatre is a distinctively visual, and auditory world.”

The exposition of any text is important but in a play the audience needs to be quickly oriented to the main characters, the narrative arc and the play’s style. 

In Nucleus the exposition takes the form of an extended monologue by Gabriel Act 1, Scene i:

• It positions the audience as to Gabriel’s opinion of Cassie Logart’s point of view
• It challenges the audience to consider why we don’t mention “waste” and other forms of energy creation like wind farms
• There is conjecture over the reasons for the abortions post Chernobyl nuclear disaster
• Gabriel asserts his qualifications and experience
• Gabriel gives some background on the Australian Atomic Energy Commission established at Lucas Heights (where is remains renamed as Australia Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation-ANSTO)

Task: In what ways does the opening Act establish key ideas of the play and its style?

Act 2 sees Cassie taking the longer monologue role where she explains her role in the relationship with Gabriel and her intention of writing an article post-seduction to taint his reputation. Cassie’s arguments against nuclear energy “being clean” are convincing. This conviction reinforces the premise of needing to hear both sides of controversial situations which is not always easy to obtain through social media or even traditional media sources. 

Task: which of Cassie’s arguments do you find the most compelling? 

This scene also raises questions about the ethics of deception and creating a situation where someone’s reputation could be compromised. Cassie also reveals their sexual encounter led to her pregnancy and her comments are confronting.

In Act 3 Gabriel resumes his monologue and his arguments are also convincing for example the storage of nuclear waste. This monologue reflects on encountering Cassie at an anti-nuclear rally in Canberra. Here the play’s title, Nucleus, becomes relevant. Gabriel explains the technicalities of the science of nuclear energy where the process “splits the nucleus of the uranium atom” which releases a huge amount of energy. 

Gabriel celebrates the role of engineers who design for “efficiency, practicality, durability… the authors of modernity.” This monologue also reveals the dilemma of Cassie and Gabriel’s relationship and the reasons he told his wife about his infidelity. Gabriel makes a powerful point that when you love someone you want to share all aspects of your life and here Alana Valentine raises more questions about the challenges to relationships when you cannot share your point of view with those who are important to you. 

Act 4 has a stage direction: “A bar. Painted with white orchids” and the narrative returns to a dialogue between the two characters evenly sharing lines. This scene captures their encounter at the conference and adds more detail. 

Cassie resumes her monologue in Act 5 and her comment is poignant: “I just wondered if it was possible to love someone with whom you disagreed utterly.” This section also reveals a much more vulnerable Cassie which adds a different layer to the play that will be amplified in the ending. 

Act 6 is also given stage directions for the setting: “The indoor pool of a large hotel. Gabriel and Cassie are in swimming costumes.” Their dialogue resumes as even lines between them and the tension grows; Gabriel’s comments about relationships is powerful: “People have to share values to be able to share a life.” 

Act 7 states that “Cassie is alone on stage, playing cards. She uses a water jug to pour a glass of water and take two tablets from a small bottle in her pocket.” 

This scene takes place in the present and it is now “several decades” since their initial encounter. In their conversation they both update each other and the audience of their involvement in both sides of the nuclear debate and interestingly, Gabriel comments that “I think anti-nuclear is seen as a bit of a thing of the past.” He also says that part of his current advocacy is “that nuclear power does not lead to nuclear war” and this is certainly an area of conjecture in the contemporary debate. 

Gabriel makes a compelling point that:

“They used fossil fuels and warmed the planet to the point where we can’t live on it anymore … the threat of nuclear disaster is miniscule compared to the certain apocalypse of continuing to use carbon, coal, oil and all the other things that our generation thrived on.” 

Gabriel reveals he has been asked to do another risk assessment on Jervis Bay and this certainly brings the play to the present. The play’s intensity increases when Cassie’s death is foreshadowed, and the poignancy of human frailty is evoked in these simple lines: “I’m so scared” and “I don’t want to die bitter.” 

Even in the intensity of Cassie’s situation their dialogue about the positives and negatives of nuclear power continues and each line of dialogue is like a debate where each side has a totally different point of view. 

Act 8 has the most detailed  stage directions of the play. The scene has moved to Murrays Beach at Jervis Bay and as well as the large, concrete platform there is the “sound of nature, the blue of the sky and the ocean. Her scream becomes the scream of a yellow-tailed black cockatoo.” 

Cassie opens this final Act with a gentle and lyrical description of the beauty of the area but the scene grows in its emotional intensity as both Cassie and Gabriel describe the plan to build the nuclear reactor according to their perspective: 

Cassie: “you want to muffle fairyland.” 
Gabriel: “I see a space to build. An emptiness to fill.” 

The intensity and adversarial contest decreases and there is even delicacy in Cassie’s reverie: 

“I called a wind Sweetness because it carried the smells of the forest, of pine and dirt and eucalypts crushed into muddy oil.” 

The human tragedy of decades of deception and wanting each other to be different and to change is now the play’s focus. The final stage directions are full of the pathos that we call humanity. Valentine’s detail is intentional as she evokes the pity and pain of Michelangelo’s magnificent sculpture of Mary and Jesus in The Pieta of the Sistine Chapel:

“He holds her like a pieta, dead in his arms. 
He cries. 
Lights fade.” 

Task: In what ways do the closing moments of Nucleus draw together the key ideas of the play?

Taking the ending further

There have been many variations on Michelangelo’s magnificent sculpture. Ask students to find a more contemporary example which captures the human frailty of this final tableaux of Nucleus. For example, the Harvard Art Museum.

There is another Pieta sculptured by American Gib Singleton at Via Dolorosa Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas, Texas. Visit his website for some powerful sculptures.

Other classroom tasks

1. The playwright alternates scenes of long monologues to short, sharp pages of dialogue. With close focus on four scenes discuss the role of these dramatic conventions. In your view is one more effective than the other- explain your perspective.

2. Why has the playwright added the romantic layer to the narrative?

3. Create a table of main points for and against nuclear energy as made by Cassie and Gabriel. Is there another perspective? Research this topic to add a third perspective.

4. Sustained response: The importance of theatre is to provoke us to challenge our own assumptions. To what extent is this true of Alana Valentine’s Nucleus?

5. Write a feature article in the discursive style that explores this topic outlined below.

   One of the important features of a healthy society is for the Arts to act as barometers for public knowledge, opinion and action. Explore how Alana Valentine’s play Nucleus fulfills this role. In your article include analysis of two editorial cartoons, one speech and one other text. Keep in mind that in English we need to focus on how the text shapes our understanding and knowledge - that is, the language choices of each composer in representing specific issues.

6. Compose a 3-4 minute persuasive speech (about 520 words) suitable for a Year 11/12 audience on the importance of debate on one of the following topics:

   • Nuclear power
   • Wind farms at sea
   • Coal-fired power stations
   • Coral Bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef
   • Damming of the Franklin River Tasmania
   • Large scale open cut mining
   • Fossil fuel and impact on climate
   • Salinity and land degradation
   • Increase in extreme weather events
   • Degradation of Ningaloo Reef

   Include:

   • An interesting and engaging opening
   • A variety of sentence lengths
   • Clever and engaging word choice
   • Consider the appeal of ethos, logos and pathos (your credibility, use of reason and appeal to emotion)
   • High modality in word choice
   • Passion and conviction
   • Convincing evidence including facts
   • Use of the tricolon for rhetorical effect

Relevant details in relation to the NSW English Stage 6 syllabus

Text requirements: Nucleus meets Stage 6 text requirements for drama, Australian author, social, cultural and gender perspectives.
Find supporting resources in our Year 11 texts and study guides at Five Senses Education.

Connecting texts of the other Valentine plays