Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Developments in Recent Australian Drama

Author(s): Peter Fitzpatrick and Helen Thomson
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 3, Contemporary Australian Literature
(Summer, 1993), pp. 489-493
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
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 Developments in Recent Australian Drama

By PETER FITZPATRICK tide like the Pioneer Players. The other new factor
& HELEN THOMSON was the very noisy arrival of the ocker.
The ocker rode in on the back of the break-
It took a depressingly long time before the Aus-
throughs in censorship which occurred in Australia
tralian theatre could lay claim to a tradition in localin the late sixties; those new freedoms
and elsewhere
drama that was lively, distinctive, andcoincided lasting.happily
The with a period of relative generosity
last two-and-a-half decades, in which that develop-
in funding for the arts. The ocker was brash, crude,
ment has at last occurred, provide a concentrated and a violator of all decorums, big in his talk and his
and very suggestive instance of that process drinking, inandan (by his own graphic but questionable
urban postcolonial society: there is the quest account)for ancul-
accomplished sexual performer as well.
tural definition, characterised by a strong He wasreaction
mostly young and middle-class, and he was
against the received values of the "parent" alwaysculture;
self-advertisingly male. For the first time the
there is the creation, through a complex set of
theatre had fac-
found a stereotype which represented
tors, of a theatrical mainstream confirmed by the
cultural distinctiveness in a form that urban audi-
repertoire of the establishment theatre and bycould
ences publi-recognize as corresponding to aspects of
cation; and there is the reaction, once that main- their own experience.
stream has been identified, of those antiestablish- The mythology of the wide brown land, in which
ment interests which would subvert it as it once so many playwrights had in earlier decades sought to
subverted the colonial power. Observers still occa-
locate their sense of Australianness, had proved fairly
sionally wonder whether the strength and momen- remote to that audience. It had also been hostile to
tum that marked Australian theatre in the the early
conventions and assumptions of naturalism, the
1970s has petered out, as so many promisingmode move-
which dominated the theatre of the time. The
ments did before; but what has been evident stridently
in the local theatre of the early 1970s fitted the
last fifteen years has been a series of quiet but social-realist
signifi- frame quite snugly, though its manner
cant little revolutions, small by comparison with the satiric caricature. And while the new audi-
was mostly
transformations of that period, but involving encesthemight not always want to be identified with the
kinds of challenges to the audience that make a liv-
figure of the ocker, he came from the suburbs as they
ing theatre. did, and everyone knew somebody a bit like him.
Two important elements coincided in the late The ocker's particular attraction for the "New
1960s to create the revolution that began at the al- Wave" theatre lay not only in his uncouthness and
ternative seasons at the Jane Street Theatre in Syd- comic vigour, but also in his complexity as a speaker.
ney and, especially, at the La Mama Theatre and the For the first time Australian theatre presented a style
Pram Factory in Melbourne, which was quickly of talk which reflected the shifts in conversational
dubbed the "New Wave" of Australian theatre. One
register so striking in a culture where idiom has very
was the opportunity for writers to work closely with a to do with regional variations and a great deal
little
performance company, which the playwrights of pre-to do with the class to which one belongs or aspires.
vious decades had mostly lacked; in the case of Mel-
Kenny Carter, the motor mechanic in David Wil-
bourne's Australian Performing Group, the collabo-
liamson's play The Removalists (1971), who defines
rative model was underpinned by the radical political
himself as "just a beer-swilling slob," makes it clear
commitment which has been characteristic of inno-
that he is crude by choice and not by necessity. His
vative companies throughout the world and which first scene in the play, in which he rationalises his vi-
might have sustained earlier swimmers against the toward his wife on the previous evening as a
olence
"love pat" which she had earned because of her slop-
py housekeeping, shows him moving through a num-
Helen Thomson is Senior Lecturer in English at Monash Uni- ber of conversational roles ranging from quite com-
versity in Melbourne and is Melbourne theatre critic for the Aus- plex and polysyllabic ironies to deliberately shocking
tralian. Soon to appear is her book The Madwoman in the Bush: crudity. When he stuffs bread into his mouth and
The Madwoman in Australian Literature.
swigs beer from the bottle in a calculated affront to
Peter Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English at Monash
his pretentious sister-in-law, his challenge, "Don't
University. He is the author of After "The Doll": Australian Dra-
you like my manners?" might stand as a motto for all
ma Since 1955, Williamson, and Stephen Sewell: The Playwright as
Revolutionary. Forthcoming is his dual biography of Louis and the ockers who followed him onto the stage. The
Hilde Esson. challenge was directed against the decorums of a

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490 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

parent culture defined as not only ing stuffy but

reconciliation withno
the grimmer facts of life with
longer relevant. Even for those in thethe
help theatre whoparallels and Mendels-
of Shakespearean
didn't like his manners much at all, sohn's there music,
was Williamson
a sense finds ways in these plays
of liberation and of nationalist assertion which was to engage in a different kind of mythologising.
exhilarating. Rather than discovering the materials for distinctive
The affluent graduates of Williamson's dramacultural emblems wholly within the culture itself,
Don's Party (1971) are even more sophisticated play- this tactic locates Australianness within a larger story
ers of the game of verbal affront and representand thea wider humanity.
beginnings of a journey in which the ocker moved Sewell's Marxism has always insisted on that
very rapidly up-market. It was not long before he broader
re- context, and in early plays set outside Aus-
sembled quite closely the educated elite which patro- tralia like Traitors (1979) and Welcome the Bright
nised Australia's subsidised theatres. Williamson set World (1982) there is a historical framework as well
the pace in the development of the ocker figure, to channel
as the lives of the participants. The Blind
he did in the not unrelated progress of Australian Giant Is Dancing (1983) and Dreams in an Empty
theatre satire from the antiestablishment alternatives City (1986), his panoramic plays about the terrible
into the theatrical mainstream. But there were other power of despair and the necessary possibility of
distinguished variants on the theme: Barry Oakley some form of belief, do more than place their Aus-
and Alex Buzo took the ocker to new heights of self- tralian actions within an international network of in-
protective irony, and John Romeril in The Floating fluence. Both works draw on received mythologies
World (1974) dramatised Les Harding's almost suc- (Faust and Christ) to shape and substantiate their
cessful suppression of the atrocities of war and im- passionate moral concerns. Even in the more inti-
prisonment beneath his mask of comic assertiveness; mate world of Hate (1989), the archetypal symbol-
even the octogenarian Monk O'Neill in Jack Hib-ism of the land as maternal principle and the invoca-
berd's play A Stretch of the Imagination (1972) can betion of familiar tragedies from Sophocles to
seen in the vulgarity and virtuosity of his talk asShakespeare
a give deeper resonance to the plot.
very senior affiliate of the ocker tribe. However, it does seem that becoming part of the
Like many a source of theatrical liberation, the mainstream involves a loss of political focus.
ocker stereotype had its own capacity for oppression.Williamson has always found his material primarily
The ocker was a triumphant product of the quest for in the moral dilemmas of the middle class. Usually
cultural definition, but in his loquacious way he re- the treatment is compassionate, even indulgent;
capitulated a number of the theatrical problems there are still traces of the tension between satiric ex-
raised by the inarticulate heroes of those early at- posure and celebration which marked a lot of his
tempts to put the outback on the stage. His value earlier work and in Don's Party produced an interest-
system and verbal style dominated the plays he was ing ambivalence of tone. When the moral analysis is
in, leaving no room for the experience of women largely or preempted by the rush to general forgiveness,
of men who happened not to share his habits or his though, as it is to some extent in Top Silk and even
Anglo-Celtic heritage; and the strategic effectiveness in the painfully recognizable complications of his
of his bid for conversational power meant that there marriage play The Perfectionist (1980), the result can
could be very little analysis of what, if anything, laybe a less productive kind of ambivalence. Money and
beneath his very practised surfaces. Friends (1992), though its people are mostly as lik-
David Williamson and Stephen Sewell, in very ably hollow and sophisticated as the other self-de-
different ways, are the dominant playwrights in con- ceivers who mostly crowd his recent plays, has a
temporary Australian theatre. Williamson has en- tougher edge; in a world where people have become
joyed an astonishing popularity, but although he re- too smart or jaded to pursue matters spiritual or po-
mains concerned with satiric observation and with litical, failing a friend is about the ultimate sin, and
manipulative strategies in familiar social situations, the vision of the play is correspondingly clearer. That
he is certainly not a playwright who is standing has implications for the shape of the plot too. There
still.
The increasing readiness to experiment with episodic is less need to turn to literary archetype, like the
structures is one sign of a more obtrusive interest journey
in to Oz in Emerald City> to confer a structure
dramatic form which has also, in plays like Top Silk which are all negotiable.
on ideas
(1989) and Siren (1990), produced particularly Even Sewell's recent work shows signs of this turn
shapely plots. More interesting, though, are William- to the values constructed in private relationships. His
son's use of music to broaden the emotional range of two-woman play Sisters (1991) is hardly a cosy affir-
his fine and compassionate comedy about death andmation of the joys of family, but its recurrent rhythms
decay, Travelling North (1979), and his reference to of wounding and healing point to a kind of emotional
the wonderful world of Oz to tighten the mythicfusion between the sisters which is finally a source of
framework of Emerald City (1986). Like Michael comfort in an otherwise dark and lonely world. The
Gow, whose Away (1986) similarly achieves a mov-Garden of Granddaughters (1993) takes this develop-

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 FITZPATRICK & THOMSON 49 1

merit further; the reunion of the expatriate

Farm (1983) parents
and Tony Strachan's play The Eyes of
with their three daughters in Australiathe Whites (1983), which examined Australia's role
takes great
risks, not this time in confronting or as postcolonialits
challenging culture in the role of virtual colonial
audience, but in reinforcing and sentimentalizing
power in Fiji and New Guinea respectively. More re-
cently,
ideas of meaning which can be fairly glib. Notplays
every-like Sex Diary of an Infidel (1992) by
Michael
one has come so painfully to hope against theGurr and The Emperor Regrets (1992) by
power-
Therese Radic have appropriated versions of those
ful reasons for despair as Stephen Sewell.
"alien" forms
SewelPs King Golgrutha (1991), a grotesque and as an intrinsic part of their treatment
surreal comedy which thereby escapes of cultural otherness. of
the dangers
dealing in sage observations that mayStill, have become theatre in any complex so-
the establishment
slightly shopsoiled in soap opera, is ciety
a most unusual
is probably not the place to look for the things
piece to have been borne along in the thatmainstream.
characterise a lively national drama. The fact
thatfor
Perhaps in its reliance on visual images for atheconsiderable
com- period in recent Australian
theatre history
munication of some of its central intuitions it it has been a reasonable place to seek
sug-
gests a way to write plays with happy such a thing has
endings been a consequence of a number of
with-
out rubber-stamping the attitudes of factors. Partly it is a product of the ambiguous con-
establishment
ceptour
audiences. It generates its own myth for of the mainstream
times in theatre in Australia; the
the capitalistic monster Golgrutha, and1970s
finds muddied
in ittheanwaters by bringing the suddenly
commercial
equivalent for the mythic and historical iconoclasm of the "New Wave" into the
framework
essentially
which informed and appraised private relationships conservative structures of the large sub-
in his earlier plays. sidised theatres. Partly, too, it is a reflection of a rel-
atively
The major plays of the establishment small marketplace;
theatre in the processes of publica-
tion modest
the last few years have tended to affirm are very closely
cer- linked to the repertoires of those
tainties and to rely heavily on explicittheatres, and the ephemerality
discussion of of initiatives outside
issues which are dangerously big and them is compounded
perhaps even by distances, real and
more dangerously old; the questions metaphorical,
range from between
the the major Australian cities.
value of a life and the meaning of lifeThe at process
one end by which
of audiences have come to
hear the
the spectrum, to the nature or possibility of Aus- voices which were not heard, or hardly
heard, in the
tralian identity at the other. One play which offers a theatre of the first wave still involves
the establishment
superior instance of this line of concern is Hannie theatre to a degree. Writers like
Alma de the
Rayson's Hotel Sorrento (1991), in which Groen,veryand occasionally Hewett and White,
have found a
Chekhovian three sisters find, like their counterparts place in its repertoire. But the energies
of developments
in The Garden of Granddaughters, that the things in women's theatre and black the-
which unite them are far greater thanatrethehave largely been encountered outside it, and a
superficial
differences which drive them apart. strong,
Rayson'sdistinctive
playgrass-roots
is movement in commu-
strong enough emotionally to avoid simply nity theatre has happened elsewhere altogether.
reinforc-
ing some domestic complacencies, but Other this initiatives.
remainsAlmosta as soon as the "New
potential problem for the largely depoliticised Wave" became reper-
a cliche, it began to be fashionable to
toire of the mainstream.
speak of Australian theatre as though it were drown-
In one area the mainstream has continued to
ing, not waving. But there has been much to wave
dramatise significant sociopolitical changeabout. in Aus-
The preoccupation with language as cultural-
tralian society. The developing consciousness of ly self-defining at once shaped our drama and placed
Australia's Asian context has been reflected in the constraints on it; it was, for a while, a rich if narrow
subjects and structures of a number of plays. vein, Mostly and it was almost certainly, in retrospect, a
it remains a strategy of defamiliarisation, a waynecessary
of re- line of interest in a culture preoccupied
defining Australian attitudes from another perspec- with establishing its difference. The recent move to a
tive; but even when the understanding of andramatic alien mythology on a larger scale and of a more
culture is not in itself a priority, there is an implicit
analytic kind provided some ways in which that dif-
analysis of the forces which have shaped or obstruct-ference can be questioned, measured, and redefined.
ed the imagining of Asia in the Australian conscious-That too is probably a necessary stage on the path of
ness. Alex Buzo's Norm and Ahmed (1969) and postcolonialism, and it might well reflect the passage
Romeril's Floating World, with its entry into Les from nationalist assertiveness or defensiveness to a
Harding's paranoia about the Japanese, his old ene-proud if skeptical maturity.
mies and former captors, were distinguished early in- Much of the most recent Australian writing for the
stances. These attempts to put old Australian atti-stage has attempted to redress this imbalance and re-
tudes into a new and revealing context, however, trieve areas of feeling and forms of expression that
were not concerned to draw on the resources of were largely excluded by the dominant mode of satir-
Asian theatre forms; neither were Buzo's ic Marginal
observation and the models of social realism to

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492 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

which it referred. It is almost axiomatic that the artic-

increasingly records the isolation of that position, is-
ulation of previously marginalised experience requireslanded between cultures and languages, heir to a ro-
the abandonment, or at least the adaptation, of those manticised past and a reality-modified future, with-
artistic structures which have expressed the percep- out valid claim to either Anglo-Saxon or Aboriginal
tions that marginalised them. Certainly in contempo- constructions of identity. Writers such as Lyssiotis
rary feminist theatre in Australia, and even more and Balodis are newcomers to the dramatic arena of
strikingly in the dramatization of black experience, alienation previously occupied by writers such as the
the audience is consistently made aware of a radical Jewish Ron Elisha, yet their voices have a particular
revision of form. Jack Davis, the most widely per- pertinence and urgency in the postcolonial project of
formed of Australia's Aboriginal playwrights, handlessubverting the "New Wave" Australian voice, partic-
naturalistic domestic interplay very comfortably but ularly that of the stereotypical ocker.
challenges it continually with the perceptions that can Nothing has proved more difficult than articulat-
only be communicated in verse, music, and dance.ing a female voice, the feminist imperative of recog-
His plays formally enact the intersection of differentnizing multiplicity only adding to the complications.
cultures and different ways of knowing. Dorothy Hewett's plays, particularly The Chapel Per-
Patrick White and Dorothy Hewett never had ilous (1971), The Tatty Hollow Story (1974), Joan
much time for the mainstream conventions anyway, (1975), and Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly (1972), de-
and both writers have focused primarily on female pict a disruptive female sexuality and subvert female
experience and on cultural myths that reflect the sexual stereotypes with a corrosive irony. Hewett's
dark and irrational underside of social experience; plays gender the Dionysian/Apollonian conflict,
their plays are characterised by an exuberant theatri- heroicising not only female desire but also its near-
calism that makes an awareness of the play as poetic anarchic expression. Shocked audience reaction to
construct always an aspect of the piece. Louis Nowra the explicitness of her writing of the female body in
shows a similar disdain for the exploration of sur- previously censored or silenced forms, such as the
faces, and his charting of the human capacity to in- sexually active menopausal woman, attests to the ef-
flict and suffer cruelty has been very distinctively or- fectiveness of her iconoclasm. Her appropriating of
ganised in terms of a series of indelible visual images. episodic cinematic techniques as well as musical dis-
Ron Elisha has also pursued some of those larger, ruptions to naturalistic dramatic forms puts her in
presocial subjects, though his frankly philosophical company with Louis Nowra and Patrick White.
interests place a larger emphasis on talk as the means Nowra has persistently explored the area of lan-
of analysis; like Nowra's, though, Elisha's kind of guage acquisition and the ways in which a human
conversation is never centred on locally recognisable subject is inserted into a culture through language.
sliding registers. Inner Voices (1977) dramatised the psychological
The postcolonial problems of marginality and na- mutilations brought about by language deprivation,
tional identity have proved fruitful areas of dramatic The Golden Age (1985) the primitivism uncovered by
conflict for many contemporary playwrights. First- language erosion, and Visions (1979) the collapse of
generation Australians with parental, linguistic, and sanity when a tongue is traumatised into silence.
cultural loyalties to Europe have articulated the grief These plays were also metaphorical satires on Aus-
of dislocated lives not always fully compensated by tralia's history. More recently in Summer of the Aliens
material prosperity. Janis Balodis's first two plays of (1992) Melbourne audiences were intrigued to see
a planned trilogy, Too Young for Ghosts (1985) and the author playing himself, commenting on the fic-
No Going Back (1992), move away from Latvian/ tional, early adolescent self who is the play's protag-
Australian contrasts toward the mysterious intersec- onist. The autobiographical story was enlarged by
tion between physical place and personal identity. the tragically alienated Aboriginal girl whose irre-
The second play's introduction of an Aboriginal pressible vitality is her only defence against a threat-
character signals its postcolonial awareness of the eningly hostile world of prejudice. Cosi (1992), the
complications of serial imperialisms. second part of Nowra's still incomplete autobio-
The migrant woman's extreme marginalisation, graphical trilogy, mirrored the moratorium days of
her falling victim to the sexism of both Greek and the 1960s but centred its action on a group of insane
Australian masculinist cultures as well as her drama-therapy clients, consistent with Nowra's re-
displacement from preindustrial domesticity peatedtoemployment
Aus- of madness to satirise the dan-
tralian country town or suburban alienation, gerous,preoc-
irrational underside of Australian society.
cupies Tess Lyssiotis. The Greek/Australian dia- These latest plays continue the satiric bent of
logues she creates in A White Sports Coat (1989), The Nowra's writing, but the autobiographical direction
Forty Lounge Cafe (1990), and The Journey (1985) has lessened the intensity of the metaphysical search-
convey to English-speaking audiences something of ings. Instead of using symbolic settings such as
the strain and anxiety of language-isolated newcom- Paraguay and Russia to embody the bizarre in Aus-
ers. The fully assimilated Australian-migrant writer tralian life, a far less intellectually and artistically

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 FITZPATRICK & THOMSON 493

challenging naturalistic reflection ofmiscegenation

recent history
preoccupies Richard Whalley in
seems to have lowered the emotional Munjong
temperature of tackles the seemingly in-
(1990), which
his drama, a direction Sewell's drama also seems to tractable force of racial prejudice, particularly among
be taking. Even the psychology of language acquisi- white police officers. The play's technique of pre-
tion, put to such effective use in Nowra's Visions and senting white characters in terms of stereotypes and
Inner Voices, with its symbolic potential for a post-black ones as complex individuals quietly signals its
colonial reading of the painful process of the devel-awareness of one pattern of implied inferiority as it
opment of a national voice speaking for an authenticreverses it. Jimmy Chi's intoxicating, optimistic ver-
Australian self, seems, for the time anyway, to havesion of interracial and intercultural richness is much
been left behind. harder to imagine in the country towns and suburbs
Australian history emerges as a very different storyof eastern Australia, where kooris suffer more pro-
from Aboriginal dramatists. Jack Davis's trilogy offoundly the double alienation from an indigenous
plays, No Sugar (1985), The Dreamers (1982), and culture now often only a memory and a modern
Barungin (1988), and his earlier Kullark (1979), haveeconomy where social justice barely impinges either
disturbed audiences, black and white, right acrossin theory or practice.
Australia. Covering nearly 200 years of disastrous Meantime, the feminist agenda continues in the
white-contact black history, from poisoned flour bagshands of women who have followed Dorothy
to deaths in custody, Davis's plays work in two di- Hewett. Alma de Groen's recent Rivers of China
mensions. Song and dance evoke dreamtime culture(1988) and The Girl Who Saw Everything (1991)
while the messy, often alcohol-confused present lives brought an intellectually challenging dimension to
of suburban black Australians mirror a reality no one the debates about sexual identity. Rivers of China's
is proud of. Only a black writer could depict withsex-reversed dystopia revealed the need to break out
such credibility and honesty the feckless self-destruc-of sterile binary oppositions, whereas The Girl Who
tiveness of male Aboriginals and the malaise of alco- Saw Everything continued the earlier play's analysis
holic excess which marks their despair. It is Davis'sof the importance of art as a transformative tool,
women who represent his plays' source of optimism, both socially and personally. Both de Groen and
their moral and physical strength promising a future Hannie Rayson, in her Hotel Sorrento, have put the
of more than mere survival on the demoralised New Man on the Australian stage, suggesting at least
fringes of white society. a softening in the national sexual divide. Unlike
Younger Aboriginals (Jack Davis is now seventy- David Williamson's similarly well-educated middle-
five) have a different vision. Jimmy Chi's musical class men, the women writers' male characters are
Bran Nue Day (1988) joyfully celebrates difference feminist practitioners, not just theorists.
and a hybrid national character. No longer mongrels A younger generation of women writers is well
or bastards, as defined by racial and legal prejudice,represented in Tobsha Learner, whose Wolf (1992)
mixed-race Australians are happily preparedprobes to ap-the psychosexual drives of the obsessively pri-
propriate the future on their own terms. Chi, himself apic male in terms of both the sexual revolutionary
a northwestern Australian of mixed descent like so sixties, seventies, and eighties and the archetypes of
many people in that area, product of a multiracial the fairy tale. Unfortunately, its central male charac-
culture of several generations where Chinese, Timo- ter, circled by a group of women, antihero though he
rese, Indonesians, Indians, and Malays have merged is, does little to help bring women in from the mar-
with both indigenous and white Australians, gives gins of dramatic action. De Groen and Hewett have
Aboriginal a new and complex meaning. His play made more strenuous and complex challenges to
mixes music and spiritual beliefs in a liberating that non-persistently male heroicising which has charac-
hierarchical manner where country-and-western terized so many efforts at a culturally distinct Aus-
joins didgeridoo and rock 'n' roll, and Lutheran tralianand character.
Catholic beliefs adapt themselves to dreamtime The Outsiders club has members other than
myth. The comic sophistication of a shifting series of women, migrants, and Aborigines. Sam Sejavka in In
ironic self-representations on the part of indigenous Angel Gear (1990) gives dramatic form to the alien-
Australians represents a profound rejection of both ated subculture of drug addicts in a play that might
Otherness and victim status. National identity be- be set in any large city in the world at present. The
comes a simple matter of self-election: the barriers efforts of those on the margins to claim ground in
are down, most hilariously and succinctly demon- the centre represents the most lively source of dra-
strated in the line "Ich bin ein Aborigine," spoken by matic action in Australia at the moment, just as it
a tourist whose journey comes to replicate the wan- does in all national literatures in process of postcolo-
derings of all the Australians whose walkabout feet nial self-definition.
make maps in the red dust of northern Australia.
The tragic other side of what used to be called Monash University

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