Louis Nowra ed. by Veronica Kelly, and: Patrick White by May-Brit Akerholt, and: Jack Hibberd by Paul McGillick, and: David Williamson ed. by Otrun Zuber-Skerritt (review)

Book Reviews VERONICA KELLY, ed. Louis Nowra. Amsterdam: Rodopi 1987. pp. 152, illus . $29.95. MAY-BRIT AKERHOLT. Patrick White. Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988. Pp. iv, 206, illus. $29·95. PAUL McGILLICK. Jack Hibberd. Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988. pp. iv, 153, illus. $29.95. OTRUN ZUBER-SKERRITT, ed. David Williamson. Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988. pp. xii, 259, ilIus. $29·95· For items which purport to be part of a series, these four volumes are extraordinarily diverse in fonnat - and in quality. May-Brit Akerholt's Patrick White is the simplest in design - a play-by-play plod through White's oeuvre, with scant generalisation of any kind. Paul McGillick also proceeds play-by-play (omitting some), but he is much lighter on his feet, and he supplements his study of specific plays with some lively and contentious remarks about Hibberd. Australian theatre and playwriting in general. He has managed to obtain a colourful autobiographical chapter from Hibberd, and the book also contains the text of an interview which he conducted with Hibberd and which is available separately on videOlape. These interviews are billed as an essential feature of the series. With one exception, each book contains the text of the appropriate interview. and the tapes - none of which I have seen, but I have read some bad reports - can be obtained from the Austra1ian Film Institute, 213 Palmer Street, Sydney, 2010 NSW, Australia. " Unfortunately," writes OrtIUn Zuber-Skerriu in her foreward to the series (and the tautology is not atypical of her style), "there is no video programme on Patrick White, because we were unable to obtain an interview with him." Lik~ McGillick's Hibberd, Veronica Kelly's Louis Nowra and Zuber-Skerritt's David Williamson do contain the appropriate interview text. In fact, Zuber-Skerriu's book consists very largely of interviews. She explains in her introduction that the appearance of Peter Fitzpatrick's study of Williamson in what she calls ''the 'Methuen Studies in Australian Drama' series" - the correct title is "Methuen Australian Drama Series" - rendered a second such study superfluous and prompted her simply " to bring together for the first time in one volume the main statements which Williamson has made himself about his plays, the nature of his work, influences on his writing, his views of the development and character of Australian drama and other issues." Since there was no competing volume on Nowra at the time - though one is planned - it isn't clear why Kelly didn't undertake a full-length study herself, but, having decided against this, she took a more obvious (and, surely, sensible) course than Zuber·Skenitt and compiled an anthology of significant criticism of Nowra's work. She also got from him - as McGillick did from Hibberd - a fascinating autobiographical sketch, a sort of lllywhacker in miniature. From these few remarks about fonnat some sense of the variations in quality within the series should already be apparent. Zuber·Skenitt's Williamson is clearly the Book Reviews weakest volume. As she herself recognises, "a certain amount of repetition and overlap is unavoidable" in a collection of this kind. The interviewers - many of them nOflMspeciaiists, attuned to gossip rather than analysis - tend to ask the same kinds of questions, to which Williamson inevitably gives the same kinds of answers. Certain key tenns - "realism" and "naturalism" (seldom properly distinguished, except when John Willett is one of the interviewers), "satire," "irony" and "farce" - are flung about continually, without proper care and attention, Zuber-Skerritt obviously needed a more rigorous selection policy. Trivial pieces like "Drama: A Skeleton in the Literary Cupboard" (in which Williamson simply tosses off the old commonplace that drama isn't drama until it's off the page and on the stage) should have been omitted altogether, and others should have been drastically pruned. Instead she compounded the problem by adding a Preface which presents a laborious "precis of each section of the book." There's even a two·paragraph preface to the Preface. The text is accompanied by no fewer than sixty·four photographs, but again this prodigality turns out to be something of an embarrassment. Zuber·Skerritt looks to have printed every picture that she could lay her hands on, instead of...