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Stage Convention in the Plays of Patrick White
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 1976
- pp. 11-24
- 10.1353/mdr.1976.0003
- Article
- Additional Information
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Stage Convention in the Plays of Patrick White DENNIS CARROLL • PATRICK WHITE, RECENT RECIPIENT of the Nobel Prize for literature, is chiefly known as a novelist. His four plays are mostly analysed in relation to the rest of his output; they have never received important productions abroad. Within Australia, they are more familiar and have had a good deal of significance in the recent development of Australian drama. All were performed between 1961 and 1964, at a time when their presentational conventions served as a model for other Australian playwrights seeking to break away from the plodding naturalism then pervasive on the local theatre scene. The stage conventions are the play's most challenging aspect - for directors and actors, for audiences, and for critics. Their difficulty of realisation in production is a crucial reason why the plays have not been more widely performed. A number of people have dismissed them as "gimmicky" and arbitrary,I quirky indulgences of a "novelistic" playwright foraying into an unfamiliar medium, and this in spite of the fact that White, years before his novelistic fame, wrote several plays and saw them performed. More thoughtful critics have described the conventions in detail and have analysed some of their derivations and objectives.2 But no one, as far as I know, has dealt with the crucial issue of their organic relatedness to the material they dramatise. Are they justified in that they produce artistic results which less flamboyant conventions could not achieve? Do they reinforce the plays' action, structure, and thematic meaning? 11 12 DENNIS CARROLL The Ham Funeral (1947)3 is set in Central London in 1919, as remembered in the mind of the main character. The unit set represents a basement , a flight of stairs, and the two identical first floor rooms of a boarding house. The Landlady, Alma Lusty, is dissatisfied with the settled routine of her life and the silent content of her husband; she asks their young boarder to tea and sandwiches of bread and dripping. During the Young Man's visit, the Landlord loosens up and reveals something ofhis past life and his satisfaction at having come to terms with experience; but the tea party explodes when the Landlord, jealous at his wife's sexual -maternal interest in the guest, slaps her over the face. Later, alone in his upstairs room, the Young Man talks to an imaginary girl-confidante in the room next door. This anima deflates his immature desire to be complete and urges him to come to terms with the life in the basement, drawing his attention to the Landlord and the grasp ofexperience he has achieved and may be able to communicate. But it is too late. There are screams from the basement and the Young Man runs down to find that the Landlord has died. He helps the Landlady layout the body. Then, after a grotesque journey across London depicted in a front cloth scene, he informs the Relatives. In Act II, an expensive ham wake is in progress. The Young Man is persuaded by the anima to go back to the basement. He orders the unpleasant and insinuating Relatives out. The Landlady, somewhat drunk, draws the curtains. She starts to chase him in a ritual-like dance, half in drunken fun, half in pathetic earnest. He almost succumbs to her, then breaks desperately away and runs upstairs. The anima accuses him of not being up to the challenges of involvement; in a final bid to be complete, he breaks open the door between the rooms and exorcises her for good. He then says goodbye to the Landlady and walks out into the night. A summary of the action indicates the basic nature of the material, which is localised but archetypal, naturalistic but allegoric. For much of its length, the action proceeds on a finely judged level of naturalism foreshortened by memory; but at certain key moments, White achieves great theatrical richness by heightening the level to Expressionistic nightmare , or lowering it to a fuller, more reportorial naturalism. An example of the former process is the front cloth scene, I, vii. Here the two old lady music hall performers who have become scavengers crack jokes, rummage...