Brink Productions in association with Adelaide Festival Centre presents A new Australian play 10–24 October, based on a short story Space Theatre by Patrick White brinkproductions.com Featuring Zephyr Quartet Director Chris Drummond Designer Michael Hankin Lighting Designer Nigel Levings Musical Director Hilary Kleinig Composers Belinda Gehlert, Emily Tulloch, Jason Thomas, Hilary Kleinig Cast Paul Blackwell, Lucy Lehmann, Kris McQuade, James Smith and Zephyr Quartet Creative Team Creatives and Production Creatives and Production Director Scenic Artist Chris Drummond Michelle Delaney Designer Scenic Artist Michael Hankin Wendy Todd Lighting Designer Carpenter Nigel Levings Tom Sutton Musical Director Hilary Kleinig Cast and Characters Composers Older Man Belinda Gehlert, Hilary Kleinig, Paul Blackwell Jason Thomas, Emily Tulloch Younger Woman Production Manager Lucy Lehman Françoise Piron Older Woman Stage Manager Kris McQuade Stephanie Fisher Younger Man Assistant Stage Manager James Smith Danielle Mullins and Wardrobe/Costumes Zephyr Quartet Emma Brockliss 10-24 October 2015 Space Theatre Adelaide Festival Centre Director’s Notes Chris Drummond The first and perhaps most important act of massive cultural and political change. This adaptation in undertaking this production historical and social perspective has a ‘mirror’ was changing the title of Patrick White’s short in so many narrative details throughout story from Down at the Dump to The Aspirations the story: from Ossie living on the cusp of of Daise Morrow. This new title, taken directly society, to the Whalleys living on the cusp from the text, immediately focused the task of poverty; from Myrtle Hogben living on of the adaptation process – thematically, the cusp of political influence, to Meg and conceptually and dramaturgically – cutting to Lum living on the cusp of adulthood; from the heart of the raison d’être, not only for the all the town’s men and women living on production concept but for the motivation of the cusp of their fears and desires, to Daise undertaking this adaptation in the first place. herself, hovering on the cusp of memory and rumour, judgement and envy, life and death. As I see it, Patrick White’s Down at the It is a rich and potent world that feels to me Dump is a timeless story about seizing the as theatrical as any of Patrick White’s plays. day; about following one’s instincts, taking From the moment I first read it, it has been a a chance and not letting the bastards grind world of ghosts and magic in my imagination. you down. It’s an evocation of the wonders of small beginnings, the complications of The goal of our adaptation (actually, let’s compassion and the grace and majesty of call it a ‘theatricalisation’) has been to lift love. It’s a story of small communities and this story from the page into a theatrically all the complexities that come with that. immersive production that allows the unlived And perhaps most pertinently it’s about a lives hidden within all the characters to darkness that lies at the heart of so many: become, momentarily, flesh and blood. This a fear of the outsider, of the unknown and fundamental ambition for the piece (wedded of the uninhibited (or is it the unattainable?). to the unique capacity of the theatre) was the Ultimately though, I believe Down at the Dump crucial departure point from the page to the is an ode to the opposite; a paean to courage, stage. By relooking at White’s story through to reaching, to yearning and to the ache for the prism of the title The Aspirations of Daise something bigger. Morrow, the interior lives of the characters become framed by a universal and unifying Down at the Dump is a story that places us on perspective: our need to believe that tomorrow the cusp of many things, in a time heading will be better than today. into the 60s, in a world itself on the cusp of Down at the Dump Peter Goldsworthy I first came across a book by Patrick White with him a poet’s obsessive attention to the down at the dump, literally – one of the coun- music of his sentences. Perhaps no writer try town dumps of my childhood that I loved since Flaubert (and I include James Joyce) to explore. I wish it had been The Burnt Ones, has paid more attention to the rhythm, the the book that contains Down at the Dump; that timing, the exact placement of each word. would have been nicely spooky. Here’s the well-known opening sentence Especially since it hadn’t been published yet. of his early masterpiece, The Aunt’s Story: In fact it was a novel: The Tree of Man. ‘But old Mrs Goodman did die at last.’ Among the other treasures they coughed The big things you can do with little words. up, those dumps were well-stocked libraries. Prepositions like ‘but’ often punch above Most of the items I withdrew from their their weight in White’s highly mannered deep, clay shelves – Mad magazines, Biggles style, as actual prepositions, of course, but books, Isaac Asimov novels – I devoured also as rhythmic notations. They are part immediately, but The Tree of Man proved of his personal time-signature; the musical impenetrable to my 12-year old brain. score of Down at the Dump is thickly marked with such notations, interruptions, Biggles it wasn’t. fermata. I finally read it when I was 19. Is it possible Here is Meg Hogben, the Juliet in this sto- to weep with awe? With joy, certainly. Patrick ry of two families, telling her friends she White might not have been sentimental, but can’t come with them to the Barranugli I was: I shed tears as I read the magnificent pool because her Auntie has died. opening pages, not least because of the poetry of Stan Parker’s relationship with his red dog. ‘Arrr!’ their voices trailed. They couldn’t get away too quick, as if it had Like all poetry, it was also memorable: I soon been something contagious. had those pages by heart. But murmuring. Meg sensed she had become temporarily White’s first ambition was to be a poet; like important.’ many poets who come to fiction, he brought Chris Drummond and James Smith. Photo: Heath Britton He uses ‘because’ in the same way when we the limited perspectives of his characters, first meet Mrs Whalley: using their own voices even as he describes them: ‘She was an expert with the axe. Because you had to be. You couldn’t expect all ‘Wal Whalley did the dumps. Of course there that much from a man.’ were other lurks besides. But no-one had an eye like Wal for the things a person needs: dead batteries and Or ‘but’ again, when Mrs Whalley is shouting musical bedsteads, a carpet you wouldn’t notice was at her son, Lummy, our inarticulate Romeo: stained, wire, and again wire, clocks only waiting to jump back into the race of time.’ ‘Arr,’ he said. But didn’t spit. This is the narrator speaking, not Wal – but ‘What gets inter you?’ she asked.’ speaking in a heightened Wal-vernacular before jumping back into the race of poetry. Timing in writing – in poetry, especially – is crucial. On stage it’s just about everything, ‘As Dad had got out the old rattle-bones by now, which – among the other dramatic qualities Lum began to clamber up. The back of the ute was at it possesses – makes this miniature fiction so least private, but it wasn’t no Customline.’ suited to stage adaptation. Among its other poetic qualities, White’s prose is terrific to ‘It wasn’t no Customline’ is also narrative, read aloud. not Lum’s spoken dialogue, but less third- person commentary than a sort of half The passages I’ve quoted above also first-person, half third-person fusion that is illustrate another key White characteristic: very much White’s signature writing voice. the way his narratives alternate between The American novelist William Faulkner, one of his masters, might have suggested a scrub between – offers a natural template. way, but he made it his own. The characters might lack the complexity that can be more fully developed in a novel; they Down at the Dump is a dense jewel. In many are drawn instead with the swift, cartoon- ways, it’s a more complete and satisfying lines of film – or indeed, theatre. White had work than the big novels that work with the a ferocious, often malignant eye for human same materials – that same narrative voice, failings – but then no great art ever came out the same range of suburban types – at that of niceness. Those characters have much in time in White’s life. This was the Sarsaparilla common with the various personae Barry period of Riders in the Chariot and The Solid Humphries was putting together at roughly Mandala when he really began to wrestle with the same time, with similar satiric ferocity. his love-hate (okay, mostly hate) relationship Early Edna Everage and Mrs Myrtle Hogben with post-war Australian suburbia. Perhaps feel almost interchangeable at times. it’s more fitting to call it the Barranugli period; the amusing, faux-aboriginal name White gives Myrtle hell, but allows her one of Sarsaparilla’s neighbouring suburb tells us redeeming moment: a memory of strolling much about his views at the time. arm in arm with her sister Daise in younger, more carefree days – when, as if infected by The plot of the story doesn’t strive as her wayward sibling, she feels a larrikin urge portentously as those two big novels; the to toss a lemon into a Salvation Army tuba.