A Consuming Interest: Food Codes In Australian Drama

by

Gaye Poole

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Honours)

School of Theatre and Film Studies University of New South Wales.

August 1993 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

Acknowledgements i i

List of illustrations iii

Introduction 1-22

Chapter One: Background: food in drama. 23-43

Chapter Two: Australian plays based on a meal 44-77

Chapter Three: Food as currency for power and site of family politics in Australian drama. 7 8-1 04

Chapter Four: Food rituals in Australian drama: nostalgia, 'social' rituals and death 105-144

Chapter Five: Women and food: eating/not eating and women eaten. 145-194

Chapter Six: Conclusion 195-202

Appendix A: Sweets and Drinks on stage 203-224

Appendix B: Practicalities of food on stage 225-230

Bibliography 231-250 i

ABSTRACT

In the context of current critical attention to food in related disciplines, this thesis sets out to explore food codes in Australian drama. Chapter One gives a brief background to contemporary Australian food uses in drama and in so doing identifies some of the continuities, discontinuities and sh"ifts in the ways in which food has been incorporated into drama. Chapter Two focuses on plays whose entire proceedings or key scene take the form of a meal. It is observed that food on stage as a gathering and shaping element takes one of several forms: a communal event; the turning point of the play, or the interrupted meal. Chapter Three argues that food bestows power on its controllers. Food is found to be a terrain for the enactment of family and sexual politics. Food as a subversive weapon and associated food taboos are discussed. Chapter Four first investigates food as a mediator for nostalgic desire and emotional associations with particular places. Then, social food rituals in Australian plays - picnics, alfresco meals and barbecues - are found to constitute an incorporation of liminoid activities. An exploration of compulsive food rituals, consumerism and its dissatisfactions leads to the final section of this chapter, the intersection of food with death rituals, principally funerals. Chapter Five focuses on plays which specifically deal with women's relationship with food: what it means in their lives. Women's food behaviours in contemporary Australian drama disclose food as a major lifestyle and behavioural determinant as well as a dominating and disempowering force in women's lives. Food, especially in plays by women, is seen to act as a crucial barometer of the physical and psychical well or ill-being of the female characters. Across the entire spectrum of ptays, however, the conclusion is reached that, whether in plays by women or by men, the range of women's food responses and behaviours is more varied, more subtly and extensively charted, and more multiply coded, than conduct by men in relation to food. The complex and entangled nexus between women and food emerges as the most significant conclusion of the thesis. ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank my supervisor Dr. Margaret Williams of the School of Theatre and Film Studies, UNSW, for her help and support. Additional consultation was provided by Professor Robert Jordan, School of Theatre and Film Studies, .. UNSW .

I am also grateful to the following people for advice and useful conversations at various stages: Associate Professor Mary Chan, School of English, UNSW. Dr Bruce Johnson, School of English, UNSW. Professor Clive Kessler, School of Sociology, UNSW. Dr Richard Madelaine, School of English, UNSW. Associate Professor Grant McCall, School of Sociology, UNSW . ..

Thanks to Ms Robyn Long and Ms Shirley Webster of the School of English and Roland Hilder for their assistance with technology. Also, to Matthew Bishop for translation of Latin passages of The Emblemata. The UNSW library staff have been consistently helpful. ..

Acknowledgement should be made of the financial assistance of a Commonwealth Postgraduate Scholarship . ..

Thanks, too, to Bruce and Dustin for their tolerance and good humour; and to my family and friends for their kindness. iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter: Background

(a) Sin (making pigs of themselves)

Chapter 2

(b) The Cooked and the Raw (menu/programme)

(c) Come Back For Light Refreshments After the Service

(d) After Dinner (front cover of Currency text)

Chapter 4

(e) A Cheery Soul (abstract food)

(f) Martello Towers (getting stuck into "the sacrifical cabanossi")

(g) Travelling North (barbecue as icon: "focal point for a new religion")

(h) The Adman ('dog-eat-dog' consumerism/cannibalism)

(i) The Adman ("about as appetising as their toasted cheese")

(j) The Adman (throw-away food)

(k) The Ham Funeral (grimy bulk of Max Cullen as Mr Lusty - man as ham)

(I) The Ham Funeral (wake scene)

(m) The Ham Funeral (having eaten she offers herself)

Chapter 5

(n) The Famine Within (Everywoman's portable Iron Maiden)

(o) Binge (reprint of poster from Griffin Theatre Production) Introduction

Food and drink in Woody Allen's films are frequently used as striking metaphors for the 'big' questions concerning humankind and the meaning of life. In Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall Alvy Singer's opening comedy monologue includes a food joke that encapsulates a bleakly ambiguous view of life:

There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of them says: "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah I know and such small portions." Well, that's how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness and it's all over much too quickly .1

Cultural commentators in areas such as anthropology, philosophy and gastronomy have documented the significance of food in decoding the patterns of a culture. A century and a half ago the saying "one is what one eats" was coined by French magistrate and writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin ( 1755-1826) in his treatise The Physiology of Taste2. More recently, in The Raw and The Cooked, Claude Levi-Strauss identified the importance of food as · a means of civilising and defining humans.3 The food process, raw to cooked, provides a model, an analogy, for the movement from savage state to civilised state. Formation of individual and collective identities, such as national and ethnic, arises largely out of the way in which food and diet are understood. The conviction that food is an extremely powerful repository of cultural meaning is fortified increasingly by the appearance of special journal issues and collections devoted to discussions of food, gastronomy, gluttony and food behavioural issues4 . More and

1 Four Films of Woody Allen London: Faber and Faber, 1983: 4. 2 New York: Dover, 1960. 3 Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology.1964. Trans. J & D Weightman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. 4 See for example: Meanjin Special issue "Talking at the Table", Vol. 49, No.2, Winter 1990; Food and Drink in History: Selections from the Annales Economies, Societies, Clvillsatlons. Vol 5. Eds. Robert Forster and Crest Ranum, 1979; 2

more writers from various disciplines (for example, Kim Chernin5 , Sally Clines, Mary Douglas7 , Peter Farb and George Armelago8 , Joanne Finkelstein9, M.F.K. Fisher10, Michael Symons11 , Margaret Visser12, Naomi Wolf13 ) are recognising that valuable cultural insights are gained from an examination of the varying social meanings food and eating practices carry in a culture. In all cultures food and drink are full of social significance and "symbolically refract the ideology of the social world in which they are consumed"_ 14

The literary field of fiction has already proved to be a fertile ground for the investigation of food as both motif and rite of passage. A cross-section of this kind of criticism can be found in Cooking by the Book: Food In Literature and Culture 1 5 • Among the novelists whose work has been found to be richly embedded with food and eating analogies is Margaret Atwood (in The Edible Woman [1976] the woman is 'edible' because she is

Fed Up and Hungry: Women, Oppression and Food. Ed. Marilyn Lawrence. New York: Peter Bedrich, 1987. 5 Chemin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity. London: Virago, 1986. 6 Cline, Sally. Just Desserts: Women and Food. London: Andre Deutsch, 1990. 7 Douglas, Mary. "Deciphering a Meal." Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. 8 Farb, Peter and George Armelagos. Consuming Passions: the Anthropology of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. 9 Dining Out: a Sociology of Modern Manners. Oxford: Polity, 1989. 1 O The Art of Eating. London: Pan, 1983. 11 Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: a History of Eating in Australia. Adelaide: Duck Press, 1982. 12 Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal. Lon don: Penguin, 1989. The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. 13 The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. 14 Kapferer, Bruce. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture In Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 1988: 157. 15 Ed. Mary Anne Schofield. Bowling Green Ohio: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1989. 3

powerless). 16

This study of food in theatre is preoccupied with the aesthetic and metaphorical dimensions and reverberations of food. Food as nourishment is central, though the kind of nourishment it stands for, whether physical, figurative, or a combination of both, varies according to the prevailing circumstance in the scene or play. The structuralist writers on food - anthropologists Claude Levi­ Strauss and Mary Douglas, semiologist Roland Barthes and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu - clearly acknowledge that 'taste' is culturally shaped; their work pays attention to the aesthetic and pre-eminently social patterning of food preferences. Claude Levi­ Strauss maintained that structures to be found in the cuisines of a society could also be found in art, mythology, codes of etiquette or political ideology. If so, writes Levi-Strauss, "we have a right to conclude that we have reached a significant knowledge of the unconscious attitudes of the society or societies under consideration." .17(my emphasis) Whilst not claiming adherence to a structuralist model for this thesis, I believe that several basic tenets of the structuralist project seem to have applicability to discussions of the way in which food functions and elucidates transactions on stage. Repeatedly it will be found to be the case that food does uncover and reveal unconscious attitudes, that it is the key to immanent qualities and that playwrights themselves, paradoxically, may have incorporated food codes unconsciously precisely because of the latters' ability to distil and show forth

1 6 Other fiction writers whose works have been analysed for the semiotic value of food references are Anzia Yezierska (Hungry Hearts [1920], Bread Givers [1925]); Edith Wharton (Cynthia Griffin Wolff's study A Feast of Words: the Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: OUP, 1977, concentrates on this aspect of her work); Anita Brookner (The Debut [1981], Providence [1982], Look at Me [1983], Hotel du Lac [1984], The Misalliance [1986]); and Virginia Rich, whose culinary crime titles The Cooking School Murders [1982], The Baked Bean Supper Murders [1983] and The Nantucket Diet Murders [1985], boldly declare their settings. Australian food writer and novelist Marion Halligan, the 1990 winner of the Geraldine Pascall Award, transmutes a passion with food history and food mores into an influence on her fiction (Spider Cup, 1990) and non-fiction alike (Eat My Words, 1990). 17 Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. 1958. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 4

indwelling meanings in a powerful fashion. Food's inherent capabilities as carrier of signification (and more particularly theatrical signification) will constantly recur in the ensuing discussions.

There is a remarkable absence of global uniformity in the codification and practice of food customs and taboos. What is considered appropriate for one culture to eat is thought repellant by another. In some cultures dog is eaten, in others, dog is synonymous with pet and not dinner. Another country's inhabitants may be starving yet they will not kill a cow for food because it is a sacred animal. Meat itself represents very different things to a meat eater and a vegetarian.

Since it is now generally accepted in the field of cultural studies that food possesses many non-nutritive values, social meanings which have to do with more than merely its ability to satisfy hunger, it therefore appears timely to investigate food's meta­ nutritional codes with reference to Australian plays. Food is a polysemous theatrical signifier and one that "articulates in concrete terms what is oftentimes vague, internal, abstract ...... (it) provides a metaphoric matrix, a language that allows us a way to get at the uncertainty, the ineffable qualities of life.". 10 It is this channel between concrete stage images, food presence, onstage eating, textual food imagery and the illumination of ineffable, sometimes interior, meanings which lies at the heart of this study.

Since theatre is a highly mediated reality a playwright will be selective about what is represented and what is omitted. Even so, in theatre as in life, food, with all its accompanying associations and activities, in all its forms, is an absolutely fundamental substance. I propose to show that food and eating, instead of being incidental to the mediated experience of theatre, in fact often assumes a prominent role, and that this is especially the case in plays and performances by women. I will demonstrate that food is employed by playwrights, and more notably women playwrights, as

18 Schofield. Preface: 1. 5

a crucial yardstick, a barometer of the stability and psychological well-being of characters, in particular female characters. For good or ill, food and women, it will be shown, are inseparable. In this study of (principally) contemporary plays by Australian playwrights, the manifestations of this linkage, however, are not the traditional ones of woman as nurturer and provider of food. I will show that the plays by women demonstrate a much more complex and extensive range of possible responses to food and food-related circumstances than is evident in plays by men. Overall though, the interest of the investigation arises not only from illustrations and/or evidence that women use food in plays more often than do men but rather from the variety of ways in which food may be enlisted as a theatrical signifier.

Why do playwrights choose food to illuminate aspects of human existence? Partly, because it focuses and facilitates so many social transactions, providing a reliable form of 'social cement'. More than sex, gaining, preparing and sharing food is the essential human activity. Because the preparation of food requires thought, energy, labour, time, and in some cases love, it is an ideal conduit for emotional language. It is possible to 'say' things with food - resentment, love, anger, rebellion, withdrawal. This makes it a perfect conveyor of subtext; messages which are often implicit rather than explicit, but surprisingly varied, strong, and sometimes violent or subversive.

Another characteristic makes it a remarkably concentrated signifier for the stage: it is a physical substance and may be shown or simulated on stage relatively easily. Food takes up space on stage. As it is being served or shared it can be passed from character to character. While it is being eaten it can hamper or dictate the flow of dialogue. It can be cooked on stage, put into the mouth, swallowed, spat out, argued over, regurgitated, thrown. It is food's physicality, its corporeality in performance (while being neither the actor nor the set) that makes food such a versatile and eloquent element. The practical problems and challenges this presents are considered in Appendix B. 6

A comment by Alma De Groen bears out my contention that the physicality of food on stage is a primary reason for playwrights to be drawn to it as a way of giving greater dimension to a scene, a sequence, an exchange:

Things like eating are attention getters, that's all. I tend to feel it's important to physicalise the characters as early as possible in the play so the audience is drawn into that physical reality. We're not just watching television .... It's not just a person there speaking dialogue, it's a real physical presence. So when you're watching Katherine [Mansfield, in The Rivers of China] eat that apple, you're engaged in a moment of real physical being.19

Moments of 'real physical being' involving food occur in many of the plays discussed, including Patrick White's The Ham Funeral (the handling of the ham at the wake), Louis Nowra's Byzantine Flowers (the audience's knowledge that the food being eaten has been spat on), and Julie Day's Come Back For Light Refreshments After the Service (the audience watch the actors preparing and cooking the food during the performance).

There is a personal reason for my interest in the topic of food in theatre. I grew up in a guest house, the site of many a culinary crisis, precipitated principally by a succession of temperamental cooks whose power to jeopardise the contentment of the proprietor (my mother) and her hundred guests (at peak) was never underestimated. Salad plates forming a porcelain grid on the marbled pink laminex table top, large quantities of home made beetroot cooling, the Dandy small goods man calling, the cold milk frosting stainless steel jugs - everything seemed to revolve around providing pleasing food punctually. I can't dismiss this atypical exposure to food as service, as escape, as part of the medicine of holiday renewal; it is a remarkable, though initially unconscious, influence on my choice of topic.

19 Interview, Alma De Groen. Australasian Drama Studies, Oct 1989/Apr. 1990, 15/16: 19. 7

* * * * * * * * *

The saturation of language by the vocabulary of food is symptomatic of the culture's acknowledgement of its supra­ nutritional possibilities. Colloquial expressions such as 'I could eat you', 'cooking the books', 'making a meal of something', 'what's eating you?', 'eat your heart out', 'feeding a line', 'sandwiched between', 'a half-baked idea', 'you look good enough to eat', 'what's your beef?' and 'feast your eyes on that' reflect our compulsion to construct a discourse originating from food and eating. The popular Victorian expression "Every meal is a lesson learned" also reveals that mealtimes were (and though less explicitly and formally acknowledged, still are) a forum for the scrutiny of the young by adults and the teaching of refinement, ritual, politeness, and manners; that they have a moral, educative purpose as well as a nutritional one.

An extension of this deep penetration of the language of food into everyday discourse may be found in theatre criticism which itself often resorts to cooking and food analogies. It is one of the indicators of the centrality of food that it has so permeated the critical vocabulary. "Spence stalks tall to farce-feed undernourished plot" was the header for Peter Craven's review20 of Sunday Lunch (Bill Garner, 1991 ), a play whose title invites such a response. However, even when the play is not in any way about food or eating these analogies are constantly enlisted in discussions of theatre. A sample of borrowings from gastronomical discourse that have found their way into theatre criticism include: 'rich fare', 'successful recipe', 'entertaining food for thought', "An Aussie theatre banquet"21 , "cooked over a fire of recognisably Australian origin"22 , and one that acknowledges the source: "Perhaps a culinary metaphor about marination would be appropriate, the play (Norm and Ahmed) seems to improve with

20 The Australian, 2 Oct. 1991. 21 Healey, Ken. Sun Herald, 20 Jan. 1991. 22 Milne, Geoffrey. National Times, 22 Feb. 1985. 8

11 age • 2 3 This tendency to utilise the discourse of food is attributable, I suggest, to the facts that theatre, like food, is a sensual experience, that we consume theatre in stages (scenes, acts) not entirely dissimilar to those divisions (courses) in a meal, and that theatre is collaborative - the contributions of personnel and various facets of the production are often likened to ingredients of a meal. Director Jim Sharman, too, showed a consciousness of the parallels when he referred to his premiere Paris Theatre Company production of Dorothy Hewett's Pandora's Cross as 11 a meal of sadness and celebration" .24 From another angle, Brecht's derogatory term for unchallenging and 'palatable' theatre, 'culinary theatre', further extends the perceived connection between the two kinds of diet - physical and cultural, or more specifically food and theatre.

Aside from Brecht's 'culinary theatre' - something to fill in the evening after dinner - several seminal twentieth century theatre practitioners have, in searching for a language to describe the role of theatre in contemporary life, invoked expressions clearly informed by the concept of culture as food, theatre as feast, and theatre as basic to survival (sometimes with a celebratory overlay). Jerome Savary of Grand Magic Circus, formerly Theatre Panique, regrets people's loss of animality and sense of play and declares: 11 Theatre should be a feast, a joyous occasion, a 11 25 festival • Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theatre believed that theatre should feed and nurture; and that theatre should be as basic to life as bread: 11 Theatre is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theatre is a form of religion. It is fun. 11 2 6 This was more than just a slogan, for Schumann would customarily prepare dark bread made from hand ground flour using a recipe given him by his

23 Healey, Ken. Sun Herald, 20 Jan. 1991. 24 Theatre Australia, Sept. 1978: 34. 25 Roose-Evans, James. Experimental Theatre From Stanislavsky to Peter Brook London: Routledge, 1989. 4th ed.: 86. 26 Roose-Evans: 86. Schumann's work, characterised by a celebration of shared humanity, accessibility and the utilisation of popular theatre, circus and puppetry techniques as well as ritual and pageantry is described in many books including Theodore Shank's American Alternative Theatre. London: Macmillan, 1982: 1 03-11 3. 9

German mother, and aioli (garlic mayonnaise). These he would hand out to the audience either during or at the end of every Bread and Puppet performance, to make concrete via ritual enactment the metaphor of feeding people by means of theatre.

It is also possible that this tendency in theatre criticism derived from a heritage in plays which themselves utilise this analogy between meal and performance. The entire prologue of George Farquhar's play The Inconstant; or the Way to Win Him ( 1702), for instance, is based on extended parallels between enjoyment of food and different aspects and styles of theatre:

Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks; Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks. The founders you: the table is this place: The carvers we: the prologue is the grace. Each act a course; each scene a different dish: Tho' we're in Lent, I doubt you're still for flesh Satire's the sauce, high-season'd, sharp and rough; Kind masks and beaux, I hope you're pepper-proof. Wit is the wine; but 'tis so scarce the true, Poets, like vintners, balderdash and brew. Your surly scenes, where rant and bloodshed join, Are butcher's meat, a battle's a sirloin: Your scenes of love, so flowing, soft and chaste, Are water-gruel, without salt or taste. Bawdy's fat venison, which , tho' stale, can please: Your rakes love haut-gouts, like your damned French cheese. Your rarity for the fair guest to gape on, Is your nice squeaker, or Italian capon; Or your French virgin pullet, garnish'd round, And dress'd with sauce of some - four hundred pound. An opera, like an oglio, nicks the age; Farce is the hasty pudding of the stage. For when you're treated with indifferent cheer, You can dispense with slender stage-coach fare. A pastoral's whipt cream, stage-whims mere trash; 1 0

And tragi-comedy, half fish and flesh. But comedy, that, that's the darling's cheer; This night we hope you'll all inconstant bear: Wild fowl is lik'd in play-house all the year. Yet since each mind betrays a different taste, And every dish scarce pleases ev'ry guest, If ought you relish, do not damn the rest. This favour crav'd, up let the music strike: You're welcome all - now fall to, where you like.27

So, meals and performances are both consumed in stages: course by course or scene by scene. Usually they are shared experiences. Neither lasts. They are both ephemeral and sensual pleasures possessing form, structure, patterning, balance, contrast and resulting, ideally, in satisfaction. The notion of meals as staged events - the staging of banquets and dinners, their performative aspects - is fascinatingly developed in Margaret Visser's book on dinner rituals. At one point she emphasises the theatrical nature of dining, characterising the dining table as a stage and the host as a casting agent who must engage the right cast. The Western dining room table raises food waist-high and the individual seating both unites and separates the diners. All the diners are evenly distributed and on view, while the table is a stage upon which the dishes can make entrances and exits. In the past where banquets were theatrical events with processions and non-dining spectators, and seating was on one side of the table only (the other was open to

27 Professor Robert Jordan, UNSW, gives the source of this fashion as Martial Epigrams ix, 81 and adds that gastronomic imagery, in the texts of Restoration plays, is one of the standard means of referring to sexual lust. The metaphor can also be found in several Restoration epilogues and prologues eg. in Thomas Southerne's prologue to The Wives' Excuse (1691}; epilogue to Oroonoko (1695) and The Fate of Capua (1700). Judith Milhaus in Thomas Betterton and the Management of the Lincoln Inn Fields. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1979, describes the fashion and gives examples [138-9]: "The playwrights' sense of the state of the theatre was expressed in a recurring food image. The epilogue to Feign'd Friendship (ea 1699) deplored the fact that the meat of drama must now be dressed with expensive sauces - Balon and Clementine. The idea was picked up in prologues and epilogues to such plays as The Double Distress, The Humour of the Age, and The Inconstant." l l

enable diners to watch the performance) the metaphor of tables as stages was even stronger.2 8

* * * * * * * * *

In the early stages of research a number of films - He a rt burn (1986)29 and Babette•s Feast (1987)30 in particular - were especially strong stimuli for my interest in the study of food as a dramatic signifier. The title Heartburn does triple service - as an affliction associated with overeating, pregnancy, and heartache. In the film Rachel Sanstatt (Meryl Streep) is a food writer, pregnant for much of the time and being caused a great deal of 'heartburn' by her unfaithful husband (Jack Nicholson). In Nora Ephron's novel Sanstatt, in contrast to the vicissitudes of her marriage, admires the dependability of the activity of cooking:

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing ..... in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some sort of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.31

The rhythm and structure of the film is created principally by a series of meal scenes: Washington private dinner parties, Washington restaurants, alfresco lunches, picnics in Virginia. Sanstatt's final fighting gesture, the departing 'up you', occurs when she slaps a whole freshly creamed Key lime pie - intended as her contribution to a collectively catered dinner - into the face of her compulsively promiscuous husband, at the dinner table in front of their friends. This has none of the predictable humour of the slapstick pie in the face (another theatrical routine reliant on food). Rather, it conveys bitterness and anger, signifying the spoiling of all their shared domestic intimacy embodied in the

28 Visser Rituals of Dinner: 130. 29 Directed by Mike Nichols. 30 Directed by Axel Gabriel. 31 Heartburn London: Heinemann, 1983: 133. l 2

thing she did best - cooking and writing about it. After the incident she reflects:

If I had to do it over again, I would have made a different kind of pie. The pie I threw at Mark made a terrific mess, but a blueberry pie would have been even better, since it would have permanently ruined his new blazer, the one he bought with Thelma. But Betty said bring a Key lime pie, so I did. The Key lime pie is very simple to make. [166)

Rachel wanted to leave a mark, a visible scar for her husband's betrayal. She used food actually and symbolically to end her marriage: the pie embodied her combined professional and personal selves.

One of the most memorable renderings of the multiplicity of resonances inherent in food as semiotic code - food as civilising influence, food as healer of severed bonds, food as labour of love and food as art - and one which helped to fuel my interest in this topic - is the film Babette's Feast (1987). Based on the lsak Dinesen short story (1950) from the collection Anecdotes of Destiny, it was written as a result of a bet between Blixen/Dinesen and a friend who wanted the author to crack the American market. "Write about food," the friend suggested. "The Americans have food on their minds constantly." (This strategy also did nothing to hinder the success of another famous 'food film': Luis Bunuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [1972]).

Directed by Danish film maker Gabriel Axel, Babette's Feast is set in a village on the Jutland peninsula, and concerns two elderly sisters who keep the faith of their deceased father, the dean of a pious Lutheran sect devoted to good works and a simple ascetic life. Their only 'lapse' is that they have kept for fourteen years a French housekeeper, Babette (Stephane Audran). (The reasons behind Babette's presence are not relevant to this discussion.) After this long period of spartan existence, an annual lottery ticket (her only tie to France) wins her 10,000 francs. This windfall provides the means by which she can recreate the artistry of her former life as I 3

a first class chef in a famous French cafe. Conspicuously expanded in the film is the preparation of the feast - the preparation, staging and consumption of which has become a filmic set-piece. All the film's ironies gravitate towards this sequence: the final release of some feelings of bonding among the men and women of the ecclesiastic Brotherhood, under the influence of the food which they refuse to acknowledge they are eating; as well, Babette's ultimate act of self-sacrifice (she spends her entire winnings on the meal) which is also her most autocratic act of self assertion, using the occasion of the celebratory dinner to reveal herself as a 'great artist'. The partakers of the feast have never in their lives drunk wines or tasted anything beyond the plainest and most frugal diet. The scenes of preparation of this sumptuous and most painstakingly prepared repast, the feasting scenes themselves, and the awakening, akin to a sexual awakening, of the hitherto gastronomically deprived diners, provide a film experience both sensually delightful and emotionally transporting in its celebration of the powers of food prepared with skill, inspiration and gratitude.

Though this thesis does not concentrate on filmic use of food I wish to emphasise that food as an elaborated code struck me in many media simultaneously - fiction, advertising, film and theatre. In seeking conceptual frameworks, I have found most helpful writings not in the field of theatre studies but in cultural studies (mainly, the intersections of anthropology and gastronomy with literature). Film studies and literary studies journals have also been useful sources for articles on the incorporation of food and gastronomy as a polysemous code.32

32 A sample of such useful material includes the following: Two articles by Ronald Le Blanc (i) "Love and Death and Food: Woody Allen's Comic Use of Gastronomy." Literature/Film Quarterly. Vol 17, No 1, 1989: 18-26, focuses on Allen's metaphoric portrayal of nature as an enormous restaurant and, as well, the recurring motif of eating as synecdoche for living in Love and Death; and (ii) "Satisfying Khlestakov's Appetite: the Semiotics of Eating in The Inspector General.. " Slavic Review. Vol 47, Fall '88: 483-98. J.P. Telotte's "A Consuming Passion: Food and Film Noir." The Georgia Review. Vol 39, No 2, Summer 1985: 397-410, draws on psychoanalytic dream theory to argue that images of eating in dreams, and their analogue cinema, have little to do with a hunger instinct and more to do with a psychic need for nourishing images. T elotte 14

* * * * * * * * *

During my research it has become increasingly apparent that while food plays much more than an accidental or incidental role, it is almost never referred to in any general discussions of Australian theatre or performance or in any critical treatments of individual Australian playwrights. If food is mentioned, it is referred to in passing, as though semiotically neutral in relation to other thematic, structural or stylistic concerns. I do not claim that food is uniformly and evenly present or that it is equally important in all plays by all Australian playwrights, but I would argue that it functions severally as an on-stage presence, a prop, metaphor and dominant motif in a significant number of contemporary Australian plays. A few Australian commentators have observed the presence of food/eating in plays. May-Brit Akerholt in her book Patrick White33 refers several times to food in White's plays. John McCallum signals the prominence of alcohol a frequent accompaniment of food on stage - in Williamson's plays, by tagging the middle plays, beginning with What If You Died Tomorrow, his 'Claret Period'3 4 • Helen Gilbert, in an interview with Alma De Groen35, raised the question of the significance of the apple eating scene between Mansfield and Gurdjieff in The Rivers of China. discusses food scenes in films such as Tom Jones (dir. Tony Richardson, 1963), and its parodic counterpart in Woody Allen's Bananas (1971}; Breakfast at Tiffany's (dir. Blake Edwards, 1961), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1967) as well as the cannibalism of Paul Bartel's Eating Raoul (1982). Paula G Eckard's "Family and Community in Ann Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant." Southern Literary Journal. Vol 22, Spring 90: 33-44, makes the point that at the Homesick Restaurant customers can get those foods for which they are 'homesick'; they can be nourished in body and spirit much as they would be at home. Minrose Gwin's "Mentioning the Tamales: Food and Drink in Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas and Other Stories." The Mississippi Quarterly. Vol 38, Winter 84- 85: 44-57, claims that all the eating and drinking in the stories of the Porter collection seems to become the physical, external manifestation of human complexity and indefinability. 33 Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. 34 McCallum, John. "A New Map of Australia: the Plays of David Williamson." Australian Literary Studies. Vol 11, No 3, May 1984: 342-354. 35 Australasian Drama Studies, Vols 15/16: 19. l 5

The above-mentioned constitute no more than a handful of references to food or drink in Australian plays or productions.

There has been no exhaustive or extended study of such a topic. Perhaps it is that food is taken for granted (by critics and commentators, not by playwrights) possibly because it is considered too basic, too prosaic a subject for theatre commentary. Even when food is mentioned there is a tendency for it to be bypassed; it seems to vanish from the discussion. Enumerating the most frequently occurring props in theatre Julian Hilton proposes a kind of properties hierarchy: "So the commonest props are letters, daggers, rings, purses and items of food."36 He claims that these props, characterised as portable and capable of advancing the plot or enabling its advancement, also tend to establish status, occupation, and with it a value system. Food clearly fulfils these criteria yet, having claimed its place as primary prop, when Hilton proceeds to provide examples he talks about clocks, telephones, a scarf, candles, daggers, a handkerchief, a lamb (mistaken for a a baby), an ass's head, and a crown, embellishing his point with not a single instance of food.

Interestingly, critical commentary on contemporary drama is not peculiar in its avoidance of the significance of food. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that modern medieval scholars have ignored a religious symbol that had tremendous force in the lives of medieval Christians - the religious significance of food. She proposes a reason for the omission which may be applicable to my suggestion that food is largely ignored in commentaries of contemporary drama; that is "that modern scholarship has focused so tenaciously on sex and money because sex and money are such crucial symbols and sources of power in our own culture."37 In the arena of dream scholarship Barbara Tedlock remarks on the paucity of attention to

36 Hilton, Julian. New Directions in Theatre: Performance. London: Macmillan, 1987: 81-82. 37 Bynum, Caroline Walker. "Fast, Feast, and Flesh: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women." Representations. Vol 11, Summer 1985, Berkeley, California: U of California P: 1. l 6

food in dreams. In her search through standard psychoanalytic texts on dream interpretation by Freud, Karl Abraham, Geza Roheim and Ernest Jones she finds an almost total neglect of the subject of food and the act of eating. Even Jung, she reports, all but ignores the topic of food in dreams, with the exception of a rather brief discussion of the possible significance of black versus white bread. Since, as Tedlock says, eating is more basic in humans than sexuality or aggression, she finds it "astounding to notice this neglect of the analysis of eating within western depth psychology." She notes the exception of James Hillman ( 1979) who suggests that eating in dreams has very little to do with the hunger instinct, but is rather an expression of the psychic need for nourishing images.38 Tedlock's findings have parallels to this study on a number of levels, principally the rather mysterious lack of critical attention to food and eating in contemorary dramatic commentary. Hillman's conclusion is confirmed by a number of Australian playwrights' (Robert Hewett, Andrew Bovell, Alma De Groen, Alice Spigelman, Karen Mainwaring) in their portrayal of behaviour related to food to evoke the idea of an absence of psychological nourishment in our society. This study foregrounds the role of food; it centres on the surprising and intriguing variety of ways that food and eating may function as a code, as an additional sign system, a leitmotif of intriguing complexity, to expand the possible repertoire of readings of a play or production.

* * * * * * * * *

Cynthia Ozick's acknowledgement of the importance of noting the quotidian aspects of life may contribute to an explanation for the invisibility of food in contemporary Australian drama commentary: "For the sake of making life as superlatively polished as the most sublime work of art, we ought to notice the Ordinary" _39 Perhaps because food and eating are such necessary and integral parts of

38 Tedlock, Barbara. "Zuni and Quiche dream sharing and interpreting", in Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Ed. B. Tedlock. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987: 106. 3 9 Art and Ardour. New York: A. Knopf, 1983. 1 7

our daily lives they are overlooked as a component of dramaturgy. It is precisely because food is both so fundamental to our lives and so perfectly adaptable for the theatre, loaded as it is with messages about survival, class, power, obligation, prestige, loss of control, restriction, that it demands more detailed and elaborate examination. It is not only that it is a portable prop or that it is capable of signifying status and values (all of which it does); perhaps more intriguing is its disappearing nature, its tendency to become psychologically invisible. Does it 'vanish' because the idea of the consumption of food is related to, but is a psychologically complex inversion of, our thinking about menstrual blood, excrement, spit and breast milk: they all tap into anxieties and taboos concerning shifting body boundaries? Food is something that is separate from the body but will become the body; menstrual blood, breast milk, excrement and spit are at one time the body, then no more the body.

Initially I concentrated on plays by women, intending to construct a thesis solely about women and food. As I proceeded, however, this focus came to appear increasingly arbitrary, and a widening of the net became inevitable. Having said that, one of the main conclusions of the thesis is that it is impossible to disregard the consistently complicated and tangled interconnections between women and food in plays by both women and men. So pronounced is this bond/bondage, that it remains central to the thesis. For this project, in addition to many non-Australian plays with food references, I have now read or seen performed over 250 Australian plays, published and unpublished. Of the published Australian plays Currency Press was the most common imprint, with Yackandandah Press, Playlab Press, McPhee Gribble and Apcol constituting most of the remaining sources of published plays. The unpublished plays were obtained through one of several means: personal contact with the playwright, personal correspondence with the playwright, through the playwright's agent, via the education officer or reader attached to a theatre company, or by attending rehearsals and procuring a working draft with the permission of director and playwright. In the case of these unpublished plays all the I 8

playwrights are aware of the nature and topic of my research project and have given me permission to use any relevant material. 4 0

The selection shows a deliberate concentration on recent Australian theatre for a number of reasons. Attitudes to, and behaviours surrounding, private and public eating in Australia have changed significantly in the last fifteen to twenty years and cultural forms in Australia have registered those changes noticeably. 41 An interest in the sociological dimension of local cultural production and how food behaviour has been incorporated into and transmuted in local drama in particular made Australian theatre the immediate choice. As well, Australian drama was in an important sense the only possible choice for me since it is the only culture with which I have both a critical and organic relationship. Being inside the coding system affords me an understanding of the range of possible intuitive responses to food and food behaviours. The plays' subtexts and rituals in terms of their food references are instantly accessible to me. Being a consumer and observer of both Australian food and Autralian theatre allows me an insider's position in a way which would not be the case were I to approach, say, food codes in Canadian or African drama. As part of the audience for whom the plays were written I am especially alert to the subtleties and specificities of food codings in Australian drama. As well, I wanted to give a substantial emphasis to work by women and that desideratum is best served by concentrating on the last fifteen years because in that time women have become an increasingly visible presence in Australian theatre. Another reason for this emphasis is simply that more has been written about the established writers, and while I do include references to Williamson, Hibberd, Buzo, De Groen and Nowra, I was interested to

40 I will reference the published plays in footnotes; the unpublished plays will be denoted by the date of first performance in brackets in the body of the text. 41 For example, fifteen years ago it would have been dificult to imagine the staging of an event such as the banquet at the National Gallery in Canberra, conceived by Gay Bilson and coinciding with the Surrealism exhibition, for the attendees of the Seventh Symposium of Australian Gastronomy. The banquet was as much a statement as a meal; the courses symbolised the gradual dismemberment of the body. 1 9

document the function of food in less often performed material including many unpublished plays.

One avenue I will follow with particular emphasis is the relationship between women and food as revealed by these plays. Kim Chemin in The Hungry Self tells us that a troubled relation to food is one of "the principal ways the problems of female being come to expression in women's lives"42 . There are plays which deal overtly with this issue; there are plays in which food and eating occur on stage without necessarily dominating the content; and plays which use food and consumption as a metaphor for other aspects of existence.

Chapter One will present a sampling of the ways food/eating and related issues have figured in theatre prior to and outside the contemporary Australian drama which constitutes the principal subject of the study. This is not to foreshadow a thesis about food in world theatre. Such background is intended to acknowledge the existence of a history for the incorporation of food in drama, thereby providing a context for the discussion of Australian plays. Consequently this background will not be exhaustive or complete, but rather will demonstrate that food imagery, food consumption, feasts, banquets and the like have functioned as conspicuous dramaturgical markers in varying ways at different times. The background should also illuminate a broad shift in the way food has been used in drama: from its early celebratory, ritualistic function in festivals to a pronounced emblematic one in Renaissance drama through to a more detailed, naturalistic or abstract and stylised function by the late twentieth century. In broad terms, food in drama has undergone a change from the generic to the particular.

Chapter Two will deal with those plays in which food is a primary focus and significant shaping element. Food, in the form of a special meal for a special occasion, is often the rationale for gathering characters together on stage. In these the sharing of food is sometimes a convention of the performance and such food

42 ix. 20

sharing, involving both performers and audience, as the central activity will be examined. Some plays revolve around or frequently return to the business of preparing and/or consuming food. Other plays involve a meal as the pivotal scene of the performance. Still others turn on the device of a repeatedly interrupted meal.

In Chapter Three I shall examine food as a vehicle of power, as a site for family and sexual politics. This exploration of power in relation to food, in addition to encompassing power over life and power over others, extends to take in food as a subversive weapon as well. Defilement of food as a manipulative tactic and the taboo of food pollution is also drawn into the discussion.

Chapter Four will investigate emotional associations pertaining to food, place and nostalgia; social rituals involving food; compulsive food rituals; and the links between food rituals and death. These will be dealt with under the following headings: A. Food and place. Food often evokes nostalgic associations of particular places. In plays food is frequently location-specific, that is, there are different food-related customs and behaviours according to where the action is taking place. B. Social food rituals such as barbecues, picnics and alfresco meals C: Compulsive food rituals; and consumerism and the construction of dissatisfaction and desire. D: Eating and death are both reminders of our mortality. This section concentrates on 'funeral plays', plays dealing with the intersection of food and death rituals.

In Chapter Five I shall focus on the treatment of different aspects of women's troubled relationship with food. It is no accident that the plays which confront food as a social and political force are by women and about women's relationship with food. Food has traditionally been women's domain, yet women receive totally confusing messages about food every day; they are encouraged to 2 I

prepare tempting meals, respond sensually to food, yet stay slim.43 Young women often reject food as a way of prolonging childhood, avoiding womanhood and sexuality or refusing to 'become' their mothers. This complex cultural coding of food is increasingly being consciously transmuted into literary and theatrical material, and it is this process and its manifestations which are very much at the heart of my thesis. This chapter will consist of two main sections: A. Food and mother/child relationships. B. Food, women and 'illness'.

Food so completely insinuates its way into our lives that it is almost impossible to remember a period of time, a relationship or place without some food memory attaching itself. Food, then, has the capacity to become a vital part of a playwright's dramaturgical strategy. However because food is so embedded in life (the first thing a child 'learns' consists of what 'is' and what 'is not' food) I am not certain that playwrights always consciously employ food either in substance, as a structural device, or as theme or metaphor. I shall show that they use food in ways that are various, complex, and crucial to the play's meaning.

* * * * * * * * *

For the sake of clarity, I will include here a note on punctuation conventions. Play, book and film titles are in bold type. Article titles and in text quotations from both primary and secondary sources are in double inverted commas. Single inverted commas are used when a modification of meaning is intended. Stage directions quoted in the body of the text are in plain text, in double quotation marks, followed by SO. When stage directions appear as part of an indented quote from a play text or manuscript, I have used italics to differentiate from the dialogue.

In a few cases there appear no page references. These quotes are from televised plays, for example Lust, or unpublished plays whose

43 Again, a film, Eating (1990), from director Henry Jaglom constitutes a filmic counterpart in the rendering of this sphere of experience since it is a uniquely personal vision of food and eating as indicators of women's emotional states. 22

only available text was a radio broadcast, for example Words of One Sy II able. A date in brackets after a play title indicates that the play, to my knowledge at time of writing, is unpublished. Published plays are given publication details in a footnote, either at first mention or, if discussed immediately after first listing, at the commencement of discussion. 23

Chapter One

BACKGROUND: FOOD IN DRAMA

Prior to the discussion of contemporary Australian plays I wish to provide a gastronomic-theatrical context for the contemporary focus which should demonstrate, however impressionistically, that food on stage is no recent phenomenon. Moreover, the various ways food is used in recent Australian drama should be seen as part of a continuum rather than merely a reflection of an increased consciousness of food issues - diet, nutrition, health, slimness. Both continuities and discontinuities will be detected.

Just as in Shakespearean drama a stage property, used to very different effect in an earlier play, is adapted to a new role, so too the significance and meaning of food on stage has altered over time. The mingling of religious connotations of stage properties with the secular expression of the same ideas is argued convincingly in relation to the tradition of the blood-spotted cloth or handkerchief by Marion Lomax in Stage Im ages a n d Traditions 1• I would suggest that food on stage was once capable of the same fusion of religious and secular, moral and emblematic connotations, especially in the Shakespearean and Jacobean theatre. In contemporary drama the religious and emblematic qualities of food as stage property have become vestigial and it is the secular, verisimilar and culturally particular meanings which predominate.

For much of the following pre-Elizabethan background material on food in theatre I a~ indebted to Anthony Caputi's Buffo: the Genius of Vu I g a r Comedy .2 Most ancient ritual revels involved food. The Thargelia, an Athenian feast in honour of Apollo began with a procession of the eiresione, an olive branch twined with wool and hung with figs, loaves of bread, and a small container of

1 Stage Images and Traditions: Shakespeare to Ford. London: Cambridge UP, 1987: 36-37. 2 Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1978. 24

wine. After this emblem had been hung over the door of a house the procession made its way to the temple to offer the first fruits of the year to Apollo. The second part of the festival featured the ritual execution of the pharmakoi, two men who were first designated male and female and then led from the city, provided with food, beaten on the genitals with leeks and branches of wild fig, and finally burned to death. The conjunction of sex, death and food apparent in these ritual revels remains a constant of theatre up to the more discursive modes of current drama. Rudimentary folk plays such as originated in northern Greece constituted the central portion of day-long ceremonies. One such example from Thrace begins with a procession in which certain set characters go from house to house begging for food and money.

The general term for ritual revels in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was 'carnival', a term which embraced a number of loosely organized episodes ranging from the election of a carnival king to his death and funeral. The details of the carnival processions and of the subordinate ceremonies and pranks associated with them varied from place to place, as did the special foods eaten and wines drunk. At the end of these activities the king would submit to and fail a test and thereafter be 'destroyed' on the spot or ceremonially executed after a trial. Sometimes the king was accompanied by a queen or female antagonist known as Lent who would appear at some point late in the scenario to indicate the arrival of the time of abstinence. She was not only representative of austerity, however; frequently she was associated with fertility and the promise of plenty. Sometimes a festivity in mid-Lent involving her destruction was accompanied by feasting. Quite often the dummy representing Lent was sawn up in a ceremony called in Italy the Segavecchia (the "Sawing of the Old Woman"). Caputi recounts Paolo Toschi's report of the festivity in Florence where the dummy was filled with candies and fruits of all kinds which spilled out when it was sawn. Common to most carnival festivities and primitive plays are treatments of the combat-death episode (developed from scenes of combat between Carnival and Lent such as that depicted in Breughel's painting "The Battle between Carnival and Lent"). From Siena a loosely derived action under the title of Bruscello sulla caccia ("Play of the Hunt") consists simply 25

of a speech by an Old Man (the Vecchio) inviting everyone to hunt in celebration of the carnival season, followed by speeches assigned to hunters, cooks, and personified cooking implements, and then the feast which follows when the hunters return without game.

One of the recurring features of the processional revels is the frequency of food-stealing pranks. Cap~_ti concedes that there is no firm historical link between these food-stealing pranks and the many little plays including incidents involving food; however he believes the similarities between them to be too striking to be accidental. He draws together a number of scenes and fragments featuring food-related rituals and incidents: the episodes of food thievery (and subsequent beatings) which contributed to the frenzy of the revels as a whole, the reference in Aristophanes' The Wasps (422 B.C.) to a mime in which Hercules is defrauded of his dinner, and the vase painting in the Louvre depicting a scene from a mime in which slaves have apparently stolen wine from Dionysus. 3 These examples constitute very early dramatic accommodations of practices and rituals involving food.

Aristophanes' Ecclesiazousae (The Women at the Assembly) (392 B.C.) is characteristic of a tradition common to both Old and New Comedy, that of a comedy ending in a feast, dinner or banquet. In this instance the eksodos (finale) dramatizes the total success of the women's plan to transfer political power from men to women. The banquet has already begun and the audience is invited to share the food and drink. After the chorus leader begs the audience to judge the comedy fairly, all dance gaily off to dinner accompanied by a choral song relating to a feast. During this the servant describes the main dish, a gigantic word compounded of twenty-six different kinds of food to be served which "reproduces linguistically the hasti it describes. "4 The inclusion of the audience

3 Caputi: 105. 4 Parker, Douglass quoted in Lois Spatz Aristophanes Boston: Twayne, 1978:133. Australian playwright Jack Hibberd absorbed many influences from Aristophanes such as exuberant use of physical comedy and bawdiness. In Hibberd's adaptation of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae (Women!) for the 'longest word in Greek' Hibberd and James Mccaughey substitute vocal group work involving: •a rhythmical sound texture made up of: 'Free beer, sausage rolls, pie and sauce, sirloin steak, horse radish, pavlova.' 26

in a performance involving the sharing of food in a celebratory mode will crop up in discussions of the Australian plays where the sharing of food with the audience is crucial to the play (Chapter Two).

Usually a happy subject in Aristophanes, in Knights (424 B.C.) food becomes a symbol of every kind of political corruption. The play abounds with references to food, cooking vessels, and language relating to eating and gourmandizing. In particular, Cedric Whitman finds remarkable the way in which "the food images accompany and develop the characters and situations . in the play. "5 Food's pervasiveness is dramatized in the scene where the two adversaries (Cleon and the Sausage Seller) bring out their sacks of presents for Demos so that Demos can decide who has more to offer him. For the most part the presents consist of food, and Demos accepts these food gifts from both sides until the sacks are empty. The food presented to him includes cake, barley, bread, pea soup, sliced fish, meat broth, tripe, entrails, another cake, wine, more cake, and rabbit. Despite the association of food with political corruption throughout this play in the end there is a restoration to harmony, festivity and social health via food. Demos is rejuvenated by being cooked, the Sausage Seller is invited to dinner. Cleon, however, is condemned to become a sausage seller and to make his wares of dogs' and asses' meat. Perhaps the more usual appearance of food in Aristophanic comedy is of the festive gathering at the end, as in Peace (421 B.C.) where food and drink is shared with all as the wedding party marches off. Also typical is the appearance of scatological humour associated with eating, and in Peace, Trygaeus, a small farmer, attempts to promote peace by pleading with Zeus himself. He soars up to Olympus on a dung beetle whose appetite for finely knE;aded cakes of faeces provides such humour.6

For Caputi, however, the first fully developed play which proclaims the centrality of food is the late fifteenth-century La farce du

The pavlova finally assumes the upper hand and the texture ends with an ecstatic shout." (Hainsworth, John. Hibberd. Sydney: Methuen, 1987: 75.) 5 Whitman, Cedric H. Aristophanes and the Comic Hero. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1964: 92. 6 Spatz: 41 27

paste et de la tarte ("The 0 Farce of the Meat Pie and the Tart ). In this play two rogues bemoan the cold, their hunger and the thin pickings to be had by begging. Then the first of them overhears a pastry cook taking leave of his wife and telling her that he will send someone to her to fetch a meat pie; his instructions are that she should give the pie to whomever comes and takes her by the finger. The first rogue quickly confides this to the second, who gets the pie. When the pastry cook returns and learns of the loss he beats his wife. Next, the first rogue goes to the shop and tries to get a tart but this time the wife traps him and the pastry cook beats him. To equalize matters, the first rogue then sends the second to the shop, telling him that the wife wants him, and the second rogue is also beaten. The play ends with the rogues taking solace in what is left of the meat pie and the first rogue explaining that, after all, they had agreed to share everything.7 Here, food can be seen to be instrumental in a sequence of trickery, deception and punishment, a trend that is continued in more violent forms in the revenge plays.

Many Senecan8 , and later, Jacobean tragedies featured acts of eating in the form of cannibalism. Seneca's tragedy Thyestes9 is the model for many revenge tragedies involving bloody banquets and cannibalism (most notably, perhaps, Titus Andronicus). One of the Hellish Furies, Megaera, raises up Tantalus from Hell and incites him to set against each other his two nephews Thyestes and Atreus, brothers who have governed Mycenae interchangeably, year by year. Atreus seeks his revenge on Thyestes (for the thief of a ram with a golden fleece) by dissembling a reconciliation and inviting Thyestes to a banquet at which he secretly serves him his own children to eat and their blood to drink. Lastly he commands the heads to be brought in, at which moment Thyestes realises he has eaten his own children. An act of eating, therefore, brings a curse ( oicos) on the house of Atreus. Tantalus himself had been punished by perpetual hunger. As king of Mount Sipylus in Lydia, he revealed the secrets of the gods and was punished in Tartarus by

7 Caputi: 105. 8 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.4 BC - AD 65). 9 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Four Tragedies and Octavia. Trans. E. F. Watling. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. 28

having to stand under a loaded tree up to his chin in water, the fruit and the water retreating whenever he tried to satisfy his hunger.

Developing the Senecan model Shakespeare employs food as a retributive mechanism against successive acts of brutality and violence in Shakespeare's Titus Andro_nicus (c1594) 10• Here food plays a crucial role in an aesthe_tic of mutilation, revenge and cannibalism; most horrifically, the enactment of the unthinkable: a mother eating her own children. Dismembered body parts - heads, an arm - at one point appear like food on platters (as in the case of the two wrongly accused Andronici brothers); Titus requests that his own severed hand be carried off stage by his daughter Lavinia in her mouth (since both her hands have been amputated), so that the appearance may suggest a dog carrying a bone away. In the Act 3 scene 2 banquet, food is present only as fuel for revenge:

TITUS: And look you eat no more Than will preserve just so much strength in us As will revenge these bitter woes of ours. (3.ii)

When Titus tries to encourage his daughter to eat a little it is unlikely, in most productions, that she ever does take food. From the moment of her rape and mutilation she behaves more as a mute image of sorrow than a living human being. In the BBC Television 11 version she rejects the food offered to her by Titus and this seems reasonable given the circumstances. She has no wish to take sustenance. She considers herself as having died along with her husband and this period of escalated planning and revenge, from her point of view, is a limbo period before what seems to be her predetermined death at her father's hand. Her mouth has become, not the means of taking in food, but useful for holding other matter: Titus' hand, at his instruction (3.i.280-1 ); the staff with which she writes the incriminating message naming Chiron and Demetrius, sons of Tamora, as her mutilators and rapists.(4.i.)

10 Ed. Eugene M. Waith. Oxford: OUP, 1984. 11 BBC Television Production in association with Time-Life Television, MCMLXXXV. Directed by Jane Howell, with Trevor Peacock as Titus, Anna Calder-Marshall as Lavinia, Hugh Quarshie as Aaron, Eileen Atkins as Tamera and Gavin Richards as Lucius. 29

In the BBC production Chiron and Demetrius are seen engaged in a food fight at the moment when the Young Lucius comes to them to present weapons from Titus with verses in Latin attached (4.ii). Showing them as children engaged in a food fight could be seen to reinforce their lack of maturity, a fact which is soon born out by their inability to understand the Latin message attached to the weapon. Later their association with food is elaborated gruesomely since they themselves become food when they are made into pasties and served to Tamora their mother. Puzzlingly for Tamora and Saturninus, in Act 5 scene 3 Titus appears dressed as a cook - he is so completely in character as vengeful provider that it takes precedence over his former persona:

...... welcome all: although the cheer be poor, 'Twill fill your stomachs; please you eat of it. (5.ii)

Encouraged by the cook, Tamora and Saturninus eat and drink the human banquet while Titus, Lavinia and the young Lucius look on silently, knowingly. Such a punishment recalls Jeremiah 19; 9:

I will compel men to eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters; they shall devour one another's flesh ...... 12

After killing his daughter Lavinia, Titus identifies Chiron and Demetrius as her rapists. When the Emperor orders them to appear Titus replies:

Why there they are, both baked in this pie; Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred. (5.iii)

Additional resonance comes from the use of the Elizabethan term 'coffin' for pie crust .(5.ii.188) which in this instance is to contain the ground Chiron and Demetrius. A feast which should provide the context for harmony and community turns into a bloodbath and the parent-child relationship is defiled with the enactment of the final cannibalistic horrors.

12 The New English Bible (with the Apocrypha) Oxford UP, 1970: 938. 30

An even more complicated response, if such is imaginable, is evoked by another bloody banquet in John Ford's drama of incest 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (first published in 1633) 13, in particular Giovanni's entrance with his lover/sister's heart on his dagger. The metaphor for recognition of envy in the expression "eat your heart out" had a pictorial equivalent (a man eating a heart) in Renaissance iconography. 14 It seems certain, then, that consumption of bodily parts, along with other violent acts, would have carried an ethical and moral dimension to Renaissance audiences of revenge tragedy. That Giovanni, making an entrance from sister Annabella's bedroom in the house of her new husband Soranzo, has carved her up to extract her heart (to demonstrate literally and graphically that Soranzo will not possess it metaphorically) is complicated by the fact that she is pregnant. Giovanni, therefore, has killed both his sister/'wife' and his child. The irruption of Annabella's heart into the banquet, "trimm'd in reeking blood", blends and confuses the activities of killing/eating/cannibalism/sex/incest in a polysemically coded sequence. The various hungers contest as Giovanni brandishes Annabella's heart in the midst of the banquet, proclaiming his possession of the iconic emblem of romantic love and feelings. Blood shed and bride banqueting have previously been yoked in the Friar's observation at Vasques' poisoning of Hippolita:

Mark this , my Giovanni, and take heed! I fear the event; that marriage seldom's good, Where the bride banquet so begins in blood. (4.i)

When Giovanni receives a banquet invitation from his father Florio to be attended by the Cardinal and others, the Friar warns him not to go:

0, do not go! This feast, I'll gage my life, Is but a plot to train you to your ruin; (5.iii)

13 Webster, John and John Ford. Five Plays. London: Dent, 1976. 14 Huston Diehl points out that Renaissance pictures depicting the literal consumption of human bodies frequently function as visual embodiments of well-known quotations, adages and proverbs: the picture of a man eating a heart, for instance, embodies the saying "envy eats its heart out". "The Iconography of Violence in English Renaissance Tragedy." Renaissance Drama. NS 11, 1980: 37. 3 I

Vasques' injunction to his master Soranzo to let Giovanni "go and glut himself in his own destruction" (5.iv) fortifies the associations between sexual and gastronomical appetites. This is taken further when Annabella and Giovanni are alone together in Annabella's bedroom, with her urgent plea that the banquet is 'an harbinger of death' to them. (5.v) This banquet is not an occasion of any joy but rather a ceremony of obli.gation. Soranzo invites the Cardinal "To taste these coarse confections; though the use/ Of such set entertainments more consists/In custom than in cause". Giovanni cuts Annabella's heart out while the host waits on their arrival to begin the banquet. His is a much more desperate and passionate interpretation of feasting. With his sister's heart upon his dagger he speaks:

You came to feast, my lords, with dainty fare; I came to feast too, but I digg'd for food In a much richer mine than gold or stone Of any value balanc'd; (5.vi)

In the Italian film version ( 1971) 15 with Charlotte Rampling the crazed intrusion of Giovanni (Oliver Tobias) into the banquet hall with bloodied, dripping heart wrapped in white muslin fabric has him throw the heart onto the banquet table in front of Soranzo and the guest of honour (his own father Florio), blotting the pristine cloths with slashes of blood, upturning the plates of fruit and cups of wine. Again the confrontational mingling of body parts with edibles increases the shocking impact of the gesture. The fact that a freshly excised heart is the desperate and defiant symbol of a doomed, incestuous liaison imparts a violent pornography to the scene through the blatant display of the private and erotic (embodied in the heart) at a public ritual occasion (a banquet). In the film, following the stabbing killings of all the guests (Giovanni and Annabella's family and household members), a single dog wandering through the banquet hall sniffing dead bodies and table contents alike points up the sense of carnivorous, even cannibalistic, assault. Verna Foster makes the point that in 'Tis Pity She 1s a Whore Ford transforms the wedding feast and the birthday feast - festivities that in comedy usually promise

15 Directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. 32

renewed life to individual and society alike - into •tragic ceremonies of death and destruction• .16

Shakespeare utilises food and feeding for dramatic reasons in four main ways: pervasive food and eating imagery (as in Coriolanus); feasts and banquets as fulcrums (for example, Timon of Athens and Macbeth); feasts or banquets disrupted and/or frustrated to dramatise discord ( only the final banquet in The Taming of the Shrew is successful), or threat to marital bonds (The Comedy of Errors); as an extension of the Senecan tradition of on-stage consumption linked with violence, dismemberment, mutilation and cannibalism (as in Titus Andronicus).

The noteworthy aspect of Corio Ian us 17 in terms of food is the dominance of food and eating imagery. 18 The trigger for the action of Coriolanus is a horde of hungry mouths; the contemporary social relevance of this lies in the Midlands enclosure riots of 1607-08, popular riots, not manipulated by religious or aristocratic factions, protesting against the acceleration of enclosures and resulting food shortages. The violent and urgent beginning to the play is captured in the First Citizen's question "You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?" (1.i). The imagery suggests that if not eaten by the patricians, the people will be devoured by the wars.(1.i) Coriolanus' mother Volumnia is not a nourishing mother. Her response to Menenius's invitation to a consolatory dinner following Coriolanus' banishment is "Anger's my meat: I sup upon myself/ And so shall starve with feeding." (4.ii). As she plans to feed only on her own anger, so she has fed Coriolanus only bravery:

Thy valiantness was ~ine, thou sucks't it from me. (3.ii)

Throughout the play there is a repeated association of the people (ignoble lower classes) with appetite and the nobility with

16 Foster, Verna "'Tls Pity She's a Whore as City Tragedy." John Ford: Critical Re-Visions. Ed. Michael Neill. Cambridge: CUP, 1988: 192. 17 The Complete Works of Shakespeare Ed. W.J. Craig, London: Oxford UP, 1911: 809 - 851 . 8 1 Both Maurice Charney and Janet Adelman have documented the centrality of such imagery in Corlolanus. 33

appetitive restraint. All food and eating imagery carries negative connotations. The "grain a day" which Coriolanus would live on rather than "buy their mercy" with flattery discloses the aristocratic ascetic strain. 19 The discourse of food is enlisted to highlight the distance between two sectors of the society, the patricians and the plebeians, as well as to make explicit the psychological scale from invulnerable .- to highly vulnerable. The metaphoric process at work throughout the play suggests the psychological reality at its centre: the taking in of food is the primary acknowledgement of one's dependence on the world, and as such, it is the primary token of one's vulnerability.2 0

In terms of a tradition of food on stage, certainly one of its principal manifestations still enduring today is that of the disrupted banquet or meal. It will be seen in later chapters that the interrupted or frustrated meal is a device still in use in contemporary Australian drama. In relation to the Renaissance stage the disrupted banquet features in many plays, a few of which are discussed here: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, discussed above; and to follow, Macbeth and Timon of Athens, constitute especially striking and varied examples of the impact of the disrupted banquet. Foster confirms my general point in an article on Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore:

In the potent, if by the 1620s conventional, dramatic symbol of the disrupted banquet Ford twice presents an image of social harmony shattered by forces the city has been unable to control.21

The shattering of social harmony via the symbol of the disrupted banquet will be examined now with reference to Macbeth and

19 It will be developed later, but noted now that women's denial of food often denotes the hope of achieving a more 'noble' and transcendent state. Studies as different as Carolyn Walker Bynum's treatment of religious women and food Holy Feast, Holy Fast and Matra Robertson's Starving in the Silences look at the way women make sense of their self-imposed denial of food and chart variations of the tendency to associate the need for food with the reminder of animality, lack of restraint and therefore gross appetite. 20 Adelman, Janet. '"Anger's My Meat': Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Corlolanus." Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature. Ed. David Bevington and Jay L Halio. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1978: 110. 21 Foster: 192. 34

Timon of Athens. The banquet scene in Macbeth 22 upholds two strong symbolic connections: that of banquet as symbol of harmony, fellowship and union and that of banquet as symbol of order and hierarchy. The opening line, "You know your own degrees, sit down: at first and last"(3.iv), establishes the latter connection. For J.P. Dyson the banquet scene is Macbeth's "formal or gestural attempt to enthrone himself, to become the true king."23 Each time Macbeth is overtaken by Banquo's ghost he breaks the communal feeling of unity provided by the shared banquet. It is for breaking this bond that Lady Macbeth reproaches him toward the end of the scene:

You have displac'd the mirth, broke the good meeting, With most admir'd disorder. {3.iv)

Emrys Jones argues for the structural importance of the banquet scene on the grounds that the third act is entirely constructed around this scene. Jones also makes the point that the performance Macbeth is putting on is a social performance in the presence of his country's nobility, since the feast is intended to ratify the new social order.24

In Timon of Athens 25 the generosity of nobleman Timon is manifest largely in terms of the munificence of his banquets. He frequently and lavishly feeds his friends but as it transpires they are merely "mouth friends" who feed on him. They flatter him in proportion to the food and drink he provides. Cynic Apemantus has their measure; he declines to eat at Timon's laden table ("No; I eat not lords"), implying that the others would do so. Later in Act I this sense reveals itself in a more explicit and scripturally allusive fashion:

I scorn thy meat; 'twould choke me, for I should ne'er flatter thee. 0 you gods! What a number of men eats Timon, and he sees 'em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood;

22 The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. W.J. Craig. London: Oxford UP, 1911: 978- 1005. 23 "The structural function of the banquet scene in Macbeth." Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol 14 (1963): 371. 24 Scenic Form In Shakespeare. London: Oxford UP, 1971: 216. 25 The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 35

and all the madness is, he cheers them up too. (1.ii)

Later in the same speech Apemantus comments "the fellow that sits next him, now parts bread with him, pledges the breath of him in a divided draught, is the readiest man to kill him" (1.ii). The parallel between Judas' betrayal of Jesus and the hypocrisy of Timon's friends has been used as the rationale for staging the scene to resemble paintings of the Last Supper.2s

The idea that Timon himself is eaten by those who eat his food runs through the play in more than a metaphorical sense: the inclusion of two very different kinds of banquet symbolises this dominant motif. In the first of these Timon's own life-blood is pictured as the juice into which the banquet meats are dipped and, unbelievably, he encourages his enemies to drink his blood. In the BBC Television version the sense of Timon's being devoured is enhanced by the fact that Timon himself takes no food throughout the long feasting sequence and that he is portrayed in this scene in a heightened, manic state of mind, watching intently as others eat while denying himself any part of the banquet. This portrayal of Timon's behaviour accentuates the textual sense that he is being eaten by the parasitic lords. The first banquet is notable for its sumptuousness and abundant supply of foods - various meats, fruit, wine. The camera in the BBC version lingers on the joints as they are carved, broken and consumed by the hungry lords, sloshed down with goblets full of wine and finished off with fresh fruits.

When, to satisfy his debtors, Timon solicits his friends' demonstrations of reciprocal generosity (a thing he not unreasonably expects) Lucullus, Lucius and Ventidius excuse themselves in successive scenes with a number of weak, implausible excuses .. The second banquet promises a satisfactory meal ("cover'd dishes") but delivers a shock to the same group. Timon invites the same false friends again after receiving the news that not one of them is prepared to assist him in his financial crisis. The diners are instructed that their "diet shall be in all

26 Frank Kermode comments on Wilson's Knight's 'Last Supper' staging of the banquet scenes in the Introduction to Timon of Athens in The Riverside Shakespeare.: 1443. 36 places alike" and it is true that all the dishes are the same. After the invitation to "Uncover, dogs, and lap", the diners uncover the dishes to find they are filled with warm water. Timon rages at them, throwing the water in their faces, driving them out with

May you a better feast never behold, You knot of mouth-friends! Smoke and lukewarm water Is your perfection. This is Timon's last; Who, stuck and spangled with your flatteries, Washes it off, and sprinkles in your faces Your reeking villainy. (3,vi)

In this scene Timon's friends who can be won by the mouth, by merely being fed, are rebuked by the mouth, by a trick involving apparently good food in covered dishes. One commentator, Mahon, contends that the banquets in Timon are structurally significant in that the two meals are staged to support the structure of a play that breaks neatly into two halves: the first a portrait of a prodigal, the second the manifestation of a misanthrope.27 I would suggest that the stagings of the two meals work emblematically to uphold this two part structure: the first meal symbolises his prodigality by its lavishness and number of dishes; the second meal, once the trick of the "cover'd dishes" is uncovered, emblematises the beginning of his state of misanthropy, wretchedness and penury.

The phenomenon of the interrupted meal is evident in both As You Like It and The Tempest. A comic model of the interrupted banquet, The Taming of the Shrew, is also noted but will be discussed in Chapter Three. The banquet in The Tempest28 is not only interrupted, however, it disappears completely before it is consumed. Jan Kott explores the antecedent, Virgil's Aeneid, stating that the interrupted banquet derives directly from Aeneid 3. When Aeneas ana his companions landed on the shore of the uninhabited Strophades they were attacked by Harpies who

27 Mahon, John W. • 'For now we sit to chat as well as eat': conviviality and conflict in Shakespeare's meals." "Fanned and Winnowed Opinions": Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins. Eds. John W Mahon and Thomas A Pendleton. London : Methuen, 1987: 239.

28 The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. W.J. Craig. London: Oxford UP, 1911:1-25. 37 snatched away their supper. Kott also stresses the element of performance, the theatre-within-a-theatre of Prospero's island, and refers to the snatching of the food by Ariel the harpy as •only a theatrical trick" taking account of the precise and concrete theatrical meaning of the word trick, "to denote an elaborate device or ingenious piece of mechanism used for pageantry" .29 A reading of temptation and punishment is- supportable for this scene; Frank Kermode, for example, notes that banquets "represent the voluptuous attractions of sense which the resolved soul must resist"30. The opportunity for satiation and community presented by the feast is denied the shipwrecked courtiers. Since the mythical harpy stood as emblematic for guilt and punishment this action of the stolen or interrupted banquet could be seen as a minor retribution for the major disruption of community they caused by the usurpation of Prospero's throne and their attempt to murder Prospero and Miranda.

Misunderstandings and confusions over sexual/marital partners in relation to dinner invitations constitute a variant of the delayed meal/_frustrated meal phenomenon. Plautine Comedy (Titus Plautus c.254-184 BC) incorporated both Greek and Roman elements; however The Brothers Menaechmus3 1 (date unknown) relies on Greek characterisation, in particular the Greek type of the Parasite, the professional sponger who gives flattery in return for meals. This play was the model for The Comedy of Errors32 though Shakespeare added another set of twins. The interest with these plays in this case turns on the scenes involving the meals prepared for and served to the wrong man. In Plautus' The Brothers Menaechmus the mistress Erotium muddles the twins whereas in The Comedy of Errors the mistake is Adriana's, Antipholes' wife; the parallel is that they are both preparing a meal for 'their man'. Since sharing a meal in this context symbolises

29 Kott, Jan. The Bottom Translation: Marlow and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1987: 123. 30 155. 31 In Two Classical Comedies. Trans. & Ed. Peter D. Arnott. New York: Appleton­ Century-Crofts, 1958. 32 The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. W.J.Craig. London: Oxford UP, 1911: 114 -135. 38

marital union and harmony, serving the meal to the wrong man, even a twin brother, represents a threat to marital accord.

Unlike its coding in The Comedy of Errors, in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus33 food is not coded erotically; however Faustus' ruling vice is gluttony. Medieval authors such as Chaucer and Gower34 have made the connection between Adam's Fall and Gluttony and in turn many critics have linked Adam with Faustus. Faustus' intellectual pursuits are depicted in terms of hunger in the Prologue ("glutted now with learning's golden gifts,/ He surfeits on cursed necromancy"), and this early impression alerts us to an insatiability which will become more literal as the play progresses. He invites Cornelius and Valdes to eat with him before he'll conjure - food must precede magic. In Marlowe's play, of the seven deadly sins Gluttony has the longest speech and unlike the dismissive exchanges with Pride, Covetousness, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, and Lechery, Faustus converses with Gluttony. After refusing a request to have Gluttony dine with him, Faustus' concluding remark to Gluttony, ("Choke thyself, Glutton"), reveals a case of like recognising like. Instead of the usual envy of wealth, of possessions, of position the character of Envy serves to amplify Gluttony:

I am lean with seeing others eat. Oh, that there would come a famine over all the world, that all might die, and I live alone, then thou shoulds't see how fat I'd be. (2.i)

The effect of this change of emphasis is to put significantly more weight on the sin of Gluttony. The extent of this gluttony can be gathered from the encounter with the Carter. Thinking he is safe if he offers Faustus all the hay he can eat for three farthings, the Carter is astounded · to witness Faust us continue to eat until the whole load of hay has been consumed. This comic incident reflects

33 In Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. 34 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Ed. F.N. Robinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. 2nd ed. Summoner's Tale lines 1845ft, esp. 1915-17; Pardoner's Tale lines 498-548, esp. 505-11; Parson's Tale lines 818-19. The Complete Works of John Gower Ed. G.C. Macauley. Oxford: Clarendon, 1901, Ill 167: Confesslo Amantls VI 2-7. 39 what is, in the main action, deadly earnest. Parodic treatment of the sin of gluttony is also a feature of Australian playwright's Jack Hibberd's Music Theatre piece Sin 35 , a playful satire of the seven deadly sins. In this case gluttony is the corollary of cultural snobbery and the affectations and elitism of opera-going's first nighters. Lady De Bacon and Sir Raphael Rasher De Bacon, she in her first night finery, he a pig-puppet in a. dinner suit, "bend [their] steps to that chic little Point Piper restaurant where they feature of a staff of declasse types!"[SD,70]. They guzzle champagne, "La Perouse 1778", then proceed to make gluttons of themselves. (See illustration [a]):

She ...... assaults with horrendous appetite the food, Sir Raphael snouts and hoinks amongst the roasts, rare pies, cakes etcetera. (71]

The parallels with Marlowe's play lie in the use of the sin of gluttony to signify more widely than itself in relation to human conduct and the enlistment of food as part of a parodic strategy.

Lorraine Stock36 cites a number of critics who have traced Marlowe's focus on oral imagery, eating and gluttony, and concludes that one main strand of criticism favours a psychoanalytic interpretation of the orality in Doctor Faustus. 37 A further commentator, W.L. Godshalk, also recognises the prominence of eating and feasting in the play but maintains that the gluttony is a sign of his unnatural desires and an extension of Faustus' sensuality rather than a mark of spiritual emptiness.38 Faustus'

35Hibberd, Jack The Overcoat; Sin: Two pieces of Music Theatre. (Music by Martin Friedel) Sydney: Currency, 1978. 36 "Medieval Gula in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus." Bulletin of Research in the Humanities. Vol 85, Winter '82: 372-385. 37 C.L. Barber reads the oral emphasis as an infantile fixation; Edward Snow attributes Faustus' gluttony to a "metaphysical lack"; Charles Masinton reads the eating references as a rejection of, substitution for and travesty of the spiritual food of the Holy Communion. C.L. Barber. "The Form of Faustus' Fortunes Good or Bad." TDR. 8 1964: 92-119; Edward A. Snow. "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire", Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Ed. Alvin Kernan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977: 70-110; Charles Masinton. Christopher Marlowe's Tragic Vision: A Study In Damnation. Athens: Ohio UP, 1972: 129-140. 38 The Marlovlan World Picture. The Hague: Mouton, 1974: 187. Sin by Jack Hibberd. Victoria State Opera, Music Theatre Season, 1978. ( a ) L to R: Evelyn Krape as Lady De Bacon, Jan Friedl as Gail, John Wood as Sir Raphael Rasher De Bacon. Photo courtesy Currency Press. 40

sensuality rather than a mark of spiritual emptiness.3B Faustus' last feast is an inversion of the Last Supper iconography: Christ symbolically distributes himself to his disciples, whereas Faustus, after his diabolic feast, is literally torn to pieces. 39 In the picture of hell painted by the Evil Angel the worst horrors of hell are reserved for the gluttons:

These that are fed with sops of flaming fire, Were gluttons, and loved only delicates, And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates. (5.ii)

Faustus' sensuality is repeatedly underlined by the motif of eating and feasting. In Rome, Mephistophilis and Faustus attend St Peter's feast, and after a promise that they will make bold with the Pope's venison, Faustus, rendered invisible by Mephistopheles, eats freely at the papal feast. Prior to his descent to hell, he feasts his former students with a banquet served by devils. Finally Faustus' admission that his end has been brought about by a "surfet of deadly sin, that hath damn'd both body and soul", suggests that his overeating is symbolic of his complete commitment to the sensual as opposed to the spiritual.40

Emphasis on the Elizabethan and Jacobean period in the background material is intended to highlight a shift in the ways food has been employed on stage. The popularity of emblem books41 and commonplace books indicates that emblems and pithy precepts or saws (often accompanying the emblems) both performed an educative function. M.C. Bradbrook refers to the Elizabethan responsiveness to both "direct moral instruction" and the "play of words and images" as well as the consequent "feeling for allegory". 42 Lomax explains it this way:

38 The Marlovian World Picture. The Hague: Mouton, 1974: 187. 39 Godshalk: 188. 4o Godshalk: 188. 41 Collections of emblems such as those in Henkel and Schone's Emblemata: Handbuch Zur Slnnbildkunst Des XVI. und XVII. Jahrunderts. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967. 4 2 Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy. 1935. Cambridge: CUP, 1980: 69. 4 1

The Elizabethans and Jacobeans could appreciate emblematic or symbolic staging because they, unlike us, were familiar with the concept - not just in relation to drama or masques but in the emblematical way they viewed the world.43

The predominantly emblematic use of food as discussed in, principally, Elizabethan and Jacobean _9rama gradually modulates into an increasingly naturalistic use of food as demands for theatrical realism take over.

Verisimilitude, however, is not the only criterion. The presence of real food on stage in twentieth century drama is not always essential for the creation of the sensual experience of the presence of food. To take one instance, English dramatist Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen, based on the playwright's experiences as a pastry­ cook, is set in a place of production of food but has no food on stage. Food, therefore, does not have to be present on stage or even consumed on stage to be dramaturgically crucial. A commentary on John Dexter's 1961 production of The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker is noteworthy for the way it admits of the absence of real (or stage) food · while at the same time stressing the pervasiveness of the 'feel', in particular smell, of food in the production:

The piece is splendidly visual: the white-hatted polyglot cooks dart about between the stoves and tables; we are made aware of the heat, the exasperation, the stealing, the flirtations between cooks and waitresses ... Not a scrap of food is actually used on the stage. Yet so completely persuasive are both dramatist and producer that we can almost smell the stench.4 4

The commonly experienced saturation of sense memories with food meant that the critic (and presumably he was not alone in this) 'provided' the smells .and tastes of food in the absence of any food at all. The invisible becomes visible because of the strength of associations between visual cues, rhythm, body language and tense verbal exchanges connected with the business of preparing and serving food commercially. The ordering of dishes sets up and maintains the rhythm of many of the sequences in the play and at

43 Lomax: 34. 44 Muller, Robert. Dally Mall. 28 June 1961. 42 times when the kitchen is not under maximum pressure the dialogue still takes place in the context of the tensions prevalent in such an oppressive work environment.

It will be found that, generally speaking, the Australian plays deal with food in a more psychological-physiological-naturalistic rather than imagistic-emblematic manrJer. The foregoing review has sought to sample the various ways food can be used in theatrical performance. The purpose of this background is to demonstrate that food is a perennial device in theatre. Furthermore, the conduct and appurtenances associated with food are not merely incidental to matters of plot, theme, structure, character; they are not merely ways of decorating a set or plot line simply in order to register a degree of spatial and temporal naturalism, in the way that painted backdrops were used to situate action as in, say, a study or drawing room. The way in which food is used becomes a comment on and a vehicle for the play's ideologies and structures. This architectural metaphor prompts another: food is, so to speak, both a load-bearing component of the dynamic, and a determinant of its social meaning. Apart from references I have made to the prominence of the food motif in scripts which survive from earliest periods, I have also, in particular, made reference to particular productions of such scripts, as for example, BBC Television productions. I have done this for two reasons: first, because they are extant points of reference and verification; but second, because they indicate, in their camera trajectories, that contemporary directors have grasped and exploited the semiotic implications of food, its dense shorthand as a bearer of codes.

The prominence of an emblematic food code in the Renaissance stage seems certain. Along with the bed, the banquet was one of the few large commonly used 'set piece' properties on the Renaissance stage and precisely for this reason would have been a readily intelligible stage property for the audience. 45 Most common smaller properties such as crown, handkerchief, letter, cup and

45 Conversation with Dr Richard Madelaine, Senior Lecturer, School of English, UNSW, in relation to his work on the iconography of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, in particular the iconography of violence and sensationalism. 43 direction "enter a banquet" occurs with sufficient frequency for the banquet to be considered a stock property. Such banquets would have been pre-set with the items of food, plates, bowls of fruit, joints of meat nailed securely to the table. Whereas the Renaissance stage property of the bed was simultaneously practical, realistic and symbolic (as in Hamlet and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore), the banquet tended to be primarily iconic.

Neoclassicism, with its concentration on order, balance, decorum, correctness and control of excess, tended to wipe from the stage all signs of stage detail and evidence of sensual enjoyment. Twentieth century theatre has inherited a Victorian legacy in terms of attitudes of food. Although there is an abundance of both stylisation and realism in relation to food on stage ,in contemporary drama the general tendency is that food is something to be monitored and controlled rather than revelled in.

Contemporary drama has absorbed the mannerisms, the obsessions, the fads, the trends and has found a way of making wider cultural meanings out of these current food customs and mores. Food on stage no longer indicates generalised eating or hierarchical structures alone. A concentration on and fascination with the specificities of food - ingredient combinations, the impact of cultural and ethnic diversity on Australian food habits, changing attitudes to food preparation and presentation - has overtaken food as emblem or prop. The utilisation of food as social badge, special dietary needs and restrictions, the regimentation and mania of the food refuser, self-denial and punishment via food, excessive consumption in a culture of plenty: all these behaviours are symptomatic of the current search for self through what is taken into the body and all find a place in the way food is represented in contemporary Australian drama. 44

Chapter Two

AUSTRALIAN PLAYS BASED ON A MEAL

The enduring ritual of eating together is a persuasive exemplification of the human pleasure in patterned activity. The meal derives its power from being a repeated social act and as such it becomes a factor in stability arid social cohesion. A meal interrupted, let spoil or rejected, severely disrupts its stabilising capability. Occasions of communal eating in drama create a context presaging conviviality and a striving for communion, but, it will be shown, more often end as a medium of conflict and division. At one end of the gastronomical spectrum, anthropophagy is inextricably bound with up with violence and possession. At the other end of that spectrum eating disorders can be read as a kind of self­ directed violence. Somewhere in the middle lurk the meal time tensions and dinner table arguments which erupt apparently out of nowhere, giving credence to findings by researchers into the dynamics of family relationships that most quarrels in the home take place at the table. 1 The particular focus of this chapter will be the stage meal: the meal as the organising activity or fulcrum of the action.

There are many manifestations of the meal or banquet as the centrepiece or pivot for the performance event or drama. By the latter part of the fifteenth century, for example, Italian Renaissance society had developed a form known as the musical banquet. Coherent, and with a single theme, the banquet comprised a "fusion of all the arts of music, dancing, poetry, food, painting, sculpture, costume and set design", an entity which Nevile terms a "gastronomic opera" .2

English dramatist A.W. Pinero was fond of the stage meal or banquet as the centrepiece of his plays, such as in the first act dinner of Trelawney of the 'Wells' (1898) and the several laid

1 Visser Rituals of Dinner: 97. 2 Nevile, Jenny. "The Musical Banquet in Italian Ouattrocento Festivities." Food in Festivity: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium of Australian Gastronomy, Sydney 16-18 October, 1988. Eds. Anthony Corones, Graham Pont & Barbara Santich. Sydney 1990: 128. 45

tables in The Second Mrs Tanqueray ( 1893). Trelawney of the 'Wells' devotes the whole of the first act to a dinner in honour of Rose Trelawney who is leaving the acting profession to become a 'lady'. From the play's beginning Mrs Mossop and Ablett proceed to lay the table with 11 a pile of plates and various dishes of cold food - a joint, a chicken, a tongue , a ham, a pigeon pie, etc. 11 [S0]3.

American dramatist Thornton Wilder, in The Long Christmas Dinner,4 so deliberately exploits the possibilities for a staged synthesis of family, continuity and change arising from the annual celebration of Christmas, that he has the on-stage meal technique traverse ninety years. Representing in accelerated motion ninety Christmas dinners in the Bayard household, the play mixes naturalistic and non-naturalistic effects with regard to food. At the opening, the long dining table is 11 handsomely spread for

11 11 Christmas dinner , including the carver's place [set] with a great turkey 11 [3]; however Wilder simultaneously specifies that "throughout the play the characters continue eating imaginary food with imaginary knives and forks. 11 [3] Imaginary utensils extend to the act of carving the turkey (the constant Christmas fare), as when Roderick extends an imaginary carving-fork[5]. The passage of time is theatricalised by entrances and exits via two portals ( one trimmed with garlands and flowers, one edged and hung with black velvet) and facilitated by the annual gathering for Christmas dinner. The turkey - emblem of family cohesion and thanksgiving - sustains them through the decades, as the refrain-like offers of a little white meat, stuffing and cranberry sauce [5,9, 15,21] remind us. Food's customariness is the canvas for the passage of time, the process of ageing, the loss of loved ones and the inevitability of change.

The first (and longest) scene of British writer Caryl Churchill's Top Girls5 consists of a dinner party of famous women from history. Top Girls gathers a cast of famous women from history

3 Trelawney of the 'Wells' in Plays by A.W. Pinero. Ed & Intro. George Rowell. Cambridge: CUP, 1986: 146. 4 Wilder, Thornton. The Long Christmas Dinner, in The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931. 5 Churchill, Caryl. Plays: Two. London: Methuen, 1990. 46

together by means of a kind of trans-historical, trans-cultural dinner to celebrate the promotion of Marlene, the one continuous character in the play, to managing director of "Top Girlsy employment agency. The dinner scene in the restaurant, the longest scene in the play, constitutes a means of drawing together these disparate 'achieving' women of history and myth. For Lisa Merrill, a note of irony is struck by the amusing juxtaposition of incongruous characters, the mundane restaurant setting, with its constant interruptions of ordering, serving, and consuming food and drink, rendering all conversation trivial. 6 Arguably, Churchill's overlapping scripting technique in the dinner scene of Top Girls fractures any impression of a unitary, shared feminism.

Certainly the interweaving of serious topics with the business of ordering food often leads to incongruous juxtapositions. While the women are ordering appetisers Lady Nijo exclaims , "The first half of my life was all sin and the second ... ". At this point Marlene interjects with "What about starters?". As Nijo continues " .... all repentance", Dull Gret replies to Marlene's question "Soup". Pope Joan responds to Nijo's original comment by asking "And which did you like best?". The overlapping in this particular section has the effect of bonding the first "sinful" half of Nijo's life with "starters" or appetisers, "repentance" with "soup"[61], and a propensity for sin with an appetite for food.

While Joseph Marohl remarks on the mixture of women and the way that mix exaggerates class and ideological differences rather than similarities on the basis of sex,7 he omits any mention of culinary differences, reflected in what each character orders. Their selections either reinforce our expectations or enlarge our knowledge of the character. Dull Gret's main order of (only) potatoes [59], which she precedes with soup and follows with cake, declares her class unambiguously. Joan's choice of Zabaglione remains consistent with her other Italian preference, Canelloni. Griselda (based on Chaucer's Patient Griselda), arriving late, opts

6 "Monsters and Heroines: Caryl Churchill's Women." Caryl Churchlll : A Casebook. Ed. Phyllis R Randall. New York : Garland, 1988. 7 "De-realised Women: Performance and Identity in Top Glrls." Modern Drama. Vol 30, Sept. 1987: 381-2. 47

for cheese and biscuits [74]. The food differences apparent in their orders also exaggerate their lack of historical and socio-economic commonality.

American Tina Howe's The Art of Dining ( 1979)8 is a restaurant play dominated by food to the extent that meals are cooked on stage and the "fragrance of the evening's offerings fill . the theater"9 enveloping the audience in food aromas.1 o

From these non-Australian examples it may be observed that in general one of the most fundamental ways in which food can determine or add to a play's meaning is as a focus for activity and a context for dialogue. Many contemporary playwrights utilise the communal consumption of food as a gathering and grouping device. Sometimes the 'regulation' dinner table scene can be predictable or cliched. Often, however, if handled with ingenuity and assurance, it offers surprising opportunities for high energy interaction and dynamic proxemics.

Food may operate as a theatrical shaping device in the following ways: (i) by providing the primary raison d'etre of the play or the basic 'engine' of the play itself; for example, the meal as event or festive gathering where the entire performance hangs on a celebratory repast such as a birthday, anniversary or wedding; (ii) by dividing the play into sections or movements and thereby significantly dictating the play's shape or direction; (iii) by means of a repeatedly interrupted meal.

8 In Three Plays by Tina Howe. New York: Avon, 1984. 9 Three Plays by Tina Howe: 73. 1 O The play concerns Cal and Ellen, co-owners of a recently opened New Jersey gourmet restaurant. On one level Cal is simply a jealous husband frustrating his wife's attempts to express her creativity: chef Ellen grows more and more infuriated as all her lovingly gathered and prepared ingredients - hollandaise sauce, grapes, floating island - are profligately consumed by him. Cal also represents the business side of the restaurant, depicted as anathema to the impulses of artistic integrity. While Ellen struggles to feed the guests, Cal talks wildly of expanding the operation and books tables for ever-growing numbers of diners. Ellen, as artist, is uncertain of her abilities and craves reassurance; Cal is without his taste literally; he is "no longer able to distinguish between cinnamon and salt, and though he consumes vast quantities he appreciates nothing." (Judith Barlow "The Art of Tina Howe." Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights Ed. Enoch Brater. New York: Oxford UP, 1989: 243. 48

It is my observation that most Australian plays revolving around the meal as celebration, anniversary or wedding include the audience as part of the performance. The role of food as symbol of sharing and marker of rites of passage is invoked and acted out as part of the performance. In these plays food plays a sustained and integral role in the performance because the form of the play is determined to a great extent by the process and implications of drawing the audience into an experience of shared communality. The following four plays, in which the shape, actions and themes of the play are determined by a shared meal involving audience and actors, will illustrate this phenomenon: The Cooked and the Raw, Dimboola, Emma and Come Back For Light Refreshments After the Service.

The most complete illustration of food used as a major determinant of the form of a performance is a production by Adelaide Performing Theatre, The Cooked and the Raw: an Exquisite Ceremony of Appetite and Desire ( 1991 ). This was performed at several restaurant venues around Adelaide - at The Astor, Mclarens on the Lake and Jambalayas. 11 The Cooked and the Raw aimed to invigorate the popular form of Theatre Restaurant by taking the topic of food as the central topic of discourse; and sought to integrate the experience of consuming food with the voyeuristic experience of watching performers. In its form, content and structure it posed the question "How do we fill the inner void?". The production was constructed to reflect the four stages of appetite, as the Adelaide Performing Theatre saw them: arousal, engagement, satiation and reflection. The naming of these stages makes explicit parallels between eating and sex, parallels which are restated in the thematic and gestural aspects of the performance. Each A9t/Course focuses on one of these stages as 'a

11 The Cooked and the Raw was the result of a year's research and preparation, and of a four-week Script Development Workshop funded by the S.A. Department for the Arts and Cultural Heritage. Initially APT commissioned Nick Gill (founding director of Bristol AgitProp Theatre, actor, writer; plays include Them, Space Movers, Give Us an Inch, Swimmers) to assemble a body of research material that focused on the connections between sexuality and food. The material gathered ranged from the essays of Montaigne, through the iconoclastic Marquis de Sade, to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. In April 1991 a workshop was held in which four actors, under Nick Gill's direction, explored the food/eroticism theme, looking at different cultures but with special attention to the Australian connection. 49

sensual, emotional and cultural experience'. Actors partook of the four-course meal simultaneously with the audience as part of an enactment of how social behaviour is reflected in how, where and what we eat. 1 2

In Course One, Arousal, the audience members are dinner guests in the eighteenth century elegance of Baron and Baroness D'Outremer, a pair of French emigres. In Course Two, Engagement, the scene changes to the Colonial homestead of two settlers in 1870s Australia; in Course Three, Satiation, the audience assist a Toorak debutante celebrate her coming of age in the 1920s. The Fourth Course, Reflection, is set in a surrealistic boardroom, with greed and appetite merging into a proliferation of loving, living, eating disorders in a collision of myth and high technology.

The four episodes are cross-linked: the seventeenth century baron and baroness of the first course, with the recently liberated serfs, are echoed by the nineteenth century Australian squatters of the second course, with their domestic help, and by the bourgeoisie of the third scene with their family retainers. Similarly the narrative and food are cross-referenced to enhance consuming pleasure. (See menu, illustration [b]) When squatter Andrew in the Australian bush fantasises about rich bread rather than bad damper, the waiters at that moment serve lepinja bread. And when the flighty Ellen is being seduced by a mad Italian Futurist daubed in chocolate {her personal weakness), the audience is served a rich Chocolate Marquise. In this performance the ceremonies of food and sex become indices of both social continuity and social change over the time-span of the four courses. Hunger and sexual/emotional need are repeatedly conflated: "I've missed you, Margaret - how I've longed for a decent meal," says the colonial settler to his wife on returning home from the bush. Such self-conscious cross­ referencing of performance and gastronomy harks back to the elaborate conceits characteristic of certain Jacobean and

12 I did not see this production as it only played in Adelaide. Nor was I able to obtain a script of the performance text though I tried repeatedly to secure one. Consequently I am dependent on the company's publicity kit, articles, reviews of the production and a radio interview. While I acknowledge that such sources are less than ideal I felt that it was impossible to ignore this production in the context of my thesis.

1 1

, ,

11

·, ·,

11

r,1h,1 r,1h,1

\

11 11

S.A. S.A.

J\u:,j

YALUMBA YALUMBA

~ ~

Ill Ill

GAlfUt:Erf GAlfUt:Erf

~ ~ Foundation

Soull1 Soull1

rnli({ rnli({

111/ 111/

\ \

:

, ,

c c

1i

.

1

'-.... '-....

1 1

rt rt

,

~-:--

1

ANDRlEW ANDRlEW

C:l

except except

Age Age

Grapes Grapes

of of

Finger Finger

Waiters Waiters

Spinach Spinach

Cheese; Cheese;

Pickled Pickled

Sponge Sponge

& &

Coming Coming

Port Port

& &

Dine Dine

of of

to to

Braised Braised

Chocolate Chocolate

their their

Summoning Summoning

Coriander Coriander

Sauce Sauce

and and

You You

Brandade, Brandade,

Glass Glass

with with

from from

a a

Homestead Homestead

Melba's Melba's

with with

Platter: Platter:

& &

of of

Invite Invite

the the

Celebrate Celebrate

Courses Courses

Course Course

Course Course

• •

• •

• •

• •

• •

Course Course

Quandong Quandong

• •

• •

Course Course in in

I I I I Vegetables Vegetables

-

Bayeldi" Bayeldi"

Coffee Coffee

Refrain Refrain

Brioche Brioche

Search Search

Toil Toil

d'ouevres d'ouevres

Root Root

to to

MENU MENU

First First

Century Century

Third Third

Stewed Stewed

Baroness Baroness in in

Fourth Fourth

Second Second

between between

"Imam "Imam

& &

with with

llors llors

after after

Flambe, Flambe,

with with

Yabbies, Yabbies,

asked asked

Actors Actors

Fowl Fowl

Tartlet Tartlet

Food Food

Baron Baron

Twentieth Twentieth

Fresh Fresh

Four Four

The The

Marquise Marquise

the the

Profiterole Profiterole

Guinea Guinea

and and

Aubergine Aubergine

Respectfully Respectfully

Roast Roast

Asparagus, Asparagus,

are are

Chocolate Chocolate

Ellen Ellen

~, ~,

Fresh Fresh

Patrons Patrons

~ ~

~~ ~~

1 1

' '

, ,

' '

A A

· ·

Arts Arts

l(,I

ll

~-~ ~-~

H

t11e t11e

b) b)

,c~ ,c~

r r

---n~ ---n~

( (

I I

.. ..

. .

o . .

l

;

t t

,

Australia Australia

)

"-

-

~ ~

\I()() \I()()

lh lh

t.. t..

Sou

¥I

TOURISM TOURISM

~~~~: ~~~~:

~-'.•

~ ~

< <

Dt,partmen ~ ~,

,-

.i11d

\\'inn

1,

Aus

S.A.

+ttee-

YALUMBA

~ ■

9:-r

Ill

Soutt1

Foundation

~

GAlRJRIETT

:\uslralia11

r

,'-....

1~

~

~­

ANDJRJEW

Classic

except

Age

Grapes

of

Finger

Waiters

Spinach

Pickled

Cheese;

&

Sponge

Coming

Dine

Port

&

to

Braised

of

Chocolate

their

Summoning

Coriander

Sauce

and

You

Brandade,

Glass

with Homestead

a

from

Melba's

with

Platter:

Invite

&

of

the

Celebrate

Course

Course

Courses

•

• •

• •

Course

Quandong

• •

Course

in

Vegetables

-

I I I

Bayeldi"

Coffee

Refrain

Brioche

Search

d'ouevres

Toil

Root

to

MENU

First

Baroness

Century

Third

Stewed

in

Second

Fourth

between

"Imam

&

with

Hors

after

Flambe,

with

Yabbies,

asked

Actors

Fowl

Tartlet

Food

Twentieth

Fresh

Four

The Baron

Marquise

the

Profiterole

Guinea

and

Aubergine

Respectfully

Roast

Asparagus,

are

Chocolate

Ellen

~,

Fresh

Patrons

~

~

1

1

1

Aris

the

RIJJ(;F

b)

for

(

Ausl(al1a

[)j ,.,

South

TOURISM

CO

Department

SO~A 50

Continental court masques; one evening for instance featured a hunting masque after which the venison was served. 1 3

The critics on the whole were captivated by this unusual and innovative theatre experience, with some reservations, mainly related to the writing of the piece. Tim Lloyd criticised Nick Gill's 'over-developed writing' and in particul~u his attempts to draw a close to the evening, attempts which for Lloyd are 'pretentious, theatrical mouthings•.1 4 John Edge, too, found the conception of the fourth course a mish-mash, mixing 'exploitative capitalism, ages­ old ritualism, an anorexic Snow White with her wicked step­ mother, and the logical extension of the eating-eroticism link into cannibalism.'15 In fact, all the reviews comment on this aspect as the one blemish on an extraordinary evening and note the irony of the most outstanding course - a savoury Aubergine Tartlet and Profiterole Flambe - accompanying the weakest part of the performance.

The aims of this theatre piece were to illuminate the connections between food and sexuality. The manner of presentation of this performance about eating, gastronomy, gluttony, sexuality, cannibalism and food mores had the effect of magnifying the audience's consciousness about what they were eating and how they were eating it. This was especially evident in the sequences of the show which incorporated scenes of cannibalism at close proximity. In film director Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover we are confronted with a contemporary cinematic manifestation of the complicated web that ties eating, food and bodily parts. This confusion whereby body parts are potentially or actually eaten is familiar from plays such as The Spanish Tragedy (the bitten tongue) and Titus Andronicus (the pastie made of Taniora's two sons) and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (Annabella's freshly excised heart brandished at the banquet). Perhaps the most recent local incarnation of dramatised and

13 Conversations (21.7.93) with Associate Professor Mary Chan, School of English UNSW and Jenny Nevile who have published work on Jacobean and Continental court masques respectively. 14 The Advertiser. Oct. 5, 1991 : 21. 15 The Bulletin. Oct. 22, 1991. 5 1

ritualised cannibalism was the banquet of the Seventh Symposium of Australian Gastronomy. The deliberately confronting menu was not for the faint hearted: Stomach, Egg, Flesh, Bone, Skin, Blood, Heart, Milk, Fruit, Virgin's Breasts, Dead Men's Bones. Served on a table covered by a cloth of vanilla-sprayed untreated tripe and featuring a mummified body which rose up off the table, this menu of bodily parts was served by bandaged .waiters.1 s

The Cooked and the Raw sought to address the question of how people went about filling their own spiritual voids: by means of relationships and food as well as other means. Another stated aim of the Adelaide Performing Theatre was to make a show which went some way towards reinstating the sacramental aspects of life. 17 (As I did not see the production I cannot say whether or not this goal was realised.) The Cooked and the Raw at the very least involves the audience in the investigation of food mores as laden with synchronic and diachronic specificities; the menu is at least half the enticement offered to the public - they know that the food will be a feature, a performative aspect of the evening in the sense that the food is part of the dialectic of the performance and is in constant dialogue with the action. The 'theatre' and the 'restaurant' parts of the evening are inseparable.

Unlike The Cooked and the Raw, an experience confined to Adelaide's 'foodies', Dimboola has been a phenomenal success at all kinds of venues all around Australia and overseas since 1969. In several of Jack Hibberd's plays the audience becomes part of the performance, rather than eating a meal and watching the show as in conventional theatre restaurant. It should be pointed out that although actor/audience interaction is always a feature of conventional theatre restaurants, interaction less frequently requires the audience to adopt a role or become part of the performance, for example, to behave as wedding guests. At the once extremely popular Neutral Bay Music Hall Theatre Restaurant,

16 Rogers, Sheridan.The Sun-Herald, March 14, 1993. It is pertinent that Rogers' description of those attending the banquet acknowledged the theatrical element: "Bear in mind that many of the actors in this drama influence the way you and I eat each day, even if not overtly.• 17 Performance. ABC FM radio (5.76), 14 Oct. 1991, 10-11am. 52

during the year long run of East Lynne 18 , food often played a part in the on stage action, but not in quite the way the major part of this thesis will investigate. Frequently the more outgoing and liquid-ated patrons would, in a quiet section of the show, hurl their partially eaten or uneaten bread rolls with considerable force at the character they least liked. This could have been a pre-verbal gesture, the equivalent of "Hiss" at the villain! Or maybe the bread rolls were inedibly stale (the actors didn't eat there) and made better missiles. In Hibberd's Dimboola and Liquid Amber, however, the diners are guests at a reception, in Goodbye Ted, supporters of a football club attending a testimonial dinner. As John Hainsworth, writer of a monograph on Hibberd, observes, in these plays "the meal has become part of the play and the diners are encouraged to adopt fictitious roles which make them also part of the play and not mere spectators." 19 The incorporation of a meal as part of the structure of the play serves to alter fundamentally the nature of the relationship between actors and audience.

Hibberd's well-known wedding play Dimboola takes the form of a shared meal and communal ritual celebration, as the audience become guests at a "cruelly farcical enactment of an Australian country wedding reception"20. Recalling the opening night performance at Carlton's tiny La Mama Theatre in 1969, Leonard Radie captures the flavour of the event and in particular the integral nature of the food and drink to the play:

Dutifully we went upstairs before the play to meet the bride and groom and the other members of the wedding cast. We drank their health in sweet sherry, then took our places downstairs at tables set with pies, cocktail frankfurts, jam and peanut sandwiches, and jugs of orange cordial. The sandwiches from memory were resistjble; but the play was great. Not great in a literary or artistic sense, but full-bodied, gutsy and very funny.21

18 East Lynne, the final production at the Music Hall, closed at the end of 1980. 19 Hibberd. Sydney: Methuen, 1987: 49. 20 Williams, Margaret. Drama. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1977: 38. 21 Radie, Leonard. "State of Play in Australia."(1979) Contemporary Australian Drama. Ed. Peter Holloway. Sydney: Currency, 1987. Revised ed. This aspect of the production is also recounted in Radic's book The State of Play. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1991: 59. 53

The comestibles Radie describes are quintessentially down-market Australian but possibly more fitting for a child's birthday party than a wedding reception. Clearly, factors dictating the kind of food provided at La Mama would have been the space, both in the preparation and in the performance, and the cost, since limited space determined meagre box office takings even with capacity audiences. Since that night Dimboola has been performed in clubs, theatre restaurants, church halls and civic centres all around Australia both professionally and non-professionally. Accordingly, the food for the wedding play will vary enormously according to the scale, regional location and venue of the production. Whether the menu includes (as it has) jam and peanut butter sandwiches, prawn cocktail or chicken kiev, the food always remains a shared element in the ritual and one that runs throughout the performance punctuating the speeches, dances, brawls, tensions, minor humiliations and drunken displays.

Confident manipulation of audience participation, ensured primarily by a "clear spatial indication of where the participating audience should sit and a separate area for those who merely want to sit and watch", is, for Dennis Carroll, the crucial convention of the play.22 Carroll refers to the 1973 Australian Performing Group production at the Pram Factory that gave the audience members a choice of becoming part of the production by coming "suitably dressed for the occasion", paying $2 extra for dinner and acting as one of the wedding guests or "sitting at a separate area at the back"23 in a more traditional, passive audience position.

A National Times critic noted that the Dimboola audience "does have some autonomy but this is restricted by the normal structure of a wedding reception" .24 Ian Robinson's comment acknowledges that the ritual occasion, the shared wedding meal, is the major structural determinant shaping the rhythm of the piece, that is, the movement between the alternating scripted sections and the looser

2 2 Australian Contemporary Drama 1909-1985: a Critical Introduction New York: Peter Lang, 1985: 217. 23 Carroll : 217. 24 Robinson, Ian. National Times. 7-12 May, 1973 : 28. 54

interludes. The meal also helps to define the parameters of the involvement of the participating audience:

It soon becomes clear to the audience that their participation is to be concentrated into the seven interludes between the altercations among the characters - interludes in which they eat a three-course wedding breakfast and are entertained by the M.C.s and various musical and comedy acts introduced by them.25

Also revealed by these comments is the contrast between the La Mama food (1969) and the APG food (1973). The review of the latter production directed by David Williamson and featuring Max Gillies, Tim Robertson, Fay Mokotow and Bruce Spence indicates that the food served was humorously titled: the first course for example was Boeuf Derriere (supposedly ox-tail soup). Some inkling of the quality can be gained from Robinson's comment that for $2 extra you can "partake of the same unappetising fare as the rest of the cast"26 . Leslie Rees recalls items on the menu other than boeuf derriere, including poule a la Wimmera with sauce mysterioso, trifle and blancmange and wine. These two productions, it seems, served amusing food, 'joke food', presumably as a satirical comment on the kinds of events - in both culinary and familial terms - that country (or any) weddings often are. The food and drink, though idiosyncratic and incongruous, were integral to the audience's sense of participation in the event.

In the West, Fremantle company Deck Chair's production of Emma (1991) involved food too, though not of the humorous kind; a communal pot of spaghetti, not the self-conscious designer food of The Cooked and the Raw. The audience in the old Customs House entered into the celebration by being seated at long tables as if they were guests at a wedding banquet. The play opens with Emma in her kitchen preparing food for a wedding. At interval the audience dipped into the huge pot of spaghetti that had been simmering gently during Act One.27 Based on the award-winning book Emma, A Translated Life by Emma Ciccotosto and Michal

25 Carroll : 217. 26 National Times. 7-12 May, 1973 : 28. 27 Banks, Ron. West Australian. 17.6.91. 55

Bosworth, Emma is a tale of ordinary people, in particular of one woman's migrant experience. The play's focus is family relationships, especially Emma's love for Peter Ciccotosto, the 'too good-looking' husband whom she married at 17 while he was in Fremantle jail for refusing to enlist in the Australian army.

The writer for the Fremantle Gazett~ emphasises the integral part food plays in this woman's life as she busily prepares for her granddaughter's wedding:

Emma is an Italian cooking lesson, a wedding reception, a vibrant insight into life's important lessons and a musical feast in more ways than one. Emma Ciccotosto, played by Rosemary Lenzo, is haunted by figures from her past as she cooks up a mountain of food for a grand-daughter's wedding ...... lt seems that nothing can stop this woman from cooking and the audience, who are treated like guests at the wedding, are encouraged to eat before and during the show.28

The aspect of food as labour is not emphasised in any of the above plays, and although the audience sees Emma cooking, it is presented as an act of love, not labour.

Plays are sometimes based around whole meals involving real food - either consumed on stage or meals prepared on stage. Less commonly meals are prepared and cooked on stage with real food in real time, as in Julie Day's Come Back For Light Refreshments After the Service ( 1 9 91) 2 9 . The service of the title is the funeral service for the central character's father who has just died of Alzheimer's disease. The ritual elements of the play will be discussed in Chapter Four; however the entire play consists of the food preparations for the guests' arrival after the service, so in this chapter discussion of the play as centrally concerned with and revolving around food is appropriate. In this instance the expected guests are the members of the audience who are invited to partake of the food prepared during the performance. At the close of the service the audience members are informed by the minister that he

28 Fremantle Gazette. 11.6.91. 29 Premiere directed by Margaret Steven at the Carlton Courthouse, Melbourne, February, 1991. Hereinafter the shorter title Light Refreshments will be used. 56

will •escort (them) back to Beth's home for some light refreshments." [40] This transition from the church to Beth's home (the same physical space) is effected when the minister addresses the audience member nearest "Excuse me, I wonder if you would mind putting this plate on the food table." [41] This signals the audience to enter the performance area and help themselves.

Domestic food production is the focus of Light Refreshments. In particular, women's work with food is foregrounded here as the audience watch the process, end result and join in the consumption of the fruits of the women's productivity. The first time we see Pat and her niece, Vanessa, they are "laden with food and paraphernalia" [5], ready for the task of catering for the guests who will return to the house after the funeral service. Even though the setting for the play is not specific there is a sense of community and almost a country town atmosphere arising from the way these women relate to each other, the homely kitchen they inhabit, and the equipment they use - gem irons, high cake plates, tea urns. (See illustration [cl) The characters have strong links with one another. The codes of cohesive community and gestures of social reciprocity are evident:

PAT: Well here are the scouts' teapots, we've already been in and put the pies in the warmer. VANESSA: It's nice of the scouts to do that for you BETH: She does plenty for the Scouts.[6)

These women are conscious of continuing a tradition: old ways are frequently the best, especially for Pat and Enid. Soon after she enters Pat asks Beth: "Where are your mother's old Gem Irons?" [6]

Culinary territorialism and culinary deference is explored as the four women discuss women's behaviour in a kitchen other than their own:

VANESSA: ... People can get very strange in someone else's kitchen. They ask how to do the simplest things. Like will I butter the bread thick or thin? Or how do Steven

Margaret

Dir.:

Pat.

as

Day

Julie

y-

~

D

e

Juli

by

S~rvice

the

After

Refreshments

Light

For

Back

Come

(c) 57

you cut your oranges? Silly things that they'd do automatically in their own home.

PAT: Yes, I even do that in my own kitchen when there's someone else helping me. What do you suppose that is? Self doubt? The desire to please? (Laughs) It's the same thing really isn't it? (20]

The discussion turns to the issue of the way women work together in a kitchen as the women have trouble trying to imagine four men in an analogous relationship vis-a-vis food:

VANESSA: ... I would like to see a group of men in the kitchen making sandwiches like we are. It's not that they can't, it's that they won't. Unless they get paid for it. PAT: I must admit, it's hard to imagine a group of fellas working in a kitchen. ENID: They wouldn't work as fast or as co-operatively as we da at something like this - but well I wouldn't have been able to do what Jack used to do when he was a bank manager. (22].

Vanessa feels that she has the preventative solution for resisting the domestic drudgery trap:

... The catering firm I work for want me to become their functions manager when I finish. In three years or so I'll be running my own business. I don't want to get stuck in that dreary, domestic rut so many women find themselves in. Look at the three of you. Look to the right and you see a version of yourself twenty years ago. Look the other way - 20 years ahead? I'm not going to spend the rest of .!DY life in a routine like that.[22]

As the women attend to all the preparation of the edibles they discuss issues of illness, death, caring for the aged, selfishness and selflessness, autonomy and dependence as well as the comforting and constraining aspects of friendships.

One of the main revelations in the play concerns Beth's decision to move away from the area, to free herself from her past. Pat is shocked by the announcement that Beth plans to sell the house and leave. She had imagined that things would be much the same as before, except now the two friends would be free to go to films or theatre together. She confesses she feels guilty for wishing Jack 58

was still alive so that they could go on as before.[38] She fears the emptiness of not having anyone to care about on a daily basis. Part of that loss will be the deprivation, after the funeral day, of someone to care and cook for. During the course of the play, Pat undergoes what Wendy Walker-Birckhead terms a "crisis of nurturance". 30 This crisis of nurturance is especially real for a character such as Pat whose identity is so completely bound up with caring and cooking for others. Almost immediately she casts around for someone else to fill the gap: " ... there's always Mrs Benson she'll probably be needing a hand with her mother" [35]. Elderly Enid's response to Beth's decision to move is more indignation that Beth won't be around to continue to fulfil the daughterly role. Beth unsentimentally confronts Enid with the truth about her assumption that she will continue to experience family vicariously:

BETH: You've spent your whole life doing your 'nurturing and caring' for a family who didn't need it. An unwilling, substitute family. [32]

In contrast to a play such as Light Refreshments in which all the cooking, cutting, spreading, baking, icing and arranging is done on stage in full view of the audience, and then consumed by the audience, more often meals are prepared offstage but served and consumed on stage. Whereas The Cooked and the Raw, Dimboola, Emma and Light Refreshments all enlisted the audience's participation in the timing, service and consumption of the food, the plays to be dealt with next utilise food as a measure of the values, sophistication and tastes of the characters. The characters' behaviour in relation to food and their knowledge and control of food as a mark of cultural capital assumes prominence. Hotel Sorrento, .The Garden of Granddaughters, After Dinner, Daylight Saving and the television play Lust from Seven Deadly Sins all share the centrality of a meal; but it is the way the characters position themselves in relation to the food which gives the plays in this group increased common ground.

30 Walker-Birckhead, Wendy "The best scones in town: old women in an Australian country town." Australlan Ways: Anthropological Studies of an Industrialised Society. Ed. Lenore Manderson. Sydney : Allen & Unwin, 1985 : 101. 59

Manifestations of contemporary foodism - that is, intense interest in gastronomy, food trends, ingredient use, food combinations - are apparent also in all these plays.

Primarily though, the food scenes in this next group of plays provide the reason and the conventions for the characters to sit and face/confront each other. This enforced physical intimacy often enables the painful and implacable family ghosts of the past to revisit. The dinner party scene in Hannie Rayson's Hotel Sorrento31 is the fulcrum of the play, the one scene with everyone gathered together. Rayson wrote a dinner party scene in order to fulfil her aim of having everyone come together on stage. It was for her a device for getting characters on stage since she "wanted a conversation for seven and could not think of a better way than to do that around a dinner" .32 Hotel Sorrento could be described as a play about the 'women's work' of responsibilities such as holding the family together, and discharging obligations to ageing parents. As well, it is about the position of the woman artist in Australian society and about the reconstruction of the past. It is also a play about sisterly tensions and sibling distance and closeness: the hostilities arising from one sister being more dutiful than the others, of one sister being more materially successful than another, of one sister gaining more public accolades than the others. Following her divorce the eldest sister Hilary has lived with her father at their beachside house, raising her son and running a gourmet delicatessen. The youngest, Pippa, is an advertising executive in New York. The middle sister, expatriate novelist Meg, is pivotal, since her nomination for the Booker Prize precipitates her return home to confront a few ghosts. In the course of the play both Pippa and Meg return to a tense, memory­ stirring reunion. Meg's denial of the accusation that the book is autobiographical does not dissolve the hurt felt by the other two sisters. In Act One there are three households - Meg and Edwin's flat in London, the Moynihan family home in Sorrento and Marge's holiday house in Sorrento. In Act Two all action takes place at the

31 Sydney: Currency, 1990. Hotel Sorrento won the 1990 Green Room Award for Best New Play. 32 Telephone interview. 14.2.92. 60

Moynihan home and the nearby pier. Abounding in the play's thematic and visual codes is 'three sisters' imagery, now familiar dramatic and cinematic territory in a continuum from Shakespeare's King Lear through Chekhov's Three Sisters to Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart (1981 ), Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and more recently Sewell's The Garden of Granddaughters ( 1993) ..·

The character of novelist Meg Moynihan has grown increasingly out of touch with the Australia she writes about. Her disdain for what she sees as Australia's cultural paucity is expressed disparagingly in food terms. Despite having lived away from Australia for ten years, Meg, to the annoyance of the others, still sees herself as an authority on Australian society and agrees with Shelley-quoting husband Edwin's suggestion that Australians are guilty of perceiving culture as "being conversant with things that are irrelevant and dull". She demonstrates her wrong-headed perception of Australian cultural consciousness in the following speech:

That's what the whole middle class is like at home. They go off and memorize Shakespeare's date of birth and a few rhyming couplets so they can sprinkle it in conversation around the barbie: 'D'you think Kylie'II bring the coleslaw. Ah, To be or not to be. That is the question. Shakespeare you know. Born in 1564, strangely enough. Yes. Died in 1616. Poor thing. Such a tragedy. Terrific bean salad Val.' [13]

Meg's ridicule at the expense of Kylie and Val and her equation of cole slaw and bean salad with philistinism backfires. It shows Meg as ridiculous - out of touch and a snob as Edwin says - as she attempts to assert her intellectual superiority and distance herself from what she perceives Kylie and Val stand for in both intellectual and culinary terms. It is no longer original to note, but worthwhile doing so in the context of both this scene and the next two discussed, that contemporary food advertising and lifestyle magazines connect food - its selection and presentation - to sociability, status and sexuality. Food in First World countries is an important analogue of the self - it 'places' and defines individuals as certainly as does their clothing. 6 l

Act One, Scene Eleven, between Marge and Dick in the garden of Marge's holiday house, is set off by a food incident reflecting their respective ideological stances. Dick relates a story from his youth about a fifty year-old bookshop owner who kept his shop open on the weekends. Proof that this bloke "had none of the suburban shit that my family went on with" resided in his habit of smoking Gaulois and then stubbing them out . in the leftovers from his Chinese take-away. [23] Dick's 'reading' of this was that it was a statement about anarchy. Marge, on the other hand, interprets it differently:

The simple gesture of stubbing the cigarette into a container of cold congealed sweet and sour pork ..... could also have been read as the act of a pathetic human being who had no grasp of the simple concept of personal hygiene, because ... wait... he expected his mother or some other female figure to clean up after him. [24]

Dick's inability to see such behaviour in this light is, for Marge, further confirmation of the "great tension between feminism and the Left." [24]

The dinner party scene, Act Two, Scene Eleven, of Hotel Sorrento is the turning point of the play. It is by far the longest scene in the play; all the other scenes range from half a page to three pages whereas the dinner scene is twelve pages long. It is the only scene in which all seven characters are on stage. By this stage of the play Wal Moynihan, father of the three sisters of the play, has drowned. Hilary and Pippa are in the kitchen preparing the dinner; Edwin, the English husband of Booker prize nominee Meg Moynihan, is talking publishing with ideologue Dick Bennett. There is a detectable food continuum throughout this scene; it begins with Edwin admitting that his publishing co·mpany produces a few cookery books, "against his better judgement"[63]. Dick ventures the view that the English lack a culinary tradition, while Edwin maintains that it's "highly fashionable to know about food and wine" [64]. Meanwhile in the kitchen, Hilary is alarmed at the lack of correspondence between the appearance of her dish and the image in the cookery book. Pip reassures her by saying that in those magazines "they use colour filters". But then, just how little like the illustration it looks is 62

underlined when Pip asks "What is it? Lamb casserole of some sort?". Hilary replies: ·chicken Cacciatore" [65].3 3

The lack of similarity (to the extent that it is mistaken for lamb casserole) represents a failure on Hilary's part and some sibling point scoring on Pip's part. It would not be the case that she frequently has culinary disasters since .. she has been successfully running a gourmet food shop in the area. Certainly, though, when Hilary lays her gift on the table she is under no illusions that it constitutes a perfect moment. However a further dramatic point is made by the placing of her entrance with the food in juxtaposition to a particular moment of Edwin and Dick's conversation. The two men are debating the gains of bourgeois feminism:

EDWIN: In Britain, there are so many women moving into top executive positions, these days. DICK: That may be so. There's also a woman Prime Minister. But she's hardly a paragon of liberal enlightenment. Look. If feminism is only about women making it - then it's a crock of shit as far as I'm concerned. What matters is what women actually do, when they have made it.[66]

At precisely this point Hil and Pip "enter carrying food", Hil immediately announcing "O.K. Everyone. Food.". The entrance of the women bearing victuals, unaware of the comments of the men, has the effect of being a perfectly timed enactment of "what women actually do". Then the dubious colour of the meal (Troy asks "How come it's grey?") is again referred to, reminding us once again of the ever-widening gap between the reality of domestic food production and the glossy, manufactured 'doctored' images set

33 Rosalind Coward's cogent analysis of food photography as a kind of food pornography raises issues· pertinent to the dilemma faced by Hilary with her Chicken Cacciatore that bears little resemblance to the image on the page. In "Female Desire and Sexual Identity." Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the Eighties: Selected Papers. Eds. M. Diaz-Diocaretz & I.M. Zavala. Amsterdam: Philadelphia, 1985, Coward makes the point that "food is photographed in a very particular way; its {sic) a regime of ideal imagery, the culinary equivalent of the removal of unsightly hairs on glamour models. The photographs, like those of models, are idealised, touched up, represent food at a perfect moment. And what's more, any evidence of the labour women do to prepare food is totally suppressed. These pictures never show chaotic and steamy kitchens, the inevitable mess which cooking involves. They only ever show some imaginary perfect moment, the end-product of the labour when woman, the perfect hostess, lays her gift on the table for others to enjoy." [28] 63

before the cook as an impossibly unattainable ideal. The food served is neither inedible nor gourmet, despite the fact that Marge makes a point of saying •This is delicious, Hilary" (70], a nicety more indicative of her status at the house as a first time female visitor than any genuine rapture over the meal.

Clearly, food operates in this play in a structurally functional way so that it is surprising to find that Hannie Rayson herself admits to the incorporation of food as "totally unconscious" .34 There is no fuss surrounding the meal; nobody refuses to eat it or throws it at anyone. In this case the meal is a platform, a credible context for the discussions on the nature of art and life. Rayson's recollection of food in the play during rehearsals was at a extremely pragmatic level: discussions over how to get the food so the actors would/could eat it. What was eaten had to be realistic enough to facilitate preparation in the theatre and sufficiently edible to forestall complaints from the actors. The conscientious stage manager in his desire to 'get it right' worried over 'what kind of beans' to include for the bean salad. (See also Appendix B) This same. bean salad is the source of one of the humorous high points of the production. Dick's comment "Terrific bean salad Hil" is a delayed pay-off for a much earlier line, discussed previously, when Meg is ridiculing Australians. Rayson's response to this joke in performance is a highly pleasurable one:

That kind of pay-off in the theatre; it's fantastic when it happens. The bean salad has not been mentioned for ages and there's been an interval in between and the audience just loved it. That's such joy to me.35

In acknowledging the "totally unconscious" dramaturgical use of food, Hannie Rayson also reveals just how deeply embedded food is as part of our collective cultural context and personal mythologies. The meal in Hotel Sorrento acts as the forum for discussion of the thin line between art/life/autobiography. This gathering (partly due to its late placement in the play) also facilitates the scratching of veneers of restraint and tact. It is a truism that

34 Telephone interview. 14.2.92. 35 Telephone interview. 14.2.92. 64

people reveal more while engaging in the vulnerable act of eating together.

The special family reunion dinner at Mietta's Restaurant in Act Two of Stephen Sewell's The Garden of Granddaughters36 centres on expatriates of a different kind - a Jewish conductor and his wife who return to Australia briefly from their European base to visit their three daughters and three granddaughters. Similarities to Hotel Sorrento include its overt concentration on philosophical questions concerning how lives should be best lived, the presence of one artist daughter, and the full cast reunion dinner.

Situating the reunion dinner at Mietta's imbues the scene with intertextuality: Mietta's, an actual Melbourne restaurant, has a reputation for the staging of literary luncheons in conjunction with Readings Bookshop. In the play, therefore, Mietta's is a repository of meta-theatrical significations: associations of 'culture' 'European elegance' and 'Jewishness' adhere to the older couple by dint of their cosmopolitan life style, his profession, the references to Viennese coffee shops, their choice of restaurant ("Your father's favourite restaurant"[34]), and the welcome they receive at the hand of Mietta herself in this establishment. The sense of privilege is explicit: "Mietta has put on a special celebratory dinner just for Max" [48].

With reference to the recent Playbox Theatre Company production of the play at the Wharf Theatre (July 1993), the staging of this particular food scene was detrimental to continuing action and dialogue. There were several moments in the Mietta's scenes (Act Two, Scenes 2 - 6) where the passage of time was denoted by the dimming of lights directly over the dining table to enable a shift to a two-hand conversation, for example between Max and Moriley just outside the restaurant. The elaborate table setting and clearing by the waiters throughout such scenes was highly distracting. Also puzzling was the decision to serve no further courses after bread rolls and soup, even though the group spent the entire evening there

36 Sewell, Stephen. The Garden of Granddaughters. Sydney: Currency, in association with Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, 1993. 65

and later commented on the wonderful dinner [61]. It should be noted that these were production decisions, not textual prescripts. The attenuated naturalism involved in limiting the dinner to soup alone seemed to be an unhappy compromise.

In the case of Andrew Bovell's After Dinner37 , dinner is structurally pivotal; it divides the play exactly in half. The dinner is a structural determinant of the action; however the dinner does not take place in front of the audience, but in the performance 'gap' of interval. It exerts its influence by its absence and what comes in its wake. The title After Dinner is a declaration of when the 'action', the social and sexual possibilities, will start. In this way the play uses the device of before dinner and after dinner behaviour based on stages of lonely singles' rituals.

After Dinner captures the Friday night rituals of wining and dining of a group of bank and office workers. The play breaks no formal or stylistic ground. In fact, Angela Bennie makes the fair point that in its structure, theme and preoccupations it is as though "time had stood still theatrically and it is somewhere around 1980 or 1970 ..... ". 38 Five characters (three women, two men) meet in a Bistro: domineering, lonely and inhibited, Office Senior Dympie; her regular Friday night ally Paula; recently bereaved Monika; brash, apparently confident Stephen; and timid divorcee Gordon. These five 'ordinary' people enact their latent fears and inhibitions on a static set. In the published text and reviews of the play there is evident a consciousness of the relevance of food. The front cover of the Currency text declares "A comedy of table manners"; "A satisfying feast of laughs"; "If laughter whets your appetite, it's an after dinner treat!" The 'I' in DINNER has been transformed into a fork and the cover illustration is of a bistro meal, on a checked cloth, consisting of a basket of garlic bread, a side salad and a plate of pasta, a couple of empty glasses and a used ashtray - the remains of a standard bistro meal. (See illustration [d]) Food is intrinsic to any reading of the play: attitudes toward food, the timing of ordering, the

37 Sydney: Currency, 1989. 38 The Australian 12.1.89; review of Griffin Theatre Company's production. E ttA comedy of t:abl.e manners'' .It tt A satisfying feast of laughs'' , Y ttJf laughter .diets your appetite, it's an after-dinner treat!" AFTER DfNNER BY ANDREW BOVELL

______~ _-◄. ''

(d) After Dinner

Front cover of Currency text,1989. 66

disagreement over what to order, the interrupted meal; however the actual eating is not part of the action. The dinner takes place in the interval: act one is before dinner, act two is the 'after dinner' of the title.

Even though the dinner is not consumed in front of the audience there is a very pronounced food code- in the play mainly in the deference to notions of food sophistication, food protocol, and control of the discourse of food as a means of peer pressure. First there is protracted discussion among the women over what each will have to eat. Monika is finding it difficult to decide but suggests the chicken cacciatore.[17] Dympie warns her off that because "Paula had that once and was sick for a week"[18]. Monika suggests they get two entrees between the three of them and share. Food prejudices . and narrow food tastes are enlisted here as Dympie blocks most of the sharing suggestions: she can't eat seafood because it brings her out in a rash; avocado is unsuitable for sharing; the prosciutto with melon (which Monika can't pronounce) is rejected also: "It's ham with rockmelon. Don't like mixing my savouries with my sweets"[18]. When Paula finally decides on an entree of pate de foie gras the other two decide they are not very hungry. The next stage is food as social pressure - whether it will be fair for one to order entree if the other two are not intending to. Dympie maintains that "it will just hold everything up. You'll get your pate first and they won't bring ours until you've finished"[18]. Paula is pressured into backing off ("well I suppose I won't have one either"). Additionally, food functions as an index of the level of sophistication and knowledgeability of the character:

DYMPIE: ... Should we have the green salad? PAULA: The what? DYMPIE: The green salad. PAULA: Does that come with lettuce? DYMPIE: Or should we have the Greek? PAULA: Does that come with lettuce? [19]

During the course of the evening food is also a forceful stimulus of guilt and reminder of inadequacies. Before Monika swallows a 67

mixture of valium and alcohol, causing her to reveal the truth about her unhappy marriage and loathing for her husband Martin, she imagines him still alive and hunting in vain for his dinner:

I was thinking about what I was going to order when I remembered that I hadn't left anything out for Martin. I thought of him searching through the fridge and not finding a morsel, and I panicked because -I hadn't done the shopping. I knew that Martin would be wanting his dinner. I wanted to say something. To tell you that he'd be looking, but I couldn't get it out. It was as though a large piece of phlegm had lodged in my throat and my words couldn't pass it. But then I remembered. Martin wouldn't be wanting his dinner because Martin's not with me any more. Martin's dead. And the phlegm just slid away. (21]

In Chapter Five I will explore connections between the depiction of women's compulsion to provide food for others and the onset_ of guilt for not performing those tasks to a sufficiently high actual or imagined standard. The use of food both as a vehicle for peer control and pressure and as a means of delineating stages in the evening (before and after) assumes prominence in After Dinner. As well, Andrew Bovell's ancillary portrayal of food as a guilt­ provoking mechanism is highlighted in Monika's vision of choking on her phlegm at the thought of her failure to keep the fridge stocked.39

A meal interrupted can be just as useful a dramaturgical strategy as a meal consumed, as in the case of Nick Enright's Daylight Saving4o. In Nick Enright's Daylight Saving the dinner party scene is a gathering of everyone in spite of earnest attempts to prevent the parties from meeting. Resembling farce in many of its elements, chiefly the unexpected comings and goings of the characters and the strategically timed phone calls, the tension of Daylight Saving· is largely provided by the device of the interrupted meal. On one level, there is a message here about the fracturing and compartmentalisation of contemporary life and the

39 This guilt reaction is reminiscent of the the distress experienced by the (nameless) shopping and cooking woman in Lissa Benyon's The Real Matilda. It is seen again in Peta Murray's Wallflowerlng with Peg's realisation that she has failed to put love in the Veal Marengo. 40 Enright, Nick. Daylight Saving. Sydney: Currency, 1990. 68

competing interests that complicate personal relationships. Implicit in this light comedy is the observation that the partnership of two successful professionals in their own fields does not make them immune from conflict over food - it merely takes on a different form from the more traditional domestic scenario of women's singular bondage to food and the kitchen.

Restaurateur Felicity (Flick) is something of a Gay Bilson - chef and food writer - who is the owner manager of a trendy Whale Beach seafood restaurant. Away from the business, however, she does not assume total responsibility for what she and husband Tom will eat. They barter over who cooks what and when:

FLICK: Every night you've conked out asleep in front of the television - TOM: Waiting for you to knock out two thousand words on extra-virgin olive oil and Baltic vinegar. FLICK: Balsamic. And let me remind you about last Wednesday night, Tom. You were cooking dinner, remember? I was going to come home and there'd be something smoking away in the Weber, and something cool on the ice, and we'd sit out there and watch the sun set over the water. [5]

Conflict over priorities surf aces; the cause of the constantly disrupted meals is Tom's fixation on his young tennis protege, Jason. When Tom goes away for one of his frequent overseas trips to 'sell' Jason, even his return date is dictated by the Californian formality "first the sushi then the contract" .[6] The physical aspects of the play combine the near-Pacific ambience of Whale Beach, the last sunset of daylight saving, chilled wine and seafood - oysters and lobster. Into this ideal sparkling Sydney setting burst, in turn, several other characters all of whom contribute idiosyncratically, via food, to the humour. Felicity's former American lover Joshua arrives in Sydney and they plan to have an intimate seafood dinner in husband Tom's absence. Then, to complicate this, unlucky-in-love neighbour Stephanie arrives miserable, and in response to being given up for Lent by her married Catholic boyfriend, Brendan, makes an equation between herself and a box of chocolates.[25) On the same evening Bunty, Felicity's mother, arrives bearing her sticky specialty, Walnut Surprise, and insists that Josh sample some before dinner.[30] To capitalise on 69

the humour of this episode the Sydney production with Sandy Gore as Felicity and Barry Langrish as Joshua Makepeace made a feature of "a daringly spun-out scene of Josh trying to survive the jaw­ locking assault of a piece of Bunty's Walnut Surprise".41 Reporting on the second Sydney production (Les Currie in association with Wharf Theatre), Carmody attributes the audience's 'wild laughter' at this stretched out piece of business to Langrish's skill and their recognition of similar moments of being victim to that kind of plight.

Enright's Daylight Saving plays with the recent increased aestheticisation of Australian foodways (modes and mores) by means of a comic juxtaposition of a range of contemporary food attitudes and trends. When the aptly named tennis star Jason Strutt arrives with his own supply of macrobiotic food - "Azuki beans, shitake, tofu, miso -" - Felicity quips "That's not dinner, that's the cast of a Kung Fu movie." Neighbour Stephanie does not rate it as food either: "You said lobster. What's this shit?"[41] The playful parading of food vogues ranges from the health food fanatic Jason Strutt whose body is his temple, to the chardonnay and seafood trendiness of Felicity and Joshua, to the home-cooked Walnut Surprise approach of Bunty, representing three differing approaches to the stylisation of food habits. The assertion of one's taste in food is a cultural badge, a sign of how one situates oneself in relationship to others regionally, generationally, socially and economically. When Felicity and Stephanie come in with the 'real' food, the seafood, they clear Jason's health food off the table. The discrepancy in food philosophies of Bunty and Felicity affords a satirical insight into the 'excesses' of nouvelle cuisine. Bunty's response to Felicity's talent is typical of the 'I want food on my plate, not art' respon~e to the minimalism of nouvelle cuisine:

Felicity's never too lavish in the portion department as it is. I know she wins all those awards, but what for? A snow pea and a Julienne carrot in a wasteland of white porcelain. [46]

41 Carmody, John. Sun Herald. Feb. 4, 1990: 101. 70

The play relies on the build-up to the meal for its shape. The continuing attempts on Felicity's part to serve the lobster form the grid for the action. And it is Tom's familiarity with Felicity's attitude to food which gives away the true nature of Josh's visit. Tom knows that Felicity would never intend a lobster to stretch to three (Josh, Stephanie and herself) despite her claims to that effect. Typical of the farce-like form, the anticipation of an idyllic, and illicit, scenario and the subsequent shattering of that ideal outcome provide the backbone of the play's direction. Calling on an acknowledged erotically coded site, Daylight Saving' s envisioned scenario is a romantic candle-lit dinner with an old lover of twenty years ago. The frustrations, the interruptions and eventual total disruption of that desired outcome give the play its rhythm. In this way food is fundamental not only to the play's subject matter but to its form as well. Related to the shaping device of the interrupted meal is the significance of the time span and the title of the play - the action moves through two consecutive Saturdays in March, the second of which is the night the clocks are turned back for the end of daylight saving. The play ends. as the sun rises on the first morning after daylight saving ends. So the two evenings (though the second occupies more stage time) provide the overall frame, and the promising connotations of the romantic meal (first anticipated and then frustrated) constitute the internal shaping mechanism.

Dinner parties for groups of old friends do not usually connote romance or even necessarily harmony. An inflection of normal rules or a moratorium on restraint frequently applies to these kinds of gatherings. As Deirdre, the alcoholic character in the first instalment of Seven Deadly Sins, says, "I think the greatest test of friendship is how r~de you can be with one another and get away with it". Playwright Andrew Bovell (After Dinner) wrote the screenplay for Lust, the first play of Seven Deadly Sins.42 The discussion of this television drama could arguably belong in the chapter on ritual or the chapter on women and food, for it intersects with both of these areas. I have chosen to place it in

42 Lust was directed by Ken Cameron and screened 23rd Feb. 1993 on ABC-TV. Seven Deadly Sins was a seven-play series, one 'sin' per episode, with five writers, including playwrights Hannie Rayson, Joanna Murray-Smith and Andrew Bovell. 7 1

this chapter on plays based around a meal because the entire play is the dinner party; nonetheless, the ritualistic elements of the occasion are integral to its progress.

The scenario is an anniversary dinner party and its 'sub-rituals': the arrival of the guests, the crossing of the threshold from outside world to private domain, the giving of flowers and champagne (a non-lasting gift is the appropriate gift for a dinner guest to bring}, pre-dinner drinks, the pause before commencing to eat (in this case a toast}, the invitation to start before it gets cold, the admiration of the cook's skills, the discussion of the ingredients of the entree, clearing the first course, scraping the dishes, basting of the joint, serving of the main course, discussion of the meat, the offering of seconds and so on. In addition to this highly structured ritual sequence there are the parallel rituals of sexual conduct: eye contact, flirtation, the wearing of sexual totems (the pearls given by Alistair to both sexual mates, wife Belinda and lover Frieda), wearing of costumes as part of sexual display (Eric's new coat), sexual demands (Deirdre of Eric), sexual refusals (Belinda to Colin), flattery (Colin to Belinda}, sexual insults (Alistair to Deirdre, Deirdre to Colin}, physical contact both acceptable (the greeting kisses) and unacceptable (Colin's penis against Belinda's leg as she is preparing the entree), displays of lust (Alistair and Frieda), sexual boredom (Deirdre}, male territorial violence (Eric and Alistair). According to Leach there is "a universal tendency to make ritual and verbal associations between eating and sexual intercourse. "43 The fact that the setting for a television play entitled Lust is an evening long dinner party with every section of the dinner prepared and served and eaten during its unfolding cements this association. Every ritual aspect of the staging of a .dinner is explored against a backdrop of the destructive urgency of increasingly explicit sexual overtures, melodramatic declarations and scarifying confessions.44

43 Leach, E. (1964] "Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse", Mythology. Ed. P. Maranda. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972: 53. 44 Louis Malle, interviewed for his film Damage, reinforces the dramatic advantages of dinner party scenes, chances, according to interviewer Alex Mitchell, for "moody glances, frozen grimaces, fleeting eye games and smoldering[sic] close-ups". Malle concurs: " .. there are so many meals in my films because it is at meals that people look 72

The progress of the meal in Lust is also analogous to a lifetime path: the movement from freshness, brightness and optimism towards anger, disappointment, disillusionment, limitation and tiredness along with a care-worn confrontation with mortality and deceptions of self and others. Lust hinges on the dynamics of a dinner party lavished with the trappings of taste and attention to niceties of etiquette and modishness. Food in this drama is utterly pivotal to the proxemics, mood, behaviour, meaning, humour and bleakness of the assembled gathering as orchestrated and staged by a woman in a highly veneered marriage. Belinda's understandable need for order and control over her personal environment is evidenced in her domestic perfectionism: obsessive cleanliness, special guest towels, strikingly positioned indoor plants, lemons in the glass bowl, imposing floral arrangements, quality wines. The conduct of her guests and the ensuing psychological barbarism are not meliorated by the civilising effect of Belinda's trendy, spotless, halogen spotted, renovated home or her designer food.

The ~ntire episode is a series of revelations and demonstrations on the theme of lust and betrayal. The setting for this is the home of the host couple, Alistair and Belinda. By the time we learn that this is their thirteenth wedding anniversary the audience has been cued already to expect a bumpy night. In a scenario full of extremes, excess, intrigue and concealment the unlucky date is one more shadow on a blighted situation. Belinda's impeccable preparations for and execution of the dinner party are searchingly captured in every scene: when she answers the phone she wipes the wall clean, when she cooks she wears an apron co-ordinated to the colour of her outfit, when she is ready to steam the snow peas they are already rinsed and p~epared in a glass bowl in the refrigerator.

The action ebbs and flows with the changing oppositional combinations: promiscuous husband/faithful wife; ardent lover/reluctant lover; betraying friend/naive friend; charming woman/abusively drunk woman. These groupings follow the natural at each other and react. It's all about the reactions of people around the table". The Sun-Herald. Feb. 14, 1993: 113. 73

impulses and movements of dinner party personnel: pouring another drink, sipping a glass of wine, clearing dishes, checking the roast, going to the toilet, touching up make-up. At the beginning of the dinner Belinda is in the kitchen with the unhappy Deirdre, neatly arranging the spinach and fish rolls in an ovenware dish. She delicately places each roll neatly in place with perfectly manicured and tastefully jewelled fingers·. As she does so she tries to justify to Deirdre why she has invited her divorced friend Frieda to dinner with them. Dissatisfied that it won't just be the five of them for old times' sake, Deirdre accuses Belinda of pushing widower Eric and divorcee Frieda together. "I'm not pushing" Belinda defends herself, throwing the eighth spinach roll into the dish: "Besides, I've asked them to dinner, I haven't asked them to sleep together.". During this preparation of the fish and spinach rolls with a pistachio sauce she is then joined by Deirdre's husband, Col ("the fat man from the sea") in the kitchen. Having recently bought a launch Col now "refers to everything in nautical terms" or so Deirdre claims. Col attempts to greet Belinda with a hello kiss. Belinda warns she has fish on her hands. "That ought to please him" snarls Deirdre. The association of women with fishy smells and nautical terminology is given unselfconscious articulation in Deirdre's recounting of a rare moment of sexual intimacy between Colin and her, during which Colin whispered to her "I'd like to put you into dry dock and scrub the barnacles off your backside. u.

After the full-cast entree scene Frieda, Belinda's divorced friend, purposefully follows Belinda into the kitchen. They begin to talk about Frieda's life after divorce. They have both observed that each is wearing the same pearls. Belinda immediately tells Frieda that hers are a present from Alistair; Frieda doesn't reply. "Aren't you going to tell me where you got yours?" presses Belinda; "No", replies Frieda. "Are you seeing someone?" quizzes Belinda, rather pleased that her friend seems to be dating again but curious as to the secrecy. Frieda assents, but claims that she couldn't have brought him along tonight because he "had something on with his wife". Up to this point it has been playful, interested banter between two old friends. On hearing that Frieda is seeing a married 74

man Belinda, who has been attending to the lamb, begins to baste it more aggressively, not meeting her friend's eyes:

FRIEDA: Why do you disapprove?' BELINDA: What makes you think I disapprove? FRIEDA: The way you're basting that lamb.

In this sequence Belinda's jabbing basting motions become a register for her emotions. The two women make eye contact and laugh, a moment of agreement that Belinda was using the lamb as a vent for her disapproval of her friend's conduct. The swiftness of the look of recognition turning to laughter of self awareness made it an all the more effective way of communicating her 'overreaction'. The audience possesses additional knowledge: Belinda's irritation was justified but necessarily unfocused. At this point she does not know that Frieda's pearls were from the same man; the married man: her husband Alistair; the wife mentioned: herself.

Throughout Lust numerous breaches of propriety are paralleled by insults to the food, the presentation, the manner of cooking or the combination of ingredients. This is especially noticeable in the case of Deirdre. When Deirdre arrives she demands a drink; ready for her second she oversteps the boundaries of politeness by ordering her host not to ration the gin like her husband, who pours a gin as if "the world was short of juniper berries". Moving into the dining room, she scans the place settings. Deciding that she wants to sit next to widower Eric she moves the place cards so that she (rather than the 'available' Frieda) will be seated next to him at dinner. There ensues her embarrassingly protracted insistence that Colin will not eat the entree of spinach and fish rolls with pistachio sauce because he never eats spinach at home. Colin claims that he will because "This is not just throwing a lump of cooked spinach onto the side of the plate, this is really doing something with spinach Deirdre.". As a further slight, after making a scene about delaying the meal for Eric's toast ("there's nothing worse than cold spinach"), Deirdre insults Belinda further by telling the table "I'll just pop mine into the microwave, to heat it 75

up". So far she has broken all the rules - changing the host's placement of the guests, insulting the cook, leaving the table at an inopportune moment - yet she accuses her husband of being a peasant for having difficulty with the order of utensils and worse, of behaving like an animal at the table ("She said to taste it Colin, not sniff it, you're not a dog."). Deirdre's disruption of dinner etiquette extends further still. During. the main course Belinda observes that Deirdre has left her meat:

BELINDA: You've hardly touched your lamb Deirdre. DEIRDRE: It's a bit rare. BELINDA: Gone are the days of overcooked meat. DEIRDRE: I like the blood cooked out of my meat. BELINDA: It's the blood that gives it the flavour.

Belinda again demonstrates her authority and command with respect to her knowledge of contemporary food ways. Deirdre is not to be persuaded and proceeds to get rid of the offending meat: "You have it Eric, you need the blood", as she throws the slab of meat onto his plate. Her comment that Eric needs the blood is a direct attack on Eric's lack of passion, lust, danger and animality. Deirdre wishes that Eric would take on the qualities thought to be conferred by the bloody meat. Red meats, in which the blood is most vividly evident, are traditionally held in highest esteem.45 So, in rejecting the bloody lamb and thrusting it at Eric she is performing a doubly coded action - offending the cook by rejecting a high status dish, and humiliating Eric by implying he is bloodless. There is a further implication that this action is also motivated by Deirdre's jealousy of Belinda - when the former first arrives she observes that it takes her husband a week to adjust to her cooking again after he's eaten Belinda's cuisine. This exemplifies the

45 In Meat: a Natural Symbol, Nick Fiddes explores the motif of blood as central to the meat system: "Blood is the stream of life itself...Blood is the source of our passion - to be hot blooded is to be wild, spirited, lusty, impulsive"[69]. Fiddes also quotes M. Cox and D. Crockett The Subversive Vegetarian: Tactics, Information and Recipes for the Conversion of Meat Eaters. Wellingborough: Thorsons, 1979, who write of the "mythopoeic belief in the regenerative power of blood" and the power of meat to confer certain qualities on the eater: "Blood is the very stuff of life and meat partakes of its qualities and of its mythical and psychological associations. Sometimes no amount of factual evidence or moral exhortations can conquer this primordial logic."[18-19] 76

density of the meanings borne by food in the play. It is not merely the signifier of tensions, but the terrain over which they are explored. Colin himself in an intimate moment declares to Belinda •1 love your lamb. You're a wonderful cook. You're a wonderful woman", in an immediate transference from her ability as a cook to her desirability as a woman.

The interchangeability here between the male constructs of 'wonderful cook' 'wonderful woman' and the implicit 'wonderful lover' hints at other unstable subjectivities concerning women and food, which I shall elaborate in Chapter Five.

One of the reasons that food is such a popular way of providing dramatic focus is that playwrights and audiences instinctively understand it and its cultural patterns, from both normative and non-normative real life food situations. Food on stage, as in life, is not merely an inescapable 'noise', but a language. Food can substantiate through colours, textures, shapes and smells. It is capable of immediately indicating opulence or poverty. It can connote security or addiction. It can enhance a table or make it look messy. It can be familiar or exotic. Food can provoke tensions on stage as it does in life - when there is not enough, or too much; when it is unfamiliar, or too familiar; when it is overcooked or raw; when it is too plain or too rich; when too much is eaten or too little; when it is late or does not appear. Expectations of a rhythm and a sequence in the courses, duration, setting, of a meal mean that these customary patterns may be enlisted and then changed in some way - reinforced, restricted, extended, interrupted, disrupted altogether, rejected.

Of particular note i~ the contemporary Australian drama is the presence of food as an index of individual style and personal expression. In these plays food is a receptacle of individual rather than collective meanings. Food is no longer just a meal or a banquet but rather attention is paid to food detail, specific ingredients, and there is a consciousness of the subtle differences connoted by specific foods. This pronounced devolution of the specificities of food representation in contemporary Australian plays is perhaps one of the most significant observations to be made in regard to 77

the shift away from the emblematic toward the detailed and specific representations of food on stage and their accompanying connotations of socio-economics, lifestyle, aspirations and individual personal identity and psychology.

The next chapter turns from plays whose main focus or turning point is a meal to investigate in -more detail the political dimensions of food in contemporary Australian theatre: food as the instrument of social power. 78

Chapter Three

FOOD AS CURRENCY FOR POWER AND SITE OF FAMILY POLITICS IN AUSTRALIAN DRAMA

The notion of food as an instrument of power is fundamental to all societies. Famine causes death, prestigipus foods are reserved for important people, lovers serve each other favourite foods. Food deprivation is one of the most common forms of punishment and humiliation. Withdrawal of food deprives people of energy, stability, dignity and personal power.

For Arnolphe, in Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes (The School for Wives) 1 the language of food rather than food itself betrays a craving for power and domination. Arnolphe has been nurturing his young charge Agnes for years so that she will be more 'appetising' to him. His way of ensuring her 'edibility' is to keep her ignorant. Arnolphe's discourse is characterised by a confusion of codes, as is evident in verse 1595 spoken to Agnes: "Je te bouchonnerai, baiserai, mangerai." Arnolphe's servants too see human sexuality in terms of appetite for and possession of food. In explaining jealousy to Georgette, Alain makes the following comparison:

ALAIN: Suppose you were eating soup and it occurred that someone tried to take what you were eating. Wouldn't you feel like giving him a beating? GEORGETTE: Yes I see that. ALAIN: Then grasp this if you can Womankind is in fact the soup of man And when a man perceives that others wish To dip their dirty fingers into his dish. His temper flares and bursts into flames. GEORGETTE: Not every husband is the greedy kind who wants to have it all. (2.iii)

Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew2 constantly manipulates the theatrical meaning of the sharing of food. Petruchio breaks Kate's spirit largely through what and when he allows her to eat. Food is the medium for both conflict and, ultimately, harmony. Of the three meals in the play two are sabotaged by Petruchio, and

1 Moliere, J.P.B. Five Plays. Trans. Richard Wilbur. London: Methuen, 1971. 2 Ed. Brian Morris. London: Arden, 1981. 79

only the third actually is consumed. Despite the "mad marriage" between Petruchio and Kate, Petruchio's refusal to stay for their wedding feast still comes as a shock and is one of a sequence of humiliations constructed to remould Kate into a more acceptable and tractable Paduan wife. Petruchio unceremoniously tears Kate away from the feast as well, forcing her to make the journey to his lodgings hungry, wet and cold. It is significant that the wedding feast, which would seal their marriage vows and provide the first public forum for them as a married couple, is deliberately disrupted as part of Petruchio's strategy for taming Kate. After the long and tiring journey to his house, at the moment Kate is about to satisfy her desperate hunger, Petruchio perversely throws the meat away claiming '"twas burnt and dried away" and forbidding Kate to eat it. He counters her claims that the meat was perfectly acceptable with the argument that overcooked meat can aggravate a choleric disposition. The final meal, the Act 5 banquet, is usually staged as a full feast but originally would have been intended as the dessert course of sweetmeats, fruit and wine served as a continuation of the principal meal. This banquet, given by Lucentio for the members of the wedding party, would follow the wedding feast, given by Baptista:

My banquet is to close our stomachs up /After our great good cheer. (5,ii}

The banquet is intended to fulfil a dual purpose: first, that of a fitting conclusion to the wedding feast, in finishing the meal with dessert, wine, fruit; and second, to see an end to all the previous quarrelling and cross-purposes. In a sense, too, partaking of this banquet could be seen as the sharing of the wedding feast Petruchio and Kate did not share at the time of their own marriage. "For now we sit to chat as well as eat" [5.ii.11] increases the sense of this repast having the purpose of building bridges as well as sharing food. Finally food joins the two; but throughout the play Petruchio's dominance over the timing and consumption of food demonstrates the exertion of power through food. In particular Petruchio's control over Kate's food consumption signifies a form of patriarchal dominance and possession since Petruchio first denies Kate food at the wedding staged by her father and in front of Kate's 80

friends and family and next denies her in his own house in front of his household members and servants.

* * * * * * * * *

As Petr Bogatyrev's seminal work on the principles of theatrical semiosis makes clear, objects on sta.ge are transformed by a signifying power lacking from those objects in their normal social context: "on the stage things that play the part of theatrical signs ...... acquire special features, qualities and attributes that they do not have in real life". 3 Bogatyrev suggested that on stage we find signs of the material object as well as signs of a sign of the material object; for example, an actor on stage can denote that he eats bread as such or that he eats bread as a sign of poverty. 4

Poverty and hunger pervade Hilary Bell's Fortune (1990)5 : it could be subtitled 'The politics of hunger' and certainly bread in the play functions in the ways described by Bogatyrev - to denote bread as a class of food and to connote the idea of poverty and starvation. Director Terence Clark's programme notes for the NIDA workshopped presentation of the play explained that the process had given more attention to development than to production and underlined the integral nature of the physicality and function of food in this play:

The audience is, in consequence, invited to use its imagination rather more, at times, than a full production would require, particularly in the matter of food and drink.

Fortune may be seen as an allegory of Australian post-colonial behaviour. Set in the_ NSW goldfields in the 1860s, Fortune is the story of a 12 year-old Chinese giant who is exhibited as a freak

3 Bogatyrev, Petr. "Semiotics in the Folk Theatre." Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions. Eds. L. Matejka & I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1976: 35-36. 4 Bogatyrev: 34. 5 This discussion is based on the unpublished manuscript, Fortune Draft #4, August, 1990. With minor revisions this was the draft used for the showcasing of the play (along with 3 others) in August 1990 as the final stage of the NIDA Company's season for that year. 8 1

show. Other characters in the play include Irish Kathleen, the Cockney Duck (both former convicts), Iris, a Chinese woman well educated in England and the German Reinhardt, one of the people who exploit the giant.

In both rhythm and preoccupation the play is a succession of cycles of manipulation and exploitation, which can only be broken by an act of will, a conscious moral act. Hunger is the sustaining dramatic metaphor of Fortune, a play which directly acquaints us with the impossibility of conducting life's business while one is hungry. Hunger is simultaneously the most urgent and the most routine threat. It is a state to be avoided and feared. Food functions as the play's currency. Bell's characters see money and gold in terms of how many meals it will buy them. The value of relationships is assessed in terms of how much food can be 'purchased' by the association.

A potent form of punishment dreaded by the less powerful characters is the withdrawal of food. Chang, the play's focus, a young Chinese giant, is simply 'always hungry' [6]. Chang's physical oddness means he is never far from trouble; when a group of young kids throw rocks at him early in the play, he is scared to go 'home' to the man who profits by him. His major apprehension over returning to Reinhardt, the German who lives by people's desire to be photographed with a freak, revolves around the worry that he won't get fed:

CHANG: He'll kill me when he sees the cuts - messes up the portraits. You wait, I won't get any dinner tonight. [In pain] Ah! [Pause] That scone looks good. [8]

Despite the painful lqcerations the thought of food is ever present. Thinking himself rich at the possession of a farthing given to him by Kathleen, Chang asks Iris, the Chinese owner of a Cold Bath Hill boarding house, how much food he can get for it. Iris' reply that he could get "a pound of spuds" and at that he'd be getting a bargain, is for Chang demoralising news; Kathleen had misled him into thinking the purchasing power of a farthing was far greater ("She said a 82

palace."). Such a lie is typical of the series of minor and not so minor betrayals and lies of which Chang finds himself victim.

Hunger is a powerful behavioural imperative, and one for which the characters betray one another in the play's scheme. Hunger motivated Chang's mother to sell him to Reinhardt: "She sold me to Mr Reinhardt! Just so she could eat.'.~ There is both truth and extreme harshness in Iris' excuse for Chang's mother: "If she hadn't, you'd have both starved." Mother-child bonds, conventionally perceived as inviolable, are here represented as breakable for a sure meal. Throughout the play characters are willing to trade loyalty for more tangible sustenance.

Lack of plentiful food promotes lack of gentility. Access to food, however, can easily override the accepted code of manners. When Kathleen returns to Iris' boarding house, in arrears with her board and clearly famished, she immediately "swills the teapot, pours herself some tea, and grabs a fistful of cake. "[11] Stuffing her face, she begins a conversation with Chang who all the while has been eyeing the food, but has not taken any. Kathleen grabs the last piece of cake. As she's about to devour it she notices his eyes. Asking whether he wants some, she snatches it away from him. In light of her own tenuous circumstances Kathleen adopts an inappropriately high-handed stance toward Chang ("Manners! 'Please Mrs O'Reilly'"), made more obvious for the audience by comparison with Iris, whose beautiful grooming and meticulously genteel tea­ drinking mannerisms set the standard at the scene's opening. Possession of food swiftly conveys who is in control. In the world of this play food is almost never unconditionally given or provided. After eliciting an answer from the unresponsive Chang, a gift of food is the obvious reward for his renunciation of unforgiving silence:

Kathleen is about to eat the cake. CHANG:Mm KATHLEEN: [giving him the cake] There you go. Chang eats it ravenously. KATHLEEN: Look at him! Swear you hadn't eaten for weeks! So who died? (12] 83

In this transaction Chang's answer, "Mrs Mackinnon's uncle", is implicitly agreed upon as the price for the cake. The perpetual struggle to acquire food determines social relations entirely for the characters of Fortune. Characters' motives and behaviour are completely formulated according to where and from whom their next meal is coming. And in this context Chang is a source of ambiguous resentment (for Reinhardt, for Kathleen and especially for Duck) because Chang, on whom they are dependent (and therefore must feed), is different, an outsider both in terms of physical size and race. But it is precisely his strangeness which makes him valuable, so it is with these bankable qualities (his youth, enormous size, long Chinese pigtail) in mind that Kathleen eagerly persuades Chang to run away from Reinhardt, with the assurance that they will "have wonderful adventures together" [16] As she is working out her strategy she tellingly articulates, in gastronomic terms, what Chang represents to Reinhardt:

Valuable. You're his bread and butter.[Pause] Listen why don't you come with me? [16).

The wonderful adventures do not materialise and a couple of days later, in the blistering heat in canvas town, very little interest is shown in the attraction "PORTRAIT WITH THE TARTAR MONSTER 4d". Ever the realist, Kathleen's thoughts once more turn to survival. Chewing on a piece of bread she asks Chang:

KATHLEEN: Have you ever starved? And I don't mean just gone hungry. The closest I got to it was twenty years ago, when we first got here. Supply ship went down, and we lived on vermin for a year. Had to boil me boots for the juice. [ 1 8]

Not surprisingly Chang, inferring that they could be in similar circumstances soon, turns around violently and bursts out at Kathleen: "Then stop gobbling the last bit of bread, you greedy pig!" Kathleen's response to this is a combination of indignation and childish revenge. She "ceremoniously takes the bread out of her mouth and sticks it onto the uneaten bit." As in other plays where 84

this kind of food pollution or defilement occurs, for instance Lissa Benyon's The Real Matilda (1989) and Louis Nowra's Byzantine Flowers (1990), an emotionally violent reaction is provoked:

CHANG: It's not fair! You're a filthy vile-smelling old pig and I hate you.

Kathleen defends herself by reminding Chang that she has fed him for the last two days, but Chang remembers life with Reinhardt: "He looked after me! He did my hair, gave me mutton once a week ...... l'm going to die of starvation because of you!" [19] Chang feels doubly cheated because of Kathleen's guarantee that he would have to pose for no more humiliating portraits. Continually, the nature of the characters' emotional transactions alters depending on the availability or scarcity of food.

Even aspects of the play which are not focal but which help to create the play's world unexpectedly resonate with food. Chang's membership of a non-Caucasian race (though not remarkable in terms of the play) provides access to a cultural realm unfamiliar to the central character Kathleen. At times both cultural misconceptions and ignorance become a source of humour and surprise. While Chang is in this angry state he asks Kathleen for the knife. Kathleen is at first shocked, then tries to make light of it: "I'm not eating any kid's fingers, if that's what -"[20]. This is not the first reference to the habit of eating children's fingers and clearly it represents a gastronomic barrier for her.

In a similar vein Kathleen is in for a revelation of foreign practices when, having dissuaded Chang from cutting his plait off on the grounds that it would reduce his worth, she decides to go and whore herself. Chang. stops her, claiming she will catch leprosy, a common disease on the goldfields. He tells her that Mrs. Mackinnon's (Iris') uncle had leprosy and would charge people a penny to watch the food go down his gullet [21 ]. Thus, even with his death imminent, there was still capital to be made out of the visibility of his digestive processes. In the world of the play nothing is less desirable than starving to death even if it means 85

exposing, quite literally, the very bodily processes one is seeking to maintain.

The journey Chang and Kathleen take together is continually dictated by the availability of food. Kathleen's past life, too, has been dogged by hunger. Her only child died of starvation, though as she puts it, that time she was spared the unappeasable demands of a hungry child:

.... last time the problem provided its own solution. The little mite starved to death, and they dropped him over the side, plop into the Indian Ocean. No more hungry baby. [28]

Food colours every major decision for these characters. For Kathleen, thoughts of the scones with Bendigo jam served by Iris at her boarding house merge with the image of the "roast chook" and brandy being "wasted on a stiff" (Iris' uncle is buried with these food offerings), with the result that she can no longer restrain herself. As she says, "Hunger can make you do desperate things."[29] The desperate act she commits discloses an unconventional aspect of food lore addressed in Fortune: the appetite of the dead. Food is permitted its peculiar cultural and ritual significances. Prized foodstuffs - roast chickens, bottles of brandy - are buried with the dead. These buried treasures tempt the rash but pragmatic Kathleen to dig up and steal the food of Iris' dead Chinese uncle. Kathleen's is a serious transgression of the burial rites because, in spite of the fact that in the play straitened circumstances are the rule, not the exception, the Chinese dead must have their "ferry-fare to heaven"[13]. Here again food proves strong currency for both the dead and the living. 6 In stealing food from the grave Kathleen has committed 'an archefypal crime, an emphatic way to express a

6 Bertram Puckle in Funeral Customs: their Origin and Development. London: Werner Laurie, 1926, writes "Where the belief exists, as in China, that the dead have a duality of souls, one of which remains in the grave in order to receive the offerings of the living, the importance of the food supply is seen, for it is imagined that the soul would starve if not regularly nourished, in which case, of course, it would not fail to make its appreciation of the fact unpleasantly patent to the careless relatives." [ 1 0 1 ] 86

challenge to vested authority'7 and one with links to such acts as the eating of forbidden foods which catalysed the Fall as dramatised in the Bible and Paradise Lost.8

The funerary food, which Kathleen learns about from Chang's stories of other burials, forms the basis of a feast for Kathleen and Chang. The gold nuggets, also buried with the dead, are immediately converted to food on their recovery. Chang, however, is ignorant of the source of the unexpected goodies even though he furnished Kathleen with the knowledge of foodstuffs customarily buried with the Chinese dead. Ironically, then, because of the grave plunder Chang unknowingly partakes of a wake feast, a celebration from which he was customarily excluded because of the belief that giants (presumably because of their aberrant appe~rance) bring bad luck. The fact of the horror of hunger and its destructive effect on relationships is solidly established by the time Kathleen finally takes the step of desecrating the grave in order to sup on its edible contents.

As in. other plays discussed, for example The Real Matilda (1989), Wallflowering (1992), All the Black Dogs (1987), Pennies Before the Holidays (1987), and Binge (1987), there is in Fortune a strong nexus between the social role of motherhood and the pressure to provide food for offspring. Even though Kathleen is not Chang's mother she assumes that role, partially against her better instincts. Once in that role she takes on, in an apparently automatic response to Chang's childlike dependence on her, the burdensome task of keeping them both fed. Despite this 'maternal' instinct to provide, Kathleen, especially when contending with brazenly opportunistic Duck, never loses sight of the fact that Chang is her "bread ~rnd butter" [46]. At her reunion with old friend Duck, she attributes her better looks to her diet: "Yeah well I eat these days, don't 1?"[39]. Duck is only too aware that Chang's

7 Nicholson, Mervyn. "Food and Power: Homer, Carroll, Atwood and Others." Mosaic : a Journal for the Comparative Studies of Literature and Ideas. Vol 20, No 3, Summer 1987: 39. 8 Another food thief, Pip Gargery in Great Expectations, does not steal from the dead; there are, however, shades of resemblance in both the profound terrors his theft engenders and the fact that the pork pie he steals is food reserved for the high and mighty in his world. 87

earning power keeps them fed, so even though he resents the attentions Kathleen gives to Chang he understands the necessity for not losing Chang. In this loveless world of the play food is consistently the most persuasive and valuable currency.

Just as in Nowra's Inner Voices 9 Ivan the mute king is linguistically manipulated to the point of becoming the manipulator, so the child-giant Chang is behaviourally manipulated by Reinhardt, Kathleen and Duck until finally he gains an uneasy autonomy. The outcomes of the two plays differ in tone however, with Nowra's play concluding in an image of chilling though fitting revenge while Bell's play takes on a more humane and forgiving final mood.

Inner Voices, Louis Nowra's first full-length play, is set in· imperial Russia in the 1760s. The play's basis is that the rightful claimant of the imperial throne is not its occupant Catherine 11, but Ivan VI, locked away and denied any personal or verbal contact since birth. Ivan's two self-serving 'liberators', officers Mirovich and Leo, substitute Ivan for Catherine on the throne, then proceed to make Ivan their mouthpiece. Ivan is the ideal tabula rasa, and Mirovich seeks to inscribe Ivan with what will advance his own cause. Although most discussions of this play centre on the primacy of linguistic control and the acquisition of power through possession of the Word, I suggest that the role of food consumption is instrumental in the play's outcome, the overturn of the puppeteer (Mirovich) by the puppet (Ivan). In Inner Voices control over food is seen to confer power over life. Yet the substance which is perceived as the guarantee of control has within it the capability of annihilating the controller. The grotesquely fat officer Mirovich is repeatedly diminished through food. In his argument with fellow officer Leo over who ate Leo's breakfast (meat and cheese) Mirovich accurately but unwittingly identifies his own bestiality. By transferring his guilt to 'an animal' ("I suspect a rat"[1 OJ), Mirovich comes close to the truth about himself. Leo's meaningful look at Mirovich signifies appreciation of that rodential identification.

9 Sydney: Currency, 1977. 88

Possibilities of sensory gratification are perpetually distanced from the characters in this play. Life is watched, imagined or experienced through fantasies or prison bars. This strategy of alienation, the shielding from the apprehension of first-hand experience is theatricalised in several concrete ways: the bread is stale and insufficient; the wine is watered down; women are subjects of male voyeurism, watched through bars or as figures in dreams. An extreme version of the alienation from full experience is the systematic denial of language to which Ivan is subjected before he becomes king: the guards are not allowed to "talk anywhere, for eight hours, even if he's a hundred yards away"[11]. Thus, the tactic which is to ensure Ivan's continued total isolation and ignorance has a similar deprivational effect on those who enforce it.

The environment does not yield enough of anything - food, wine, sex, but most of all choice. This results in irritation, squabbles and competition between Leo and Mirovich over basic commodities. Tensions over food give way to sexual fantasy which in turn is displaced by an even more florid fantasy intermingling both. The food dream Mirovich describes has all the marks of a fairy story except that the prize, though a wish fulfilment, also carries a hint of punishment: "The guests haven't come, I guess you'll have to eat all this by yourself." [14; my emphasis] He will be granted the food on condition that he "screw the girls" (fifteen twenty-two year old girls). In addition, as in all fairy tales, there is a time limit for this part of the dream task: a caution that the food will get cold if he does not return in half an hour. To augment the hint of female edibility, women are subsumed under the category of food when the laden banquet tables . are personified as dangerously fascinating and tempting sirens: "So there I am, in the banquet hall, hundreds of tables, like ancient sirens, groaning to me, singing to me, 'Come and eat me', they're singing" [14]. Again Nowra's screening metaphor is invoked in Mirovich's telling of the frustration of shoving food at his mouth which will not go down.[14) In this fantasy of plenty, the intervening screen this time, as revealed by the Master of 89

Ceremonies' mirror, is Mirovich's sealed lips, sewn up by the old lady.

Women and food are conflated once more as Mirovich bends over Leo at the end of the scene: "Dream of ballrooms filled with beautiful girls. All sighing your name. Banquet tables groaning under stacks of food ... " [17]. As Mirovich conveys --the plan he is trying to engender in Leo, the previous fairy-tale quality is reintroduced in an image of inaccessibility, beauty and escape: "Towns coming out to greet you as you go past in your gold-plated coach" [17]. Before Ivan, in wordless isolation, can utter anything more more than his own name, Mirovich and Leo antagonise each other over the issue of names in Ivan's presence. Grossly overweight though Mirovich is, he is also deeply sensitive to being referred to in terms which call attention to his bulk or his gluttony. Ivan's ability to "eat like a horse" and not "put on an ounce" is a source of envy for Mirovich [24], an unwelcome reminder of his own burgeoning size, compounded by Leo's habit of name-calling: "tub of lard", "pig". Mirovich forces Leo to turn his name-calling back on himself, with an explanation supremely ironical in light of the role of linguistic dishonesty and misrepresentation in the play:

MIROVICH: [looking very angry, softly} I want you to call yourself what you called me. IVAN: Ivan? LEO: Tub of lard. MIROVICH: You are. LEO: I am a tub of lard. MIROVICH: Thank you. [Pause] Names can hurt, Leo. Hurt very deeply. Just because I like my food, doesn't mean I like being a pig. [24]

Name-calling between these two accelerates alongside their increasing frustration at Ivan's failure to absorb any words which will advance his credibility as heir apparent. Their sub-human sparring, with insults drawn from the lexis of animal terms, appears to be aggravated by their inability to communicate the 90

most basic verbal meaning to Ivan. Again Mirovich's gross appetite is the principal target. Leo baits him repeatedly with taunts such as "He probably can't understand your grunts" and "I'm going to carve you up and use you for bacon" [26]. This particular bout of abuse whirls into a frenzy of fighting undercut by the Officer's arrival and announcement that Ivan is to be king. As Mirovich's public control increases, however, his hunger does not diminish. His grossly increasing bulk is the physical corollary of his insatiable hunger. He bloats himself until he is "sluggish and fat", as if maximising the volume he occupies will stop the gaping holes. After the nightmare experience of being sewn shut at the mouth, Mirovich must take every opportunity to open his mouth to ingest food so as to prevent it sealing off again and thereby lapsing into a state of hungry helplessness. Similarly, Ivan's open soundless mouth renders him equally powerless until he is taught to fill his cavity with that which is simultaneously substantial and incorporeal - words. In this light, the "ambiguously suggestive umbilical connection" which Veronica Kelly 10 identifies between Mirovich and Ivan is foregrounded as Mirovich's gluttony increases in direct proportion to a growing power and autonomy on the part of the previously infantilised, stunted Ivan.

While Mirovich is hungrily building his own larger (immortal?) body, a childlike terror of being incorporated into a larger being informs Ivan's response to Vlad's manipulations.The fear of being consumed, albeit by a silent shadowy threat, spurs Ivan to call to a halt his usually beloved game. Vlad's voice accompanies the hand shadow of an eagle:

This one is harder. It can rip you apart, with its beak or its claws. It makes no sounds ...... lts wings n:iake the sound of a whisper. It's the whispering death. It will tear your eyes out and then eat them.[42]

Ivan's fear of having his eyes eaten by the silent, shadowy eagle assumes proportions exacerbated by his mute past.

1 O "A Mirror for Australia: Louis Nowra's Emblematic Theatre." Louis Nowra. Ed. Veronica Kelly. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987: 60. 9 1

Nowra's specifications for Scene Seven include "a table stacked with food", and a very fat Mirovich who "shovels food into his mouth". He does, however, caution against the "standard extras of food stains down the front and wine trickling from the mouth" [SO, 45], apparently keen to differentiate between physical slobbishness and a more inclusive vision of gluttony:

MIROVICH: [chewing] I knew it would be like this. I could have all the food I wanted. [Pause] I'm happy. Very happy, Peter. [Pause] Wine. [Peter lifts a glass of wine up to his master's lips. Mirovich drinks. Silence.] Everywhere I go now, sighs of admiration follow me. I hear the people say: "There goes Mirovich, isn't he big? He grows bigger every day. I wish I was like him. I wish I could have all the food and booze I wanted." [Silence] But I deserved it. I dared, I was determined. I did it. [45]

As in Mirovich's dream, voyeurism and eating are yoked consistently in Inner Voices. The most vivid instance of this union is the introduction of Princess Ali to Ivan [Scene Seven]. Though Mirovich considers her a fake, he is willing to let her 'audition' for the part of Queen to Ivan's King. Having reached the stage where he must be constantly be filled up, throughout Ali's scene Peter feeds Mirovich. The bizarre courting scene, with Vladimir providing the wooing phrases for Ivan to copy uncomprehendingly, proceeds under the gaze of the gluttonous Mirovich. One implication of his position as voyeur is that he is now so completely r~mote from any personal sexual activity that the best approximation is to eat and look, at one and the same time bypassing, sublimating and satisfying his sexual appetite in a bloated paralysis. This virtual immobility is accentuated in Nowra's direction: "Mirovich who has been watching all this with amused expression, struggles to his feet behind the table" [SO, 51 ]. By the next scene Mirovich is seen to be in a state of total entropy, 92

only able to walk with the assistance of Vladimir and Peter: "Without them, he would find it too painful to move" [SO, 52).

Mirovich appears this time as a suffocating body, making accusations of having been poisoned. The poisoning has of course been self-inflicted overeating. The final image of Mirovich is as Peter hauls him off by the legs with .- "Come on you fat tub of lard .... let's go ... "[58). Nowra's notion of self-poisoning through eating, physicalised in the sight of Mirovich eating himself to death during the course of the play, was to find variations in and set up reverberations for another of his plays concerned with self­ destruction, Inside the Island.

Like I n n er V o i c e s , I n s i de t h e I s I a n d 1 1 is not set contemporaneously, but in 1912 in a wheat belt area of Western New South Wales. Matriarch Lillian Dawson barely tolerates her drunken husband, barely tolerates the heat, but she does not tolerate at all the lack of civilising elements in her life in Australia. She seeks to mould the outback dry reality to something more closely resembling the verdant English countryside that is so green it 'hurts the eyes'.

In Inside the Island visiting soldiers use poisoned wheat to make bread for their picnic and in a few hours, in hallucinating delirium, they turn upon each other and the locals, raping, murdering and destroying. Lillian Dawson's daughter Susan is killed and her husband also dies. For John Mccallum Inside the Island may be read on a metaphorical level as a Gallipoli play: "a company of ordinary soldiers driven to violence, conflagration, madness and death by a cynically casual decision taken by a wealthy landed Anglophile. "12

There is a sense in which Inside the Island may also be read as a revenge play. It may not have so florid and graphic a grand guignol quality as Titus Andronicus, but still Nowra peels back the

11 Sydney: Currency, 1981. l 2 McCallum, John. "The World Outside: Cosmopolitanism in the Plays of Nowra and Sewell.• (1984) Contemporary Australian Drama. Ed. Peter Holloway. Sydney Currency, 1987: 573. 93

civilising bandages and displays the gaping wound at the heart of the continent and human behaviour. However, instead of the bloody outpourings of Titus Andronicus, in Inside the Island the audience is witness to a fiery discharge. Lillian Dawson's callous and irredeemable behaviour in Inside the Island classifies as a revenge action: revenge against a country which refuses to take a hospitable shape. Her view of her Australian outback environment consists of heat, dryness, social isolation, an alcoholic husband, the illiterate Mrs Harrison and her intellectual handicapped son, boorish visiting soldiers and a daughter not yet sufficiently refined. And although she unwittingly poisons many soldiers for whom she has no strength of feeling, it is just as powerfully a drama of self-poisoning, of poisoning what is most precious to her.

As is true of Inner Voi~es, Inside the Island utilises food on a dual level: actual and metaphorical. The first time we are conscious of the role of food in the play is when refreshments are offered by Lillian to the newly arrived soldiers, a significant association since they are ultimately annihilated by food, again given by Lillian. Class tension shows up clearly in the matter of food and drink. The sherry-drinking episode pits Lillian's refinement against Sergeant Collins' want of social niceties. The way in which the Sergeant responds to hospitality and deals with food is Nowra's way of positioning him in relation to Lillian, Susan and his superior Captain Henry. Having taken an extra glass of sherry when the others were out of the room he proceeds to fill the sherry decanter with lemonade, his least favourite drink, in order to disguise the dropping level. The Sergeant carries out in broad daylight and in view of the audience what Mirovich does in the dead of night away from the eyes of anyone. Childlike behaviour is often accentuated in relatio.n to food, as in the case of Sergeant Collins' sneaking of extra biscuits and sherry.

The entire action of the play turns on the basic foodstuff of wheat. At the heart of it is Lillian's 'gift' of fungi-infected wheat which poisons and hallucinates its recipients. In the 'Author's Preface' Nowra explains the background to the effects of ergot-poisoned grain and mentions that for the play he compressed the time that 94

the drug needs to take effect. He stresses, however, that all such detail ·is to give the director a literal sense of the ergot poisoning rather than just accepting it as a metaphor." .[14] That wheat is such a basic food is fundamental to Nowra's point. That it was not intended merely as a metaphor for something else also underlines the centrality of food to Nowra's Inside the Is Ian d. The wheat grows all around. The men work with th~ wheat. When they go mad it is to the bags of wheat they return, to coat themselves in the poisonous substance: a magnification of the allergy-sufferer's compulsive attraction to allergenic foods. Significantly for this argument Nowra isolates the following Rabbi Nahman's story as the impetus for writing Inside the Island:

A King one day summoned his counsellor. 'I have read in the stars that all who eat of the next harvest will be driven mad. What shall we do?' To which the counsellor advised that he and the King should eat the previous year's dwindling reserves and let the populace eat the tainted food. 'I don't wish to remain lucid in the midst of a people gone mad,' replied the King, 'so we shall enter madness together. When the world is in a state of delirium it is senseless to watch from the outside; the mad will think that we, too, are mad.' [15]

The play is a variation on this parable since Lillian does not adopt the King's view toward the non-commissioned soldiers' right to untainted wheat (although she is completely 'lost' at the .end of the play). She feels justified in ordering her husband to authorise the infected wheat to be given because it is only for bread and cakes for the junior officers. Her ingrained class-consciousness determines her dismissal of George's angry protest: "Look I'm telling you there's something wrong with it.". Lillian's reply explicitly equates the men with animals: "You wouldn't know. Soldiers have the appetites of horses. You could feed them chaff and they wouldn't know the difference ..... " .[35]

The Sergeant is an ideal yardstick by which to measure the gradations of the social divisions in the play. From the outset he commits gaffes and from Lillian Dawson's responses to the uncultivated Sergeant we apprehend her rigid, elitist world view. Having offered refreshments and proclaimed that she does not drink 95

alcohol, a position which is shared also by her daughter and the Captain, she then condescendingly marginalises the Sergeant:

LILLIAN: ...... 1 expect you're not a teetotaller. SERGEANT: I enjoy a glass now and then. LILLIAN: And it's then, now? Susan, a decanter of sherry for the Sergeant and a jug of lemonade for us. (24]

Lillian's unexamined superior attitude persists as she is "stunned by the sight of the Sergeant downing his sherry in one gulp" and pointedly inquires "Nice, Sergeant?", whereupon he further incriminates himself "Lovely. Generally I don't like sherry. It gives me a pain in the guts - ". This time it is the Captain's turn to check the Sergeant's etiquette. As well as drinking, eating more than is manners acts as an index of class in the play. Lillian's notions of genteel food quantities are contrasted with the Sergeant's obliviousness to such arbitrary rules of etiquette. As with the sherry the Sergeant 'overeats' three times, each time taking three biscuits instead of the polite one which the Captain intuits is the acceptable amount. The Sergeant is held in contempt by both Lillian and her daughter Susan for eating more than is polite. He makes several blunders which disqualify him from the refined society with which Lillian would like to surround herself. Even when he tries to be jolly and complimentary he casts himself as completely unrefined, widening the gap between himself and Susan by his friendly and well-meant admission:

SERGEANT: [Taking out three biscuits ...... ] Nice biscuits. You make them? SUSAN: The cook did. I can't cook. SERGEANT: It's easy, you'll get the hang of it. My Mum was a great cook. Cooked for six boys. [An awkward silence.] [27]

He fails to grasp that, notwithstanding the excellence of his mother's cooking, Susan is not being groomed to make her own biscuits. 96

Lillian's puritan 'generosity' takes the form of giving away something which is patently defiled. Visible charity, not true generosity, is what concerns her, as is evident from her insistence that Susan be compelled to do good works by teaching local 'half­ wit' Andy Harrison and his mother to read. Such artificial elevation of the observance of visible proprieties extends to Lillian's insistence that food should appear edible even if isn't. One quite blatant re-presentation of her environment to her own desire is in the form of cotton-wool oranges she keeps displayed in a bowl. She so much wishes to create, however misleadingly, the appearance of civilised living that she decorates the table with a bowl of imitation oranges. The unsophisticated Sergeant can't resist food but the texture of the cotton wool orange is unexpected as he "looks astonished as he feels it" [57]. This unaffected character retains no interest in the counterfeit however; as he leaves the scene he puts the orange back in the bowl. Lillian's deception in presenting artificial oranges is a decorative and benign version of her other, fatal, misrepresentation involving food - her gift of poisoned wheat to the soldiers.

Nowra's deliberate choice of flour signifies a primary, basic commodity and one fundamental to the prosperity of a rural community. That Lillian blatantly overrules her husband on the matter of the poisoned flour demonstrates that she is not concerned for the soundness of the gift, only that she has been seen doing an act of charity that will cost her nothing. Gareth Griffiths has emphasised the post-colonial analogies residing in the choice of poisoned flour as the play's main image (white-faced lost soldiers) and spring for its action:

The imagery of the pqisoned flour is one familiar to Australians, who cannot miss the implied ironic parallel with the possible actions of her father who 'got rid of the blacks' - poisoning gifts of flour with arsenic being a common method of clearing the land of its original settlers in early Autralian history .13 97

of its original settlers in early Autralian history_ 13

Visually the flour-whitened dazed soldiers wandering close to the hell-like furnace are a chilling if melodramatic device. It is not surprising that some non-Aboriginal Australian playwrights work with metaphors for the systematic attempt at Aboriginal genocide. From first contact, white Australian settlers not only did not learn survival techniques from Aboriginal culture, but actively and ignorantly set about to destroy these methods and habits. This fact alone means that food from that historical moment on assumed a heavy cultural burden. The title of Jack Davis' Bar u ngin, 14 a South-Western Australian Nyoongah word meaning 'to smell the wind', originally referred to the ability (now lost by many black Australians) to find food, water, to forecast the weather - in other words survival skills.

Food is frequently utilised by playwrights as a means of establishing power differentials between characters, thereby creating strategies for character control and conflict. Robert Hewett's play Gu 11 s 15 concerns Bill, a forty year old suffering from aphasia (loss of speech owing to brain damage) caused by a car crash while he was at secondary school. Bill lives at the seaside with his sister Frances who rescued him from the loneliness and indignity of an institution after the death of their mother. A recurring food motif in Gulls is the uneaten fish paste sandwiches. Care of the forty year old Bill is principally undertaken by his sister Frances, save for the days she has to work in the library to support him. On those days a 'well-meaning' neighbour, Molly, supervises Bill, taking disproportionate interest in whether or not he eats the fish paste sandwiches which she offers with relentless regularity to an unappreciative Bill. Bill, in speech which only the audience hears, utters his version of events which is instructive for the way it demonstrates how minor matters of diet can become battlegrounds for those in positions of

13 Griffiths, Gareth. "Australian Subjects and Australian Style." Louis Nowra. [Ed.] Veronica Kelly. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987: 97. 14 Sydney: Currency, 1989. 15 Sydney: Currency, 1984. 98

discrepant power - for example children, the handicapped, the ill, the elderly:

MOLLY: Got your favourite today, Billy. 'A little Pecks goes such a long way'. BILL: On the first day she looked after me, I stupidly ate all the sandwiches. Frances said I had to. It included a couple with fish paste. I left them, and she took this to mean I was saving my favourite tiU last. They featured heavily on the menu from that day on. [She places the sandwich before him then goes and turns on the television.]

MOLLY: Just about time for Doctor McIntyre. Frances should get an electrician to look at this TV, their faces keep turning green. BILL: Doctor McIntyre is Mrs Dwyer's favourite serial. We watch every episode while I dispose of the sandwiches. MOLLY: Don't play with your food. Now what will Frances want in hers? BILL: [forcing one down] I can tell you what she won't want. [32-3)

As a measure of Molly's control over Bill she reports each day to Frances exactly how much he eats, in the same way a mother scrutinises how much of a bottle or mashed vegetables a baby has taken. Her report, however, is not intended for Bill's benefit but rather to show the extent to which she is able to exert her will over Bill's:

MOLLY: Didn't eat much of his lunch today, did you, Billy. eh? You right Frances? BILL: Would you eat fish paste sandwiches on yesterday's bread? MOLLY: Normally eats all his sandwiches. Here you've left one. BILL: Mrs Dwyer loves fish paste. I skip lunch on those days. Mrs Dwyer, on the other hand, has a passion for paste of any kind. They make me want to throw up. [19)

One lunch time when Molly is trying to decipher whether Bill wants more sandwiches, she is confused by his gesture of 'yes' 'no':

MOLLY: .... Yes or no?

BILL: What I'm trying to tell her is, 'Yes I'd like some more but not fish paste'. [As he is saying this, he nods his head up and down then side to side, then takes one of the sandwiches out of his pocket and puts it back on the plate.] 99

MOLLY: Where did you get that from? Stand up young man. [He remains seated. She takes him by the ear and pulls him off the chair.] Billy, stand up. Now you, empty those pockets. Billy, empty those pockets. Very well, young man. [Diving her hand into his pocket.] Oh my God. Oooh. [Pulling out several sandwiches stuck together] What are these? [He sits.]

Stand up! What do you mean by this? You been saving these for them bloody gulls, haven't you? [34]

It seems fitting that Billy's attempts to sabotage the monotony of daily fish paste, loathed by Billy though apparently savoured by the seagulls, should return the fish paste to the sea.

The codes and taboos surrounding food in everyday life extend their influence to the domain of the stage. The reviewer of the Riverina Theatre Company's 1987 production of Gu II s is disturbed by what he/she perceives to be inappropriate handling of food (and in generally acceptable hygienic terms she is justified):

These may be a matter of taste but stage business that bothered was: handling urine soaked pyjamas and then peeling potatoes and making tea without washing hands and on both occasions that I saw the play referring to several beans on the floor as 'one' .1 6

This reviewer's response clearly shows the tenacity of the link between the object on stage and the degree of signification. Bill's pyjamas in fact would not have been urine-soaked; however in the action he has wet his pyjamas during Dan's visit and makes noises to indicate to Frances that she has not changed his pants. She then has to help him take _his 'wet' pants off and put clean ones on again [15-16]. Such are the taboos regarding the mixing of excreta and food, however, that the costume pyjamas have acquired attributes they do not have in actuality, precisely because of the way they are coded on stage in relation to the proximity to food and its preparation.

16 Santmyers, Sandy. The Leader. 19.8.87. 100

Late in the play Molly's death changes previous care arrangements and precipitates a turning point. Prior to this, Frances declines Dan's offer of marriage, thereby placing Bill's welfare before her own chance of securing a mate. Dan's offer is complicated by the fact that he was the driver in the accident which left Bill brain damaged, and compromised by Dan's insistence that Bill must go into an institution if they marry. The refusal is demanded by her sense of familial obligation, but her anguish at lost youth and missed opportunity is palpable in her despairing collapse over the roast dinner in Act Two.

With food as the focus, Robert Hewett creates tension in the build up to this moment, first with Dan's departure without dinner and then Molly's attack on Frances for throwing away her life on a grown up with "the brain of a kid"[47]. Frances orders Bill to bed without dinner as punishment for shop-lifting[45], then, in an atmosphere of increasingly complex cross-currents during which Frances continues to prepare the roast dinner, Dan ·decides to leave without dinner on the pretext that it's a long drive to his home. Molly is criticising Bill's behaviour and Frances' handling of it, and at the same time urging Dan to stay for the roast dinner. Molly aggravates the situation by interrogating Frances about her unwise rejection of Dan. Dan's final line, "I have dinner waiting for me at home"[46] - the home being that of his wife and children - is a doubly hurtful reminder to Frances because she could have been his 'home' had she been able to decide on a life with Dan and without Bill.

After Dan's and Molly's departure, Bill, in a well-timed piece of damage control, presents Frances with a set of gaudy beads [50]. She softens, says her goodnights to Bill, then moves back to the kitchen area. Frances takes the leg of lamb from the table: "Cold lamb for the next week." With that it falls from her hands. She sits and "finally breaks down" [SO, 50]. The spoiled roast dinner, especially the action of the lamb falling from her hands, symbolises lost opportunities, the loss of an envisaged life, and also signifies in particular the futility and wastefulness of her domestic labour. 10 1

When food is deliberately destroyed or defiled the product of work and effort is spurned, a basic social contract between preparer and eater is transgressed:

In a family the husband contributes food and the wife prepares it for him. The fact that he habitually eats what she has prepared constitutes the strongest link between them. Family life is closest where its members frequently eat together ...... The more often and the more regularly it recurs, the more those who thus eat together feel themselves to be a family. To be accepted at the family table amounts almost to being accepted into the family. 17

While it is true that many men now cook for women and/or families, that recent development is not in evidence in the plays, so the comments above stand as applicable. When this strongest of all possible links is perverted or rejected in some way, the person responsible is making a statement on the most fundamental level. The following examples from The Real Matilda and Byzantine Flowers disclose a strong taboo surrounding the act of spitting into food. It is therefore a potent subversive action, an action rejecting the person herself who prepared the food.

In Lissa Benyon's The Real Matilda 18 the central character delivers the story of a subjugated Turkish woman Emine straight to the audience, serving to heighten her identification with this woman whose every waking hour is monitored by her domineering husband. Emine spits in her husband's meals every day as the only possible (silent) revenge she can achieve:

She's leaning over the large serving of breakfast. She doesn't see me. She spits right on top of his fo~d, a big gob, and mixes it in a little bit. A big gob of spit. It was what she must have done last night too. She does it every day, to every meal she gives him. I know she does. Oh, it's hilarious! I'm sure all over the country, all over the world, there are women who spit secretly every day into their husband's food! But it makes me uncomfortable. I left. [17-18]

17 Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. London : Victor Gollancz, 1962 : 221. 18 Unpublished MS, 1989. 102

Spitting into food as an act of retaliation also occurs in Louis Nowra's Byzantine Flowers, 19 set on a cane farm on the north Queensland coast before, during and after World War 1. Eighteen year-old Roma is the manipulative and opportunistic Aboriginal girl/woman whose dilemma is the core of the action: should she choose her Aboriginal boyfriend and certain poverty or should she betray her origins and achieve the status, comfort and respect of a white plantation owner's wife. She chooses the latter and in the course of the play insinuates her way into the life of cane-farm owner Harris, having transformed herself from pickpocket to girlfriend of Aboriginal cane-mill worker to housemaid of widowed cane-grower to his lover, wife and ultimately widow. Her brazen survival tactics make her a tenacious and annoying character. At the stage of her upward mobility between maid and lover we are given a scene in which food conduct is once more a litmus test for power relations between Roma and long serving Aboriginal housekeeper Meg. This scene concerns the first time Roma and Harris dine together. This situates them, according to Canetti's argument, more or less as equals (as family) much to the jealousy and i,:-idignation of Meg who is furious at having to wait on the much younger parvenu Roma. Meg's disapproval and anger is so great that she spits in Roma's soup before bringing it to the table. Roma, intuiting that Meg may have carried out her earlier threat of spitting in her food, swaps the plates around, thereby getting the 'clean' food. This tricky manoeuvre means that the boss, Mr Harris, is given the fouled soup, much to Meg's horror. Acknowledging the problem in front of Harris would only publicise an action executed in the privacy of her kitchen and meant to be a silent protest against the intrusion and increasing status of Roma in the household. The cunning Roma has frustrated and disempowered the more deserving Meg_. The two women (and the audience) have knowledge of the circumstances which affords delightful comic irony to Harris's verdict of "Delicious." and Roma's reply:

She's a wonder Mr Harris. She puts special ingredients in her soup, don't you Meg [Sc.11].

19 Unpublished MS, 1990. 103

There is a variant though related exemplification of the notion of pollution and taboo in relation to the consumption of food in one of Barry Humphries early 'recreations'. Described in the chapter Russian Salad Days in his autobiography More Please, the incident involves Humphries and a can of Heinz Russian Salad:

The firm of H. J. Heinz had an excellent .product called Russian Salad. It consisted largely of diced potato in mayonnaise with a few peas and carrot chips. Surreptitiously spilt and splashed in large quantities on the pavement of a city block, it closely resembled human vomit. It was a simple and delightful recreation of mine to approach a recent deposit of salad in the guise, once again, of a tramp. Disgusted pedestrians were already giving it a very wide berth, holding their breaths and looking away with watering eyes. Not I, as I knelt beside one of the larger puddles, curdled and carrot-flecked. Drawing a spoon from my top pocket I devoured several mouthfuls, noticing out of the corner of my eye, and with some satisfaction, several people actually being sick at the spectacle.20

By veering away, holding their breaths, experiencing watery eyes and vomiting the onlookers were psychologically, physically and physiologically reacting to the idea of someone eating vomit, even though it was actually canned food being consumed. This reaction is also similar to the reviewer objecting to the peas being shelled by hands which have just touched pyjamas she believes to be urine­ soaked. Clearly these scenes have such potent impact on their audiences because of the breakage of conventions, internalised beliefs and rules associated with food-related behaviour: principally, the necessity of separating food and excreta, whether urine, spit or vomit.21

20 Humphries, Barry. More Please. London: Viking, 1992:118. 21 There is of course an important distinction arising from these examples of audience revulsion and nausea: in the case of the the Benyon and Nowra plays the audience would know that no spitting in the food actually occurs, in the case of Gulls the reviewer would know that in fact the pyjamas were clean even though she was responding to the illusion created by the realism surrounding the food elements of the play - real sandwiches, real peas, real roast. In the Barry Humphries incident the onlookers were not to know that what was being eaten was not vomit. From the point of view of the respective audiences the sequences from the plays were framed as part of a performance whereas the street incident was not so framed. 104

Interestingly in none of the instances do we actually see anybody spitting into the food (or vomiting on the footpath). The act is implied not enacted. Perhaps the playwrights (in the case of the plays) recognise that such a sequence - spitting into food by one and consumption of it by another - would be considered too abhorrent if carried out on stage. The fact that even what is known to be a simulation of the taboo act is not made visible but implied, testifies to the power of that taboo. 105

Chapter Four

FOOD RITUALS IN AUSTRALIAN DRAMA: NOSTALGIA, 1SOCIAL1 RITUALS AND DEATH.

Food is not always used as a means to exert control, to create or preempt tension. It has been demonstrated previously that the presence of food most frequently produces an atmosphere of contradictory qualities - hospitality and friendliness, tension and antagonism. It may also, however, function as a bonding medium on stage. Meals may become a geographical indicator; a fixer of regional mores, class and life-style. The way people eat together acts a social 'cement'. The establishment and practice of eating habits bring with them the creation of gastronomic icons and food rituals which bind people, for good or ill, to a certain repertoire of interactions. At its best these shared rituals can provide great cohesive energy within a community or family. I am using ritual in the sense argued by S.F. Nadel who believed that ritual can contain anything, and that any aspect of social life, any aspect of behaviour or ideology, may lend itself to ritualisation. 1

In addition, these secular rituals have in common with religious rituals repetition, stylisation and a conscious acted component. The book Secular Ritual provides a definition germane to the enactment of the rituals in the plays:

actions or symbols used are extra-ordinary themselves, or ordinary ones are used in an unusual way, a way that calls attention to them and sets them apart from other mundane uses.2

The food rituals in this chapter are mostly secular and for the most part involve ordinary actions used in an unusual way.

This thesis argues that food is implicated in so many human activities that it intersects with almost all social rituals represented in drama. The discussion of food rituals in Australian

1 Nadel, S.F. Nupe Religion: Traditional Beliefs and the Influence of Islam in a West African Chiefdom. New York: Schocken, 1970: 99. 2 Moore, Sally & Barbara Myerhof, eds. Assen/Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977: 7. 106 drama will be dealt with in three phases: 1) food in relation to nostalgia, nationality and place including informal food occasions such as barbecues and picnics: 2) compulsive food rituals; and consumerism as a kind of frenzied ingestion; 3) deeper, superstitious and primal levels of ritual vis-a-vis food.

At its simplest level food rituals in the plays can take the form either of especially strong connections between eater and eaten in terms of prior associations, or repeated consumption of a particular food in connection with a special context or place. Food is often used by playwrights to locate and fix a character's geographic (and therefore gastronomic) origins and their relative sense of belonging or alienation in their adopted place. A character's nostalgia may be disclosed by their responses to, and memories of, food. Food crystallises and concretises nostalgia. Susan Stewart sees memory as a mediating link between objects such as photographs and souvenirs and their referents, and "it is in this gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire a rises". 3 I would argue that food memories also can create a mediating link productive of nostalgic desire. Food can readily be the catalyst for memories of place and past. Nostalgia for a prior moment in time/place is frequently evoked by smells or tastes of, or longings for, a favourite food. John Blum's notion of food as a metaphor for home is applicable here. 4 With reference to certain plays, I suggest this notion of the linking capability of memory applies to the gap between the 'old' or 'home' foods in the 'new' place and the perceived reclamation of the ethos, values and customs of the place of origin.

Mary Gage in The New Life5 chooses food nostalgia as one focus for the problems of a couple (the wife in particular) dislocated

3 Referred to by Sneja Gunew in "Home and Away: Nostalgia in Australian (Migrant) Writing." Islands in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture. Ed. Paul Foss. Sydney: Pluto, 1988: 37. 4 John Blum, in V Was For Victory, offers John Hershey's recounting of asking a group of soldiers at Guadalcanal what they were fighting for. After a long thoughtful pause one of them said, to the others, "Jesus, what I'd give for a piece of blueberry pie." (quoted in E.D.Potts & A Potts. Yanks Down Under 1941-45. Melbourne: OUP, 1985: 208). 5 Sydney: Currency, 1977. 107

from her English lifestyle and unable to make the adjustments necessary for a harmonious life in Australia. Betty in the play has not adapted to her new country. A symptom of her maladjustment is her chronic agrophobia and her insistence on living a fantasy through the radio DJ Johnnie. William tries hard to make her feel at home, but the home Betty wants is England, not Australia. Her refusal or inability to embrace a new life is nowhere more apparent than in her determination to continue to cook her traditional 'home country' favourites:

BETTY: Not pizza. Pie. WILLIAM: Aha. Pie! BETTY: (proudly) Steak and kidney. WILLIAM: Just what I feel like. Too busy to eat all day. BETTY: I should think you were. Look at you! WILLIAM: Nice bit of the old steak and kid. (11]

A recent Australian film adaptation of Richard Barrett's play The Heartbreak Kid6 gives prominence to the capacity of food rituals to signify the values, customs and beliefs of the country of origin. Food scenes in the form of pre-wedding family dinners were largely responsible for evoking the strong traditional (and for Christine/'Pappa', ultimately sexist and restricting) values of the older and conservative Greek characters, Pappa's mother, father, uncle and husband-to-be.

Incidents involving daily food rituals often provide humour, as well as evoking place and time period. Part of the function of food in Nick Enright's St James lnfirmary7 is to locate the play as a 'period piece' - in a boarding school in Australia in the 1960s, with the food tastes of that time still defiantly Anglo-Saxon.

The action of the play takes place over one week in October 1967, at St James College, a Catholic boarding school on an island in a river. At the centre of the play is Dominic, wrestling with his

6 The Heartbreak Kid, 1993, directed by Michael Jenkins, with Claudia Karvan as 'Pappa' and Alex Dimitriades as Nick. 7 Sydney: Currency, 1993. Seen originally as St James Infirmary Blue. NIDA, May 1990. 108

conscience (and his pomposity and selfishness in the NIDA production) over the issue of military conscription. Recovering from an accident, he is in the infirmary, in the care of the new young matron (Jenny), the widow of a brilliant ex-scholar of the school, a doctor killed on duty in Vietnam. In the play the comedy arises from the pattern and routine provided by the relentlessly regular and unappetising meals proffered by Norma who brings the self-indulgent 'principled' main character his quite inedible meals in the infirmary. Norma is a pragmatic, amusing woman who comes in and out of the play to deliver the meals to the infirmary and generally help around the place. There are several other characters - Father D'Arcy, Dominic's sister and a couple of his peers - however they visit the infirmary rather than being in residence there.

The play has serious concerns: young people caught up in an arbitrary call-up system, whether one should compromise one's art for financial assistance and institutional forgiveness. Much of the humour in the play arises from incidents relating to food, in particular the awfulness of boarding school food. The most consistent running joke calls on an appreciation of boarding school food of the period. Even Norma who serves the food agrees it's best avoided. As she says to Jenny, the newly arrived matron, who she picks for "a choosy eater anyway", "I could bring you meals down but I wouldn't recommend it" [5] In one scene, in order to watch the passing band from the infirmary window, Dominic tries to get out of bed, knocking his tray onto the floor as he does so:

DOMINIC: Shit. (Jenny appears) JENNY: What was that? DOMINIC: I lost my dinner. JENNY: Did you vomit again? DOMINIC: Give me a chance. I hadn't eaten. Jenny cleans up the food . [21]

Other food incidents reveal the narrow culinary attitudes of the time. Anxious to impress the vegetarian matron that he does not lack sophistication, Dominic defensively replies to her offer of 109

cheese as a substitute for the lost dinner, "You're not the first vegetarian I've met." [32) Jenny's withering rejoinder, "What an interesting life you've led", earned instant response from the audience as a comment on the bohemian and exotic associations surrounding vegetarianism in the sixties. Repeatedly action and dialogue related to food injects a sharpness and liveliness into a play which at times suffers from an unlikably arrogant young central character.

The notion of 'food as place' is most clearly seen in plays segmented by location shifts. The changing attitudes to food may be perceptible as a result of a memory of a former place or the immediate felt experience of present place. Two plays which incorporate food in this manner are David Williamson's Travelling North 8 (discussed later) and Suzanne Spunner's Dragged Screaming to Paradise (1989); both plays take their characters on a far north odyssey. The mythical lure of the far north of Australia rewards its pilgrims with a somewhat more complex and mixed reality than is anticipated.

Writing Dragged Screaming to Paradise was Suzanne Spunner's way of dealing with her fear of moving from Melbourne to Darwin, but by the time she had written it things had changed: "Darwin had seduced me and I had fallen in love with the place. "9 The one­ woman play deals with the trials and tribulations of a recent emigre to the Top End, a contemporary woman with an independent life and work of her own who, with the greatest misgivings, follows her husband to his challenging and interesting new · job opportunity. In the playwright's words: "among other things it (the play) is about memory and the reluctance to break with the past" .1 o

Spunner's character trades in much to make the move but one of the more painful sacrifices is her loss of the cosmopolitan inner-city food delights of Melbourne - crusty Italian rolls and baguettes - in return for the smell (and taste) of Rid, the heat and seafood

8 Sydney: Currency, 1980. 9 Beach, Cherie. "Suzanne Screams with Laughter." Sunday Territorlan. March 11, 1990: 36. 1O Writer's personal letter from the playwright, Dec. 4, 1989. l l 0

barbecues. The generic 'she' is presented with advice and judgements, solicited and otherwise, regarding her husband's planned move to Darwin. Her friends and relatives make well­ intentioned efforts to boost her confidence about the wisdom of the move. Her sister reminds her of the labour-saving advantages of such an existence: she won't have to cook, she'll have barbecues all the time and eat prawns every night.[6] Here again, it is significant that this comment is directed to the 'she', not the 'he', that this perceived life-style change will suddenly transform the woman's domestic workload. The reality doesn't quite match the advance publicity. Everything moulds including the bread. She finds herself fantasising about a smorgasbord of Melbourne breads:

I dream of crusty plaited Italian rolls, real baguettes, crisp on the outside, cottonwool soft on the inside, or Choller laquered golden and dotted with toasted sesame seeds or real Rye loaves. Everything you eat tastes of your fridge and is wet and claggy. [31]

If memories of specific food experiences form the basis of a nostalgic identification between characters and the place of consumption then the absence or deprivation of those foods may cause a sense of alienation from a place unable to provide a similar food experience. The woman in Dragged Screaming tries to acquire her favourite foods, but is defeated:

Someone I met told me you could even get local Ricotta, but I never found it.[26]

Similarly, one of the causes of alienation for the character of the Greek mother in Hannie Rayson's Mary 11 is the fact that when she moves away from Richmond to the more prestigious (and less 'ethnic') suburb she is unable to purchase traditional Greek ingredients.

The women in Tes Lyssiotis' play The Forty Lounge Cafe12 also work with food, serve food, and are delineated as migrant women

11 Montmorency: Yackandandah, 1985. 12 Sydney: Currency, in association with Playbox Theatre, 1990. l l l

belonging to two cultures. 13 The Forty Lounge Cafe deals directly with the experiences of the playwright's mother:

alternating between the eponymous fish and chip shop in Horsham in the Wimmera district of Victoria, where Elefteria works with her sister-in-law Sonia under the friendly support of Head waitress and ex-dancer Mrs Wick; flashbacks to Elefteria's childhood and adolescence in Greece; and scenes in the present with her daughter Toula.14

The play concentrates on four Greek girls/women, the central character Elefteria having been sent first to an orphanage when food was scarce as a girl and then later, in 1949, to Australia as a proxy bride. She arrives in Horsham (for the Take Away Theatre company's production at the Fig Tree Theatre, Kensington, it was Dubbo) to marry a stranger and have his children. She works alongside her sister-in-law Sonia in the cafe. The play alternates between Horsham/Dubbo and Kythera. The forty lounge cafe of the title, named for its seating capacity, is the principal location throughout the play; food is ordered, prepared and served, though never naturalistically. The cafe rituals and the rhythms of ordering and serving food are 'constants'. Reviewing the Take Away Theatre's production of the play (1993) Pam Payne notes the stylised cafe sequences involving Ellie, Sonia and Mrs Wick who perform "a kind of Greek chorus commentary on the business of waitressing."15 A Greek chorus perhaps, but with highly individualised and differentiated personae. With utterly different attitudes to their work in the cafe and acquisition of the language, the cultural gaps between them were made poignantly · yet humorously obvious in this production via an inspired routine with a tea towel each as their only props. The confidence, grace and sassiness with which they dealt with the catchy but contained rhythmic routine transmitted information about the three women in excess of its discrete dynamic constituents.

13 The central family in the playwright's earlier play A White Sports Coat also ran a country cafe in Horsham after their arrival (from Greece) in Australia. 14 Mitchell, Tony. Australasian Drama Studies Number 17, Oct. 1990: 230-1. 15 Payne, Pam. Sun Herald. Jan. 31, 1993. This production was directed by Christine Totos, with non-professional actors, for Carnivale 1993. l l 2

Apart from the activities surrounding the serving of food, other scenes feature food in a less stylised and more sensuous manner. In a scene in the orphanage (Scene Six) the girls are sitting on their beds in their underwear practising their singing and playing a spinning game. They attack a bag of chocolates with great eagerness. The joyful sensuality of consuming the chocolates and eating the toothpaste straight from the tube leads into a more general display of physicality and friendly intimacy as Eleni offers Stavroula chewing gum out of her mouth. In the Take Away Theatre's performance the actors concentrated on the chocolates, exchanging chocolates from mouth to mouth and savouring the other's sweet. This lolly swapping suggested intimacy and hunger of a more pervasive kind. The other incident involving real food occurred in Act Two at Toula's birthday party. Toula surprised and amused the audience for this particular production by continuing to stuff excessive quantities of cream cake into her mouth while simultaneously speaking at top speed. In addition to the humour, the exhib1tionistic cramming of the cream cake signified a defiance and rebelliousness against her mother's earnestness and traditional values.

In Shop Routine Two (Act One, Scene 10), a scene that has its own distinctive bright and breezy music (the intro . to a fifties radio serial), Sonia, Mrs Wick and Elefteria juggle the orders and the meals. Tony Mitchell's assertion that the text of this play is a barely adequate substitute for the performance 16 has particular relevance to this scene: it reads more like a shopping list than a playable scene. In performance it depends entirely on the ritualistic rhythms, body contact and avoidance, work mannerisms and timing between the actors working together in this interdependent fashion. This is especially the case since no actual food appears on stage:

MRS WICK: Steakn' eggs. Clear table one and four. SONIA: Two lemon squashes. Box James Chocolates. MRS WICK: This weather's great for the crops. Morning Mr Trounce, Mr Farmer. SONIA: Two mixed grill. Pavlo?

16 Mitchell: 231. 1 1 3

MRS WICK. Steakn' eggs again. Tea trays ready Ellie? ELEFTERIA: [Do you want a Jolly?]* SONIA: Pavlo? Pavlo? [Where is he?J*17 MRS WICK: Butter some more bread. Butterfish and chips for four. SONIA: Time for your pills. MRS WICK: Steakn' eggs again for two, one underdone, butterfish .... two tomatoes on that, single steak please ... .fish for three .... that's five fish now.[16]

It should be observed here that it is not uncommon for food to be integral to a scene but not actually appear on stage. Abstractions of food may illumine ideas attaching to food in relation to its female preparers and consumers. Although no actual food appears on stage, nonetheless food may be signified via the actors' incarnations of eating, dining or food handling as in Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner (Chapter Two) and in the shop scenes of the play under present discussion. In fact, many productions of plays not discussed in this thesis have chosen to make just such a creative virtue out of an absence of food by highlighting real cutlery, crockery and the mannerisms and timing of eating, for instance, the 1993 Theatre de Complicite/Royal National Theatre Co-production of The Street of Crocodiles, and the 1979 Sydney Theatre Company production of Patrick White's A Cheery Soul [See plate (e)].

Further stylised food scenes in The Forty Lounge Cafe follow; in Act One, Scenes 18 and 20 and in Act Two, Scenes 1 and 4. These cafe scenes have a cumulative effect; they revolve around regular customers, regular orders. The dialogue reveals customer preferences, so that we recognise who is in the shop by what is being ordered: "The usual Mr Bonwick?" [30] The technique of Elefteria or Sonia or Mrs Wick calling the orders also 'populates' the shop with customers and business without actors. The orders also sometimes convey a sense of the time of the year, giving a sense of continuity and the passage of time:

Two boxes James Chocolates for Mothers Day Mr Trounce? [31]

17 * These lines are in Greek in the text, however my word processor is unable to reproduce the Greek alphabet.

Miss Miss

ca. ca.

i

as as

Ga

Nevin Nevin

1979. 1979.

Branco Branco

Robin Robin

Company, Company,

Custance. Custance.

Mr Mr

Custance, Custance,

Photographer: Photographer:

as as

Theatre Theatre

Mrs Mrs

as as

Sydney Sydney

Carroll Carroll

Sharman. Sharman.

Jim Jim

Bishop Bishop

Peter Peter

White. White.

by by

Pat Pat

and and

R: R:

Patrick Patrick

to to

Directed Directed

Docker Docker

by by

L L

Soul Soul

Cheery Cheery

A A

e) e) ( ( 114

The ritual nature of these scenes is confirmed by their stylisation and repetition, and in particular by the inclusion of ordinary actions used in an unusual way. Unusual in the sense that the scenes call for choreography to convey the patterns and rhythms of food handling, preparation and service, so they are apt to take on a dance-like as opposed to a behaviourally realistic form. These characteristics of the play's dramatic style recall the qualities of secular rituals defined earlier in the chapter. In each case the non­ naturalistic food scenes are driven by the stylisation of the mechanics and rhythms of food preparation and cafe life. The technique dramatises the routine, the repetition of food preparation, the work without the grease and mess as it were. The absence of real food however does not diminish the sense of the tiring repetitive nature of the work. The music works in counterpoint to the scenes; the music, perky, good spirited and bubbly, opens these scenes and often we are taken behind the scenes to the back of the shop where the women are exhausted. The rituals of service and preparation associated with food are foregrounded in relation to gender by the single gender play which, as Michelene Wandor observes, though unrepresentative of conditions in the world, does provide "an imaginative opportunity to explore the nature of the gendered perspective (male or female) without the complexities and displacements of the 'mixed' play." 18

Nostalgic desire in The Forty Lounge Cafe is not only experienced by the migrant women. Australian-born Mrs Wick in a sense lives as wistfully in the past as does Elefteria (though not as mournfully; the former hankers for the Tivoli, the Pride of Erin and toe dancing, the latter for her icon-replica Panagia Mertithyotisa (Madonna of the Myrtles) and Andoni (her true love).

A grasp of the language invests the speaker with authority and confidence. In Shop Routine One Elefteria's difficulties with English are conveyed by her pronunciation of the food orders in the cafe ("Sorsiges and chipya. Fridays too much busy"), and contrasted

18 Wandor, Michelena. Carry on Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics. London: Methuen, 1986: 69. I I 5 with her total ease with the Greek dialogue of the bilingual text. Her fear of the new language is transmitted by her reluctance to speak the food orders confidently. In contrast Sonia has taken up the challenge of the cafe environment. For her, learning the food, learning the language of the cafe, constituted the means and reason for learning the language. Sonia several times criticises Elefteria for not using English in the cafe. Both implicitly and explicitly, Sonia pressures Elefteria to erase the 'alien' language from the cafeteria environment. 19 Elefteria is unwilling to relinquish her first language. This linguistic atavism is perceived by Sonia as stubborn and transgressive of the demands of her new environment. Sonia's repeated insistence that 'Ellie' speak English in the cafe doubly disempowers Elefteria - she hesitates at giving the food orders in English which makes her more conspicuous, and she is seen as failing to learn the new language which would make her more efficient in her work environment. 2 0

* * * * * * * * *

A number of leisure social rituals in plays are constructed around food. These social rituals - the picnic, the barbecue, the alfresco meal - will be explored in relation to Martello Towers, Dragged Screaming to Paradise, Travelling North, Upside Down at the Bottom of the World and Big River. These food rituals take on a less structured form, involving a more informal repertoire of social gestures, associated linguistic mannerisms and behavioural imperatives.

Outdoor meals establish a closer than usual continuity between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the eater and the eaten. It is arguable that their placement and the conscious relaxation of formal dining customs qualify these activities for inclusion as liminoid rituals as defined by Victor Turner in Process,

19 In the previously cited article on nostalgia in Australian migrant writing Sneja Gunew poses the question "What happens to the other prior language attached to a specific culture? Is the first language subsequently rendered alien, shameful, transgressive ... ? Gunew: 37. 20 The play does not explicitly provide the reasons for her inability to become proficient in English but suggests a combination of her lack of flexibility, fear of the new, and reluctance to suppress her original langauge. l 16

Performance and Pilgrimage.21 Turner's notion of liminoid (as distinct from liminal) phenomena would appear to accommodate activities such as the picnic, the barbecue and alfresco meals. Liminoid phenomena are characteristically individual products though they may have collective effects. They are not cyclical but continuously generated, though in the times and places apart from work settings assigned to leisure activities.22 Turner declares certain spaces permanent liminoid settings and spaces, for instance pubs, bars, and some cafes. His view is that the liminoid is felt to be freer than the liminal, a matter of choice not obligation. 23 Alfresco, picnic and barbecue sites surely qualify as liminoid spaces since they are neither totally inside nor totally outside, neither totally domestic nor totally wild. They take place at the border zones of nature and culture.

Alex Buzo's Martello Towers 24 is set in a liminoid zone both spatially and temporally - a smart Pittwater weekender over an Easter weekend. Martello Towers constitutes for the mismatched gathering a "refuge from the harsh realities of ordinary living"2 5 according to Leonard Radie, and in this environment Edward Martello proposes that they get "stuck into the cold dry white, the sacrifical cabanossi and Jennifer's coffee al dente and postpone territorial imperatives till later" .26 {See illustration [f])

Later, the desire to gather nature's bounty, become expansive and remove inhibitions is explicit in Vivien's proposal of an excursion up river:

VIVIEN: ... Look, why don't we take the boat up river with an esky full of booze and knock off a few oyster leases. Don't worry about the owners catching us because I can swear in Italian. We could take a thermos full of mornay sauce and get stoned and pissed and admire the scenery. [30]

2 1 New Delhi: Concept, 1979. 22 Turner: 53. 23 Turner: 54. 24 Sydney: Currency, 1976. 25 Radie: 136. 26 Buzo: 24.

Martello, Martello,

1976. 1976.

Jennifer Jennifer

as as

Parker. Parker.

Finn Finn

Company, Company,

David David

Janice Janice

Theatre Theatre

Press) Press)

Photographer: Photographer:

Martello, Martello,

Melbourne Melbourne

Berg. Berg.

Edward Edward

Buzo. Buzo.

Currency Currency

Ice Ice

as as

as as

Alex Alex

by by

courtesy courtesy

Curtin Curtin

Allen Allen

Towers Towers

(Photo (Photo

Peter Peter

John John

R: R:

to to

L L

Martello Martello (f) (f) 11 7

Not everyone, though, is prepared to take the risk of foraging outdoors. Jennifer resists the project, asking "Must we all go on this voyage?"[30]. The perils associated with gathering food out in nature and bringing home "beautiful big oysters" have to be weighed up against the less desirable but safer option of settling for the 'fruits' of technology, "tinned herrings for dinner" .[31]

Particular ritual foodways in certain communities become the dominant form of social contact. One such 'obligatory' gastronomic site is the ubiquitous icon of the Australian barbecue. The barbecue as prescribed social and culinary ritual is a feature of Travelling North and Dragged Screaming to Paradise, both set in the north (Queensland/Tweed Heads and Northern Territory respectively). The 'she' in Spunner's play Dragged Screaming to Paradise is surprised to encounter the comforting and reassuring side of this far north cultural institution:

People are friendly and hospitable. They ask us to their parties, to swim in their pools, to have dinner, have lunch, and always we sit around outside, or under the house, keeping vigil beside the barbeque. The smell of cooked meat and charcoal hangs in the still, warm air. They pass around Rid and stubbie coolers.

In Dragged Screaming to Paradise the alfresco dining ritual becomes the pattern. The loosening of more formal dining regulations is associated with the movement to a particular place, and the establishment of a more relaxed, though no less codified, set of rules.

Likewise in Travelling North, the prescribed initiation into local outdoor eating practice is via the barbecue. Frances and Frank's environment is not considered complete without a barbecue:

FREDDY: You've got to have a barbecue, Frank. Everyone does up here. It's part of the outdoor living. [36]

So, well-meaning neighbour Freddy promises to build a barbecue in the garden of Frank and Frances' Far North Queensland cottage 'idyll'. The prospect of Freddy's barbecue brings on one of Frank's angina attacks.[36] Freddy persists and, in Act 2 Scene 3, barbecues meat on the newly completed edifice. Ultimately, Freddy's gift of I I 8

the barbecue provides a cohesive moment for the characters, even for Frank who, against his inclinations, is mollified and seduced by the smell of burning meat. The barbecue, what Philip Parsons calls the central dramatic image in the play,27 certainly dominated the set of the Nimrod Theatre production (1979). Even though the nlarge, mis-shapen eyesore"[42] (See illustration [g]) is a source of amazement to Frank and Frances and amusement for the audience, it is recognised as the altar for a sacred Australian ritual. Francis and Frank temper their response to it because of its iconic significance:

FRANK: Frances and I feel it's got a strange haunting aura about it, Freddy. There's something of the Aztec, or perhaps it's Druid; we're not quite sure, but whatever it is we think it has enormous potential as the focal point for a new religion. [43]

Another style of meal that encapsulates ritual, a change of location, and a break with routine is the picnic. Margaret Visser contends that a good picnic is particularly cherished because it is "a thrilling reversal of normal rules. "28 Although a very English custom, in connection with Australia the habit of the picnic may be seen to grow out of the reliance on rations. Michael Symons, in his book One Continuous Picnic, advances the theory that because Australia, from the time of European settlement, was built on food sent on ships our national perception of food was of imported food rather than of produce arising from the bountiful local earth. From these beginnings the idea of living on rations became firmly embedded in the national psyche. 29 Picnics have a particular Australian application - a relationship between the 'pot luck' or 'bring a plate' meal and the later 'everyone eats out of doors' meal. Symons advances the theory that the former derived from the ration mentality brought about by the shortage of familiar food in the newly settled colony. The playwrights have explored this attitude to food, wittingly or unwittingly, by the mere fact that so

27 Introduction. Travelling North Sydney: Currency, 1980, xiii. 28 Visser Rituals of Dinner: 151. 2 9 Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: The History of Eating in Australia. Adelaide: Duck Press, 1982. !__r_a_v_e_l_l_i_n~g.,____N~o~r~t.:..c..;_h by David Williamson. Nimrod Theatre Company, 1979. (g ) L to R: Graham Rouse as Freddy Wicks and Carol Raye as Frances. Directed by John Bell. Photoqrapher: Peter Holderness. I I 9

often in Australian plays picnics, hampers or packed food is a feature.

A picnic lunch provides a focal scene in David Allen's Upside Down at the Bottom of the World.30 Set in Thirroul, NSW, it captures English novelist D.H.Lawrence's time in Australia in 1922, his relationship with his wife Frieda and their new home. Australia is represented by a fictionalised pair,31 neighbours Jack and Victoria, who befriend them and take them on the picnic. The environment makes a palpable difference to the characters' behaviour: restraints are loosened and inhibitions dropped.32 The outdoors, too, has an impact on the proxemics of the four: "Frieda settles to drink with Jack. Lawrence and Victoria move away." [SD, 41]

During the picnic scene, with the proximity to nature, Lawrence becomes more conscious than ever of Frieda's earthiness and sexuality. His fear of being swallowed up by her is first evident from his teasing her of being capable of swallowing a python.(36] Then his obsession with Frieda's voracious female sexuality grows:

Sex makes her destructive. To me. She devours me.[42]

As well, repeated reference to a gobbling shark [5,57,61] confirms Lawrence's pervasive woman fear. As Susan Bordo notes, most cultural expressions of the "fear of woman-as-too-much" revolve around her sexuality and are "strikingly full of eating and hungering metaphors. "33 In the intense atmosphere of the Lawrence picnic, the food provided - sandwiches, lamingtons, beer and lemonade - seems positively wholesome.

30 Richmond: Heinemann, 1981. 31 Radie, Leonard. The State of Play: The Revolution in the Australian Theatre Since the 1960s. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1991: 142. 32 This was true of the 1979 Nimrod Theatre production directed by Neil Armfield, with Barry Otto as Lawrence, Kerry Walker as Frieda, Paul Bertram as Jack and Sally Cahill as Victoria. 33 Bordo, Susan. "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture." Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Eds. Irene Diamond & Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988: 106. 120

Catering for such excursions can sometimes cause anxiety. Olivia in Alex Buzo's Big River3 4 is at pains to ensure that the picnic party is adequately provided for. Spectres of early explorers who perished may be detected in her thoroughness. Slight variants only on the original convict ration staples - beef, flour (in the form of bread) and tea - are the basic constituents of the Hindmarsh family's hamper:

[Olivia comes in from the kitchen carrying a hamper] OLIVIA: Oh, you're all here. IVY: Yes, Liwie.

OLIVIA: I've got sandwiches - chicken and beef - and some wine and tea - it's made up so we won't have to use any of that dirty hot water from the boat - and fruit and do we need some raisins? No? No? [36]

In the same way that the early women settlers, longing for the reassurance of the familiar, used to write back to England for favourite jams and hams, Olivia is revealing a similar insecurity about what will await them at journey's end when she safeguards against having to drink "that dirty water from the boat". Instead of counting the number of people about to go on the excursion she reminds herself of the amount of food prepared:

OLIVIA: Now we've got twenty-four sandwiches and eight mugs. MONICA: You said you were going to count us. [37]

This little muddle of Olivia's discloses her nervousness and anxiety over whether she has packed enough food, a nervousness that is evident also in her uncertainty about whether to pack raisins.

* * * * * * * * *

Compulsive food rituals, as distinct from healthy eating, are often a shorthand way of communicating a character's state of being to the audience. The obsessive nature of the food ritual may define the character as somehow different or apart from the other characters. Compulsive food behaviours as they relate particularly to women's

34 Sydney: Currency, 1985. I 2 I

self-definition and social construction will be treated in detail in Chapter Five. Other compulsive food rituals will be discussed now with reference to Travelling North and Light Refreshments.

The main characters in Travelling North, Frank and Frances, are drawn to the far north of Queensland. Travelling North charts the journey to the ultimately tolerant love two mature people achieve against the odds of family interference, illness and the inelasticity of rigidifying habits. Williamson alerts us to the significance of place and ambience in Travelling North in the opening stage directions: "Queensland, late afternoon. The atmosphere is warm and tropical. "[5] Peter Fitzpatrick makes the distinction between a specific, functional sense of place and a mythic sense of place in Williamson's plays, the latter being best exemplified by Travelling North. 3 5 Significantly, there is through the play always a tension between the mythic associations of the place and what imperfect, cranky lives the characters live out there. Even though the atmosphere is warmer and there is promise of a more spiritual, harmonious, tranquil lifestyle, it is here (away from the grasp of Frances' daughters Helen and Sophie) that Frank becomes more and more demanding, self-absorbed and neurotic about medications, diet and vitamins. The place does not confer automatic peace of mind on its inhabitants as is obvious from Saul, Freddy, Frances and most especially Frank. Their imperfections take many forms: disease, bigotry, restlessness, guilt, possessiveness and compulsive behaviour.

Throughout the course of the thirty-three scenes that make up Travelling North the audience is gradually acquainted with Frank's obsession with diet and vitamin intake as it grows to suffocating dimensions. Diplomacy and timing are not Frank's strong points as his announcement while Freddy is christening the barbecue illustrates:

I've read all I can on this cholesterol business and the circumstantial evidence seems pretty strong, so I'm cutting out all meat. [43]

35 Fitzpatrick, Peter. "Styles of Love: New Directions in David Williamson." (1986) Contemporary Australian Drama. Revised Edition. Ed. Peter Holloway. Sydney: Currency, 1987: 422. I 2 2

However, the meat smells so good that he decides to wait till tomorrow to convert to vegetarianism. Frank then instructs Frances on his proposed diet, overturning his earlier assurance that she is his companion and not his slave[8]:

Apparently you can eat very well without meat with a little forethought and preparation. I'll get you a vegetarian cooking manual. Oh, and this theory that large doses of Vitamin E are beneficial seems worth a try. I'll put that on your shopping list for tomorrow ... [43-44]

Freddy's assessment - "He takes his illness pretty seriously, doesn't he?" [44) - is understatement itself. The instructions soon begin to sound like orders as Frank expects his every dietary whim to be catered to by Frances, and all at discount prices too. On her return from one of many shopping expeditions [Act Two, Scene Eleven], he quizzes her first on the prices she paid for the various ' health foods and then on whether she has managed to buy every item. He adopts a devotion to the rituals of dietary purity with an uncompromising fanaticism:

FRANK: Did they get in the bran and the brewer's yeast? FRANCES: Yes. FRANK: Did you get the vitamin 8 tablets? FRANCES: Yes, they're there. FRANK: The lentils and the leeks? FRANCES: Yes. FRANK: The alfalfa and seaweed? FRANCES: Yes, yes. I got everything. FRANK: (looking at his watch) It's time for my Promite. FRANCES: I've just put the kettle on. FRANK: I've been reading this diet book and it appears it's much better to shred the carrots. You release about seventeen percent more of the vitamins that way. My dear are you listening? [67]

This exchange captures his escalating demands. For all Frank's rather glib earlier promises about refusing to enslave Frances, the balance of domestic labour in the relationship (and in particular the demands associated with Frank's adherence to his self-devised l 2 3

dietary regime) tilts heavily toward Frances as the play progresses. Frank's obsessive health food and vitamin regime is portrayed as a ritual intended to confer a will-to-life ascendance over his heart condition. The self-absorption of Frank's ritual practice blinds him to an awareness of its impact on Frances.

Apart from food consumption, some food habits become so ingrained that they assume the status of a personal ritual. In Light Refreshments it is not until the women subject their personal food preparation rituals to the scrutiny of the other women that they become conscious of how inflexible and systematised their methods are. When asked to help with the sandwiches, elderly Enid imparts her sandwich-making technique:

Well first of all you should put down a tea-towel then the bread board so that you can collect all the crumbs after you cut them. I always cut them this way in triangles, alternating the colour of the bread. ls that alright? [19]

Enid understands the sensitivity of such ritualised practices. She gives lip service to the fact that refusal to recognise another's 'system' may cause offence:

Some people get really upset if things aren't done the way they're used to.[20]

Enid's demonstration of her idiosyncratic way of preparing and cutting sandwiches assumes comic proportions in performance. The humour arises out of the gap between Enid's conviction about the rightness of her method, her defensiveness, and the other women's indifference to the niceties of sandwich cutting: 3 6

ENID: Well if you don't want the sandwiches this way why don't you just say so. It's no skin off my nose. PAT: Enid That's not what I'm saying.[20] (Long pause as the women work away)

36 Because the production relies on simultaneous food preparation, conversational and physical interaction throughout the entire performance a meaningful reading of the scenes is realised only in real performance time with real food. This becomes clear after a comparison of the script and the video documentation of the performance both of which were made available to me by Julie Day. 124

* * * * * * * * *

The modern endemic disease of consumerism is given stark expression in the familiar graffiti CONSUME AND DIE. Film director Peter Greenaway connects the impulses behind rampant consumerism and cannibalism when he grimly articulates his prognosis for modern consumer society:

There is a way in which the ultimate obscenity of the consumer society, when we have eaten up everything, is that we turn and eat up one another.37

In Greenaway's film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover that idea is exploited in ironical but repulsively literal fashion; in a play such as Robert Hewett's The Adman 38 we get a less literal, comic analogue of this cannibalistic tendency of modern society. Appositely, in this connection, John Larkin describes the advertising office set as a place resembling "some sort of sterile, post-modernist, neo-cannibal cage, in which the inmates gather daily for the ritual of dreaming up new-account schemes, and scoring off each other. "39

Robert Hewett's The Adman deals with the dog-eat-dog advertising world including the construction of desires, and jaded appetites. The tag for the title and the graphics of the inside cover of the published text declare the values of advertising, consumption and competitiveness: "The dog-eat-dog world of modern advertising". The image is of two adversarial dogs whose most prominent features are their sharp jagged snapping teeth. (See illustration [h]) Advertising presumes and makes a virtue of perpetual novelty, built-in obsolescence and disposability, and in The Adman these ethics are aggressively played out as the younger breed unconscionably usurps the position of the preceding generation of story board kings and jingle writers.

37 Cinema Papers No 78, March 1990 : 40 38 Sydney: Currency, in association with Playbox Theatre, 1991. 39 Sunday Age 28.7.91. The Adman

"The dog-eat-dog world of modern advertising"

Current Theatre Series published by Currency Press, Sydney in association with Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne

( h) 125

Throwaway food in throwaway containers appears again and again, half-eaten, handled, thrown around, left uneaten. Robert Hewett's script specifies a polystyrene cup for Tess's tea [66], and fittingly the Playbox Theatre Company production40 in general did not utilise any food plate, container or drink cup that could be used more than once. Permanence and durability is the enemy of advertising, an industry premised on the need to continually create more and more consumers to consume more and more promiscuously. The play is a comic critique of this insatiable industry.

Apprehensive at the youth dominated approach at Woods Advertising and fearful regarding his personal life, the central character, Colin Anderson, award winning Art Director of the Agency, has become listless and anxious. Evidence of this general malaise is that his appetite, a correlative for his general state of mind and judgement, has become jaundiced. Repeatedly the audience sees him almost eat something, only to reject it on the grounds of its being undertoasted, high in cholesterol or inedible.

The first thing we learn about Col is that he is a creature of habit, his food habit being a toasted cheese sandwich every morning for breakfast as soon as he arrives at Woods. Stage directions note it is 'a ritual he has performed every Monday meeting since joining Woods over nineteen years ago'. The opening of the play takes only eight lines to arrive at food:

COL: Jim Bastow never worked for D.D.B. [He pulls the toasted cheese sandwich out and holds it up] How many years have I been getting a toasted cheese sandwich from downstairs? [He shoves it right under her (Tess's) nose] Look at it. Would you call that toasted? [1]

Tess's question "Did you ask for it toasted?", is greeted by Col's "Of course" followed by the qualification "Well she knows I always have toasted." This exchange reveals two things about Col. First, he feels he has been around long enough for the canteen staff to know his order by heart; second, Col expects not to have to articulate or alter the well worn routines that have become second nature during

40 Opened July 21, 1991. Merlyn Theatre, Melbourne. 126

his long service to Woods Advertising. Clearly there are things that shouldn't have to be said, and correspondingly, expectations that things will always go on without change. The events of the play overthrow such expectations.

The attitude toward food and the manner in which it is handled may initially seem extraneous or incidental to the main action, but there is usually an undercurrent, a tension or a crisis of which a relationship with food is symptomatic. For instance Col, in coming to terms with the news of Jim Bastow's sudden death, oscillates between disbelief at Bastow's premature death and preoccupation with the condition of his cheese sandwich:

COL: Well, she knows I always have it toasted. Jim Bastow used to buy one when he worked here too. [He takes a bite] She's just passed this one under the griller. Jeez forty-two. Driving down the south eastern, collapsed at the wheel.... [He shoves it back in the bag] God I used to look forward to this toasted cheese sandwich .[1]

The Jim Bastow mentioned was a one time colleague at Woods. Typically in The Adman food appears in the context of discussions of death, loss and disillusionment, and this instance is no exception. The mingling of Jim Bastow's death with Col's disappointment that the cheese sandwich is undertoasted is sustained. Col's attention in this sequence wavers between Jim's death and the unsatisfactory cheese sandwich; more broadly the certainties of life, life's markers, are being eroded, and Hewett satirically charts Col's mid life 'crumble' with reference to the constant of the toasted cheese sandwich.

Most of the ad campaigns in the play centre on food: Rice Breaky; Meow Chow; Buccaneer Baked Bean Snacks; Pointers Nuts. The interspersed tongue-in-cheek enactments of the agency's advertising campaigns were played with great gusto by the actors who intermittently assume the roles of the required advertising cliches. Critic Leonard Radie found their Brenda the Baked Bean Pirate commercial (featuring a treasure chest full of cans of Buccaneer Baked Bean Snacks!) one of the high points of the 12 7

evening. 41 Such foregrounding of food products as the most saleable consumer item highlights Col's diminishing appetite: he works on jingles and other marketing ploys to entice others to buy food; however he cannot stomach the products of convenience any longer - nothing tastes the same any more.

Appropriate for a play about the world of advertising, the characters' personal style and image are instantly defined for the audience by what they imbibe and eat. The first piece of information we learn about Rhys, the exceedingly squeaky-clean, 'principled', born-again Christian, is that he does not take coffee. On first entrance he announces self-righteously: "I've had a soy milk this morning and it's still sitting on my stomach. "[23] On the basis of this and Rhys' 'particular' demeanour, Eric the boss jumps to an immediate conclusion about this new boy in the firm who announces he is a Christian every time he is introduced to someone, along with his- intention to address everybody formally and his disapproval of swearing:

ERIC: .... you a bit of a health nut Rhys? RHYS: Not really. Could I have a glass of water?[23]

Rhys' choice of ideologically sound soy milk and 'pure' water is part of an elaborately constructed veneer intended to obscure his rampant venality and ruthlessness.

The cafeteria sequence is established by the actors' splitting the (specified) large oblong table into four separate tables and the appearance of Leah and Rhys separately and Col and Tess together, the latter two with trays holding hamburgers in polystyrene containers. Col's belated concern for his cholesterol count (he admonishes Tess for buying him a cheeseburger) is not so much that he has turned over a new dietary leaf but a sign that the old habits are no longer satisfying. Nothing tastes good any more. The cheeseburger displeases him: 'This is about as appetising as their toasted cheese. "[27] {See illustration [i]). Col's dissatisfaction with what have always been his ritual, security foods is closely

41 The Age 23.7.91. 1991.

Busby.

Melbourne,

Jeff

Company,

Anderson).

Photoqraoher:

(Col

Theatre

Adman

Playbox

McMillan.

The

as

Babs

Hewett.

bv

Bourne

Robert

Directed

Shane

by

Adman

The

( i ( ) 128

paralleled by other increasingly intolerable aspects of his life. Col and Tess argue over who should have which burger. The disagreement over the cheeseburgers persists until it erupts with Tess's surprise announcement that she is leaving Woods to set up her own agency, and, by implication, ending what we understand to be a long term relationship with Col. This news colours Col's response to his food; first he tries to bypass it by pretending it doesn't matter: "It's alright, my arteries are past caring, siddown." He takes another bite, then, absorbing the implications of her news he transfers his irritation to the food:

[She goes to sit. Col pushes the plate aside. She remains standing} Bloody thing's inedible. Some head hunter come up with an offer? [28]

In this sequence as in many others the stage features the detritus of consumerism - polystyrene coffee cups, polystyrene hamburger packaging. The- presence of 'non-disposable' disposables (in the sense they will never completely disappear or bio-degrade) accentuates the blunting of the characters' appetites. (See illustration [j]).

First contact between Rhys and Col turns to a food metaphor. Rhys maintains that every task should be a challenge "whether it be climbing Mount Everest, or something as simple as scrambling eggs". Col, in an unfocused and generally preoccupied state, instantly moves laterally to his wife Gayle's inability to scramble eggs:

See I love scrambled eggs, but Gayle makes 'em look like something the cat's brought up. Warm grunge, sitting on damp toast, swimming in water, with a bit of parsley bunged on top. Her contribution to Nouvelle Cuisine.[33]

Again food is portrayed as something unappetising, something regurgitated, rejected. The lukewarm, soggy and uninviting image is equally telling as a picture of the state of Col's marriage as of the catering skills of Gayle.

Rhys and Col establish a working partnership. Another of the hungry young breed, Steve Jacobs, 'Wonderboy' as Col calls him, reads the

as as

Col Col

as as

Busby. Busby.

Grant Grant

1991. 1991.

Jeff Jeff

Bourne Bourne

Benjamin Benjamin

Shane Shane

Melbourne, Melbourne,

Adams, Adams,

Photographer: Photographer:

McMahon, McMahon,

Company, Company,

Tess Tess

McMillan. McMillan.

as as

Christobelle Christobelle

Theatre Theatre

as as

Babs Babs

Burgh Burgh

by by

De De

Playbox Playbox

Whitbread Whitbread

Celia Celia

Directed Directed

Hewett. Hewett.

Kate Kate

R: R:

Burns, Burns,

Robert Robert

to to

Rhys Rhys

by by Anderson. Anderson.

L L

Adman Adman

The The

) ) ( j j ( 129

fact that Rhys is now buying Col's cheese sandwich for him in the mornings as a sign that Col is exploiting the younger man. Rhys deceptively replies: "I like doing these small things for him. "[39] In a taunting way, Steve and Christobelle then throw Col's cheese sandwich around the office, signifying disrespect to the owner of the sandwich. The habitual cheese sandwich thereby assumes a metonymic function in that it may be seen to stand for Col, in particular the way Col is now regarded by the younger members of the agency. Of course gradually we discover that Rhys's every action has been devious and self-serving and it is ultimately new­ boy Rhys, not Steve or Christobelle, who cruelly disposes of Col.

In relation to The Adman I have given attention principally to the nexus between advertising, consumerism, food and death but there is also the ritualistic dimension to this network of associations. Cot's morning ritual of a cheese sandwich and the cluster of significations this food ritual takes on has already been noted. Often these ritualistic dimensions of food can also be associated with death, as in the case of funerals. Sometimes the rituals can seem no more than a way of filling in the time before death; the repetitious ritual which is familiar and comforting, marking out the stages of the day, the week, the month. Sometimes, while on one level facilitating a celebration of life, family and community, such food rituals can be a reminder of encroaching death, as in the symbol of ageing, the birthday cake.

It is as a harbinger of death rather than celebration of life that the cake operates in Philip Ryall's one-act play The Centenarian,4 2 a play about a married couple whose hundred year-old Gran dies only three hours before reaching the century. The cake prepared for the auspicious occasion of the hundredth birthday is a rainbow cake rather than a fruit cake:

SHIRL: I didn't make a fruit cake 'cause I know how it sits on your tummy. We don't want anything to spoil your birthday, do we? [93]

42 In Popular Short Plays for the Australian Stage. Vol 1. Sydney: Currency, 1985. 130

As Shirl is counting the candles on the cake Gran dies; significantly Shirl reaches "ninety-nine ... " when Clive announces "Gran's dead". Shocked, Shirl holds the one hundredth candle in front of her and stares ahead.[95] In a state of panic Shirl and Clive begin to plan how they will deal with all the expected party guests including the mayor. They rehearse keeping the chair rocking while distracting the guests with tea and cake.[96] Food is by no means central to the continuing action of the play; rather its role is that of symbolic marker, specifically of the line between life and death.

Successive ritualistic afternoon teas measure for the gradual stylistic shift in Lissa Benyon's play Pennies Before the Holidays.43 Lissa Benyon's examination of the relationships within family members - all except one of whom are women - is effected by the peeling back of civilised and compassionate layers to increasingly reveal the psychologically 'unclean' emotional forces behind them. Death, love, and dependence are explored in bleakly funny encounters. The play focuses on a young woman's narrow, shallow conceptions of old age as a condition which precludes autonomy, individuality and creative growth.

This play is about emotional parsimony - saving oneself up for experiences which can never occur because the lives' owners are frightened to admit life. These relatives (as seen through the lens of Elizabeth) keep each other tightly in check by observing set and joyless rituals. Lissa Benyon's black style for the most part obscures the warmth of these characters but occasionally we glimpse other possibilities - what their lives and relationships might have been. Rituals of sharing food and drink mark out the intervals, the chunks of time between grand-daughter Elizabeth's visits to her elderly relations (Iris, Daisy, Marjorie and Chas), and therefore create the rhythm of Pennies Before the Holidays. The regular-as-clock-work afternoon teas give the play its pattern but it is the ritualistic, mechanical aspects of food and food serving which are highlighted. Young, self-absorbed Elizabeth's

4 3 First presented by Ensemble Theatre Project, Canberra, in 1986 after development at the 1985 Playworks Women Writers Workshops. In 1987 it was performed at Melbourne's Universal Theatre. It has also been broadcast in the ABC­ FM Stereo Play Season (1988). Page references will be to Unpublished MS, 1986. 1 3 1

fleeting weekend calls on her relatives for afternoon tea constitute the high point of the week for them, or so she sees. With limited accuracy, she perceives these elderly people as frozen in time until she walks through their door always, from their point of view, irritatingly late. Nothing can begin until Elizabeth arrives. The biscuits sit on their plates and tea stews in the pot until her presence permits the ritual to commence. She brings the outside world to them:

ELIZABETH: Hello Nan. IRIS: Oh, I was worried about you. DAISY: We nearly started without you. ELIZABETH: Hello Gran. POP: It's Elizabeth, It's Elizabeth. ELIZABETH: Pop. IRIS: So, you're here. Would you like a cup of tea? ELIZABETH: Yes please Nan.

IRIS: Isn't this nice - all together. Now I've got baked slice or nut loaf or Anzac biscuits. Now Pop likes the Anzacs. He thinks they're all his. But I'm sure he wouldn't mind if you had one. IRIS: Now what's been happening? Tell us all the news? DAISY: I haven't had any biscuits yet. ELIZABETH: Shall I pass them to you Gran? DAISY: The Anzacs please. [2-3]

Routine concerns dominate the characters of the play. At the moment before Daisy is to enter hospital her anxiety about the prospect manifests itself in fussing over the last little bit of milk remaining:

I better tip out this little bit of milk - or will I be wanting a last cup of tea? They give you a lot of tea in hospital. [23]

Through the character Elizabeth, Lissa Benyon articulates a common, and commonly frustrated, female desire - a desire to be in the world, to act on the world, to engage with the world. In an exchange with her 75 year old but contemporary-thinking great- 132

aunt, Elizabeth searches to describe this special kind of hunger, which appears to be a conflation of the physical and the sexual:

ELIZABETH: I'm not monogamous. I'm hungry, hungry, hungry. Marjorie holds out the chocolate. Elizabeth takes more. ELIZABETH: Yes, for food today. Endless cappuccinos. And pasta! Oh God! I eat so much pasta, and drink! Slurps of red wine. But sometimes not for food at all...... I don't want to be safe. Do your feelings rush through your old husk like they rush through my young flute? ... Sorry, but ... can pure feelings sustain you like they can me .. ? MARJORIE: Not anymore ELIZABETH: Or do you always need food? [41]

Her desire to be in the world is so palpable it exudes potent sensual qualities. The play privileges Elizabeth's sensibility and sense of specialness, but not uncritically. In deliberate contrast, Pop's reflections on his wasted life underline his dependency and atavism; he enlists childhood habits and a nursery song (The Grandfather Clock) to trace the pattern of his life:

CHAS: I've numbered my life's seconds too carefully. I've hoarded them up like pennies before the holidays, thinking I'd spend them later, but I never have. I've been sitting here for twenty years listening to them, tick-tock. Listening so carefully in case I wasted them, tick-tock ...... I've been so scared of bad things that everything's been bad. I've stretched out my days so carefully and safely so as to keep alive, like when you take such small sips that you don't even taste it. [70-71]

Fortunately, Benyon's absence of moralism leaves the ultimate outcome ambiguous - it is not certain that Elizabeth, over the long haul, will wolf down life as hungrily as she imagines. While Elizabeth feels invincible, Daisy fears that Pop's decay will rub off on the rest of them. Daisy's dread that proximity to death may be contagious masks a fear of being nearer to the top of the queue:

He was making us all grow old. He was like a bad fruit in the basket infecting us. Now we've thrown him away we'll stay young.[79] I 3 3

Daisy cannot absorb the truth. Pop's death means there is one aged relative fewer between herself and death now. She has actually moved forward in the queue, despite her conviction that throwing a rotting relative out of the basket will arrest her own decay.

Another character advancing in the queue for death is the father in Richard Barrett's Words of One Syllable ( 1990). The dying father, played by Max Phipps at the Belvoir Street Theatre and on ABC radio44 , exerts many practised but unsophisticated emotional manipulations to coerce his son to return 'home' to Adelaide from Sydney. After his father's death Robert will inherit the house on the condition that he must live in it and care for his mother. This is dramatic realism with an abundance of quotidian language and mind-withering domestic detail. Concern for domestic minutiae in this paralysingly cautious lower middle class household extends to the treatment of food. The intense irritation experienced by a man limited to eating poached fish, because he can no longer "break down the fats" if food is cooked with butter, erupts with all the irrationality of someone unable to come to terms with the unfairness of cancer. It is the ghost of a suggestion of butter that sparks off one of his many bullying tirades against his wife. His refusal to eat the fish has the effect of making the others feel guilty; this is a microcosmic version of the power relations elsewhere in the play.

Several 'funeral' plays involve the intersection of food and death, for example, Noel Hodda's The Secret House4 5 and Julie Day's Light Refreshments. Many other plays highlight the association between food and death, specifically the activity of poisoning as in John Romeril's Mrs Thally f 46 and food as symbolic harbinger of death, in the form of the one hundredth birthday cake, as in Philip Ryall's The Centenarian.

Evident in Noel Hodda's The Secret House is an oppressive fixation on domestic minutiae similar to that of Words of One

44 Belvoir Street production Oct. 1990; ABC radio broadcast Feb. 1992. 45 Sydney: Currency, 1989. 46 in Seven One-Act Plays. Ed. Rodney Fisher. Sydney: Currency, 1983. 134

Syllable. The Secret House deals with a family facing the death of one of their twin sons (Patrick). The same actor plays both brothers (Patrick and Glen) so the audience never sees them together. The parents refuse to accept his death, nor will they visit his grave, but instead embrace the comforting rituals of endless cups of tea and cooked breakfasts.

Food may be a comforter, an incantation, a web and protector from realities. The soothing repetitive activity of making cups of tea and deciding whether or not to have biscuits with tea insulates Cath from the horrific thought of the worms eating her son. Cath also shields herself from the death of her son by constantly offering food - bacon, eggs, tea, biscuits - to the rest of the family. If she feeds the others will it insure them against death? If she keeps preparing meals will she not have to go to the grave of her son? Cath's comforting homilies on the virtues of a good breakfast ("Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dine like a pauper. That's the secret to long life or so they say. "(47]) buffer her from facing the death of her son.

So total is Cath's preoccupation with providing for others that, earlier in the play in a state of pre-funeral anxiety, she worries that she has not got enough food for the funeral:

It would be awful if they came here and there wasn't enough, but there should be enough, I think.[26]

The custom of providing food at the wake belongs to a tradition of funeral feasts, the earliest of which were "nothing more than a distribution of the food offered to the dead, after they had obtained - as it was supposed - supernatural nourishment from it. "4 7 In contemporary plays the primary concern is usually for provisions for family and friends attending the funeral.

Come Back For Light Refreshments After the Service, another funeral play, previously discussed in Chapter Two, involves a very different kind of funeral preparation from that in The

47 Puckle: 100. 135

Secret House: no anxiety here about a shortage of food. Set in Beth's kitchen on the funeral day of her father Jack (a sufferer of Alzeimer's disease), four women (Beth, Jack's elderly friend, a neighbour and her niece) prepare food for the guests expected after the service. The food preparation activities act as the point of convergence around which the four characters discuss and disagree over the contradictory and conflicting decisions available to women today. The women discuss such topics as separation, adultery, divorce, care of invalid relatives. In this funeral play of great warmth, as is often the case in the enactment of funeral rituals themselves, "signs of life and community eclipse representations of death and separation."48

Fiona Scott-Norman saw it as "an attractive and unique aspect to the production"49 that the audience is invited to eat the food that the actors prepare throughout. The audience members become the awaited guests. Perhaps this invitation for the audience is not quite 'unique', for the Fremantle based Deck Chair's production of Emma used the same strategy with the wedding guests/audience partaking of a bowl from the communal pot of spaghetti, nevertheless it creates an inclusive and involving conclusion. The core provided by the activities emanating from sandwich making in Light Refreshments is framed by hymns and funeral service extracts (performed live) thereby enhancing the sense of ritual occasion. Additional ritualistic elements are provided as the audience enters the theatre with the supply of arm bands and order of service leaflets inside the programme.

At the end of the service one of the principal Christian symbols - fish - is brought forth as an offerring by Jim the minister. It is a plate of sardine sandwiches, one of the topics of conversation during the food preparations. The women's earlier musings about the potentially symbolic significance of the habitual sardine sandwiches at funerals is here answered by the minister's words to the nearest audience member:

48 Huntington, Richard and Peter Metcalf. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. London: Cambridge UP, 1979: 2. 49 In Press. 13.2.91. 136

Excuse me, I wonder if you would mind putting this plate on the food table. My wife made them - some sardine sandwiches. It's appropriate don't you think, the fish is the symbol for Christ in whom we find everlasting life. Thank you. Come this way. [41]

Food in the play functions on many levels simultaneously - symbolically (as above), ritualistically (as funeral food), as continuing stage property and a source of business and action throughout for the actors, as subject matter and conversational topic for the characters, and finally as sustenance for the audience who have in a sense supervised the preparation and the service and are therefore equipped to synthesise the various food meanings of the play.

* * * * * * * * * Ritualistic uses of food pervade the Judaeo-Christian scheme: Christ was born in a manger to be eaten in the sacraments of bread and wine50 . In the Catholic Mass, "undoubtedly the most significance-charged dinner ritual ever devised", according to Margaret Visser, God enters into the minds and bodies of the congregation: the people present at the table eat God. The mass is a theatrical meal and as such it spans all the meanings of eating simultaneously: from cannibalism to vegetarianism, fusion of the group and individual satisfaction, breaking of taboos and comforting restoration. Ritual contains, expresses and controls all this via "dramatic movement and structure, song, costume, poetry, incense, gesture and interaction". 51 The centrality of eating and drinking within Christianity is explored in Carolyn Walker Bynum's study of the religious significance of food to medieval women. 5 2 Bynum finds that the corollary of the sacramental nature of eating was a heightened disgust at the mouth's 'perversions'; it was the

50 Stallybrass, Peter. "Reading the Body: The Revenger's Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption." Renaissance Drama. Vol 18, 1987: 136. 51 Visser Rituals of Dinner: 37. 5 2 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. I 3 7

desire of food, wrote Abbot Nilus, "that spawned disobedience; it was the pleasure of taste that drove us from Paradise. "5 3

As the background discussion on the traditions and patterns of food in theatre outlined, food and death, eating and dying, are frequently closely related. The almost symbiotic relationship between the two is most striking in plays such as Titus Andronicus and Macbeth. The banquet scene in Macbeth, as well as structurally significant, functions in a ritualistic way, with the repeated toasts, invitations to sit, and attempts to retain the sense of cohesion and community. The banquet scene enacts a ceremonial, a social ritual at which all 'sit down' under the aegis of the 'good king'. The dead Banquo appears and reappears and the conjunction of this reminder of death with the attempt to seal the future place of the king at the banquet dramatises the interconnectedness of food and death. In Titus Andronicus, as discussed previously, the food and death connection is extreme in its graphic rendering of parent-child cannibalism and stage violence in the context of a banquet.

Even the consumption of an everyday meal has a violent, destructive element to it. Levi-Strauss, Margaret Visser and others have remarked on the human habit of eating and baring our teeth (principally to tear flesh) in the company and view of only those we trust or consider equals. Much care is taken to prepare and present an appealing menu for guests or a special cake for a birthday celebration (in itself another reminder of increasing proximity to death), yet the inevitability that the diners will destroy the food in the process does not negate the care taken. Further, food's protean qualities of physicality, transience and mutability make a plausible analogy to the process of transformation involved in dying and decay. The food at a funeral in some sense substitutes for the presence of the dead person. Patrick White's The Ham Funeral exemplifies this most directly of all the plays in the study.

The more powerful, challenging, disturbing and multivalent uses of food occur in a non-naturalistic, emblematic manner rather than as a part of the naturalistic framework. American Sam Shepard

53 quoted in Bynum Holy Feast: 36. 138

employs food in destabilising way that posits the existence of a spiritual hunger. There is a recurring paradox in Sam Shepard's plays: there is an abundance of food but rarely shared with anyone else; an abundance of food but still the characters are emotionally hungry, spiritually empty. In The Curse of the Starving Class54 the play's central image, a young man, continually looking in the refrigerator, privileges the perspective of an eater rather than a preparer of food. This male character, Wesley, continually pulls food out of the refrigerator, eats ravenously, throws half eaten bits aside, then digs in for more. In general Wesley's ritual of repeatedly opening and closing the refrigerator (and talking to it) forms a repetitive backdrop to the other actions involving food: the mother throwing artichokes out of the refrigerator to make room for a large bag of groceries, the father cooking breakfast. A related perspective is given in True West where the struggle between the two brothers expresses itself in the destruction of their absent mother's kitchen and the compulsive eating of toast becomes a "male ritual of dominance and submission".55 As Volumnia in Coriolanus failed to nourish her son, the contents of refrigerator and kitchen fail to nourish the characters in The Curse of the Starving Class and True West. Shepard affords such ritual behaviour a symbolic function and has acknowledged a spiritual paucity: "People are starved for a way of life."56 In a discussion of Buried Child Charles Whiting takes up the theme of Shepard's spiritually bereft characters, stating that through visual exaggeration, the vegetables Tilden arrives with - fresh ears of corn and later carrots - take on a mythic function, expressing an entire family's, even America's, dream of a lost paradise.5 7

Investigation of spiritual lack is not peculiar to contemporary American drama. Spiritual lack, both national and individual, is consistently at the centre of Patrick White's expressionist and

54 Shepard, Sam. Angel City, Curse of the Starving Class & Other Plays. New York, 1981. 55 Patraka, Vivian M. "Foodtalk in the plays of Caryl Churchill and Joan Schenkar." Theatre Annual. Vol 40, 1985: 138. 56 Kakatani, Michiko. "Sam Shepard's America." New York Times. 29 Jan 1984, 2: 26. 57 "Food and Drink in Shepard's Theater." Modern Drama. Vol xxxi, No 2, June 1988: 177. 139

symbolic plays. In The Ham Funeral, food as a substitute for a sense of unity, food as catalyst for human cannibalistic tendencies, and the protean qualities of food are foregrounded. For Alma Lusty, the ham is capable of incarnating Mr Lusty. Alma Lusty's response to food in Patrick White's The Ham Funeral has an unmistakable cannibalistic quality. Early in her relationship with Mr Lusty food and sex (or more accurately, food and the man himself) become inseparable. "The bleedin' ham" is substituted for Mr Lusty in the marriage bed. From then on she confuses the solidity of one with the other:

... We were two bodies in the bed. I could return to you out of my dreams ... push against your hot side. You didn't wake ever. But you was solid. [18]

Her very next thought is of food. To the Landlord's almost accusatory "You're always 'ungry", Mrs Lusty presents no squabble: "I like to eat. I like somethink you can get yer tongue round. A nice piece of fat 'am for instance. "(18] The connection forged in the first scene of the play between the solidity of Mr Lusty's body and that of a ham will assume the foreground in the wake scene. Certainly the bulging grimy bulk of Max Cullen in the 1989 Sydney Theatre Company production of the play left no doubt as to the overriding corporeality of the man. (See illustration [kl).

Nothing can compare to meat for Mrs Lusty. She's tired of peeling potatoes, [17] though her enthusiasm for a nice bit of ham never wanes. Her basic appetites are kept in view. She is ready to devour whatever is there, including the people in the streets: "I could eat (the faces) up ...... like a lot of cherry stones." (19] She is always empty, always ready for a "cup of tea and a slice of something" [18]. White locates in food a power beyond its literal self. Though for Mrs Lusty a table may be just a table and no more, food is more than mere food. Mrs Lusty understands the world by ingesting as much of it as she can manage. By digesting (assimilating) food she can digest the world (reduce it to a systematic or convenient form). The Poet recognises her desire to incorporate what is external to her: "You'd like to devour the world and keep it warm inside of you." Mrs Lusty replies: "There's nothing like food in your stomach to .... ".

and and

Lusty Lusty

1989. 1989.

Alma Alma

as as

Company, Company,

Armfield. Armfield.

Walker Walker

Neil Neil

by by

Theatre Theatre

Kerry Kerry

Sydney Sydney

Man, Man,

Directed Directed

Campbell. Campbell.

Young Young

White. White.

Lusty. Lusty.

the the

Stuart Stuart

Mr Mr

as as

Patrick Patrick

as as

by by

Coppin Coppin

Cullen Cullen

Funeral Funeral

Photographer: Photographer:

Max Max

Tyler Tyler

R: R:

Ham Ham

to to

L L

The The

) )

k ( ( 140

It is characteristic of White to make the connection between human life and decay: the Scavengers fossick in the bins for edible rubbish. In an extreme version of White's corpse imagery a foetus is found as refuse, dead before it was born. A foetus thrown out with the food scraps connotes a society whose confusion between life and garbage is obscenely manifested in the Scavenger's activities; extended, the image is that of a gross kind of excremental extrusive excess. Finally the corpulent Landlord and the dead child in the rubbish bin amount to the same as the poet remarks: "The landlord and the dead child are one. "[43]

At the wake of The Ham Funeral the woman, Mrs Lusty, provides and dispenses the ham, tearing the flesh from the bone as she does so. The wake scenes of the play are driven by a predominantly cannibalistic energy. In eating the ham Mrs Lusty is simultaneously trying to purge herself of Mr Lusty and incorporate him into herself. According to Farb and Armelagos in Consuming Passions: the Anthropology of Eating, it was acceptable, in certain cannibalistic societies, for the wife to eat the husband, but not for the husband to eat the wife.sa

In Act Two, the act of the funeral, Mrs Lusty subscribes to the view that food keeps one out of trouble, acts as a buffer between a person and strife. She could be referring to the accepted wisdom of cultivating a protective layer of fat to afford a buffer against illness and poverty. However her reasoning is even more basic than that: "If you stuff your mouths they can't get inter mischief. "[48] She does not merely stuff herself with food. After consuming the funeral ham with the relatives (See illustration [I]) the Landlady turns her energies on the Young man: having fed, she offers herself as food. She prides herself on being a 'feeder' of men and more particularly, an embodiment of the unbreakable umbilicus between the male and the mother's breast: "No man ever leaves the breast - that's our weapon."[64] (See illustration [ml). Having no

58 Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980: 137. Speaking of cannibalism in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, Farb and Armelagos make the following point: "Cannibalism was for them also a customary way of disposing of the dead; as one anthroplogist put it, 'Their bellies are their cemeteries.'" ( l ) The Ham Funeral by Patrick White. Sydney . Theatre Company, 1989. Kerry Walker (U.S. Centre) as Alma Lusty, then, clockwise, Tyler Coppin as the Young Man, with Bob Hornery, Keith Robinson, Paul Blackwell and Arky Michael as the Relatives. Directed by Neil Armfield. Photographer: Stuart Campbell. The Ham Funeral by Patrick White. Sydney Theatre Company, 1989. Kerry Walker as Alma Lusty and Tyler Coppin as the Young Man. Directed by Neil Armfield. Photographer: Stuart Campbell •

• ,. .I " • •

,, ( m) 141

one to breast feed any longer she proposes herself as a substitute mother for the Poet when she says she'll give him a kiss to remind him of his mother. The Poet recognises the implications here of the hungry Alma Lusty: "I'd always hoped I was an orphan."[64] He can do without that kind of nourishment - the price of maternal sustenance is too high for him.

White quite consciously uses food as a way of delineating characters. His stage directions are the most obvious example of this tendency: "The Landlady is also seated at the kitchen table, with a saucepan, peeling potatoes. She is a large woman in the dangerous forties, ripe and bursting." [SD, 17] This ripe and bursting woman acknowledges in a "laughing, good natured" fashion that she is always hungry, although not fussily so, as long as it's "somethink you can get your tongue round". She savours the possibilities, after which she concludes "there's no end to pleasure": "A nice piece of fat 'am, for instance. Or a little bowl of stewed eels. Or a chop with the kidney on it. Or even a bit of bread and drippin', with the brown underneath. "[18]

Constantly throughout the play there are connections and substitutions between states of fecundity, feeding and satisfaction with life. Mrs Lusty mourns for the child she never had as hers to feed. Since the regular necessity for food is one of the constants of life, Mrs Lusty's loss of her baby also condemned her to being without that certainty: a dependant child to feed would have punctuated her life with a more agreeable rhythm than it now has.[22] The Young Man recognises her as a "bursting wife"; the imagery of "ripe and bursting" simultaneously plays on her size, her plumpness, her capacity for feeding and eating and her state of sexual overripeness.[24] Such a palpable hunger as Mrs Lusty demonstrates comes about, she believes, through insufficient bright talk and company as well as an absence of food. And just as she longs for things to put her tongue round, she knows what is missing from the landlord's mouth: it is "foul with silence"[25].5 9

59 The state of being filled with an emptiness is a familiar paradox also in plays such as Karen Mainwaring's Binge and Alma De Groan's Going Home. 142

The character of White's Girl, the anima, ascribes to food the capacity to act as a sign system, in particular a way of deriving clues about life:

It (the answer) is even in the basement...... where the landlord's teeth have left their bite in the stale crust, and potato peelings are oracles to those who learn how to read them. [32)

That is the last imprint from the Landlord for the next scene deals with his death, and even more prominently, the kind of funeral he will be given. The eponymous ham funeral is above all for the Landlady a symbol of status and respectability, a symbol which overrides in importance any felt sense of loss incurred by the death of the Landlord. The Landlady can immediately enumerate all the kinds of funerals held in the street, but knows with satisfaction that none of them have been ham funerals:

It'll be respectable. It'll be somethink to talk about. It'll be a 'am funeral...... lt never was seen in this street. Bill Piper got faggots. And Mrs Ruddock a leg of mutton. But it'll be 'am for Will Lusty, if 'is widow busts! [36].

Ham is not only for eating, or furnishing funeral tables, however. Even a temperamental quality is described in food terms when the fourth relative comments that Will was as "mild as 'am" [52]. Evidence that Alma's turn of phrase has comfortably absorbed the semantics of food occurs when, speaking of their relationship, she is saddened to recall:

.. I loved Will. As much as you're allowed to love .... lf you was allowed to love. But you aren't. And it curdles. It turns sour. [36]

Throughout the wake hysteria mounts, and as she becomes more and more raw (as the Young Man predicted) Alma apprises the relatives of the prophetic synthesis (in terms of their relationship) of man and ham. In both contexts of sex and death Will and the ham are interchangeable:

LANDLADY: I turns to my Will. Me, the blushin' bride! "Oly smoke! ' I cries. I pulls back me 'and. No Will beside me in the bed. Know what there was? 143

RELATIVES: What?

LANDLADY: Will, a course ... l fonds out later .. .is makin' a cuppa. But beside me in the bed ... you'II never guess ... the bleedin' 'am! (58]

It's never made clear why Will replaced himself with the ham in the wedding bed. This unorthodox marital practice shows, perhaps, Will's acceptance that Alma wanted above all something solid beside her? Or is this White's way of signalling Will's silent knowledge that ham was all he would amount to finally?

Unsure whether or not Will Lusty's death was a dream, Alma finds certainty in the ham: "Besides, I still got the bloomin' 'am between me teeth." [72]. Will's departure left no such material residue. In Alma's actions and attitudes regarding Will/the ham there is evidence of the cannibalistic urge for incorporation of the Other, a point alluded to by May-Brit Akerholt in her study of White's plays:

Will, who substituted the ham for himself in life, becomes the ham in death; by eating the ham the celebrants exorcise him but take him up into themselves. Alma's compulsion to devour the ham is simultaneously a wish to rid herself of Will, and keep him inside her. The relatives, embodiments of Will at his own funeral, focus on the hamfeast's symbolic meaning: "There's many a resurrection after 'am."6 0

In Hilary Bell's Fortune the hope for a 'resurrection' or after-life motivated the burial of food with the dead Chinese man. Discussed in Chapter Three, it was seen that grave desecration for the purpose of plundering the food is taken as an insult and an assault against the dead man himself. Burying the food with the dead or eating communally after the burial service at wakes are variations of the same activity - the exercise of reminding ourselves of the primacy of food for the living and the dead alike. The provision of food stems from a belief that the dead will derive supernatural nourishment from the food of the funeral feast or food buried with the dead.61 The continuities between states of eating/consuming and states of death/dying underly both The Ham Funeral and Fortune.

60 Akerholt: 48. 6 1 Puckle: 100. 144

* * * * * * * * *

In the next chapter I shall focus on plays that deal with mother/daughter relationships as refracted through food. Other plays portray confusions between women's hunger and women's denial. Some characters have developed elaborate systems of self limitation and punishment through a paradoxical search for release from the restraints associated with approved female food behaviour. I shall also include discussion of plays in which women's uneasy relationships with the food they eat, their body image, and each other, are foregrounded. Chapter Five will examine plays which enact this drama of food-fear, food-loathing and apprehension (in two senses) of food's capacity to entrap and shame. 145

Chapter Five

WOMEN AND FOOD: EATING/NOT EATING AND WOMEN EATEN

Women and food historically have been locked together in a deeply ambivalent ,~~lationship: in many instances food has been one of the main opprJ1ssTve forces of women's live~ - the necessity to provide nutritious food for the family who goes out to work, play, school, has bou~a\- many women to the kitchen. One North American performance artist, Judy Chicago, instead of rejecting the domestic sphere as subject for art has celebrated it. Of her work throughout the 1960s and 1970s one of the more famous projects, The Dinner Party, comprises dinner table settings honouring representative women from history. Initially the series was to be called "Twenty-five Women Who Were Eaten Alive". This idea evolved to become "a reinterpretation of the Last Supper from the point of view of women, who, throughout history, (had prepared the meals and set the tableJ1 There was to be a significant difference, however; in Judy Chicago's 'last supper' the women would be the honoured guests. Their representation in the form of plates set on the table was to express__ the way women had been confined, so it was intended that the piece reflect both women's achievement and their oppression. 2 Each plate depicts the clitoris of the woman represented in a manner which seeks to capture the essence or principal quality of that woman. One could, in the light of this essentialist concept, accuse Chicago's project of dangerous and retrograde biologism; however as a statement about the connection between sexuality and consumption, between domestic (private) art and museum (public) art, between domestic labour and gender constraints, the piece is dense and provocative. This close connection is not merely an interpretative overlay since hundreds of women were involved in the project to produce the china­ painting and needlework which constituted the place settings. 3 Vivien Patraka believes Judy Chicago's Dinner Party is an

1 Chicago, Judy. The Dinner Party: a Symbol of our Heritage. New York: Anchor, 1979: 11. 2 Chicago: 11. 3 Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. London : Macmillan, 1988: 56. 146

abstracted, ritualised event sanctified by the absence of actual food and people. 4

In Australian plays by women, food and activities associated with its purchase, preparation, consumption and refusal frequently constitute the locus in quo tor eruptions of violence, unresolved conflict and confusion over such issues as personal control, identity, claims for equality and individual fulfilment within relationships. There is a growing industry of literature on the topic of women and food. Women's identities are bound up with their relationship with food - their self-control, their diet management (their own and their family's), preparation, housekeeping, sacrifice, denying themselves in order to give others the best food.

The remainder of this chapter will deal with plays in which the dynamic, outcome or characters of the plays are defined or altered by food. In the latter section of the chapter the terms eating disorders or eating behaviours will frequently be used interchangeably with anorexia, itself a general class of eating disor9ers within which intake restricting ( or abstinent) anorexia and bulimia/anorexia (characterized by alternating bouts of gorging and starving and/or gorging and vomiting) are distinct subtypes. Many of the characters discussed will be locatable somewhere along this eating spectrum.

The plays in this chapter in one way or another probe the interconnections among women's searches for autonomy, their hungers, both literal and figurative, and the difficulties arising from mother/child (and more specifically mother/daughter) bonding and separation. For Chemin, food concerns are central to an understanding of con~emporary women's quest for power:

For food, after all, has defined female identity not only through the domestic routine of daily means - that endless tedious round of supermarket, refrigerator, table and kitchen sink .... It has defined more even than the history of mother/daughter relations and that early sorrow and disorder that began,

4 Patraka, Vivian. "Foodtalk in the Plays of Caryl Churchill and Joan Schenkar." Theatre Annual . Vol 40, 1985 : 140. 147

for many of us, at the mother's breast. Dating back to our earliest impressions of life, recorded in the symbolic code of food imagery, the vanished story of female value and power returns to us again and again in our obsession with food .... 5

An early play by Alma De Groen, Going Home6 deals with five expatriates, four of them Australian, anp is set in Ontario in mid­ winter. The two women, Molly and Zoe, both seek to fill the void by stuffing themselves - either with food or unnecessary consumer goods. Molly fills the void via her mouth while Zoe fills it by crowding her apartment cupboards with consumer items, both edible and inedible, among them gourmet groceries such as out of season and imported products - Australian peaches, South African oranges - food which her husband Jim claims they don't even eat. Zoe attempts to cure her homesickness and a more general non­ specific malaise by buying products which will annex for her at least part of an identity that she lacks. Alan Stewart in a paper "Need for theory in the study of food habits" notes that people appear to make connections between specific foods and events in their _personal and social life. Further, he states that the "reason why a particular food is selected from a supermarket shelf is not a property of the food itself, but a projection of how the item will fill a need at some time in the future." 7 (my emphasis)

Although Zoe's problem is not exclusively with food as such, her compulsion to consume focuses itself on shopping for exotic and inessential food items. Jim goes on the attack as he reels off the list of her haul: apart from the exotic canned Australian peaches and South African oranges, Zoe has purchased food whose origin remains a mystery, much to Jim's consternation:

Fudge Sticksickles ...... Cheddar Oodles .... Onyums ...... Crispy Bacon Rinds .... My God they must stand in the aisle and applaud! Did you buy any food? [21]

5 Chemin The Hungry Self: 197. 6 1977. Vocations; Going Home Sydney: Currency, 1983. 7 Food Habits In Australia: Proceedings of the First Deakin/ Sydney Universities Symposium on Australian Nutrition. Eds. A.S. Truswell & M.L. Wahlqvist. North Balwyn: Rene Gordon, 1988: 359. 148

There is no indication that the men in the play have any notion as to why the two women are consuming in search of a life. Jim's exclamation " ... God what a day. My wife goes berserk and buys out Loblaws ... "[21] indicates his preparedness to claim temporary madness as the cause of his wife's desperate grocery binges. There is no evidence, however, that he implicates himself, the children, the isolation caused by the extreme weather or the cultural dislocation, in her behaviour, even though he is sensitive to these factors in relation to himself. Immediately after an abrasive exchange about the foolishness of Zoe's shopping excursion, she asks Jim if he has eaten. "Briefly" he replies, "I had a hamburger in Detroit. It was like eating a baby."[20] In Jim's odd and jarring comparison De Groen engraves a meaning of cannibalistic barbarism onto a commonplace activity. Food is the point of convergence for the feelings of inequality and bitterness between them. In an attempt to curb Zoe's spending and therefore hasten their return to Sydney, Jim has compiled a list of prohibited items:

There's a list in the kitchen of things we can't afford. You can read, can't you? No coffee. No biscuits. No tinned food of any kind. No pickles. No peanut butter. No ice cream. [21]

His threat to withdraw her opportunities to consume promiscuously signifies a severe attenuation of her activities in the world. With no friends, in a place where a monthly trip to the library in winter and a trip to the clothes line in summer are major events, a threat to cut off her irresponsible acts of consumption is equivalent to total imprisonment; as she says, it's the only time she gets out. Food in this play represents a means of escape, a respite from withdrawal and loneliness, even if it is not bought to be ingested.

For Molly, food is a cloak for pain; her troubled relationship with food is a sign of a search for her identity reminiscent of many women who experience despair and conflict in relation to food. One young woman articulates the crisis this way: 149

There is no I. There's just an immense hole at the center. An emptiness. A terror. Not all the food in the world could fill it. But, I try.a

Even though no explicit causal connection is made between Molly's discovery that her ex-husband has sold all her furniture without permission to Zoe and Jim, and her "eating her way steadily through a plate of biscuits on the tray" [SD,36], the fact that the two incidents are temporally sequential makes such a link as the scene plays. While the two men talk art she fixates on the Pizza Spins [38]. She is incapable of being distracted from her obsession: "These are fantastic!" A little later she asks again:

MOLLY: (to Jim) What did you say they were called? JIM: Pizza Spins MIKE (mockingly) Feeling better, Molly? MOLLY: Mind your own business. MIKE: You should see what this girl eats! MOLLY: (protesting) I don't eat much. It's the cold weather. You should have seen me in Sydney. I was a skinny little thing.[38)

Molly recalls a time when she was manageable - "a skinny little thing" - but also manageable to herself. At the end of Act One Molly's long •cry for help' speech concludes "I can't do it any more! Nobody cares about me. I might as well die in the snow! [47]

The atmosphere at the opening of Act Two is "mellow, convivial" with "laughter as lights go up". In contrast to the opening of Act One where Zoe was nervously alone on stage with her three bags stuffed with groceries, the beginning of the second act is apparently more harmonious. The first line of Act Two is Molly's, sighing and contented, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!" to which Zoe replies "You ate it, Molly."[48] So, when the audience sees Molly again after interval she has momentarily satiated her emptiness. The audience is to accept, as in the case of Andrew

8 Chemin: 20. In Chapter 1 of The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, Betty Friedan wrote about "the problem that has no name"; this nameless suffering was a problem with identity. 150

Bovell's After Dinner, that the eating of the meal took place during interval.

The nearest we come to learning about how the men make sense of the women's relationship with food is when Mike offers a little amateur psychology regarding the origin of Molly's problem. In response to Zoe's announcement that. "Scott Fitzgerald's mother breast-fed him for four years, did you know that?", Mike watches Molly for her response as he offers:

I don't think Molly's mother fed her at all.[49]

Frequently in plays we are given insights of a psychoanalytic nature. Withdrawal of food or love by the mother is frequently held by psychologists to be at the root of overeating behaviour:

The mother may unconsciously believe that the baby daughter can meet some of her own need and longing for care ...... This might mean that the baby girl will not be allowed to have an adequate amount of emotional care within the earliest symbiotic relationship. It may well be that this very early withholding of a certain amount of care from baby girls is, even at this stage, symbolised in terms of food.9

Such metaphorical connections are often made and this transmutation of food into other human currencies - love, protection, bestowal of virtue, punishment, guilt - overlaps with the concerns of this thesis. Mike's joke about Molly's mother neglecting to feed her suggests a consciousness on De Groen's part of this trend of mother-blame with regard to eating behaviour.

For Zoe shopping is. a necessary ritual, one of the few ways of contacting the outside world. In a more highly depersonalised way her undifferentiated viewing of the daytime soap operas ("I watch it all day, as if I'm starving." [79]) is another desperate attempt to bring herself into being:

9 Dan, Mira & Marilyn Lawrence. "'Poison is the Nourishment that Makes One Ill': The Metaphor of Bulimia." Fed Up and Hungry: Women, Oppression and Food. Ed. Marilyn Lawrence. New York: Peter Bedrick, 1987. 15 l

It's almost a religious thing. [Pause]

I go into supermarkets and department stores thinking I'll get back a sense of reality. [79-80]

Both Zoe and Molly are drawn as.- depressed, anxious and dysfunctional women. As well as the darker side, however, this does have its humorous aspect. In Act Two the table is set for breakfast and Molly comes down in a dressing gown. Zoe asks her if she would like some breakfast to which Zoe replies "No thanks. I'm on a diet. I want to lose ten pounds by eleven o'clock. "[89]

Gillian, the young character in Dags 10 , · would share Zoe's urgent desire for instantaneous weight loss. The cartoon-style Dag s by Debra Oswald is a successful, affectionate and entertaining look at the problems of transition to womanhood. Compulsive overeating is

1 1 not the only feature that makes Gillian a dag , though it is probably the most obvious one and certainly in terms of theatrical impact a very _effective one. She is barely ever seen without food, usually junk food, in her hands (or mouth). For much of the play she leaves us in no doubt that dealing with food is a battle. 11 Sometimes she finds herself at war with parts of her own body. This is amusingly represented by the scene in which she tries to physically restrain her own arm from delivering the calorie-laden junk to her mouth:

Gillian sighs, then like a released spring, jumps and gets a Mars bar from her school bag. She keeps talking to the audience, nibbling on the Mars bar.

GILLIAN: What really gets me - oh excuse me eating - what gets me is that everyone says 'Oh, a_dolescence is this really terrible painful time' but if any kid, like me for example - wants to lie around being miserable for a couple of years, they all say 'What's wrong with you? ...... you gotta admit it isn't logical. Oh, Gillian. Pig, pig, pig! Stop stuffing your face.[7]

10 Sydney: Currency, 1987. 11 This metaphor of women's relationship with food as a battle is explicit in the Wendy Harmer/Jane Clifton song from Clifton's one-woman self-devised show "Food is War". The lyrics of the song are published in It's a Joke Joyce: Australia's Funny Women. Sydney: Pan, 1989: 75. 152

She grabs the wrist holding the Mars bar as if the hand belongs to someone else. In a tug of war with the rebellious hand, she drags herself over to stuff the Mars bar away under the mattress. Then she sits on her hands on the bed, to control herself. Cleverly Oswald acknowledges the audience process by having Gillian anticipate their thoughts:

Seeing me pig out like that you all probably think. 'It's her fault that's she's so fat and hideous'. Which is a fair enough thing to think.[7]

After a further battle with herself she finally succumbs, grabbing the Mars bar and taking a bite "with delicious relief" and "Aaagh ... why fight it"[8], a comment which reinforces the feeling that Gillian's (and many people's) relation to food is a continual war. By investing the Mars bar with the animated strength of will of a perverse puppet, Oswald makes concrete the idea that food may often, if not in actuality then certainly conceptually, possess a life of its own. In addition, in dramatising this scene as a battle betw~en Gillian and a part of her own body (the arm holding the Mars bar struggling with the rest of her) the audience sees acted out the conflict of a character divided against herself. In many studies of eating disorders the sufferers commonly report that the food is a poison or that it actually is alive, has an independent will. In ways such as described in the above scene in Dags food can be an animated, live physical presence; it can act.

Genuinely light-hearted, nevertheless Dags often also reaches to the core of the problem confronting young women - the food curse - as Gillian's friend Monica calls it:

MONICA: The curse says you have to spend every minute of your life thinking about food, craving it. But the curse also says you're never allowed to enjoy one scrap of it. You try to shove the food in really fast, as if it's going to do less damage that way. But you still end up feeling contaminated - like it's a hunk of poison in your guts. (31] 153

Feeling contaminated, feeling poisoned; these are increasingly commonly women's responses to the taking in of food. Women's body size has become a metaphor for some of our most cherished values, such as denial of pleasure and delaying gratification. These internalised values amount to a morals of biology to the extent that thinness and fatness are increasingly perceived as moral characteristics (positive/negative) ..· The official reasons discouraging us from becoming overweight are those relating to health and longevity. Interestingly, recent studies suggest that overweight people actually live longer than underweight people. So efficiently has Western society internalised messages about the desirability of thinness, however, that the meanings assigned to obesity go further than simply a description of body shape, as the following associations of ideas reveal - fat and lazy, fat and ugly, big fat slob, fat and stupid, fat and hideous (as in Dags).

Spare Tyre, a British women's theatre group, often runs workshops after their shows to facilitate discussions amongst audience members on issues of food and gender. Many or most of their .shows, as their name suggests, examine food-related topics such as fatness, food and violence, food and punishment, food preparation and the emotional investment that is poured into it. One of the founder members, Katina Noble, went to the heart of food-related sexual politics, revealing a problem that bedevils many women in their dealings with men and food:

If the man is late, the dinner is left in the oven and burned. These things are interesting in terms of symbols of a relationship, of love, of loss, of abandonment. He lets the dinner burn, he has let part of their love wither away. He has rejected her food, he has rejected part of her.1 2

12 Cline, Sally. Just Desserts: Women and Food. London: Andre Deutsche, 1990: 115. 154

Sheila Kitzinger, anthropologist and leading British authority on childbirth and breast feeding, believes that the 'reject my food, reject me' notion begins with the food bond established by breastfeeding. Further, this feeling of rejection that can occur between mother and baby can be translated symbolically into similar feelings between the woman and any other adult to whom she offers food.1 3

Another of Alma De Groen's early plays uses this psychologically explosive topic. The Joss Adams Show14 contains an especially striking example of the way in which food can carry great psychological weight, and with an economy and point that more discursive dialogue could not achieve. The eponymous Joss, psychologically ill-equipped to fulfil the dual roles of mother and wife but neither wholly victim nor wholly monster, ends up battering her baby to death. On a literal level the play is about the baby-bashing syndrome; however in 1979 the playwright saw it as being "about claustrophobia, being trapped, and not being able to make yourself understood when you're in pain." 15

A grey canvas bag is a focal prop in the play. This grey canvas bag, the audience is told, contains Joss' baby, the six week old baby which she "marks" and "scars" and which the television interviewer is very keen to get a look at. The television talk show scene seamlessly transforms into a home scene thereby enacting the insertion of the public into the private sphere. The canvas bag now contains, Joss tells husband Neil, sausage, basil, saffron and rosemary and honey and - she looks again - some poison. So immediately a nexus is created between infant brutality, food and alienation (via the medium of television). For Carolyn Pickett, the medium of television. is used as the "decimating signifier" in this exploration of the "abstraction of existence" experienced by a young mother. 16 De Groen's incorporation of food takes on a bizarre

13 Cline: 114-5. 14 Sydney: Currency, 1977. 15 Palmer, Jennifer. Ed. Contemporary Australian Playwrights. Adelaide: Adelaide U Union P, 1979 16 "Reality, realism and a place to write in Alma De Green's Vocations." Australaslan Drama Studies. Number 22, Apr. 1993: 70. 155

aspect in a later scene when "the inappropriately euphoric commercial music with voice-over is heard":

Want to surprise your husband tonight? Serve a really different drink. (Joss hands Neil a glass filled with white-ish liquid). Give him milk! (Pause. Neil drinks.) Breast milk! (Neil chokes) NEIL: What's this stuff? JOSS: Breast milk. Don't you like it? NEIL: My God!

JOSS: I expressed it for you this morning and chilled it in the fridge. What's the matter? NEIL, with his hand over his mouth: I feel sick! (Neil rushes out, Joss looks at the glass) [ 128]

Joss cannot understand Neil's squeamishness, and wonders why, when he will drink from a cow, he won't drink from her.[129] All the various connotations associated with breasts contest each other in this disturbing exchange : breast as vessel, breast as sexually arousing; breast milk as nourishment; breast milk as a substance only fit for a baby - all the tensions between the maternal and sexual stereotypes are at work. A collision of the facets of woman occurs in this nutritional competition generating a combative energy. Neil's horror, his rejection of the maternal milk, calls to mind Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection in Powers of Horror. Abjection, for Kristeva, is:

an extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is above all a revolt o{ the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance, but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may menace us from inside. So it is a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous and also the feeling of an impossibility of doing so - _1 7

17 Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia, 1980: 135-36. 156

In The Joss Adams Show the breastfeeding baby is portrayed as a consuming creature. The image of a new-born baby stands as the most voracious entity imaginable. It is doubtful whether the husband understands on the most basic level that he and the baby are both consuming her, sucking her dry; to the audience his revulsion at being offered the breast milk is a reminder of two things - that anything that threatens the border between woman and not woman/body and not body is unsettling and that she is being sucked dry by them both whether he literally drinks the breast milk or not. The exchange between the Other and child is reiterated on symbolic and practical levels, in social exchange and interaction; the baby is not yet separated - part of Joss's tension and crisis. Neil has separated from his Other, from the maternal and therefore the suggestion that he drink breast milk crosses the borders - enters taboo territory. Breast milk, like blood, is a dangerous fluid:

Bodily fluids .... call into question the borders of the body and even the borders between life and death. Once again it is the undecidable, the unsettling, the threat to identity, which is abject.1 8

Joss takes the startling step of separating herself from the baby - by killing it.

Joss's horror of being consumed by baby and husband is a variation on the fear that is frequently articulated, whether in stylized or naturalistic form, in plays by women: that with every night's meal the woman is serving herself up to her family. Inspired by Miriam Dixson's book of the same name, Lissa Benyon's The Real Matilda is a one woman show about a woman who, in a fugue state, 'sees' herself drive off on~ night (while out for the family's take-away dinner) in search of the 'real' Matilda, a girl dreamed up during school days, now the unconstrained spirit this woman wishes to be. Triggered by a supermarket shopping upset - a spilt carton of yoghurt on the supermarket floor - the play moves into a nightmare

18 Oliver, Kelly. "Nourishing the Speaking Subject: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Abominable Food and Women." Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformatlve Phllosophles of Food. Eds. Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992: 73. 157

encounter involving a spilt casserole on the kitchen floor then on to become a suburban-flight fantasy in search of the 'real' Matilda.

The set calls for only that icon of consumer frenzy and frustration, a supermarket shopping trolley, serving as car and pram, and a small table and chairs. Reviewer Bob Evans' description of the 1989 Bay St Theatre production suggests the intertwined yet conflictive entities of woman and meal:

It is as a paean to the resilience of the suburban mum: a flight of fancy, a moment frozen in time as the stew that was to be dinner lies cooling on the floor on the rebound from the fridge, a coagulating puddle of brown meat and burnt gravy tinted with the colours of carrots, tomatoes and celery. 19

would suggest that the food imagery evoked in Benyon's play is intentionally reminiscent of (and worked in performance as) a picture of a woman crouched beside her own regurgitated food - in this case her cooking - where the mess of congealed stew is spilled all over the floor. Boundaries between food/non-food and womqn are intentionally confused in these sequences of the play. The metaphor of vomiting up one's life is not uncommonly employed by bulimics.20 Twice in the play the woman finds herself immersed in cooked food. Husband John is angry at the son for not having passed on a message. His anger implodes not on the family this time but on the symbol of the wife's labour - the evening meal:

John is too angry to even hit him. Instead, he goes to the gas stove and looks in the saucepan ...... He throws the saucepan at the frig. The twins tap dancing. [ 9]

The play then moves into a more dreamlike mode as it does intermittently:

[To audience] Half the stew is on the floor. It's sort of satisfying. The children come to look. This hasn't happened in our house before. The stew is too

19 Evans, Bob. Sydney Morning Herald. 20.3.89. 2°Chemin: "This is my life .... My whole life I'm choking on and spewing out and trying to gobble back again"(9-10). 158

beautiful with its bright carrot and celery and tomato, its rich meat and burnt stuck gravy chipped off and floating in black patterns. I'm mesmerised. I reach my hands down and run them through it like mud pies. Like the mud pies Norah makes down by the detergent factory. I squish the carrot between my fingers. I spread the stew out on the floor. [9]

She is part of the mess, part of her. meal, 'inside' the food, an inversion of the usual relationship whereby the food is intended to be inside the family. At the end of the play, as she re-enters this dream zone she becomes aware of herself engulfed in food as it changes form. Cooking itself is a transformational activity - about changing raw food into cooked food. Here the food's transformational capabilities do not result from cooking; the change of the food from cold yoghurt to warm stew signals an altered reality and temporality. From being amongst the spilt yoghurt on the supermarket floor she is, in the play's time, simultaneously immersed in the stew on her own kitchen floor. Down on hands and knees, she is in the mopping and polishing position. She describes the changes in the colourful, glutinous subst_ance - "going brown and black and orange"[41 ]. There is in visual and affective terms only a small step from this picture of rejected, spilt food to that of vomited, undigested food - she is still able to distinguish bits of carrot and meat in a manner similar, it would seem, to that of a bulimic identifying the ingredients of the guilty act of purging. The family do not know what to make of their odd mother grovelling in food:

It's just Thomas and the other kids and John, and they're staring at me, and my hands and arms, covered with stew to the elbows. Staring at me as if to say, is this really Mum? Hey Mum! What's happened to Mum? [42]

To prove that she's not really deranged and to signal her return to the family, she suggests that she'll "go down and get a takeaway."[ 42]

In a significant sense virtually the whole play [page 9 to the end] is bracketed by food. The character's story-telling and memories are all triggered by that first tactile experience of the burnt spilt 159

stew on the floor, another instance of the way in which food triggers memory; food is. memory as writers as different as Marcel Proust (for whom the past is hidden in the flavour of Madeleines dipped in lime-flower tea) and Golda Meir (remembering the shortages of food in her childhood) have demonstrated.21

Women often serve themselves up as .offerings or feel as if they are being consumed. We see a humorous if desperate acknowledgement of this sense of being consumed by others in The Real Matilda. In response to husband John's defensive retaliation ("A man can have a few bloody beers with his bloody mates, can't he? After all you have your coffee mornings, don't you?") 'she' replies as herself:

And it's true I do have my coffee mornings. And so do the children. They have my coffee mornings and my friends' children have my coffee mornings.[4; my emphasis]

Quite unambiguously here is the suggestion that her time is not her own; _even her 'own' recreational time is consumed by her children and her friends' children. As Margaret Visser reminds us, differences between adults and children are frequently delineated by distinctions of food and drink. In our culture, underpinned by health more than moral taboos, adults deny children the free consumption of tea and coffee on the grounds that it is 'bad for them'. Visser contends that the real reason is the desire for some respite from the demands of children.22 Tea and coffee drinking are marked off as adult privileges and out of that is constructed the activity of 'coffee mornings'. In the play the woman's dilemma is that her private relaxation time (and the only time the husband can nominate as hers toq) is being eroded, taken over, consumed, not just by her children but her friends' children as well. Being admitted to tea and coffee drinking is a minor initiation rite into adult activity: in this play the children are infringing ritually as

21 Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. London: Penguin, 1984; Golda Meir My Life. London: Futura, 1979. 22 Visser Rituals of Dinner: 46. 160

well as spatially and personally and Lissa Benyon achieves this sense of invasion by the 'coffee morning' intonations.

Benyon's script makes an implicit connection between food and death. Ironically, food which sustains life can also take on the power to kill - by its smothering, dominating, fattening, disordering capabilities. Here food operates as a combination of weapon and the evidence of murder:

Herself [to audience]::! come to. I go to the sink to wash. The stew is like blood on my hands. Newspaper Headlines: "Mum drowns Dad and kids in casserole" [1 O]

This blood on her hands is not in the same category as the proverbial 'spilt milk' which is not worth crying over; it is closer to Lady Macbeth's. In this case it is not someone else's blood but her own - the blood she has shed in the service of her family.

The phenomenon of woman as dominated by food, and in particular wom~n as edible, is not peculiar to women's plays, though food tends to be more loaded symbolically and be a potentially destructive and menacing force when women utilise it.2 3 In The Real Matilda, The Joss Adams Show and many others food functions as a polysemous index of the overall mode and quality of interactions between the 'mother' characters and the 'child' characters. Food may be tendered as, or stand for, many different social and emotional commodities - love, care, gratitude, work, time, power. Food may perform the role of a bribe, a consolation, a gift, a salve for guilt. In the next group of plays there may be noticed a significant function of food : its planning, acquisition,

23 Jill, Coralie's sister in Alex Buzo's Coralie Lansdowne Says No (Sydney: Currency, 1974) describes her first poem to her 'poet and public servant' friend Stuart. Jill: My first effort was called Mozzarella Odyssey, in which the poet - that's me­ envisages herself as a pizza floating down a storm water channel the morning after cracker night when the acrid smell of cordite was upsetting the seagulls. I - the pizza - lose all my olives and anchovies and finally get emptied into the sea. [51] Buzo's characteristic surreal touch of woman as pizza does not have the disturbingly visceral or threatening qualities of Benyon's stew as murdering mother's milieu. I 61

preparation and presentation is invariably in the hands of women, usually mothers.

Peta Murray's fascination with food and how it figures in families may be detected in her play Wallflowering. The basis of the play is a couple who sit down in a room before a marriage guidance counsellor and "rake over the embers _. of their relationship" .24 As they engage in this joint act of recall, from time to time one enlists the other to help play out incidents that he or she may not necessarily have been privy to at the time they occurred. The Veal Marengo episode is one such sequence. Peg's female friends have insisted that she join them for a seafood lunch. She reluctantly goes, she tells the counsellor who is an imaginary member of the audience. During this lunch she meets "a man with a nice face" who pays for her lunch so that she will have enough spare cash to catch a cab home in time to pick her kids up from school. Once home she decides to make "Veal Marengo, a favourite of ours which I find in the Women's Weekly Cookbook on page sixty-seven". She proceeds to describe:

I toss the meat in seasoned flour, and fry it in hot butter and oil until golden brown, when I remove it and place it in a casserole. And as I do I think: I am really not hungry at all. I leave out the garlic, which does not agree with my sons, and the wine, of which my husband does not approve, but I add boiling water, in which I have dissolved two chicken stock cubes. [33-34]

And, further on into the account:

And now, as the meat is tender, I add the onions and tomatoes, and some tinned champignons because I have forgotten to pick up any fresh mushrooms, and say to myself: I really am. not in the mood for cooking this tonight. [34]

When she serves it to her family, she confides:

My husband says, but not unkindly: CLIFF: What's this?

24 Personal interview with John Romeril (Dec. 1988), dramaturg for Wallflowerlng at the 1988 Australian National Playwrights Conference, Sydney. 162

PEG: Veal Marengo. It's one of your favourites. CLIFF: It tastes different. It doesn't taste the same . PEG: It's the same. But I can't eat very much of it. My son says: CLIFF [as the child] Don't you like it too? I don't like Veal Marengo now, Mummy. PEG: But it's the same as always. I haven't done anything different. CLIFF: It tastes different. PEG: It's the same recipe. I followed the same recipe. I can show you the recipe. The only difference is that it has no garlic and no white wine in it. CLIFF: Well, I'm sorry, but it tastes a bit odd to me. It tastes like you've forgotten to put something in. There's something missing. PEG: And I think but don't say: Yes, it tastes odd to me, too. Yes, there is something missing. I think, but don't say: There is no love in this Veal Marengo. I could not find any love to put in my cooking. Tonight, I have run out of love. That is why it tastes different. Instead, I say: Perhaps it needs more salt. I think I will have a small glass of wine. Just a half. [34-35]

So, Peg can admit to a missing ingredient but not an omission of love from the family meal. Food gives control to those who choose, buy and prepare it, but that is secured often at a high price. lntere_stingly in this light Peta Murray recalls that she was able to monitor her mother's state of mind by what the family was given to eat:

I remember my mother, when she was feeling guilty about something, we would always get bacon and eggs in the morning. And if she wasn't feeling guilty about something you'd make your own breakfast which was a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk. But if she was feeling guilty her way of punishing herself was to make herself get up in the morning and cook breakfast.25

Hannie Rayson's Mary 26 juxtaposes two mother and daughter relationships: one Gr~ek-Australian (Evdokea/Mary) and one Anglo­ Australian (Carole/Gail). Food impinges on each pair in different,

25 Personal Interview with Peta Murray, 6th Jan. 1989. 26 Montmorency, Vic.: Yackandandah, 1985. 163

but overall quite negative, ways, causing impatience, irritation, disappointment. The politics of food arising from the personal and familial is frequently represented as a very sensitive area. Evdokea in Mary will only confide to daughter Mary an opinion of her friend's cooking on the way home in the car. She will grant that Despina makes good dolmathes but makes no bones about the fact that the Avgolemeno had too much salt and that Despina always uses too much salt.[31] Through this brief exchange food is the medium and focus for long-standing rivalries. At the Stephanides' place Mary makes brother Stavros' school lunch. To her exasperation her mother, Evdokea, asks her if she is making lunch for Stavros. "Yes, Mum" is her reply; the stage direction "She always makes his lunch" indicates that this exchange, too, is routine. Evdokea reminds Mary that Stavros doesn't like cheese. Mary takes the cheese slice off. "And not too much butter" Evdokea adds, "Just tomato". As well, she reminds her about the pepper and salt. Under her breath Mary mutters "Anything else?"[15] Lunch must be pleasing to the male child even if its preparation is a cause of tension between mother and daughter.

Whenever Gail visits Mary's house she is plied with baclava, biscuits and coffee by Evdokea who admits that she doesn't like anything unless it's "real sweet". Gail is skinny by Evdokea's standards. Later when the two girls are alone Gail remarks: "Boy you wouldn't want to come around here if you weren't hungry". Mary disapprovingly replies "She doesn't feel comfortable if visitors aren't stuffing their faces. "[25] Gail's mother Carole, who, as it happens works in a restaurant, denies herself food, beginning the day with "one measly Limmits chocolate biscuit and a cup of black coffee" much to Gail's annoyance.(14]

In these plays mothers control the choosing, buying and preparation of food. This invests them with a certain power but also leaves them vulnerable. The potential for disappointment and insult (intended or not) at the rejection of food is captured in Mary. One afternoon the two mothers are returning from shopping. Evdokea has done hers after work without the convenience of a car, and 164

is struggling with heavy shopping baskets.. She stops frequently, puts them down and rubs her shoulder. She continues on looking tired and weary. As she passes the Selwyns', Carole is getting out of her car to bring in large grocery bags. [37]

As she enters her place Carole calls out to Gail:

Ooh-hoo? Darling? Ooh-hoo, Gail? [She registers that she's not home] What a splurge. Thirty dollars! [She begins taking groceries out of the bags] Turkey ... Champagne. You're only forty once that's what I reckon. Ooh goodness, I hope the pav's OK. [37]

Alone on stage she reproaches herself for indulging in such forbidden edibles. The idea that she would like to share this milestone meal with her male friend occurs to her and she reaches for her address book. She dismisses this idea, content to make this a mother/daughter celebration:

No. Just the two of us. A real slap up. [She bustles around excitedly]. Now these spuds'II need about an hour and a half. Better get them in with the turkey.[38]

On Gail's entry, Carole greets her with "Hi darling. I'm so glad you're home. I've got a surprise." "What is it?", Gail calls from off stage. And as she enters:

GAIL: Wow what's this for? CAROLE: We are having ourselves a feast my dear. GAIL: Great. Is it going to be ready in time? I have to go at seven thirty. There's this thing on at school tonight. I forgot to tell you about it. [She exits]. [38]

Since she does not remain on stage to note the impact on her mother, we may assume there is no hurt intended, simply an obliviousness to the importance of the occasion. 165

Canberra playwright Jane Bradhurst's play Duet27 gives us an insight into the weight of responsibility involved in a mother's decision-making about her daughter's food. It is clear that this mother of a concert clarinetist has to be very careful what she prepares for the sensitive digestive system of her reed-playing daughter:

MOTHER: I've made you some lunch. DAUGHTER: I hope it's not salad. Because there's no good in salad. The greens make you belch. (She belches) You could belch while you're playing. MOTHER: I've got you no salad. DAUGHTER: No milk or custard. They coat your cords. Coat like a blanket. MOTHER: There's no milk or custard. DAUGHTER: You've got me no chop. Because chops just sit here. [puts hands on her stomach] I can't play with chops. MOTHER: I've made you an omelette. DAUGHTER: You've made me an omelette? An omelette will do.feats] It couldn't be better. How could it be better? A flat down below, a mother waiting on me hand and foot. No excuse if I don't play well. And that makes it worse. When there's no single excuse. [22]

This exchange is a particularly potent exemplification of the psychological confrontation between Mother and Daughter being wholly embodied in and shaped by a culinary code.

Although it would appear that discussion and preparation of food trigger mainly disharmony, mothers in these plays sometimes employ food to meliorate general family tensions. Such is the case in Olga Masters' A Working Man's Castle.28 When Rita's 'mongoloid son' is in the way of the other members of the family at breakfast time, she r~moves him from harm's way by telling him to go back to bed till she's ready to dress him. At the same time she "whisks a plate of cereal to him", in part as a substitute for her direct attention, in part to occupy him.[3]

27 Brisbane: Playlab, 1987. 28 Sydney: Currency, 1988. 166

As was the case in Mary, in this play it is also the male child whose food preferences are privileged. As well, Rita's son Jerry queries his mother's personal hygiene:

JERRY: Did you wash? Don't make me sandwiches without you washed. [Rita works on] You haven't washed. RITA: I showered last thing last night. JERRY: What good is that? All through the night you mighta been - RITA: [interrupting] I was doing nothing with my hands through the night! JERRY: You fed the cat with those hands and now you're mauling bread I gotta eat.[2]

Sometimes the traces of mother/daughter interactions are reconstructed and examined in retrospect, as in the case of Marilyn Allen's All the Black Dogs, 29 inspired by the discovery of the remains of the Truro murder victims outside Adelaide. This play deals from the inside with the horrible consequences of a young woman's disappearance and murder by a psychopathic misfit. Centr_al to the play is the mother's journey through her own conscience; a self-interrogation of her own culpability in the tragedy of her daughter's abduction. It is in this sphere of the play that food surfaces; it is a point of connection, though not an especially harmonious one, between mother and daughter as Allen looks at our society where the 'black dogs' (in this case two young criminals Robin and Frank) range outside the tribe, prowling and waiting to spring. Helen's disappearance, in a flash-forward, is the starting point of a play which works on three time-levels. Using mainly a socio-documentary style, its episodic structure encompasses the following levels - reviews in flash-back of the mother/child relationship interwoven with the girl's developing independence; the visits by the policeman investigating Helen's murder; Robin's (along with dependent sidekick, Frank's) gradual entrapment of his victim.

Clearly, from this description, food is not the principal subject matter of the play. Nevertheless, Marilyn Allen achieves a

29 Unpublished MS, 1987. 167

concatenation of a number of ways food may transmit complex cross-currents which manifest themselves in mother/daughter tensions. In this case both food as physical presence and food's capacity for signification combine to produce the scene's conflict. The sequence begins with a fairly normal 'What's for tea?' query from Helen.

MOTHER: Chilli con came. Can't you smell it? HELEN:Yuk. MOTHER: Everything's yuk to you. HELEN: No - but Chilli con came ... ! MOTHER: Gee, thanks, Nell! Here I am slaving over a hot stove ... HELEN: No you're not! You're reading! (22]

The scene soon establishes conflict between the mother's role as provider of palatable food and provider of her own intellectual 'food'. A little further on:

MOTHER: Here I am, struggling to get this thing done before they throw me out and .!J.Q:tl, when I have the odd two minutes - HELEN: What?

MOTHER: - to do some work, I can't find a thing. Everything's gone! The notes I took yesterday half digested in the dog's basket - HELEN: [Eating sandwich] You shouldn't leave them lying around. MOTHER: -and you've eaten all my pens. What the hell are you doing? HELEN: Nothing. MOTHER: Eating a sandwich when the tea's nearly ready! HELEN: Well I don't like hot food. I never have. (23]

Here the intersection of a number of different notions relating to food and eating mak~s an exceptionally clear demonstration of food as a polysemous signifier. The mother experiences the daughter as a devourer of other than what she puts before her to eat; Helen eats at the wrong time (before tea) or the wrong substance (the mother's pens). The additional implication is that in this regard the daughter and the dog are complicit, for it is the dog that has half digested the mother's lecture notes while her daughter has consumed the instruments with which the mother attempts to 168

create her own text. Cooking in the play is perceived as time­ devouring and thankless work. Helen is taking a risk when she makes an ill-advised comparison between her mother's cooking and that of a friend's mother:

MOTHER: What sort of things does Mrs Abbott cook? HELEN: Mum! - I don't know! MOTHER: You eat it, don't you! You're always telling me how good it is! HELEN: Well it is! It's just simple - I don't know - she makes these salads - and it's great - like spinach and pears ... MOTHER: You don't like spinach! HELEN: Not the way you do it. This was a salad and it's all clean ... MOTHER: Clean! HELEN: And lots of fresh fruit. MOTHER: We have fresh fruit.

HELEN: Mum! It's not a competition! I don't want you to be like Mrs Abbott. I want you to be different. But just because she's normal - MOTHER: And I'm abnormal? HELEN: -doesn't mean she has to be all bad. I mean, I know she's what you call a fascist, but that doesn't mean she has to be a bad cook! MOTHER: [Laughs] HELEN: Not that you're a bad cook ... anyway, it's only hot things I don't like [She rummages in her bag - like chilli con came. [Beat] Anyway, here's your pen. Sorry about your notes. [24)

The line of food argument here has a nice circularity about it, beginning and ending as it does with 'hot food'. This scene well portrays the emotional complexity of food-related issues. The mother does not particularly like cooking (she would prefer to be doing her University work) yet she resents the suggestion that her cooking is not as go<;>d as that of a friend's 'normal' mother. She is competitive despite the fact that she does not want to be compared with Mrs Abbott who in her eyes is "a fascist".

A character's attitude toward food, how she actually perceives food, can be a reliable indicator of her state of mind. For Jennifer Compton in Crossfire30 response to food is one of the barometers

30 Sydney: Currency, 1976. 169

of a character's stability. Because it is such a staple and necessary facet of life, unusual or atypical behaviour with regard to food is interpreted, not surprisingly, as an alarm bell. So it is with Crossfire's Cilla and Sam. When the pregnant lodger Mim asks Sam if he wants children yet, Sam replies:

Not if Cilla doesn't. You see, well when we were first married we lived a long way out. I was working hard, coming home late, buggered, and it must have been very hard for her. I got home very late one night, I'd rung her but when I got home she was cooking spaghetti. She'd cooked about twenty packets and was trying to get it to lie in straight lines on the kitchen table. We moved back into town and it was all right but there's something about Cilla that I just don't understand. So I let her do it her way. I don't mention children any more.[27]

Jennifer Compton, in a telephone interview, elaborated the spaghetti incident this way:

Cilla doesn't like herself. She has no ability to give food. She is rejecting her role as being a provider of food. If she doesn't she'll be stuck. Cilla was up against it. She was on the inside of the situation. Mim is on the outside, but wants to be on the inside. When I wrote that play I was 23 and I didn't see any hope of resolving those difficulties and choices then. For Cilla, if she took on that role of the food provider, it would have symbolised something - as if every time you cooked a perfect dinner for your husband one more little bit of you was gone.3 1

Mim's planned though partnerless foray into motherhood emerges as a sounder way of proceeding than careerist Cilia's confusion over whether or not to embrace the perils of maternity. Compton is fairly harsh on Cilia, particularly on her refusal to decide about motherhood. This is clearly one of the reasons why some feminists were critical of th.e play's equivocations when it was first performed in Brisbane and Sydney in 1975 : there were complaints that "it was yet another backwards step and could only harm the cause". 32

3 1 Telephone interview, 5th Feb. 1989. 32 Blocksidge, Jennifer. Introduction. Crossfire. xiii. 170

Big-bellied Mim's undeniable fecundity is a source of envy for Cilia as her friend Janie, a co-worker in the Women's Movement, observes that she spotted Cilla eyeing Mim's belly. What is a source of envy for Cilia constitutes an attraction for Sam. Mim readily takes over Cilia's domestic roles. She cooks, shares warmth and humour with Sam, discusses the wine he brings home. But as Compton says:

It is easy for Sam to be fond of Mim because she cooks delicious dinners for him. Cilla is not likeable because she is wrestling with a difficult intellectual dilemma.33

Presumably, too, it is easier for Mim to take on this role in the sense that she is only playing at being a wife. That she can do no more than pretend is borne out by the scene in which she asks for a loan of Sam's wedding ring to wear when they go out to lunch.[27] The vicarious aspect of this is sustained by Sam's gesture of a subsequent gift of a cheap wedding ring, which will guard against the likelihood, in Mim's words, of "dropping it in the mousse".[43] Food . is again used with loaded deliberation in a subsequent contact between Sam and Mim. It is no coincidence that the food Sam chooses to bring home to Mim to taste is the unambiguously fecund pawpaw. Nor is it surprising that Sam's decision to give Mim a fruit to taste as round as her belly and full of seeds produces an especially warm and intimate scene between them.

Cilla's behaviour with the spaghetti discloses a response to, and behaviour with, food as a way of signalling distress and disequilibrium in relation to her constructed self. Food behaviour as part of a complex and wide array of the symptomatology of female identity const~uction is acknowledged in popular, academic and health professional areas. In turn, an observable upsurge of interest may be noticed in the area of food, eating, body image and eating behaviours among playwrights (especially women playwrights) reflecting this heightening of interest, at times a preoccupation with the topic, in society in general. In order to place the perceptions of the playwrights in the context of the

33 Telephone interview, 5th Feb. 1989. l 7 l

various commentators, psychologists, feminists, it is necessary to outline the background to the social preoccupation with the problem and some of the significant explanations and approaches to the various eating behaviours. Sally Cline's book Just Desserts: Women and Food tackles this issue of women and their relationship with food. It is the book's central tenet that "food has become a symbol of women's emotional .. needs, a rhetoric of protest as well as a language of joy and anguish. "34

One area which has assumed a very high profile in the Western world in both popular and specialist media . in recent years and one that many psychologists, nutritionists, feminists and others find worrying and bewildering is the increase in incidence and severity of eating disorders, particularly anorexia, bulimia and related conditions. Under the coercive powers of consumerism and the mass media, women have come to view their bodies as hostile objects to be subjugated to the unrealistic standards of the beauty ideal. Naomi Wolf addresses this topic in The Beauty Myth, via the image of the inflexible standard of the Iron Maiden, a kind of imagi_nary punishing cage into which women are enjoined to squeeze themselves no matter how much discomfort it causes.35 Although her analysis extends to all aspects of the beauty industry including the undeliverable claims of beauty products and the transformations promised by painful cosmetic surgery, she devotes one chapter, "Hunger", to issues such as the dropping of official weight levels one stone below most women's natural level and redefining women's shape as by definition 'too fat'. She calls this 'great weight shift' one of the major historical developments of the century, a direct solution to the threats posed by the women's movement and economic and reproductive freedom. Faith in weight loss and its corollary,_ denial of food, has for many women taken on the power of a religious conviction. Joan Brumberg, social historian

34 London: Andre Deutsch, 1990: 5. 35 Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990: 7. Wolf describes the original Iron Maiden as a medieval German instrument of torture, a body shaped casket painted with the limbs and features of a lovely smiling young woman. She extends this image in contemporary terms as an hallucination in which women trap themselves, one similarly cruel, rigid and euphemistically painted. 172

and author of the well-respected study on anorexia, Fasting G i r Is, articulates the crisis:

Sadly, the cult of the body is the only coherent philosophy of self that women are offered in this society.36

In light of this noted recent accen.tuation of eating related behaviours, Carolyn Walker Bynum notes the importance of medieval women's control over food:

Food related behaviour was central to women socially and religiously not only because food was a resource women controlled but because, by means of food, women controlled themselves and their world.37

Because medieval culture associated women and the female body with food, female spirituality and piety were expressed in food language and imagery and in eating and feeding practices, as well as in fasting. Joan Brumberg makes the crucial distinction between food refusal in medieval and contemporary cultures. Whereas medi~val culture promoted a specific form of appetite control on women, anorexia mirabilis, which symbolized the collective values of that age, anorexia nervosa expresses the individualism of our time. 38 Changing notions of personal aesthetics in the twentieth century determined the body, not the face, should became the focus of female beauty, therefore dieting moved from the periphery to the centre of women's lives and culture.39 Women in this social climate began to view their own bodies and those of which they were in charge as an indication of their competence.40 Later, the feminization of scientific nutrition contributed to women's heightened sensitivity to the body .41 The appearance in 1918 of Lulu Hunt Peters' book Diet and Health with a Key to the

36 Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia as a Modern Disease. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988. 37 Bynum, Caroline Walker. "Fast, Feast and Flesh: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women." Representations. 11, 1985: 10. 38 Brumberg. Fasting Girls: 45-6. 39 Brumberg: 231. 40 Brumberg: 237. 41 Brumberg: 238. 173

Ca I or i e s was the first best-selling weight control book to confirm that weight was a source of anxiety for women and to articulate the new secular credo of physical denial: modern women suffered to be beautiful (thin) rather than pious.42 A subtle but important change in the history of modern dieting was the post World War Two popularisation of adolescent weight control.43 Over the decades there have been changing .and varied views of eating disorders. After World War Two Hilde Bruche was largely responsible for shaping a new psychiatric view encouraging a broader and more complex understanding of the significance of food behaviour. The introduction to Eating Disorders (1973), a book that represented three decades of her work, began:

This book will concern itself with individuals who misuse the eating function in their efforts to solve or camouflage problems of living that to them appear otherwise insoluble. Food lends itself readily to such usage because eating, from birth on, is always closely intermingled with interpersonal experiences, and its physiological and psychological aspects cannot be strictly differentiated. For normal people, too, food is never restricted to the biological aspects alone. There is no human society that deals rationally with food in its environment, that eats according to the availability, edibility, and nutritional value alone. Food is endowed with complex values and elaborate ideologies, religious beliefs, and prestige systems.44

Matra Robertson in Starving in the Silences notes the powerful contemporary cultural pressures towards the creation and inscription of a standardised gendered body when she writes that "gender acquisition may involve a desire to fit the female body into the socially acceptable mandates for weight, without any acknowledgement of difference in embodiment or social roles."45

Largely created by the fashion industry, transmitted through the media, fuelled by a multi-million dollar diet industry and

42 Brumberg: 241-2. 43 Brumberg: 249. 44 Bruch, Hilde. Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia and the Person Within. New York: Basic, 1973: 217. 45 Robertson, Matra. Starving In the Silences: an Exploration of Anorexia Nervosa. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992: 61. 174

exacerbated by the current mania for fitness, this body-centred ideal results in an ever-increasing number of young women developing harmful eating disorders. The whole realm of eating disorders and food-related behaviour in (principally) women is politically determined. Society exhorts women to pour their energy into what, when and how much they eat and weigh; by complying with this pressure, the dieter is reassuring society that it still has the upper hand over her and over the imperatives of 'nature'. Paradoxically, this anxious quest for the perfect body is going on precisely at the point where women face serious challenges of self-definition as they orientate themselves within the world of work outside the home.

Winner of the Genie Award (Canada) for Best Feature Documentary for 1991, The Famine Within, directed by Katherine Gilday, combines the direct testimony of many women who have suffered from the body obsession (anorexics, bulimics, fat women, mothers, models, athletes, dancers, career women, young girls) with insightful analyses by feminists and activists, exploring the kind of hunger that cannot be satisfied by food, and locating the phenomenon within our social context. Among many of the perceptive observations in the film, it is suggested that these disorders are a desperate, if unconscious, protest against the denial of the feminine within both men and women. Suggested by the film, too, is the view that women are somehow being punished for their increasing power outside the home by a hidden clause: women can have all the status and income they want, but they must still be an object for others. (See illustration [n]) Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist lssue46 and Hunger Strike47 , comments in this film that feminism has not solved this dilemma; there has been no dil_ution of the emphasis on the body and, in fact, women who do not pay attention to their bodies are stigmatised.48 Joan Brumberg, supporting this view, accurately calls this double pressure "a critical brain-drain" on the female population.

46 London: Hamlyn, 1978. 47 London: Faber & Faber, 1986. 48 The Famine Within, Canada 1990; producer, writer, director, Katherine Gilday. A scene from The Famine Within, directed by Katherine Gilday, Canada, 1991.

( n ) 175

It is frequently argued in the literature on the subject that one of the many reasons young women adopt this relationship with food may be a refusal to grow up into adulthood, and more specifically a rejection of 'becoming' their mother's own nurturing bodies because they perceive that their mothers lacked power in the world. The mother/daughter relationship is often perceived to be the primary problematic relationship in terms of the manifestation of these food-related behaviours. 4 9

This problematic area of women's experience has been taken up as subject matter by theatre, performance and documentary makers. Although more than ever prevalent as a social problem in Australia (in 1992 Education Minister Virginia Chadwick announced the establishment of a NSW task force into the eating habits and attitudes of NSW school girls) it is not confined to the late eighties/early nineties in terms of its inclusion as subject matter for theatre.

Elizabeth Natalie, in Feminist Theatre: a Study in Persuasion5o documents several American groups which have tackled this troublesome topic of food-related behaviours. The Women's Experimental Theatre in New York put on a play called, simply, Food in their 1981-82 season as the first of a "series of plays about women's daily unrelenting relationship to food."51 The second play in the series on women and food, Foodtalk, was produced at women's lnterart Theatre in July 1982. Present Stage in Northampton Massachusetts staged Food Fright, a play about women and food. Thesbian Feminists of Albany New York presented a short vignette Carbohydrates. This concentration on women's relationship to food, body weight, and body image was not an isolated phenomenon;_ Rhode Island Feminist Theatre's earlier show Taking It Off, first performed in 1973, was set in a weight-loss camp. The women are dehumanized during weigh-in and exercise sessions by the male authority figures in the play (camp director,

49 The 'pathology' of mother/daughter/food interactions is outlined in various texts including those by Brumberg, Chemin, Cline, Erichsen, Lawrence, and Orbach. 50 Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1985. 51 Natalie: 125. Quoted in program received by Natalie from Sondra Segal on behalf of the Women's Experimental Theatre Group, March 1982. 176

psychiatrist, recreational director and chef). At one stage the chef prepares a 'soup' consisting of stereotypical beauty requisites: •Iong slender thighs, small even breasts, striking features, small waist .... "[15-16].

In the United Kingdom, a company calling itself Spare Tyre formed in 1979, inspired by Susie Orbach's F_at is a Feminist Issue. As they describe themselves in the British Alternative Theatre Directory:

We began as a group of out of work actresses who shared a compulsive eating problem with millions of other women and wanted to share its dilemmas and solutions with them.52

More recently Spare Tyre Theatre Company has shifted its emphasis to more general topics of women's health. Women's daily battle with food, however, appears to remain as relevant and evident as subject matter in theatre in the nineties (more especially for groups which define themselves primarily as women's theatre groups) as it did in the seventies and eighties.

A number of Australian plays by women deal with this topic seriously while some take a more light-hearted look at the dilemmas of over-eating, dieting, weight-watching. The 1991 Artrage Festival (W.A.) included a production by Theatre We Two of Life's a Breakfast, dealing with the politics of dieting.53 The characters Clare and Wendy, both overweight, plan to start a diet tomorrow. They deceive each other and themselves in relation to food. Meanwhile their self-esteem plummets and moods become irritable as they realise they will never resemble the 'perfect bodies' torn from the_ pages of Cleo and stuck to their refrigerators as their inspiration.54 Critic Roger Martin criticises the dialogue of this 40 minute play, claiming it needs to be more incisive, and that it often only "serves as a background to Clare and Wendy's constant

52 1990/91, extract from International Theatre Institute Directory, n.p. 53 Written and performed by Karyn Barbarich and Judith Stewart. 54 Martin, R. West Australlan. 16.10.91. 177

eating and these two eat more in 40 minutes than most of us would eat in 40 days" _55

Although this may be a slight exaggeration, it is interesting to note the emphasis on the quantity of food consumed on stage, since it has always been acknowledged as a practical difficulty for actors to eat even normal quantities and act at the same time. Yet, the reviewer seems to suggest that large quantities of real food were consumed. If so, this is a marked contrast to other 'food plays' which usually do not compel actors to eat extremely large quantities. In Weighing It Up from Adelaide-based group Vitalstatistix (1985) for example, one huge (actual) cake eaten by the actors is emblematic of the sinful temptations of food and the threat posed to diet and strenuous exercise regimes by such fatal indulgences. In Karin Mainwaring's Binge we see mainly the remains of the bingeing, the empty packets of Tim Tams, and the exhausted and self-loathing binger.

When women eat massive quantities of food on stage, it makes a strong statement and is a confronting, uncomfortable experience for the audience. This is partly because it foregrounds women's relationship with food whether or not that is the overt issue of the play. Because food is coded in such a complicated and perilous manner for women in contemporary society most women in an audience feel ambivalent about watching other women perform eating. Eating large quantities on stage is also remarkable in terms of the accepted stage wisdom of avoiding food on stage which is difficult to swallow. A particularly memorable moment of concentration on a woman eating in front of an audience occurs in Nowra's unpublished play The Watchtower (commissioned by NIDA for the Gra~uating class of 1990), when one of the consumptive characters force feeds herself in the hope of fattening herself up, thereby demonstrating that her condition is improving, and moreover, that she has beaten TB. She is being watched while she eats - by the audience of course, but also by the male character who discovers her at this act of force feeding. This is an unusual sight. Among the various possibilities of food on stage it is very

55 Martin, 16.10.91. 178

rare that a character will have to gorge him/herself. Eat in a politely restrained manner; nibble; but gorge rarely. There is something quite shocking and disturbing about watching a person, especially a woman, stuffing her mouth with food and then actually swallowing it, as opposed to spitting it out, or pretending to eat but merely taking in a very small amount. 'Faked' eating (eating minute amounts while acting the eating}. is the way most on-stage eating is accomplished due to the difficulties involved for the actor in eating, speaking and acting simultaneously. There is always the danger that food will be sprayed on other actors or that it will create difficulties for the actor to manage his/her next line. In this scene, however, the emphasis was entirely on the act of eating - it was not an adjunct to the action. The actor playing the part was in appearance quite robust; however the physical size of the patient (and therefore actor) was not the crucial issue here but rather her state of mind - her impression of her own self image in relation to her need to self-fatten. If she could take in and put on substantial weight then she would have produced, with her bigger body, a visible sign that she had conquered the disease.

Clair Chapman, one of the founding members of the English group Spare Tyre, reports that people "sit stunned and repulsed by what we manage to get down. This is not gratuitous eating; it always has a point." She goes on to list some of the food that the Spare Tyre cast has consumed on stage:

half a sponge cake with a cup of tea poured into it a Mars Bar six slices of Mother's Pride a bag of crisps a bag of Maltesers mouthfuls of whipping cream spoonfuls of Coffee Mate (really sherbet) an Aero bar frozen Brussel sprouts a Swiss roll celery 179

Clair Chapman goes to the heart of the very real difficulties of consuming real food while trying to perform:

These little binges always seem to precede a song and you spend half the time trying to swallow and not spit all over the audience. For many it sounds like a great excuse to eat on the job however as for 'eating what you want' in this context, we certainly do not. And if I never see another Mars Bar in my life it will be too soon.56

Bearing in mind that some of these shows were very successful and ran for several months this type of eating may well have become a form of aversion therapy for the actors.

Just as Spare Tyre formed out of a desire to make theatre out of a book which at that time articulated women's problematic relationship to food and fatness/thinness, so 13 years later in Australia The Girl's Gotta Eat grew out of the inspiration and identification felt with the views articulated by Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth. So firmly positioned now in the centre of the culture are the issues relating to the ideological factors surrounding women's self-entrapment to the beauty ideal that Belvoir Theatre's publicity material, as well as the articles and reviews, acknowledge and foreground the show as response to Wolf's book.

First performed at the Western Australian 1992 Artrage Festival, then as an Umbrella event in the 1993 Sydney Festival, the title The Girl's Gotta Eat declares the centrality of food in a way that intentionally shows a divided meaning; the girl's gotta eat (in the sense of survive in general); and the girl's gotta eat (literally, eat food). She's 'gotta eat' (is compelled to by her hunger) even though she is not supposed ·to. Joanna Cathcart-Mitchell, Courtney Dundas and Barbara Turnbull are young, ambitious, corporate women, watching each other, watching themselves. Their corporate 'uniforms' consist of mono- and primary coloured suits, one red,

56 Chapman, Clair. "Putting the Issue on the Boards." Fed Up and Hungry: Women, Oppression and Food. Ed. Marilyn Lawrence. New York: Peter Bedrick, 1987. 180

one blue, one bright yellow. They alternate between parallel acting in self-defined areas, and acting as a trio.

The announcement of the arrival of lunch time is not an opportunity for food as might be expected but time for a session of self­ inflicted ritual agony at the beauty salon for a half leg, underarm and bikini wax. When the torture stops.· they unconvincingly chorus "Ah that's better". The audience enjoys the dual reading: relief that the process is over and congratulations for the smooth-skinned hairless result. Lunch has come to mean variations on strict bodily discipline, not nourishment. They have depilated but have not taken in anything sustaining. The notion of the substitution of discomfort for nourishment is taken up later at the dinner engagement, for Barbara's thirtieth birthday, and the focus of the play. At night the contract between the women is denial rather than actual pain. This is handled slickly as the three scan and drool at the physically large (and presumably totally tempting) menu, check each other in a reflex monitoring of expected mutual disapproval, then obediently resign themselves to "salad, no avocado", with smiles which say "it's all I ever eat", but order two bottles of chardonnay; then another two; then another two. The alcohol acts as a compensatory blot for the lack of real food.

No actual food appears on stage. All actions are mimed and vocalised: use of the cellular phones, typing, eating, drinking, exercising at the gymnasium, going to the toilet, showering, dressing, applying make-up, snorting coke, driving a car. Food, despite its physical absence, is, nevertheless, a visible shaping factor in the girls' driven existences. The amusing synchronisation of the sequence of the dread of stepping onto the scales, the horror of the result registered, and then the precarious balancing on one leg (in an attempt t6 lighten themselves and improve the verdict) multiplies in impact because all three women are doing this in the manner of a daily ritual of guaranteed disappointment. The audience response to the Sydney production suggested that all of the watchers had undergone a similar demoralising ritual at some stage in their weight-conscious lives. The show builds through variations of female monitoring, rivalry, suspicion, deception (all three are, unbeknown to each other, 'boffing' Paul Cavanagh, a 181

corporate success story). The girls, it would seem, have not convincingly internalised the caring-sharing psychology epitomised by the group hug which first bonded them at a corporate workshop.

Ultimately, however, they are united by an act of solidarity as they deface a billboard depicting a woman in brief lingerie. In a case of art reflecting life reflecting art this act in the performance bore an uncanny similarity to a publicised real life incident of vandalism of a lingerie billboard. 57 During the show's run in Sydney, magistrate Pat O'Shane's decision to acquit two female offenders of billboard graffiti stimulated some timely remarks. While some disputed her decision to rule on an issue of justice rather than a matter of law, more and more people are making the connection between the damaging effect on women of having to internalise sexism in advertising. Alan Luchetti of North Sydney writes in "Letters to the Editor":

..... Those not bothered by the relatively mild sexism of the billboard in question miss the point. The ubiquitous and incessant subtle sexisms of advertising perpetuate insecurities and obsessions about the female body. Without them there would be no anorexia or bulimia, less sexual harassment, fewer imports of cosmetics and better communication between the sexes.SB

Part of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz's understanding of 'sexed bodies' rests with the notion that inscriptive procedures mark the body and produce it as sexually determinant and coded. In an article "Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the corporeal", she writes

The morphological surface is a retracing of the anatomical and physiological foundation of the body by systems of social signifiers. 59

57 Both billboards were advertising women's underwear; the one in the show (projected onto the screen) was for Bendon lingerie and featured Elle MacPherson. The real life billboard advertised Berlei lingerie, and pictured a woman's body in underwear, cut in half, with the words "You always look good in Berlei"; the graffitists added the comment:"even when you are mutilated". 58 Letters to the Editor, Sydney Morning Herald. Jan. 25, 1993: 12. 59 Femlnlne/Mascullne Representation. Eds. Terry Threadgold & Anne Cranney-Francis. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990: 73. 182

Grosz's comments have particular relevance to many of the plays in this chapter, dealing as they do with socially condoned and encouraged forms of body marking which produce the socially inscribed, sexed, female body. Just as The Girl's Gotta Eat discloses a consciousness of self-chosen socially inscribed "body­ morphologies"60 in the portrayal of such body-moulding activities as exercise, diet, depilation, make-up, .high heels and tight fitting clothes, in The Girl Who Saw Everything61 Alma De Groen shows an awareness of these social meaning of women's dietary habits. Twenty-three year old Edwina Rouse constantly pops diet pills. She reports a life of undifferentiated. experience:

I write all the time. I paint all the time. I eat all the time. I throw up all the time. It's all much of a muchness really.[17]

Early in the play her position is someone who consciously pares her body down because she understands the connection between a near­ skeletal morphology and her social usefulness. She lives with an older man Saul East, an artist, who uses her as a model. Ironically, in a play which deals with responses to a young women's death as a result of male violence (rape), this young woman chooses to mark her body in ways she knows will be rewarded. At one point her resemblance to a dead person is articulated as desirable:

You wouldn't paint me if I was fat. I have to look like I'm practically dead or you're not interested.[6]

Subtle clues to Edwina's food refusal lie in her question "Is there any more of that soup you had at lunchtime?" [25]. Although lunch was not consumed on stage it is clear in Edwina's mention of "you" that she did not eat. any lunch. Symptoms of food deprivation are apparent too when she complains that her blood sugar has dropped. Feminist historian Liz offers the obvious solution: "So eat something." [24]

60 Grosz: 73. 61 Sydney: Currency, 1993 183

The Girl's Gotta Eat confronted its issues in bold caricature, without the presence of real food on stage. In The Dark Side of the Moon food is present but on stage food consumption is avoided. Alice Spigelman revised and renamed the play The Dark Side of the Moon; it began life as Becoming Emily.62 The characters in the revised version are Karen, a sixteen year old girl, Grace, her mother, Emily Dickinson, the nineteenth .century American poet and Virginia Woolf, the early twentieth century English writer. The play takes place in a suburban house in the present. Karen's life is confusing. The only people she feels she can talk to are Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. The play follows Karen's journey into anorexia, capturing both her inner and outer worlds. Fact and fantasy merge. Following its Playworks showcasing in June 1990, Spigelman rewrote the play excising the characters of the brother and the father. These characters had grounded the play domestically and provided much of the comedy and contrast to the private, internalised world inhabited by Karen and her writers Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. This decision to rewrite was taken in part because the showcase audience responded to the play as being literally about the problem of anorexia, rather than the anorexia functioning as a metaphor of the position of the creative woman in our society. A more compelling reason still for Alice Spigelman was that the fantasy figures (the writers) were initially "popping in and out too much and I wanted to develop them as fuller characters". Spigelman decided that "the family scenes were a bit banal". 63 On the debit side she acknowledges that by moving the play to a more internalised mode it loses a good deal of the comedy and vitality provided by characters who were well-meaning but ill­ equipped to understand Karen's alienation and process. The characters' presence in the play also foregrounded the inequitable treatment of Karen as compared with her brother - all his career dilemmas were major family concerns whereas the issues which Karen felt strongly about were ignored or trivialised.

62 In the Directory Playworks Women Theatre Writers 1993. Ed. Virginia Baxter. Glebe: Wild and Woolley, 1993: 47, Spigelman's play is named as The Prlvllege to Fly. The entry notes its workshop as Becoming Emlly but makes no reference to the the title I use in my thesis. I will retain The Dark Side of the Moon since that is the title of the script I was given by the playwright. 63 Telephone interview with Alice Spigelman, 18th Oct. 1990. 184

In the rewritten version scenes are staged predominantly in Karen's bedroom, a fact which strongly dramatises her withdrawal from the external world and entry into the private fantasy sphere peopled by herself along with Dickinson and Woolf, two of her favourite writers and models for both her own attempts at writing as well as her behaviour and attitudes with regard to sexuality. and food. Despite the decision to cut the characters of the father and brother it still reads more as a dramatic amplification of an anorexic's progression into increasing stages of obsession and withdrawal than a play dealing with the position of the woman artist in society. Instead of their physical presence we hear about father/brother and their reactions to her condition through Karen's mother Grace. Karen's food habits increasingly become as significant and compelling a form of self expression as does her writing. In the same way that religions use the "denial of the gratification of appetites in order that one may live above carnal desires and escape the fear of complying with instinct", 64 Karen's 'religion' of food rituals serve to blot out and distance her from her sexuality. There is no accidental causative connection in this; the refusal to grow bigger is usually a fear of growing up. If one stays a child (and refusing food will prevent development), one will not have to develop breasts or menstruate or have sex or any of the things grown young women 'have' to do. Naomi Wolf identifies the pressure on women to become unnaturally thin as tantamount to asking them to relinquish their sexuality65 . In terms of her creativity, Karen's atavism is in direct conflict with her desire to develop the confidence, maturity to express herself as a writer.

As the play progresses the nature of Karen's eating disorder develops from deni~I of food (anorexia) to erratic food intake (binge/purge behaviour). This dramaturgical decision is based on one possible scenario for eating disordered behaviour. One common misconception surrounding the perception of self-starvers is that they are not hungry (many anorexics themselves use this as the

64 Lowenberg, Miriam E. et al. Food and Man. New York: John Wiley, 1974. 2nd ed: 159. 65 Wolf, Naomi. "Sex and the Cult of Starvation." The Weekend Australian Review. Sept. 15-16, 1990: 4. 185

principal reason for not taking in food). Most anorexics, however, tell a different story - that is, that they are constantly thinking about food but deny themselves nourishment for fear of getting fat. In Karen's case her starving becomes too difficult to sustain and she begins to succumb to food only to get rid of it by vomiting immediately after - food without the guilt of weight gain. Her behaviour in the play grows to resemb.le a bingeing and purging pattern. Without overtly alluding to the clinical aspects of the condition, the playwright makes Karen's progression clear as we see different manifestations of her disorder. Early in the play we witness Karen's refusal to eat the junk food popular with her peers and her reluctance to eat at the family dinner table. She disposes of food, wrapping it in paper bags and then plays down her dramatic weight loss, blaming it on a tummy wog. As the play progresses and her condition worsens we see the character's advanced anorectic behaviour: frenetic concern with eating rituals; timetables: particular brand and flavour preferences; secret places to hide her food; private food consumption; cooking for other family members but eating her own special foods. There is often food on stage. Karen lays out her special foods with the fervour and vigilance of a fanatic. Though we do see Karen at the point of eating, at no stage do we actually see her bingeing. There are two main reasons for this: one practical - Spigelman thought it too hard on the actor;6 6 and one dramatic - when Karen does begin eating she is always interrupted by someone which highlights the anti-life and furtive nature of her behaviour.

Karen's perception of her body is distorted: while her mother sees her as worryingly underweight, Karen has another perception of herself altogether: "You're a fat blob, Karen, no one's ever going to take you seriously."[3] Any hint of roundness, in her view, disqualifies her from being taken seriously. Her muddied thinking about her weight means that her creative energy, as well as her body, wastes with her fixation on her moon-shaped face. The related though very different moon image of the title - the dark side of the moon - is used to signify the mental landscape Karen strives (but fails) to inhabit in order to facilitate her writing. I

66 Spigelman interview, 18.10.90. 186

take this to be the hidden side of life - the area which is not preoccupied with surfaces but by the mind's black holes, the unconscious realm. Her relationship with food blocks her chances of experiencing the territory of the dark side of the moon.

Virginia Woolf, on whom Karen models her thinking, is portrayed as gifted, arrogant and paranoid. Spigelman.. shows us the character of Woolf the writer full of self loathing, especially for her own physiological processes. She describes herself as an animal for whom she has total contempt:

What am I? A stinking lump, chewing food, regurgitating, eliminating foul waste.[13]

Karen's obsessions about the timing of her eating routine grow to the extent that they eventually eclipse her contact with her adored writers. From being reverential in the presence of Virginia her world narrows to the point where she wishes to be alone with her disordered eating:

KAREN: I have to do it by myself, Virginia, please understand, from six o'clock [looks at her watch], it's ten to six now.[Long pause] VIRGINIA: [Pause] Was that a hint? KAREN: I'm sorry if I sounded rude but please try to understand, I simply must start eating at six, otherwise I finish so late that I can't get up in the mornings! VIRGINIA: YOU are telling Virginia Woolf to push off? A nobody? ...... [32]

The self-righteousness and utterly blinkered vision of the eating disordered personality is captured in the final scene. Virginia is 'in' the hospital room with Karen when Karen, without any sense of self-directed irony, remarks:

All they can talk about is if you've had a bowel-motion or how much you'd eaten. [ 3 8]

Though Karen is devoid of the capacity for self-reflection or humorous self-deprecation, it would occur to the audience that Karen's description of the small-minded hospital staff aptly fits 187

her own behaviour through much of the play. Her whole world has contracted to the point of being totally ruled by monitoring, timing, measuring, counting and restricting what goes in and out of her body. Many audience members would read her individual plight as being part of a wider silencing. Naomi Wolf argues that young women are starving themselves at this moment in history because although the women's movement chang__ ed institutions to the point where they admitted women the changes were not sufficient to alter the maleness of power itself. She sees an 'advantage' in this:

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history - a quietly mad population is a tractable one.67

Karin Mainwaring's Binge 68 overtly concerns itself with the behaviour and psychology of a bulimic. (See illustration [o]) Confused and sloppily written in parts, its strength lies in its uncompromising treatment of a fat woman caught in a cycle of guilt and gluttony. The chip on the shoulder of the main character Adele seems so deeply implanted one could be forgiven for mista_king it for the playwright's own. The play's tone is aggressive, but it does bring to light the daily pain, self­ deprecation and astonishingly low self esteem of the compulsive binge eater. Almost every scene hinges around Adele's inability to relegate food to a manageable category of experience. Alma De Groen's description of Molly in Going Home could equally apply to Adele in Binge: "insensitive to the feelings of others and when she herself is in pain she deals with it physically by eating".6 9

Since food is perceived consciously or unconsciously as something given - a labour of love, a sign of thoughtfulness and care, or at the very least a duty - . it follows that rejection of family food can have a violent and hurtful impact. It is frequently the case that anorexics reject the food provided by their families as a way of establishing their own private food rituals and their sense of secrecy and specialness, and perhaps primarily as a way of

67 Wolf Australian: 4. 68 Unpublished MS, 1987. 69 Going Home Sydney: Currency, 1977: 5. __ , ---Sil t E. I t @J 15 < tttan sm 188

maintaining control over what they consume. The bulimic in Binge (and bulimia is the other end of the anorexia spectrum) is critical of what her mother and father customarily eat and even of the time at which they choose to eat:

DAD: Adele, come and get your tea before I belt the pants off you. ADELE ENTERS ADELE Oh, not fish fingers. MUM: You eat the bloody things. There's people in India who'd give their right arm for a fishfinger. ADELE: I only said "Oh not fishfingers." MUM: I know what you said, young lady, and I know how you said it. Now you just eat the buggers up. [14]

Control over who decides what goes into her body is the issue here, for although Adele overeats she has to choose what it is she eats too much of, and fish fingers, being family food and mother-cooked food more specifically, do not satisfy the binger's requirement.

Bing~ behaviour is a repulsive spectacle in the eyes of Adele's father. Trying to shame Adele into restraint, he compares her to fat Dianna Whatley: .

Bloody disgraceful the amount she puts away. I was up the fish and chip shop Friday night when she comes wabbling (sic) in. Well, blow me, if she didn't order $4.00 worth of chips. $4.00!, that and two chiko rolls. Bought herself a family size block of chocolate to keep her going while she was waiting for the order, and a family size bottle of coke to swill the whole lot down. It's bloody disgusting it really is. The way she was eating, well, it was like she hadn't seen food for a month of bloody Sundays. Thought no-one was watching her. I couldn't keep me bloody eyes off her. ~e and everyone else in the shop. [16]

This cautionary tale is meant to curb Adele's gluttonous tendencies: "So you watch yourself girlie" warns Dad. [17] Dad may have been unable to take his eyes off this hungry woman but not for the reasons of male appraisal. His comment, "Imagine sleeping with it", reveals a refusal to personalise her and a revulsion with her obesity. His aversion may well hide a fear of unbridled female 189

sexuality according to Naomi Wolf who reminds us that fat, referred to by Victorians as their 'silken layer', is sexual in women. •Fat is not just fertility in women but desire," she writes, quoting findings by a Chicago research team that fat women desired sex twice as often as thinner women.7°

Adele already experiences her own priv~te horrors about her shape and size. Her dream graphically illustrates her body terror:

I'm sitting at the kitchen table .... like this, looking at my legs. I'm rubbing them, like this, thinking how big they are. I'm rubbing them and they start to move. Suddenly my legs are this mass of jerking lumps. I take my hands away .. .it's my legs .... they've turned to rats, and they're swarming inside my jeans. The rats can't get out and I think "I've got to get out of these jeans"; but I can't move. I start to panic, and of course, the rats pick that up and start to eat me. [18] [my emphasis]

Consume and you will be consumed, Adele's dream seems to be telling her. Out of the dream bursts violently self-destructive imagery. Adele is trapped in her jeans (her body). She witnesses the rat's feeding frenzy on herself as the dream equivalent of her own repeated enactments of uncontrolled eating binges. The voracious rats are a correlative of her own appetites, but in the dream, hunger takes on frightening abilities akin to a ravening cancer.

Kim Chemin, author of The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and ldentity71 would have it that such fear is a sign that Adele is baulking at the transition between girl and woman. She rests her argument on the connection between eating disorders and the inability of women with eating disorders to make the passage from girlhood to womanh~od. Such hesitancy over the rite of passage between girlhood and womanhood arises from confusion between the image of the mother we carry as a restless inheritance and the new image of female possibility our time presents.7 2

70 Wolf Beauty Myth 1990: 158. 71 London: Virago, 1986. 72 Chemin: 45. 190

It is arguably a flaw or at least a disappointment of Binge that the solution suggested (and indeed sought and provided) for Adele's bulimia and low self-esteem is a man. She only begins the transition after she's been to bed with Jagmar the Swedish masseur. It is difficult not to see this as cause and effect, for immediately after the blissful night with Jagmar Adele throws out all her diet books and announces that_ she can now eat all the chocolate she wants to without guilt:

I'm not worrying about food any more. I'm not punishing myself any more. I will eat what, when and how I like. I don't need the me that says "Adele, put the chocolate back!", "Look at the belly you've got". Who needs it? I like my belly. It's round, and warm and soft and womanly. What's the crime? What's the crime?

Adele goes over to a chocolate that is somewhere on stage. She picks it up and with every evidence of sensual enjoyment she enjoys it. ADELE: There I can do it. I can eat without guilt. [57]

This glib resolution of both the play and the issues involved is irritati_ng and confusing. There is not sufficient exploration of the psychological transition from Adele's eating with guilt and shame to a state where she eats what she likes with sensual enjoyment. The end result in real terms is that a woman will put on weight and become obese whether she feels guilty about it or whether she indulges with rapturous expressions of sensual delight. Surely a more constructive resolution would have been for the character to reach a position where she was enslaved neither to diets, nor to food, nor to male approval. The play maps a limited journey of the character's progress from solitary binge sessions in the dark to the resolution to eat as much chocolate as she wishes without guilt, all achieved apparently as a result of one night with Jagmar.

Adele has constructed herself with a cruelty and vulgarity intended to repel people. In her description to Mary of the two women snubbing the man on the train her joy at the man's humiliation accentuates her unlikable and repellent character. Perhaps this strategy is deliberate - to convey an inability to achieve humanity or closeness with anyone (including the audience) before she can I 91

accept herself. Her cruel and vulgar streak is accompanied by a tendency towards both self-annihilation and destruction of others.[18,46] Paradoxically one of her dreams signifies a fear of harming herself and the emblems of the self-protective energies at work in her are evident in her egg dream involving a cave symbol .[34] The egg and the cave are, respectively, traditionally female symbols of fertility and womb-l_!ke protection, signifying a simultaneous desire for withdrawal and self-protection. In the dream the egg-eating chips are equivalent to the thigh-eating rats except that this time it is a projection of herself as something golden, precious, that is being threatened. Even the weapon with which she wards off the attacking chips from the precious egg is food - baked beans fired from a bra catapult.

Mainwaring explicitly connects the two hungers - for love and for food; Adele compares her preoccupation (how can food be avoided?) to a starving person's obsession (how can food be obtained?) - the self-starver and the binger are equally dominated by it.[56] She connects fatness, becoming fat, with her increased desire. Adele can see no other way of expressing desire than to take food into the body. Her resultant shame of desire leads to shame of her body.[47] Adele's description of a binge catalogues the total loss of control experienced by the matter-of-f actness of the endless list of foods consumed in one sitting:

Do you know that I can eat a whole packet of Tim Tams, followed by half a dozen sandwiches (of various denominations), a litre of ice-cream (smothered in 1/2 a tin of Milo naturally), a box of potato chips, 1/2 a pizza if there's one lying around, and still I can go on. The only proviso is the amount of food in the house, and the current state of my finances. It's no good leaving anything! If you have one tim-tam you have the packet. Otherwise they'll be there tomorrow. If I run out of normal food i.e. the sort of food you'd eat in front of someone, I'll whack the lid off a tin of condensed milk and wallop that down. I will make and eat a litre of custard that covers an entire Xmas pudding (providing of course that they are in season). I will eat out of a can, out of a box, out of the fridge, out of the bowl. Very rarely will I eat off a plate, very rarely will I eat standing up, and very, very rarely will I eat in front of someone. I will whip up a double batch of cake mixture with no intention of cooking it. As soon as the flour is semi-mixed in, 192

down the hatch she goes. I can't wait till it's cooked. I can't wait till it's mixed! I can't wait so badly I devour a family size block of chocolate, 1/2 a kilo of cheese, an avocado or two, while I'm frantically mixing cake batter. Thank God for the electric mixer. I eat all this crap until I feel so sick I have to throw up. And often this binge is brought on by me doing something as wicked as eating a chocolate.

I don't need hunger to eat. I don't want hunge.r. I will eat all day so I don't feel a hunger pain. I wouldn't know physical hunger if you bashed me across the face with it. I have no conception of how normal people eat. I've been told they think of food when hungry. I think about food all day. Obsessed. From the moment I wake. Is it disgusting to compare myself with a starving person? Is it? Surely a starving person's first thought is how can I get food today. Mine is ...... How can I avoid food. [55-6]

Adele's account comes toward the end of the play just before she is about turn her life around. This speech is a kind of retrospective confessional.

In her article "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as Crystallisation of Culture" Susan Bordo asserts that eating disorders reflect and call attention to some of the central ills of our society, including the heritage of disdain for the body, fear of loss of control over our futures, and the disquieting meaning of beauty ideals in an era of female power. Her schema is particularly useful and applicable to the previous discussions. Bordo divides the possibilities for a cultural understanding of anorexia into three streams or "axes of continuity" as she refers to them - the dualist axis; the control axis; and the gender/power axis.7 3

Bordo's argument is summarised thus: she first takes Foucault's notion that the body is constantly in the grip of cultural practices which inscribe themselves "on our bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures." Speaking of aspects of medicine and fashion Bordo asserts that the social manipulation of the female body emerges as an absolutely central strategy in the maintenance of power relations between the sexes over the last one hundred years. In the area of eating disorders it is

73 Bordo: 90. 193

the case that the dominated (women/women's bodies) have frequently advanced and extended the situation themselves by way of strategies similar to those seen at work in Binge, The Dark Side of the Moon and The Girl's Gotta Eat. The Cartesian dualism (mind/body split) has been a particularly tenacious Western legacy. This heritage characterises the body as alien, other-than-self, confining, limiting, a material prison, the enemy. The way to win against the body is to control it, or rather go beyond control, that is to kill off the body's spontaneities completely and cease to experience our hungers and desires. This goal is very much the driving force of Karen's actions and motives in The Dark Side of the Moon.

The playwrights discussed in this chapter are responding to and keenly picking up from the popular media as well as academic and medical commentators' attention on the relationship between body image, self-esteem, personal and political power and the increase in eating disordered behaviours.

The ~omination by food and the varying obsessive food behaviours explored in this chapter constitute an intensification and elaboration of one of the principal trends disclosed throughout this thesis: that is the construction, limitation and definition of women through and by food. Before proceeding to the conclusion I would like to briefly highlight this aspect in light of the final chapter's exclusive concentration on women and food by drawing out some of the strands associating women and food from the previous chapters. Through food, women were seen to negotiate many of their lives' major rites of passage and struggles for autonomy.

Co-operative food preparation was the terrain over which the female friends in Light Refreshments showed their support of one another. Daughters criticised and distanced themselves from parents, as in the Daughter in Duet, Karen in Dark Side of the Moon and Helen in All the Black Dogs. Women socially positioned themselves via food, as with Iris in Fortune and Lillian Dawson in Inside the Island. Women celebrated and paid tribute with food 194

in Daylight Saving and the family's special dinner at Mietta's for Max in The Garden of Granddaughters. Belinda in Lust and Dympie in After Dinner affirmed themselves and competed with one another by means of food. Kathleen in Fortune and the Mother in Duet sustained dependents. Cath in The Secret House used food to normalise the abnormal. Betty in The New Life, the 'she' in Dragged Screaming to Paradise _and Elefteria in The Forty Lounge Cate valorised the past by their food attitudes. Hilary in Hotel Sorrento, the women of Light Refreshments and Olivia in Big River all took responsiblility for catering to the food needs of others. Frances in Travelling North pandered to Frank's food regime. Through their willing or unwilling control over food the wife in Words of One Syllable and Peg in Wallflowering, the 'she' in The Real Matilda, the Mother in Du et and Peg in Wallflowering all 'failed' or made themselves vulnerable to criticism. Molly in Gu 11 s manipulated by means of food. In markedly different, though equally graphic, ways Joss in The Joss Adams Show and Alma Lusty in The Ham Funeral served themselves up as 'food'. Cilla in Crossfire cried for help. In The Real Matilda and Byzantine Flowers women revenged themselves through food. Clare and Wendy in Life's a Breakfast and Joanna, Courtney and Barbara in The Girl's Gotta Eat deceived and monitored each other. Eaters, such as Molly in Going Home and Adele in Binge, simultaneously sought to fill the psychic void and perpetuate their self-loathing. Non-eaters, like Karen of The Dark Side of the Moon and Edwina in The Girl Who Saw Everything, attempted to secure autonomy, approval or a sense of their own uniqueness. 195

Chapter Six

CONCLUSION

This thesis set out to examine food codes in Australian drama. My primary proposal was that food as a theatrical signifier is capable of articulating concretely the internal.· and the abstract; that it generates a metaphoric matrix and helps to build a language capable of elucidating some of the more oblique facets of dramatic interaction. Since food and drink symbolically refract a culture's ideology then their presence on stage surely promotes a double coding.

In the plays studied the human relationships illuminated through the provision, preparation and consumption of food are not always harmonious. More typically, in fact, food in these contemporary Australian plays seems to be associated with negativity. Food is frequently utilised as an index of many aspects of the characters' worlds: economic hardship, an obstructed rite of passage, manipulative behaviour, psychological cruelty, enforcement of restrictions, loss of control, depression and specific eating disorders. Theatre's concentration on the conflicts and disquietude arising from the unresolvable, dark sides of life means that food's ability to provoke hostile responses and carry negative connotations makes it such a strong dramaturgical tool. '

In the Introduction proposed that food channels social transactions while at the same time uncovering and disclosing unconscious attitudes. Food, like language, is a crucial mode of experiencing the world, at once cerebral and sensual. I suggested several similarities between models of consumption and appreciation of both food and theatre. I noted the permeation of the vocabulary of theatre criticism by gastronomical discourse. At the same time the paucity of attention to food semiosis in relation to Australian drama was given as part justification for embarking on this thesis topic. 196

The background chapter outlined and explored both continuities and discontinuities in food traditions and dramatic conventions pertaining to food on stage. I SUQgested the persistence of food rituals linked with drama from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. From the earliest play fragments to contemporary Australian drama, food continues to be a site of interaction, whether as a family, a community or as friends. I suggested the shift from a predominantly emblematic food code on the Renaissance stage to a contemporary representation of food which ranges from the stylised to the totally detailed, ingredient­ specific and naturalistic. Reflecting the general societal move from a collective era to an individualistic one, the function of food on stage has altered from that of signifier of group and collective meanings to its vastly increased role as signifier of individual preoccupations, states of mind and behaviour.

Communal eating settings transmit signs of potentially agreeable social exchange. This is possibly the principal continuity. Another major continuity is that this potentially harmonious occasion is frequently ruptured. A picture of social harmony, symbolised by a festive meal or banquet, but threatened or overturned into violence, chaos, hostility and bitterness is a sequence common to many plays, among them Macbeth, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Titus Andron icus through to Lust (Seven Deadly Sins), Dim boola and even Hotel Sorrento. Possession and provision of food continue to position characters in an economic and social hierarchy, from Timon of Athens to plays as different as Fortune and Hotel Sorrento. Food continues to be an index of power and a means of manipulating others in The Taming of the Shrew through to Inner Voices and Gulls. Excess of food, gourmandizing and gluttony work as p_hysical corollaries of political corruption in Aristophanes' Knights and Nowra's Inner Voices.

The physically violent and overtly cannibalistic eruptions of Titus Andron icus are rearticulated in contemporary Australian drama, foregrounding instead psychological violence, as in Lust, though even there the physical violence is never far from the surface. The existence of a moral dimension to food behaviour evident in the sin 197

of Gluttony in Doctor Faustus may be detected also in the anorexia of Dark Side of the Moon and the bulimia of Binge. Food continues to be used as a vehicle for the enactment of various rites of passage as in Dim boo I a, Emma, Come Back For Light Refreshments After the Service, Travelling North and Dragged Screaming to Paradise, as it did during carnival at the onset of Lent. In non-contemporary and contemporary drama alike food appears as part of marriage celebrations, initiations into social rituals, anniversary gatherings.

Motifs of eating and feasting sometimes deliberately confound sensuality and food (Doctor Faust us) or sexuality and food (The Cooked and the Raw). The conflation of sexual hunger and hunger for food is common to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Moliere's The School for Wives through to The Cooked and the Raw and Lust.

Having identified and elaborated a number of food paradigms in the background chapter one is able to see these models operating in recent Australian plays: the paradigm of the disrupted banquet/meal - from Macbeth and The Tempest to Lust. The broken or disappointing meal dramatises discord from Timon of Athens to Wallflowering. Frustrated banquets are still staged from The Taming of the Shrew to Daylight Saving. The celebratory repast paradigm is at work in Taming of the Shrew's final banquet as well as Dimboola and Emma (wedding), Lust (wedding anniversary) and Hotel Sorrento and The Garden of Granddaughters (family reunions). The paradigm of food as revenge is at work in Titus Andronicus as it is in the polluted meals of The Real Matilda and Byzantine Flowers and in variant form Inside .the Island, though an absence of deliberate malign intention should be noted in the latter. Feasts, banquets, meals were found to be structurally pivotal, that is, providing a fulcrum for the play. This holds as true for Macbeth as it does for Hotel Sorrento.

The issue of misleading representation of food, and the presentation of food as something other than it really is may be 198

detected in Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, and Barry Humphries' street 'recreation' with the Russian salad. Taking a slightly different angle, food as a mechanism for trickery and deception forms a continuum from early processional revels to food stealing pranks in early play fragments to the spitting and swapping plates of Byzantine Flowers to the Barry Humphries misrepresentation.

Chapter Two concentrated on plays in which the major activity or key scene was a meal scene. Dinner table or meal scene conversations are characterised by their polyphonic dimension. Table talk implies many voices, many opinions. It is in the nature of dinner table conversations to drift from topic to topic, cover a wide range of subjects and not especially have to focus on one subject. 1 This license for free range conversation and polyphonia makes it an appealing dramatic device. There need be no pressure to reach a univocal utterance. In its cross-talk it can be an enactment of diverse speaking positions. Polyphonic gatherings within a frame of communality or conviviality was seen to characterise the 'meal plays' from the English plays - the bubbly opening atmosphere of Trelawney of the 'Wells' and the overlapping dialogue scene of the Top Girls - to all the Australian plays considered under this grouping: Dimboola, The Cooked and the Raw, Come Back For Light Refreshments After the Service, Hotel Sorrento, The Garden of G r a n d d a u g h t e ,r sA ft er Dinner, Day I i g h t Saving and Lust.

Within the broad heading of plays based on a meal I categorised the plays under the principal subheadings of (1) celebration or festive event plays including the audience as part of the performance, and (2) plays with key ryieal scenes in which food refracts the often conflicting personal aspirations, ideologies, pretensions and attitudes of the social mix on both group and individual levels.

1 As Giordano Bruno puts it "So many diverse topics must be put together that they do not appear to constitute a single topic", from The Ash Wednesday Supper, which tells of a meal at the house of the poet Fulke Greville, to which Bruno is invited to debate natural philosophy with representatives of Oxford's Aristotelian school. Quoted in Michel Jeanneret's A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance. Trans. Jeremy Whitely and Emma Hughes. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991: 198. 199

Active 'audience involvement' plays were found to have in common the sharing of food among actors and audience with the audience taking on some kind of collective persona for the duration of the performance: for example, for Dimboola and Emma they were wedding guests, for The Cooked and the Raw the role varied according to the setting of each act, and for Light Refreshments, funeral guests. Food as a performative part of the evening applies to all the plays in this category. The nature of the audience's relationship with the actors is altered because of the role assigned to food in the production: there is a mediation via food and a renegotiation of the usual actor/audience relationship.

Food was found to function as an index of a character's degree of social know-how and urbanity. Food savvy was a desirable commodity in Daylight, while it was seen to act as a mechanism for social exclusion in After Dinner. Registering mercurial food trends, playwrights have characters aspiring to glossy results; sometimes unsuccessfully, as in the case of the failure of the dishes in Hotel Sorrento and Wallflowering, sometimes with the aggressive success of Belinda, the food vogue expert of Lust. Belinda's apparent cool competence is largely contingent upon her artful management of food protocol, dinner etiquette, flair with presentation, timing and ingredient combinations. Many would support Frieda's somewhat double-edged response to such excesses of foodism as a result of hearing Belinda's description of the entree of fish-filled spinach rolls with a pistachio sauce: "How unusual!"

Chapter Three addressed aspects of the power of food to act as a vehicle of manipula!ion (Inner Voices; Fortune; Gulls), or as a means to socially position (Inside the Island), empower (Inner Voices), or humiliate (Byzantine Flowers). Food is also a means to revenge (The Real Matilda), to desensitise and even to poison (Inside the Island). In other plays particular foods operate as a sign of poverty (Fortune), a marker of routine and habit (Pennies Before the Holidays) and a measure of monotony and an emblem of loss (Gulls). The issue of food taboos in relation to audience 200

response was explored in relation to The Real Matilda, Byzantine Flowers and Gu 11 s. Food as a reminder of visceral corporeality occurs with the breast milk of Joss Adams Show and the spilt food and images of regurgitated food in Re a I Matilda.

Chapter Four dealt with the role of nostalgia and the retention of particular foods as a common experiential thread. Food and food memories were found to possess a linking capability: food links characters' memories of a former home with their experience of their new or adopted home and is instrumental in the formation and expression of their preconceptions, biases, acceptance and/or rejection of their new home. The New Life, Dragged Screaming to Paradise, Travelling North, and The Forty Lounge Cafe all incorporated food as a focus for nostalgic desire. Food rituals and sociability with reference to picnics, barbecues and alfresco meals were treated and positioned as liminoid rituals. Portrayals of compulsive food habits were found in Frank's obsessive behaviour in Travelling North and Enid's sandwich-making pedantry in Come Back For Light Refreshments After the Service. Consumerism and the jaded appetites of those in the world of advertising as gross analogue of individual consumer malaise was located in The Adman.

Chapter Four then moved on to discuss food and its relation with aging and death-related rituals in Australian drama. Food in Pennies Before the Holidays, Words of One Syllable, The Secret House and Light Refreshments assists characters to deal with impending or actual death and was found to be an index of regularity, habit, inflexibility, stability, evasion of reality, bonding and co-oper?tion respectively. Food was found to operate on every conceivable dramatic level in The Ham Funeral: its reassuring satisfactions, its protean qualities, its status and sexual significations are all uncompromisingly enacted. Refusing ever to release the ham/Will/the Young Man from between her teeth, Alma Lusty is White's ultimate incarnation of terminal hunger and voracious femaleness. 201

Chapter Five observed that the plays by women show much more complex, problematic and psychologically fraught responses to food, food-related behaviour and situations than is evident in plays by men. In general, women playwrights use food in more multi­ faceted and disturbing ways, primarily because women's nexus with food both diachronically and synchronically is more problematic. Male playwrights are no less attuned to the semiotic capabilities of food but food for males does not delineate and delimit them in the same ways that it does women. It is my observation that as a consequence male playwrights are more likely to call on food to articulate issues of power or to enable a gathering of characters. Probably the simplest distinction that could be made is that for women food on stage means what it means in life - trouble.

Food is a shorthand means by which anxiety and self-loathing can be easily generated. For female characters (if not for the playwrights) it appears to be always tied to issues of identity, separation and belonging, competence and inadequacy, desirability and undesirability, weak or strong will.

In contemporary cultural studies and literature there is abundant theorising of food as a contributing factor to individual and collective morphology, that is, food, diet, eating/not eating as a way of inscribing, marking the body. Many plays in the study specifically address this : The Girl's Gotta Eat, Binge, The Dark Side of the Moon, The Girl Who Saw Everything. Even plays which do not specifically deal with eating behaviour show an awareness of food as a way of inscribing the body. In Fortune, for instance, Chock's remark that Kathleen looks better is a declaration that her. appearance testifies that she has recently become able to afford to eat: yet another example of food's contribution to the socially inscribed body.

In addition to the specific arguments of each chapter, perhaps the most impressive, overarching conclusion to which they all point is that it is impossible to disentangle women's identity and behaviour from food. The women in the plays studied, whether as providers, 202

producers, preparers, shoppers, consumers, non-consumers, friends, mothers, daughters, wives or partners, are all constructed through food. Control over food was found to be one of the principal ways in which women attempt to gain control over their own and sometimes others' lives. This control takes many forms. It was seen to range over control of family meals to the silent revenge via food to the acquisition of favourite ingredients to the decision over where and how the meal is staged to excessive consumption to refusal to take anything at all into their bodies. Women in the plays - whether plays by male or female playwrights - are irrefutably and consistently constructed, limited, reduced, obstructed, criticised, beaten, dominated and avenged through and by food.

Whether in plays by male or female playwrights women's food responses and behaviours have been shown to be more subtly and extensively charted and more multiply coded than conduct by men in relation to food. In the cases of plays by and about women intensification of this tendency occurs so that one is met with especially finely tuned and modulated images, and depictions of women's subjectivity of impressive depth, scope and complexity. It is in all cases the women's food behaviour that is more surprising, challenging and discomforting. It is the disclosure and extensive demonstration of this phenomenon which constitutes the most significant of the conclusions of this thesis. 203

Appendix A

SWEETS AND DRINKS

(I) Sweets

Popular notions of gender-appropriate. food make a distinction between 'women's food' (white meats, eggs, salads, soft foods, sweet foods) and 'men's food' (red meat, solid foods, pies) On the matter of connotation and denotation in the theatre Keir Elam in The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama speaks of the "second order and culturally determined units of meaning" which "come to outweigh their denotative basis. "1 While this is true of all signs of food on stage, it has a special applicability to non-essential edibles such as sweets and drinks; they inherently connote something extraneous to mere survival. With respect to sweetness I find there to be a particular nexus with signs of the feminine, whereas I find drinks to be more integrally involved with signs of the masculine. I will now examine some of the 'second order' mean_ings arrived at by the decoding of sweet foods and drinks on stage.

Notions of sweetness, femininity and daintiness have traditionally gone hand in hand - such popular song titles as 'Sweetie Pie', 'Ida (Sweet as Apple Cider)', 'Sweeter Than Sugar', and 'My Sugar is So Refined' testify to that. Sweet foods in drama constitute a particular variant of gastronomic terrain over which psychological conflict may be elaborated along gender specific lines. In Norwegian dramatist Henrik lbsen's A Doll's House2 Nora Helmer's husband is concerned to discipline his wife's unruly appetite for sweet things. For Torvald, Nora's inability to stifle her cravings for sweets signifies her lack of both self-discipline and steadiness. The recurrence of Nora's macaroons as a comforter, a sign of her rebelliousness against the stultifying constraints applied by her husband, takes on semiotic weight on a par with the Christmas

1 London: Methuen, 1980 : 10. 2 Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll's House in Four Major Plays. Trans. J. McFarlane and J. Arup. Oxford: OUP, 1981. 204

tree, the frenzied tarantella dance, Nora's black shawl and the letter. Torvald's ostensible objection to the macaroons is on the grounds that they are bad for Nora's teeth, and perhaps they may be a threat to her dental health but they were even more threatening to Torvald as a banner of her autonomy, her spirit.

In the light of the events of the play it. is revealing of the level of Torvald's knowledge of Nora that th_e gravest misdemeanour he can imagine her capable of is the consumption of one or two macaroons at the confectioner's. To Torvald, this transgression is what produces in her the appearance of guilt: "My little sweet tooth surely didn't forget herself in town today?" .[5] The choice of 'forget herself' is suggestive of failure to know oneself, forgetfulness of her duty; of who/what she is (that is, Torvald's wife). Later, in her state of apprehension as the inevitable moment of revelation regarding the forged signature draws closer, Nora instructs the maid, Helene, that they will have "champagne flowing till dawn. And some macaroons, Helene ... lots of them, for once in a while.". [60] Torvald interprets this desire for champagne and the habitually forbidden macaroons as the height of wildness and excitability and wishes for the return of "my own little singing bird again" .[60] Here, the eager consumption of non-essential, luxury food items functions as threatening and disturbing to the domestic equilibrium.

During the 'taming' period of the early European settlement of Australia there was an implicit expectation by men that women would provide a contrast to life's harshness. Women's civilising influence was welcomed and indeed expected and needed, what with the unfamiliar climate and shortages of food and supplies reminiscent of 'home'. Recipe book titles such as Fish Dainties (1892) and Dainty Recipes: A Book of Selected Recipes by Nestle (1920s) are a clue to the organised pressure on women to be models and providers of daintiness. Michael Symons makes the point that the great promoters of daintiness were the modern food companies who were keen to expand markets into the extremely profitable area of frills products. More significantly for this study is his comment: 205

Daintiness - which embodied 'feminine' qualities like lightness, prettiness and gentility - was part of a long campaign to pervert the traditional caring concerns of women into petty materialist preoccupations.3

Daintiness connotes orderliness and manageability. The elevation of dainty foods by Girlie Pogson in Act Two of Patrick White's The Season at Sarsaparilla4 places a moral construction on the notion of daintiness, one associated with decorum, containment and restraint from animalism.

MAVIS: Food, food ... GIRLIE: . .food is always the question ... NOLA: ... meals to shove in front of the men. GIRLIE: Steak, chops, chops, steak ...

NOLA: Meat is a must for men ... with the juice running out...and a nice piece of fat to get their tongues around. MAVIS: Eggs are livery in the end.

GIRLIE: I always say: Educate them in daintiness. A nice spaghetti on toast. Or beans. All this meat! They'll complain at first. But settle down. Daintiness pays .... [ 174]

Girlie unambiguously maintains that if men are fed too much meat it will barbarise them, a horrific thought for Girlie who cannot bear the thought of all those juices - of any variety! This brief exchange differentiates the women and, by their expressions ranging from squeamishness to lustiness, economically discloses their attitudes to sex and male conduct. Girlie needs to use food as a means to contain sexuality whereas Nola's "nice piece of ham to get their tongues around" is strongly echoic of The Ham Funeral's landlady's earthy responses to the merits of ham.

The connection between daintiness and light foods is as strong as that between sweets and femininity. One of the perennial gifts for a man to give a woman is chocolates. Chocolates bridge the way from dissolving sweetness to luscious edibility to sex. Predictably, nobody writes a whole play about lollies; however many

3 Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: a History of Eating In Australia Adelaide: Duck Press, 1982: 139. 4 Sydney: Currency, 1985. 206

playwrights incorporate lollies into their plays for all kinds of reasons. The contemporary strand of Alma De Groan's The Rivers of China5 may be read as a deconstruction of the male patriarchal order and the replacement of that order by an inverted, but in many respects similar, female dystopia. De Groen consciously inverts the usual association of women/sweets in order to add detail to the dystopic world of The Rivers of China-. Having Wayne in bed with a bag of lollies [2] is, she admits, behaviour sufficiently non­ normative as to alert the audience early in the play that it is a signal to be noted:

With Wayne, it's a female characteristic. You're meant to look at this man with a bag of lollies in bed and think, this is odd. So it's one of those little clues in the first scene that there's something really odd about the play's world. 6

A favourite sweet, in the sense of dessert or pudding, may often serve as a placatory offering (or bribe). Lorna Bol's But I'm Still Here 7 centres on an older working class mother and daughter. In one scene Dorrie uses a favourite dessert to soften Gran up so that she can get away to Bingo for the night.

DORRIE.: ... git a move on will ya .. .l want ta serve the puddin'. GRAN: Don't 'assle me woman! ... what's fer puddin' any'ow? DORRIE: Ya favourite ... apple dumplin'. GRAN: 'n custard? DORRIE: Custard!

GRAN: Thank Gawd fer that... I can't abide 'avin ice cream plonked over everything. DORRIE: No that's be lettin' me orf too easy, wouldn't it. GRAN: Ya do it often enough .. what's on tonight any'ow that ya butterin' me up like this? DORRIE: 'oo's butterin' you up? [15]

A night out at Bingo is not the only thing that can be bought by a gift of sweet foods. Suzanne Hawley's mother/daughter black

5 Sydney: Currency, 1988. 6 Australasian Drama Studies 15/16: 19. 7 Brisbane: Playlab, 1987. 207

comedy Mummy Loves You Betty Ann Jewe1 8 , first performed as Hitler Had a Mummy Too, reveals an equation between lollies and illicit sex. At one point Mummy disappears behind the screen and comes out dressed in a coat and hat as Charles, the man who fathered Betty:

CHARLES: What a pretty little girl you are, Betty. I used to know someone just like you. Stubby legs. Always fiddling on the violin. Gave away her cherry. Would you like a lolly?

BETTY: Mummy told me never to take lollies from strangers. What sort are they? CHARLES: Humbugs. BETTY: Humbugs? CHARLES: Humbugs. (Pause) BETTY: What if I had two humbugs? CHARLES: That is asking a lot, Betty. There's a lot of favours attached to two humbugs, Bet. A lot of favours. BETTY: Would I have to tweak your tinsel, tickle your tassle, tug your tonkle? CHARLES: Betty, Betty. That's one humbug. You've asked for two. [22-23]

This extract discloses one of many food terms associated with female sexuality; 'gave away her cherry' is a euphemism for Betty's loss of virginity. The granting or denial of lollies has traditionally been part of parental reward and punishment systems. At the same time accepting lollies from strangers has always been taboo. The playwright herself was told as a child never to accept lollies from men because they may be poisoned. 9 In the scene mentioned Hawley uncovers what was behind that prohibition. Chocolate, perhaps, is considered to be the most sinful of all sweet indulgences. Mummy at one point becomes the performer, Betty her audience. As the music comes up Mummy moves forward. Betty moves to the couch and begins to eat c_hocolates from a heart-shaped chocolate box. The heart shape reminds us again of the connection between romantic constructs of love and sweet foods. During this performance Betty sits in front of Mummy gorging herself, on chocolates from the heart-shaped box. Betty is prevented from joining in much of the song because she has her mouth full of

8 Sydney: Currency, 1988. 9 Suzanne Hawley interview, Sydney, 1989. 208

chocolates. This activity suggests rebelliousness and sexual audacity. According to the playwright this sequence of action should be played by Betty in a challenging manner. 1 0

Confectionery functions as a potent stimulant of memories too. Brand-name lollies produce nostalgic reactions in the audience. Significantly, in plays by men the confectionery and sweet foods do not carry with them any troublesome connotations. This observation is consistent with my argument that women generally have a more problematic and complex relationship with food because it has been designated as their domain. For the audience of Ray Lawler's Kid Stakes 11 Milk Kisses function nostalgically, reminding them of a simpler, more straight-forward time.

[Olive picks up wrapped packet to rip it open, and Nancy joins her at the table.] NANCY: Pressies! OLIVE: That Dickie. Asked me at the Athenaeum once what he could bring me back at interval. And he looked so passionate all I could think of was Milk Kisses. [She takes a couple of toffees and puts the packet aside as she moves for the French windows.] Didn't even laugh ..... hide those throwovers, willya? Where me mum can't find them. [15]

Later in Act One Milk Kisses feature again and despite the fact that the scene concerns a grown man giving a little girl lollies there is not the slightest suggestion that they are as a sexual lure. This sequence makes an interesting comparison with the Hawley excerpt above. Lawler is nothing if not wholesome:

ROO: ... Hey who's the kid next door? OLIVE: [joining him] .That's Bubba I was telling you about. ROO: Hiya, Bub OLIVE: She's a bit shy. I know -[Diving back into the room] - there's some toffees here. Milk Kisses.

1 O Suzanne Hawley interview, Sydney, 1989. 11 in The Doll Trilogy. Sydney: Currency, 1978. 209

BARNEY: [mounting a chair to call] We're your sugar uncles down from Queensland, Bub. Uncle Roo and Uncle Barney - ROO: - with his shirt hanging out. OLIVE: [rejoining ROO on back verandah] Stand by, luv. We're gunna throw you over some Milk Kisses .... [OLIVE and ROO throw milk kisses over the dividing fence ...... ] [27]

* * * * * * * * *

(II) Drinks

It is an observable phenomenon that male playwrights use drinks and on stage drinking to display, reflect and compare differing personal characteristics, moods and power relationships. Drinks and drinking in plays by men also function as potent indicators of class, social and economic standing, and personal affiliations. All these functions of drink may be subsumed under the ritualistic nature of drinking, more pronounced in plays by men.

Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year, 12 one of the earlier Australian plays to be discussed, incorporates drinks as theatrical signifiers. In this play Seymour establishes two beverages, tea and beer, as representatives of the extreme ends of both the gentility and gender spectra. The two drinks, as they function in this play, do have one thing in common; they both accommodate the plain tastes and meagre budgets of working class families. One sign that University student Hughie is distancing himself from the habits and rituals of his parents is his rejection of his mother's well-meant but irritating "Avea cuppa tea love, avea cuppa tea" chorus, and the adoption of instant coffee instead. This 'cuppa tea' rebuttal is a minor correlative of. Hughie's rejection of his father's 'beer and chunder' Anzac ritual. Alf's and Mum's abhorrence of commodities such as instant coffee is an accurate reflection of the kind of gastronomic xenophobia which prevailed in the early sixties in Australia. Instant coffee (and even worse capuccino!) conjure an intellectual, permissive and threatening ethos to the likes of Mum and Alf. Hughie's choice of coffee is one visible and understood

12 in Three Australian Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963; 2nd ed. 210

symptom of his more general alienation from parents who seem to him to embody all that is hollow or outmoded about the Anzac day ideal in particular and all that is narrow and parochial about Australia in general.

Alf's fears about the significance of Hughie's change from tea to coffee are transferred to pronouncements about its debilitating physical side-effects:

ALF: .... Well, Mother, aren't you gunna give the young lady a cuppa tea? JAN: I won't have one thanks. [Realises this may sound rude.] Really. I hardly ever drink tea. MUM: Don't drink tea. What do you drink? JAN: Coffee mostly. ALF: Bad as Hughie. Hughie's startin' on that. See them black rings under 'is eyes? That's coffee. [39]

In The One Day of the Year there is a very marked gender and socio-economic polarisation evident in relation to drinks: Mum drinks tea, Alf drinks beer; when Wacka and Mum drink together they drink muscat[69], a more 'feminine' drink than beer, appropriate for Wacka who is a far softer, more understanding character with none of the blinkered qualities of the blustering, stridently jingoistic Alf. Jan's choice is scotch, betraying her North Shore upbringing - spirits, at that time, were not associated with working class households but rather with pre-dinner drinks on the North Shore. Too late she realises that the Cook family could not afford to keep a bottle of scotch in the cupboard. When Hughie tells her "We've probably only got beer", Jan, with a 'big smile at Dad' rather patronisingly pretends: "I'd love one". [41-42]

This sets up an interesting comparison with the roughly contemporaneous play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. 13 The women in Lawler's play do drink beer, and in a time when most Australian women in mixed company would have been offered a 'shandy' at most. Olive and Pearl drink it for very particular reasons - to settle their nerves while they are awaiting the arrival

13 1957. In The Doll Trilogy Sydney: Currency, 1978. 2 I I

of the 'eagles' from the North, Roo and Barney and on New Year's Eve. As well, Olive's job as a barmaid associates her with drinking, a fact consistently disapproved of by her mother Emma in all three plays of The Doll Trilogy.

Scotch (or whiskey) in The Doll and other plays carries an association of the high class, the expensive or the special. So, in John O'Donoghue's A Happy and Holy Occasion, 14 set in 1942 Newcastle, the extreme generosity of Breda, a lapsed Catholic barmaid with means to supplement her income, is demonstrated by her contribution of whiskey to the party. Breda's entrance is preceded by a fitting line from Houses:

... That'll have her rolling on the floor. I tell you what: that joke's like a bottle of plonk. It improves with age. [Breda Mulcahy enters carrying two quarts of beer and two bottles of whiskey. She is a full-figured sensuously beautiful woman of about thirty-five.] BREDA: Improves with age! Like me. DENNY: Breda! Come right in! BREDA: Howy're, Denny, love? I've brought a little something along.

DENNY: My God! Will you look at this? Two quarts of draught beer and two bottles of whiskey! O'GORMAN: I hope it's Irish. DENNY: Thanks a lot Breda. After all you've done! You really shouldn't have. BREDA: Forget it Denny. We only live once.[31]

The whiskey in this instance is associated with a national and religious stereotype. Equally red wine and white wine have comparable suggestive capabilities. Alex Buzo, in work extending over more than hyenty years, employs these beverages in unconventional ways. At the opening of Buzo's Big River 15 an incident involving the spilling of the red wine punch assists in the creation of a mood of imminent and inevitable change, a mood

14 Sydney: Currency, 1987. 15 Sydney: Currency, 1985. 212

which is apparent on both domestic and national levels since the death of the family patriarch is closely followed by the Federation of the Australian states into the Commonwealth. In the introduction to the Currency edition Aarne Neeme singles out this incident as being prefigurative:

Buzo also delights in using his properties symbolically. Big River opens with Adela bursting in, disrupting the slow stirring of the punch and causing red wine to be spilt over the tablecloth - thus demonstrating the impact she is to have on the play.1 6

John McCallum, in his book Buzo, takes this point further when he claims:

the opening image - the exchange of the stained white linen tablecloth for the picnic gingham - is the first sign that no matter how much we see in the opening scenes of the established order at Wombelano, things are nevertheless about to change" .1 7

Whether Adela deliberately or carelessly upsets the punch, or whether the accident is due to her heightened state of excitability on the day of her father's funeral, would largely be a matter between the actor and the director; however, the spoilage of the pristine and formal white linen and subsequent replacement by the casual, colourful picnic cloth certainly suggests a letting go, a loosening of protocol and an implicit undermining of the standards expected by the late head of the household.

In Marginal Farm 18 , set in Fiji, the liquid of welcome and initiation to a new order is not punch but kava. Toby enters into the kava ritual with ent~usiasm ("Toby bolts down the kava" [SD,97]) thereby signifying her intention to eagerly embrace her new lifestyle in Fiji. Even though it is muddy water she is drinking (and entering, metaphorically) she overcomes her hesitancy very quickly. Marshall is first to observe the speed of her conversion:

16 Neeme, Aarne. Introduction. Big River. Sydney: Currency, 1985: xxi. 17 McCallum, John. Buzo. Sydney: Methuen, 1987: 113. 18 Sydney: Currency, 1985. 213

"Well look at this. She's gone native already."[97]. Her status as "model tourist" is confirmed by this action and by her familiarity with a few Fijian phrases.

An earlier Buzo play, Tom 1 9 contains a distinctly surreal treatment of drinks. This play parodies the self-importance of those involved in the big business activities of the seventies, the chief aim of which was to "strip economic or natural resources from the country and send them overseas" .20 In a scene crammed with New Class (meaningless) jargon, the pretension is extended to a description of Tom's hobby, the making of sea wine. Although McCallum describes Sue as the character who distinguishes herself by being "unpretentiously articulate" and "refreshingly direct" ,2 1 her promotion of Tom's sea wine calls this description into question (unless of course she in turn is consciously parodying her guests' vanities and pretensions):

SUSAN: .. Like a glass of sea wine? ANGELA: Sea wine? SUSAN: Yes. Tom made it out of components derived from the sea. Marine life and water plants, that kind of thing. He ripped up a necklace of sea grapes, added powdered crab and red essence of anemone, spiced with oyster juice and mussel sap, with flaked strips of octopus tentacles jelled and melted and then slowly fermented - that's why it's coloured blue. Tom's a real gourmet once he puts his mind to it. ANGELA: Tom doesn't drink ... ordinary wine? SUSAN: Oh no, he won't have a bar of land wine. But if you'd like some just say the word. ANGELA: I think perhaps I would thanks. Do you mind? SUSAN: Not at all. Tom, bring Angela a glass of land wine, will you? TOM: Typical. SUSAN: What about you, Ken? Would you like a drop of sea wine? KEN: What's that? SUSAN: It's a new kind of drink, good fun to make. It's a sort of communal thing, for sharing.

19 Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1975. 20 Mccallum Buzo: 63. 21 Mccallum Buzo: 66. 214

TOM: It's a drink, nothing more. KEN: I'll stick with the old amber article, thanks. STEPHEN: Get me a land wine while you're about it, will you Tom? TOM: Who's for the sea? I'll be in it. SUSAN: Me too. CAROL: I had a land wine at lunch. Now I'm ready for a new experience. SUSAN: Oh really? TOM: Some people like sliced periwinkle in their sea wine, but not me. It goes against the grain as far as I'm concerned. Still, every man's got a right to name his poison. (My emphasis) [15]

In this sequence resonances appear, as varied as the sea life from which Tom makes his wine. The description sounds like another crank macrobiotic health preparation, or a kind of marine witch's brew. The ingredients, significantly, are being "ripped up" from the sea, so its preparation involves a destruction and pillage of natural resources, a shadow of the destruction perpetrated and justified by the oil industry characters.

Tom's sea wine may be a harmless enough hobby but in the presentation of the finished product the gourmet pretensions override the sincerity of the activity. As well, another question is begged. If Susan is direct and unpretentious why does she advertise Tom's sea wine as "a sort of communal thing, for sharing", a description which is immediately contradicted by Tom's "It's a drink, nothing more." Buzo has always invested water, and its inhabitants, simultaneously with capabilities of solace, life­ affirmation and tranquillity (as in Coralie's eyrie in Cora Ii e Lansdowne Says No and Bentley's rock pool in Rooted22), as well as threat, menace and fear of the unknown (the murky oyster beds of Martello Tow~rs and Anne's ocean suicide in Coralie Lansdowne Says No). Consistently then, for Buzo, here the "communal", "sharing" beverage has been "ripped up" from the sea, and its integrity neatly compromised by the verbal posturing and excess accompanying its presentation.

2 2 Norm and Ahmed; Rooted; The Roy Murphy Show: Three plays by Alex Buzo. Sydney: Currency Methuen, 1973. 215

Beverages are clearly an important gauge of and for Buzo's characters. Characters are frequently defined by reference to, or by analogy with drink. On the set of Coralie Lansdowne Says No2 3 the •only blemish in otherwise beautiful surroundings is the bar" [SD, 12]. At the outset, as Coralie mixes drinks at the bar, she acquaints the audience with the measure of her trade-off: "You know there must be more to whoredom .than a mansion with ocean views and a cellar full of Southern Comfort. "[14] Appropriately enough it is an American ex-lover who has left her in charge. As each new character enters he or she is served a drink. Unsolicited, Stuart, the Canberra public servant, informs: "I don't drink spirits. Only beer and wine." A little later, when Coralie is becoming aggressively uncomfortable in the presence of another ex-lover, Paul, and his wife Anne, she turns her attention to Stuart who has not spoken for some time: "Here noisy, let me get you a drink"[30], and proceeds to fill his glass with bourbon. Stuart then exchanges his bourbon for beer and when Peter notes Stuart's discarded bourbon with "Waste of good liquor", Stuart is adamant regarding his right to self-definition: "I don't drink spirits. Coralie will have to learn that. 11 [31]

Coralie employs an unexpected analogy when describing for Anne what life was like with Anne's husband Paul: "It was like drinking Fanta through a live eel. 11 .[33] Raw wine is a gift given by Anne and Paul to Coralie, but one which causes a good deal of disagreement:

ANNE: It's from both of us. Now don't open it. You must put it down. PAUL: Why? Tell me why. ANNE: So it can mature. PAUL: Why not buy drinkable wine now that we know is good. This stuff could be shithouse and we wi[I have wasted all that storage space.[33]

Anne's concern that they build up their cellar is ironical in view of the fact that she plans to mature wine for a future which she will not enjoy; she will commit suicide by drowning that same night. Wine is not always the cause of argument though. It can often function in plays as a pleasant social lubricant, as in Ma rte 11 o

23 Sydney: Currency, 1974. 216

Towers, another of Buzo's waterbound plays. Wine is the beverage of choice of the accidentally assembled gathering at Martello Towers. The drinking of chilled white wine is represented, by Edward Martello, as a ritual to promote harmony:

EDWARD: ..... How about lunch? Let's get stuck into the cold dry white, the sacrificial cabanossi, and Jennifer's coffee · al dente and postpone territorial imperatives till later.[24]

Jennifer's offer of some civilising tea: "I brought some Souchong tea - would anyone like a cup?", is ignored. She has to try again: "I repeat: would anyone like a cup of tea?" Silence follows. "Then I take it there's a groundswell for white wine?". The following stage directions call for a change in atmosphere and a more relaxed grouping at the prospect of cold white wine for lunch. Buzo, in these directions, indicates that white wine is the beverage of sociability, camaraderie and good humour:

(Appreciative murmurs of assent all round. Jennifer goes back into the kitchen. The others relax, pour drinks, move around... ) [25]

The sharing of drinks is not always a guarantee of good humour and conviviality. David Allen in Upside Down at the Bottom of the W or Id utilises drink as a means to dramatise tensions and differences of temperament, taste and nationality between the four characters. Lawrence's refusal to drink beer is taken as a rebuttal, in general, of all things Australian and, in particular, of Jack's offer of membership to the Civil Guard movement:

JACK: Have a beer. LAWRENCE: Lemonade, thank you. JACK: You don't like beer? LAWRENCE: Sometimes. JACK: You don't like our beer? VICTORIA: Jack! JACK: Just a question. LAWRENCE: I find beer doesn't always quench my thirst. JACK: Well, it's not water, not this beer! 217

LAWRENCE: Precisely. JACK: Good Aussie beer. LAWRENCE: I'm sure it is. JACK: And you don't like it? LAWRENCE: I didn't say that. I'm sure it's very good. [drinks] But I do like your lemonade. [38]

David Williamson manages, via drinks and drinking, to locate characters in the pecking order, isolate a character, effect a barrier, or create a social closure of a small group within a larger group. Den's Party24 , The Removalists2 5, Travelling North, and The Perfectionist26 all make use of alcohol as an efficient yardstick of character and mobiliser of stage action.

Williamson continually exploits the nexus between food and drink (both on stage and as conversational topic) to locate his characters' class and aspirations for the audience. Sergeant Simmonds' of The Removalists tells the green Ross his idea of a great night is to "grab m'self a cray and half a dozen tubes, get home, sit m'self down in front of the box and watch the wrestling. "[27] He confides this to Ross in the same breath as he divulges that his house payments on 'a little weatherboard in Box Hill' are only five dollars a week. So, early and economically, these pieces of information regarding taste and lifestyle mesh together to give an idea of the lens through which Simmonds sees the world. Kenny Carter, victim of the disturbing violence of The Rem ova Ii st s, defines himself as 'just a beer-swilling slob' though as Peter Fitzpatrick notes, he maintains that he is "crude by choice, and not by nature or necessity" .27

Kenny, the working class husband in The Removalists, according to Fitzpatrick, "shows that he is quite conscious of when he is conforming to and departing from the stereotype of 'beer-swilling

24 Sydney: Currency, 1973 25 Sydney: Currency, 1972. 26 Sydney: Currency, 1983. 27 Fitzpatrick, Peter. "Mythmaking in Modern Drama." The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ed. Laurie Hergenhan. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1988: 523. 218

slob' which he characteristically fits" .28 His facility in conforming to the stereotype is demonstrated at the point Fiona's sister Kate enters. Kenny immediately slips into his slob role for Kate's 'benefit':

[Kenny gets up, storms past Fiona into the kitchen, grabs a tin of baked beans and a can opener and a packet of sliced bread. He opens the can and stuffs beans and bread into his mouth, deliberately trying to disgust Kate. He washes the food down with generous draughts of beer from the bottle. He glares at Kate.] Don't you like my manners?" [My emphasis]

Scoffing a combination of cold baked beans, sliced bread and beer swigged from the bottle is Kenny's defiantly working class posture, one which is calculated to express resentment of and irritation for Kate's pretensions.

Violence and ritualistic alcohol consumption are connected in The Remo v a Ii s t s. It is not that an excess of alcohol causes the violence, but the alcohol becomes a mask in the fragile and volatile three-way balancing act played out by Simmonds, Ross and Kenny. Amongst these three the sharing of beer at a crucial moment in the play is mistakenly assumed to confer commonality of intent and point of view. By both characters and audience alike relief is taken in the belief that a shared beer somehow transcends and expunges the excesses of physical cruelty and psychological taunting which the audience has just witnessed. Such apparent restitutions of camaraderie are part of a barrage of unsettling tactics which leaves the audience uncertain of where it is in the play - in farce, comedy, or nightmare. Several times towards the end of the play the audience feels comfortable again, as if normality has been restored, only to soon discover that another black twist is upon them. At the moment when Kenny crawls back into the lounge looking for a beer, the audience relaxes at the return of the tone of light comedy. Kenny's apparent recovery and the accompanying tonal return to lightness is ruptured by Kenny's death occurring as it

28 Fitzpatrick, Peter. Williamson. Sydney: Methuen, 1987: 35. 219

does "during an incongruous restoration of matiness over a few cans of beer" _29

At this point, just after the deal is made regarding Kenny's access to call girls, the stage directions denote the change first in Simmonds' attitude: "relaxing - the hard bargainer at the conclusion of a successful deal"[SD]. K~nny helps create this new atmosphere with an invitation to Ross to "Siddown". Ross, however, can't switch moods quite as quickly as the other two:

KENNY: Well, if you're not going to sit down, then make yourself useful. Grab a bloody beer from the kitchen. It'll be as hot as buggery but that's your fault for lettin' then take the fridge. (115]

This is an incongruously timed piece of Australian understated stoicism. Kenny's wife has just left him taking their child with her, the removalist has taken everything from his home, the two cops have punched him till he's very near dead yet he still drily blames Ross only for the warm beer. During the next two pages of dialogue there prevails a jokey, matey atmosphere between the three men which in no way prepares us for the shock of Kenny's sudden death. During this period of reprieve Kenny and Simmonds play the roles of the sexually experienced older men to Ross' virgin. This particular and short-lived allegiance is of course abruptly overturned when Ross and Simmonds are confronted with, this time, a truly dead Kenny. Often in production and certainly in the film of The Removalists the signal of Kenny's death is the beer can falling out of Kenny's hand onto the floor.

Significantly, although a bizarre matiness is restored Kenny does not actually drink this dying beer, according to the stage directions. Williamson includes directions for Ross and Simmonds to drink but in reference to Kenny the directions stress his unfitness for consuming alcohol:

[ROSS] hands one to SIMMONDS and one to KENNY, who accepts it even though he looks anything but fit for drinking.[115}

29 Fitzpatrick WIiiiamson: 43. 220

He laughs with some difficulty at his own joke but he cannot bring himself to drink.[116}

In all Williamson's plays the drinking is part of the stage action and the drinks are highly visible as props. No Australian play, however, makes such a feature of drink from start to finish as Den's Party.30 Den's Party features . alcohol unremittingly and it fulfils a number of functions, apart from merely a stage prop. Kath berates Don for holding parties at which he demonstrates his talent as a host by pointing the guests at the fridge. So, right from the beginning, alcohol is a divisive issue; as Kath says, "I can't see the point of coming to a party with the sole intention of drinking yourself into a stupor." [6]

Alcohol may be a means, for a playwright, of marking a character's class, peer group standing, or even sometimes political persuasions. Labor voters and supporters, in the context of Williamson's election eve play, are definitely beer drinkers. The two Liberal supporters Simon and Jody - already isolated by their more_ formal garb and Simon's profession as an accountant - are further marginalised by their choice of drink, vermouth and dry. To make matters worse their choice of drink is unavailable; an 'oversight' signifying that Don only anticipated (wanted?) beer drinkers at the party, despite, as we learn, Kath's special reminder to get in some mixers for the drinks. There is implied here a basic common denominator of acceptable host-like behaviour; however, clearly Don habitually falls well below expectations. We soon learn that Don's standards, determined by any "excuse for a booze-up", involve very little work or energy on his part, and include pointing the guests in the direction of the fridge.[6]

In contrast to the on stage dominance of drinks in Den's Party, the role of alcohol in The Perfection ist3 1 is more measured and strategic. The very first exchange of dialogue (apart from the opening address by Barbara to the audience) signals that wine will carry weight as a barometer of marital discord. Stuart's first

30 1973. Sydney: Currency, 1982. 31 Sydney: Currency, I 983. 221

sentence to Barbara is "Shaun dropped the wine!" (3]. This first exchange over the broken bottle discloses many of the play's dilemmas: differing notions of child rearing; differing attitudes to money; and differing abilities to be flexible. Stuart's insistence on not relaxing with a bottle of wine - even on his birthday - is neatly picked up and built on by Williamson when later another refusal to share a bottle stands as evidence of Stuart's selfishness and mean­ spi ritedness. When Barbara shares champagne with Danish baby­ sitter Erik it is for several reasons: he, unlike Stuart, is capable of living in the moment; she is attracted to him; he is responsive to the importance of her pursuits; and she knows Stuart won't. Stuart's claim that he wanted a clear head to work on his thesis disguises the real reason which, according to Barbara, is that "he hates to hear my thesis is going well.".[14] Williamson's depiction of Stuart as the type who will refuse to share in his wife's progress and achievements is achieved concisely by having him refuse a ritual celebratory champagne. When Stuart remonstrates with Barbara over this, he does so in a high-handed, patriarchal manner ("I'm paying Erik to look after our kids, not drink our cham_pagne"). Stuart is both threatened by and disapproves of Barbara's attitude to her progress on her Ph D ("Don't you think it's a bit self-indulgent...... to start celebrating when you've only finished one chapter?") [15].

Barbara and Erik consume the champagne on stage over a period of time. During this drinking scene the stage directions indicate "Time passes" to allow the audience to see both the process and the result of the celebration. Having demolished the champagne, Erik and Barbara consume the "Portuguese red" which Stuart formerly rejected as a substitute for the smashed Chateau Lafite. Stuart's kill-joy prediction - . "Lay it on its side and it eats away the cork"[4] - is here refuted by Erik's more relaxed, accepting response - "It was fine. "[14]. In this way the same bottle of wine acts as a yardstick for the attitudes and temperaments of the two men.

The first action given to Shirley, Stuart's mother, described as "an attractive but rather haunted woman", is "Shirley hands Jack the 222

champagne bottle". Her first words are "Would you open it please". Again Williamson's dramaturgy is tailored, since it is soon revealed that Shirley has a drinking problem; "Shirley for once in your life can't you just wait? 0 is Jack's irritated way of trying to delay opening the bottle. By Shirley's fourth line of dialogue she reveals both her alcoholism and her unconventional attitude to it:

SHIRLEY: The only problem about being an alcoholic is being ashamed of it. I have never been ashamed of it. Thank you dear, pour me a drink.

Shirley's response to almost any situation is to drink. Throughout the ensuing scene Shirley continues to prompt Jack to "Pour me another drink"[30] or "Pour some drinks, Jack"[32] thereby keeping in view, simultaneously, the fact of her alcoholism, the on-stage trolley of drinks, and the sight and sounds of drink preparation. In Act Two Shirley's partiality to the bottle is the source of a delightfully amusing exchange. By this stage Stuart is in his zealous reforming phase, having turned his energies from his work to domestic routines and interpersonal relationships. He is going to work. on his parents' marriage: "You dominate her, Dad. Is it any wonder she's got a drinking problem?". Jack's challenge "What did you say?" provokes the reply "I said my mother has a drinking problem". At this Shirley, who "hasn't been listening", asks "Whose mother has a drink problem?". When Stuart tells her it is she who has the problem, she unhesitatingly agrees: "Of course I've got a drink problem". The humour is taken a step further when Jack contradicts his wife's assessment: "Your mother hasn't got a drink problem."

Shirley's manner of handling this discussion is the antithesis of denial; in this case it_ is not the analysand who has to be convinced but rather her 'minder'. Her frankness compounds the humour in an unexpected way: "I've got a terrible drink problem. I have to be sent off to that bloody grapefruit juice farm every two months to dry out." Jack is unconvinced by this evidence and insists there is barely a ripple on the surface of his existence: "Shirley, you might have a slight problem, but it's totally under control. "[62]. The 'drink' issue functions as metaphor for the concealment, dishonesty and 223

lack of accord on which Frank and Shirley's marriage has been built. They are polarised in their versions of the truth on almost every issue. Shirley reports matters with disarming bluntness while Jack prefers to delude himself. Shirley, for instance, is happy to admit she does not like their son Stuart, that Jack's bullying drove their other son away, that Jack overestimates the capabilities of Stuart (who in her eyes is nothing more than a plodder). Jack's final assessment of the "drink problem", however, may be the one to believe:

Because she could never stand being out of the spotlight and alcohol gives her the energy and audacity to get back in it.[66)

After all, it is the version which most nearly corresponds with Shirley's own, given in Act One:

The actress in me demands an audience, Jack. The one great bonus of being married to you is that I can give magnificent performances without ever having to leave the living room.[30)

Shirley's 'bluntness', though it works theatrically, is not necessarily to be mistaken for truth since, when it comes to the final analysis she agrees substantially with Jack. And this, despite the fact that they've been at loggerheads throughout over the extent and reason for her drinking. Perhaps in the case of The Perfectionist it is appropriate that Williamson chose alcohol as the fulcrum for the differing versions and shifts of position since it is a substance which typically elicits all kinds of rationalisations and sidesteppings.

Alcohol is not a problem or a vice for any of the characters in Travelling North yet it is noteworthy that Frank, Frances' late­ life partner, measures his worth in champagne. He makes a proposition for the implementation of an after death ritual, which requires Frances' cooperation:

The first thing I want you to do if I die is to break open a magnum of champagne and share it with Saul and Freddy. Not a bottle, a magnum. (36] 224

And, after he is left alone on stage, he confirms that for all his faults he's "damn well worth a magnum" [36]. Champagne, for Frank, embodies ideals of affluence, glamour and something unattainable however we never actually see the couple drink champagne together on stage. Perhaps it is the drink which for him is furthest removed from his Communist party roots, and therefore the one which he wants to mark his passing. Perhaps he ~ishes Frances' last memory of him to be associated with a luxury they never could afford to share while he was alive. The beverage which becomes closely identified with Frank during the progression of the play is Bovril, a drink completely dissimilar to champagne, and one which Frank describes as tasting like drain water. In fact we first see him drinking it immediately after interval (during which the audience has probably not been drinking Bovril) and, in the play's continuous time, immediately after his pledge to be dispatched with a magnum of champagne.

Frank's hostility and jealousy towards Frances' daughters (Goneril and Regan as he calls them) is expressed in terms of what they offer her as a bribe to stay in Melbourne, and, possibly, leave him:

Taking you out to shows and filling you with champagne. It won't last long you know. As soon as I've gone they'll have you down on your knees scrubbing the floors again .[61]

With full knowledge of the seriousness of Frank's heart attack Frances confirms her loyalty to him. Frank again refers to the champagne: "I can't offer you champagne every night, but there'll be a magnum when I die." [62] His proposition is a curious one - a treat which will only happen when he is not alive to partake of it. 225

Appendix B

PRACTICALITIES OF FOOD ON STAGE

The last two productions discussed in Chapter Two suggest a number of considerations involving the practicalities of food on stage or set. Firstly, the introduction of food sets up demands in relation to the dictates of realism. When these are not consistently met, even the most fleeting lapse ruins the construction of detailed and lavish realism vis-a-vis food. In a scene in Lust discussed previously, the actor playing Belinda (Heather Mitchell), after using oven gloves to lift the hot roasting dish out of the oven to baste the meat, proceeds to handle this hot roasting dish with bare hands. The continuity oversight of the missing oven gloves ruptures the realism set up by (i) the action of basting the 'cooking' joint with brush and 'hot' oil and (ii) Deirdre's earlier comment to Belinda that the oven temperature was too hot for the meat.

Secondly, there are many logistical problems associated with. introducing food onto the stage. Symptomatic of this is the H ote I Sorrento's stage manager's concern to buy the right kind of beans for the bean salad. For the audience, it is easy to take food on stage for granted - in its more familiar forms and compared with more spectacular stage effects, it can be relatively inexpensive and easily available. To its advantage from a practical point of view food is manageable on stage and readily procurable. Nonetheless, there are a number of practical difficulties presented in incorporating eating behaviours on stage, under lights, before an audience, night after night, with actors who must remain mobile and intelligible. It is therefore significant in relation to the overall discussion to consider the amount of atte~tion and ingenuity which must be devoted to representing food, its preparation and consumption. The logistics of such representation are complex enough to underscore the point that it is accorded considerable significance not only by playwrights, but by directors who have to translate stage directions and scenic and performance demands to the stage or screen. 226

Among the practical difficulties involved in mounting such food scenes are the provision of fresh food for consumption on stage and the economic considerations of the extra actors needed to set and serve the feast as well as occupy the extra seats at the table.1 The Tempest poses one of the biggest challenges in stage food terms, since an entire banquet is to materialise_ by magic and vanish a mere fourteen speeches later.

The banquet scene in The Tempest presents logistical problems in terms of staging difficulties that were overcome in the televised BBC version by technological, not theatrical, wizardry. Soon after the sprites bear the banquet in they remove it. For the brief period the food is on stage no-one actually eats because the courtiers are filled with surprise, amazement and suspicion at its sudden magical appearance. From a practical point of view, therefore, it would be possible to have artificial food for this particular banquet. The banquet materialises: "Enter below several strange Shapes, bringing in a banquet: they dance about it with gentle actions of salutation; and, inviting the King &c, to eat, they depart." (SD, 3,iii), and Sebastian · convinces a reluctant King Alonso to eat of the feast. With that Ariel reappears in thunder and lightning, like a harpy and "with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes" reminiscent of the myth of Aeneas, who in Bulfinch's account, watched "groups seated at tables loaded with dainties, while near by stood a Fury who snatched away the viands from their lips as fast as they prepared to taste them." 2 Several commentators suggest this scene would have been managed in the following way : the table probably stood on a trap door, and the plates were quickly removed by a stage-hand who was concealed under the

1 Mahon, John W. "'For now we sit to chat as well as eat": conviviality and conflict in Shakespeare's meals',"Fanned and Winnowed Opinions": Shakespearian Essa} Presented to Harold Jenkins. Eds. John W Mahon and Thomas A Pendleton. London: Methuen, 1987: 232. 2 Bulfinch, Thomas Bulflnch's Mythology New York: Avenel, 1978 ed: 270. Expected page number is not in the original print cop 228

Stages, covers a wide range of solutions to the practical challenges of food on stage. 5

Some examples of food substitutions for the Victoria State Opera Compants productions include marshmallow for the banquet scene in Manon Lescaut (the huge banquet scene was made totally out of plaster and plastic except for marshmallow sections for the food that had to be eaten) and puffed wheat and lemon barley cordial for gruel (in a tavern scene for The Force of Destiny). Thurston James in The Theater Props Handbook cautions props crews against thinking only in substitutions; for example, substituting cold mashed potatoes for icecream on the grounds that it will not melt and then in the second act using icecream when mashed potatoes is called for on the grounds that it does not require cooking. 6 In terms of substitutions some foods are particularly versatile: for instance, mashed bananas are soft and easily digestible, and with the help of food colourings an unmashed banana can become a carrot. Pumpernickel bread sometimes takes the place of steak because it has a similar texture and is a struggle to cut. Coconut, chocolate and nougat are all unsuitable for consumption . on stage because they have a tendency to stick in the throat or take a long time to eat.

Sometimes nothing can substitute for the real thing. In Anthill's production of The Wolf's Banquet the character of Big Daddy had to cook up some rabbit and to make the scene realistic stage management cut a hole in the stage under which there was a frypan filled with soy sauce and a variety of Chinese spices simmering away with a smoke machine to disperse the smell out to the audience. For a production of Carmen The Victorian State Opera Company needed 12 loaves and seven kilograms of plain cheese to feed an army of soldiers. La Comedie Francaise, in Australia for the Spoleto Festival

5 Stages. Melbourne. November 1989: 8-9. 6 James, Thurston. The Theater Props Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Theater Properties, Materials and Construction. White Hall, Virginia: Betterway 1987: 120. 229

Company needed 12 loaves and seven kilograms of plain cheese to feed an army of soldiers. La Comedie Francaise, in Australia for the Spoleto Festival in 1988, wanted seven kilograms of profiteroles and and three brioche for each performance at a cost of $100 a show.7

In interviews with Libby Higgin, stage manager between 1970 and 1989 with such companies as Queensland Theatre Company, Nimrod, Marian Street and Melbourne Theatre Company, several productions in particular stood out as being memorable for their food content: the Nimrod Theatre Company's production of Sam Shepard's The Curse of the Starving Class( 1978), Queensland Theatre Company's touring production of The School Mistress(1972) and Q Theatre's production at Bankstown Theatre Restaurant of Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber( 1979). 8 In The Curse of the Starving Class directed by Ken Horler, no meal is actually eaten. Wesley constantly opens and closes the door, looking for nourishment. The food in the refrigerator plays its part when, late in the play, the father, in a crazed and frustrated rage, throws all the food out of the fridge - ice-cream, bread, milk, a bag of artichokes. During this tirade the father stuffs ice-cream down Wesley's throat. For this to work the ice-cream had to be convincingly frozen so a working fridge was essential. In this production a real carcass of a skinned sheep was also used - a fresh carcass from a wholesale butcher was brought in each week. This degree of realism was demanded by the proximity of the audience in the Upstairs Nimrod Theatre. Different requirements obtained for the touring production of The School Mistress directed by Alan Edwards. The constraints of touring and the fact that the theatres were of the proscenium arch kind meant that artificial food was a9equate; this entailed the use of polystyrene and sponge shaped to represent different food items, and for

7 The previous examples from the companies Victoria State Opera, Anthill, La Comedie Francaise are taken from comments by stage managers of the respective companies and compiled in a report by Nedjeljka Viduka for Stages. 8 Personal interviews with Libby Higgin, 26.1.93 and 8.3.93. 230

an eye (a grape), hair {dental floss), and a thumbnail (a broken piece of iceblock stick) which he then threw into the audience. 9 As these examples make clear, on a proscenium arch stage the necessity to be totally authentic in matters of food realism is lessened by the actors' distance from the audience. In thrust stages or in the round the margin for reasonable food substitution is narrowed.

The foregoing exercises in the stage management of food tend, I believe, to reinforce the argument central to Chapter Two. That is, food is essential, rather than merely incidental to the contours of plot and dialogue. Unlike certain elements of the production (for instance, sound effects or set dressing) which supplement the style or atmosphere, food acts as a framework which helps to give shape to the play as a whole, both because it is so essential to social processes, and, as I developed in Chapters Three, Four and Five, a bearer of social and cultural codes.

9 The information regarding food props in these three productions was provided by Libby Higgin, who stage managed all three. My own principal recollection of eating food while playing a scene involves a Queensland Theatre Company production of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers (1976) directed by Ted Craig, in which Dottie Moore, the ex-musical star and Sir Archibald Jumper, the Vice-Chancellor, share a meal in Dottie's bedroom. In retrospect the meal, jugged hare, turns out to be Professor George Moore's beloved pet rabbit Thumper, a discovery which converts Dottie and Archie's unwitting consumption of the rabbit into heartless barbarism in the eyes of George, and reduces him to tears. George, who begins loving and tolerant, turns sour on the world after the 'murder' of his friend Thumper. The actual ingredients consumed by Charles Little and myself were not rabbit (jugged or otherwise) but gravy and mashed potato (probably Deb instant) of a consistency able to be lifted to the mouth by fork and a temperature which could be described as luke warm. 231

Blbllography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Allen, David. Upside Down at the Bottom of the World. Richmond: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1981.

Allen, Marilyn. All the Black Dogs. (Unpublished MS; 1987.)

Bell, Hilary. Fortune. (Unpublished MS; 1990)

Bent, Roxxy with Anne Brookman, Ollie Black and Margaret Fischer. Weighing it Up & A Touchy Subject: two plays commissioned and produced by Vitalstatistix Theatre Company. South Australia: Tantrum, 1989.

Benyon, Lissa. Pennies Before the Holidays. (Unpublished MS; 1988.)

__ The Real Matilda. (Unpublished MS; 1989.)

Bol, Lorna. But I'm Still Here. Brisbane: Playlab, 1987.

__ Treadmill. Brisbane: Playlab, 1978.

Bovell, Andrew. After Dinner. Sydney: Currency, 1989.

__ Lust, play 1, Seven Deadly Sins. ABC-TV, 23rd Feb. 1993.

Bradhurst, Jane. Duet; String Trio; Quartet. Brisbane: Playlab, 1987.

Buzo, Alex. Big River and The Marginal Farm. Sydney: Currency, 1985.

Coralie Lansdowne Says No. Sydney: Currency-Methuen, 1974.

Makassar Reef. Sydney: Currency, 1979.

Martello Towers. Sydney: Currency-Methuen, 1976

Norm and Ahmed; Rooted; The Roy Murphy Show: three plays by Alex Buzo. Sydney: Currency Methuen, 1973.

Tom. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1975.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales. Ed. A.C. Cawley. London: Dent, 1958.

Churchill, Caryl. Top Girls in Plays: Two. London: Methuen, 1990.

Compton, Jennifer. Crossfire. Sydney: Currency, 1976.

Cook, Tamara, Daina Reid and Sarah Woods. The Girl's Gotta Eat. (Unpublished; 1993.)

Davis, Jack. Barungin {Smell the Wind) Sydney: Currency, 1989.

Day, Julie. Come Back for Light Refreshments After the Service. (Unpublished MS & video documentation; 1991) 232

De Groen, Alma. Going Home; The Joss Adams Show; Perfectly All Right. Sydney: Currency, 1977.

Going Home; Vocations Sydney: Currency, 1983.

The Rivers of China Sydney: Currency, 1988.

The Girl Who Saw Everything Sydney: Currency, 1993.

Enright, Nick. Daylight Saving. Sydney: Currency, 1990.

__ St James Infirmary. Sydney: Currency, 1993.

Farquhar, George. The Inconstant; or The Way to Win Him. London: J. Bell, 1977.

Gage, Mary. The New Life. Sydney: Currency, 1977.

Garner, Bill. Sunday Lunch. (Unpublished MS, 1991)

Hawley, Suzanne. Mummy Loves You Betty Ann Jewel. Sydney: Currency, in association with SWY Theatre Company, Perth, 1988.

Henley, Beth. Crimes of the Heart. New York: Viking, 1982.

Herbert, Bob. No Names ... No Pack Drill. Sydney: Currency, 1980.

Hewett, Dorothy. Pandora's Cross in Theatre Australia. Sept-Oct, 1978.

Hewett, Robert. The Adman. Sydney: Currency, in association with Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1991.

Gulls. Sydney: Currency, 1984.

Hibberd, Jack. A Country Quinella: Dimboola; Liquid Amber. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1984.

__ The Overcoat; Sin. Sydney: Currency, 1981.

Howe, Tina. Birth and After Birth in The New Women's Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women. Ed. Honor Moore. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Lawler, Ray. The Doll Trilogy: The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll; Kidstakes; Other Times. Sydney: Currency, 1978.

Lyssiotis, Tes. Forty Lounge Cafe. Sydney: Currency, in association with Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1990.

Mainwaring, Karin. Binge. (Unpublished MS;1987.)

Malouf, David. Blood Relations. Sydney: Currency, 1988.

Marlowe, Christopher. Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

Masters, Olga. A Working Man's Castle. Sydney: Currency, 1988. 233

Merrit, Robert. The Cake Man. Sydney: Currency, 1983.

Moliere, J.8.P. Five Plays. Trans. Richard Wilbur. London: Methuen, 1971.

Murray, Peta. Wallflowerlng. Sydney: Currency, 1992.

Nowra, Louis Byzantine Flowers (Unpublished MS; 1990.)

Inner Voices Sydney: Currency, 1977.

Inside the Island and The Precious Woman Sydney: Currency, 1981.

The Watchtower (Unpublished; 1990.)

O'Donoghue, John. A Happy and Holy Occasion. Sydney: Currency, 1987.

Oswald, Debra. Dags. Sydney: Currency, 1987.

Plautus, Titus Maccius. The Brothers Menaechmus in Two Classical Comedies. Ed. Peter D. Arnott. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1958.

Rayson, Hannie. Hotel Sorrento. Currency, in association with Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1990.

Mary. Melbourne: Yackandandah, 1985.

Sloth, play 3, Seven Deadly Sins. ABC-TV, 2nd March, 1993.

Romeril, John. Mrs Thally F in Seven One-Act Plays. Ed. Rodney Fisher. Sydney: Currency,1983.

Ryall, Phillip. The Centenarian in Popular Short Plays for the Australian Stage. Vol 1. Sydney: Currency, 1985.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Four Tragedies and Octavia. Trans. E.F. Watling. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.

Sewell, Stephen. The Garden of Granddaughters. Sydney: Currency, in association with Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, 1993.

Seymour, Alan. The One Day of the Year. London: Angus and Robertson, 1962.

Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors in The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. W.J. Craig, London: OUP, 1911.

Macbeth in The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. W.J. Craig. London: OUP, 1911.

The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. Brian Morris. London: Methuen, 1981.

The Tempest in The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. W.J. Craig. London: OUP, 1911.

Timon of Athens. London: Methuen, 1965.

Titus Andronicus. Ed. Eugene M. Waith. Oxford: OUP, 1984. 234

Shepard, Sam. Angel City, The Curse of the Starving Class & Other Plays. New York, 1981.

Spigelman, Alice. The Dark Side of the Moon. (Unpublished MS; 1990.)

Spunner, Suzanne. Dragged Screaming to Paradise. (Unpublished MS; 1989.)

Webster, John and John Ford. Five Plays. London: Dent, 1976.

Wesker, Arnold. The Kitchen. New York: Random, 1961.

White, Patrick. The Ham Funeral in Four Plays by Patrick White. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965.

_ The Season at Sarsaparilla in Four Plays by Patrick White. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965.

Wilder, Thornton. The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays. London: Longman's Green & Co, 1931.

Williamson, David. The Coming of Stork - Jugglers Three - What if you died tomorrow; three plays by David Williamson Sydney: Currency, 1984.

Don's Party. Sydney: Currency, 1973.

The Perfectionist. Sydney: Currency, 1983.

The Removallsts. Sydney: Currency, 1972.

Travelling North. Sydney: Currency, 1980.

* * * * * * * * * * *

CORRESPONDENCE and PERSONAL INTERVIEWS

Blocksidge, Jennifer. Interview at director's home, Brisbane, Dec. 1988.

Bol, Lorna. Letter from playwright, Nov. 1988; interview at playwright's home, Brisbane, Dec. 1988.

Bradhurst, Jane. Letter from playwright, May 1989; interview at playwright's home, Canberra, June 1989.

Compton, Jennifer. Interview at playwright's home, Wingello, NSW; & telephone interview, 5th Feb. 1989.

Day, Julie. Telephone interview, 22nd Apr. 1993.

Hawley, Suzanne. Interview at playwright's home, Sydney, 1989.

Mainwaring, Karin. Letter from playwright to the writer Jan. 1990, accompanying script of Binge.

Murray, Peta. Interviews at playwright's home, Sydney, Dec. 1988.

Rayson, Hannie. Letters from playwright to the writer, 1988 & 1990; telephone interview 14th Feb. 1992. 235

Romeril, John. Interview, Parade Theatre, at Australian National Playwright's Conference, Sydney, Dec. 1988.

Spigelman, Alice. Telephone interview, 18th Oct. 1990.

Spunner, Suzanne. Letter from playwright to the writer June 1989; letter accompanying script of Dragged Screaming to Paradise, Dec. 1989.

* * * * * * * * *

Annie Hall (USA, 1977) Dir. Woody Allen.

Babette's Feast (Denmark, 1987) Dir. Gabriel Axel.

Bananas (USA, 1971) Dir. Woody Allen.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Netherlands-Holland-France, 1989) Dir. Peter Greenaway.

Crimes of the Heart (USA, 1986) Dir. Bruce Beresford

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (France, 1972) Dir. Luis Bunuel.

Eat Your Heart Out (Australia, 1984) Dir. Paul J Hogan.

Eating (USA, 1990) Dir. Henry Jaglom.

Eating Raoul (USA, 1982) Dir. Paul Bartel.

The Famine Within (Canada, 1991) Dir. Katherine Gilday.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (USA, 1967) Dir. Stanley Kramer.

Hannah and Her Sisters (USA, 1986) Dir. Woody Allen.

The Heartbreak Kid (Australia, 1993) Dir Michael Jenkins.

Heartburn (USA, 1986) Dir. Mike Nichols.

Love and Death (USA, 1975) Dir. Woody Allen.

Lust in Seven Deadly Sins (Australia, 1993) Dir. Ken Cameron.

The Taming of the Shrew (Video Recording) London: British Broadcasting, 1980. Dir. Jonathan Miller.

The Tempest (Video Recording) London: BBC Enterprises, 1979. (BBC TV Production in association with Time-Life Televsion). Dir. John Gorrie.

Timon of Athens (BBC-TV 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (Italy, 1971} Dir. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi.

Tom Jones (Great Britain, 1963) Dir. Tony Richardson. 236

Titus Andronlcus (Video Recording) London: BBC-TV in association with Time-Life Television MCMLXXXV. Oir. Jane Howell.

The Tragedy of Coriolanus (Video Recording) London: BBC Television, 1983 Dir. Elijah Mojinsky. (Presented by the British Broadcasting Association)

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Video Recording) RCA Columbia, Pictures Hoyts Video, Dir. Roman Polanski.

Travelling North (Australia, 1988) Dir. Carl Schultz.

RADIO PLAYS

Pennies Before the Holidays. ABC-FM Stereo Play Season, 1988.

Words of One Syllable. ABC-FM Stereo Play Season, 1992.

* * * * * * * * * 237

SECONDARY SOURCES

JOURNAL and NEWSPAPER ARTICLES:

Akerholt, May-Brit. "Female Figures in the Plays of Dorothy Hewett and Patrick White." Westerly No 1, March, 1984: 69-77.

Banchard, Jayne. "Women's war with food: Obsessing on food in Jaglom's touching Eating." Arlington Journal March 13, 1991.

Barbour, Judith. "Privileged, Authentic, Transcendent, Arcane: Limits of Naturalism in Some Contemporary Australian Plays." Southerly Vol 37, No 1, 1977: 77-92.

Bauer, George H. "Just Desserts." Yale French Studies No 68, 1985: 3-14.

Beach, Cherie. "Suzanne Screams with Laughter." The Sunday Territorian 11 March, 1990: 36.

Broun, Alexander. "The Girls are Hungry!" (The Girls Gotta Eat interview) The Drum Media 12 Jan. 1993.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. "Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Women." Representations Vol 11, Summer 1985: 1-25.

Candido, Joseph. "Dining Out in Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 Vol 30, Spring 1990: 217-241.

Chandler, Marilyn A. "Food and Eating in Light in August." Notes on Mississippi Writers. Vol 18, No 2, 1986: 91-101.

Corones, Anthony. "Overcoming Greed: Gastronomic Lessons for Gluttonous Times." Meanjin Vol 49, No 2, 1990: 277-281.

Croggon, Alison. "Exploring the 'rivers'." The Herald Melbourne, 28 Nov. 1988: 21.

Counihan, Carole M. "What does it mean to be fat, thin, and female in the United States: a review essay." Food and Foodways Vol 1. 1985: 77-94.

Cuff, John Haslett. "Brilliant portrait of a dark obsession." The Globe and Mail Sept. 20, 1990.

Dennis, Wendy. "Is Diet a Four-letter Word?" Flare Jan. 1991: 81.

Dessaix, Robert. "Conversation on the Civility of Dining Out." Meanjin Vol 49, No 2, 1990: 272-276.

Diehl, Huston. "The Iconography of Violence in English Tragedy." Renaissance Drama NS 11, 1980: 27-44.

Dunford, Terrance. "Consumption of the World: Reading, Eating and Imitation in Every Man Out of His Humor." English Literary Renaissance Spring Vol 14 (2), 1984: 131-147. 238

Dyson, J.P. "The Structural Function of the Banquet Scene in Macbeth." Shakespeare Quarterly Vol 14, 1963: 369-378.

Eckard, Paula G. "Family and Community in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant." Southern Literary Journal Vol 22, Spring '90: 33-44.

Edge, John "Making a Meal." The Bulletin Oct 22, 1991.

Evans, Bob. "Going into unfamiliar territory." Sydney Morning Herald Sept 9, 1987:18.

Gagliardi, Jason. "Bol writes with heart and soul." The Courier Mail May 18, 1989: 20.

Gilbert, Helen. "'Walking Around in Other Times': an interview with Alma De Groen." Australasian Drama Studies Numbers 15/16, Oct. 1989/Apr. 1990: 11- 20.

Gwin, Minrose. "Mentioning the Tamales: Food and Drink in Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas and Other Stories", The Mississippi Quarterly Vol 38, Winter 84-85: 49-57.

Harford, Sonia. "Fleeing the bougainvillea." The Herald Feb. 22, 1989: 12.

Harvey, Robyn. "New blood at the Stables." The Sydney Morning Herald Metro Oct. 13, 1989: 2s.

Healey, Ken. "A Showcase of writers' talents." The Sun Herald Aug. 26, 1990: 110.

Hebden, Barbara. "Bille makes a big meal of it." Sunday Mall Brisbane, 26 July, 1992.

Hefner, Robert. "Visual impact and some self discovery in Wal/flowering." Canberra Times May 28, 1989.

Kaine-Jones, Karen. "Contemporary Aboriginal Drama." Southerly Vol 48, No 4, 1988: 432-444.

Keller, Bruce. "Exploring The Rivers of China : Observations From the Rehearsal Room." NEW THEATRE: Australia No 2, Dec. 1987: 37-8.

Le Blanc, Ronald Denis. "Love and Death and Food: Woody Allen's Comic Use of Gastronomy." Literature/Film Quarterly Vol 17, No1, 1989: 18-26.

__ "Satisfying Khlestakov's appetite: the semiotics of eating in The Inspector General ." Slavic Review Vol 47, Fall 1988: 483-98.

Lloyd, Tim "Erotic view of food and theatre." The Advertiser Oct 3, 1991 :26.

"Original night dishes up food for thought." The Advertiser Oct 5, 1991 :21.

Lord, Gabrielle. "Fatty." The Sydney Review Number 24, Sept. 1990: 12-13.

Lucia, Cynthia. "The Famine Within: an interview with Katherine Gilday." Cineaste Vol xviii, No 4: 39-43. 239

Marohl, Joseph. "De-realised Women: Peformance and Identity in Top Girls." Modern Drama Vol 30, Sept. 1987: 376-388.

Mccallum, John. "A New Map of Australia: the Plays of David Williamson." Australian Literary Studies Vol 11, No 3, May 1984: 342-54.

__ "Studying Australian Drama." Australasian Drama Studies Numbers 12/13, 1988: 147-166.

Neill, Rosemary. "Recounting a double message." The Australian Sept. 12, 1989: 10.

Nowra, Louis. "At the Crossroads." Australasian Drama Studies Vol 2, No 2, Apr. 1984: 101-112.

McFarlane, Brian. "Peter Greenaway interviewed." Cinema Papers 78: 38-43, 68- 9.

Mitchell, Alex. "Malle content." (Interview with Louis Malle) The Sun Herald Feb. 14, 1993: 113.

Mitchell, Tony. "Going to the Source." (Interview with Tes Lyssiotis) Australasian Drama Studies Numbers 12/13, 1988: 5-15.

Nicholson, Mervyn. "Food and Power: Homer, Carroll, Atwood and Others." Mosaic: a Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas Vol 20, No 3, Summer 1987: 37-55.

Parham, Susan. "The Table in Space." Meanjin Vol 49, No 2,1990: 213-19.

Pasternak, Judith. "Jaglom's Eating: No moviegoer's feast." New York Guardian 15 May, 1991.

Patraka, Vivian M. "Foodtalk in the plays of Caryl Churchill and Joan Schenkar." Theatre Annual Vol 40, 1985: 137-157.

Perkins, Elizabeth "Form and Transformation in the plays of Alma De Groen." Australasian Drama Studies Number 11, Oct. 1987: 5-21.

__ "Exploring The Rivers of China : The Mind on Stage - Deconstructing Conventional Form." NEW THEATRE: Australia No 2, Dec. 1987: 39.

Pickett, Carolyn. "Reality, realism and a place to write in Alma De Green's Vocations." Australasian Drama Studies Number 22, Apr. 1993: 63-72.

Rea, Charlotte. "Women for Women." The Drama Review Vol 18, No 4, Dec 1974: 74-87.

Ridgman, Jeremy. "Louis Nowra, Stephen Sewell and Neil Armfield talk to Jeremy Ridgman." Australasian Drama Studies Vol 2, No 2, Apr. 1988: 105-123.

Rogers, Sheridan. "Body parts: a question of taste." The Sun-Herald Mar. 14, 1993.

Sheldon, Gordon. "Canberra Theatre Company coup", The Canberra Times May 18, 1989: 3. 240

Shine, Chris. "Interview: Jack Hibberd." Australasian Drama Studies Number 10, Apr. 1987: 79-90.

Smith, Michael. "The show with everything, including the kitchen sink." The Age Melbourne, 6 Mar. 1992.

Sourile, Darlene. "Australian Women Playwrights." Social Alternatives Vol. 8, No. 3, 1989: 39-40.

Stallybrass, Peter. "Reading the Body: The Revenger's Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption." Renaissance Drama Vol 18, 1987: 121-148.

Stock, Lorraine Kochanske. "Medieval Gula in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus." Bulletin of Research in the Humanities Vol 85, Winter 1982: 372-385.

Telotte, J.P. "A Consuming Passion: Food and Film Noir." The Georgia Review Vol 39, Summer 1985: 397-410.

Thornton, Catriona. "Comedy's storm over teacups." Telegraph Mirror 2 Apr. 1992.

Tricomi, Albert H. "The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus." Shakespeare Survey No 27, Cambridge 1974: 11-19.

Van der Poorten, Helen. "Look What They've Made Her Do." Theatre Australia Nov - Dec, 1976: 336-38.

Viduka, Nedjeljka. "Fake Food." Stages: magazine of the Victorian Arts Centre Melbourne, Nov. 1989: 8-9.

Whiting, Charles G. "Food and Drink in Shepard's Theater." Modern Drama Vol xxxi, No 2, June 1988: 175-183.

Wolf, Naomi. "The Beauty Myth, Part II: Sex and the Cult of Starvation." The Weekend Australian Review Sept. 15-16, 1989: 1, 4.

BOOKS and ARTICLES in BOOKS

Abel, Elizabeth, ed. Writing and Sexual Difference. London: Harvester, 1982.

Abraham, Suzanne. "What does Food mean to Young Australian Women?" Food Habits in Australia. Eds. A.S. Truswell and M.L. Wahlqvist, North Balwyn: Rene Gordon, 1988: 85-93.

Adams, John Cranford. The Globe Playhouse: Its Design and Equipment. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961. 2nd ed.

Adelaide, Debra. Australian Women Writers: A Bibliographic Guide. London: Pandora, 1988.

Adelman, Janet. "'Anger's My Meat': Feeding, Dependency and Aggression in Corio/anus." Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature. Eds. David Bevington and Jay L ltalio. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1978: 108-124.

Akerholt, May-Brit. Patrick White. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. 241

Backes, Nancy. "Body Art: Hunger and Satiation in the plays of Tina Howe." Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre. Ed. Lynda Hart. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989: 41-60.

Badinter, Elisabeth. The Myth of Motherhood. London: Souvenir, 1981.

Barlow, Judith E. "The Art of Tina Howe." Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. Ed. Enoch Brater. New York: Oxford UP, 1989: 241-254.

Barthes, Roland. "Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption." Food and Drink in History: Selections from the Annales Economies, Societies, Civilisations. Eds. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.

Bassnet, Susan. Feminist Experiences: The Women's Movement in Four Cultures. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.

Bassnet, Susan and Keith Hoskin. "Textuality/Sexuality." Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies. Ed. David Punter. London: Longman, 1986: 237-251.

Baxter, Virginia, ed. Playworks: Women Theatre Writers 1993. Glebe: Wild and Woolley, 1993.

Beckett, Richard. Convicted Tastes: Food in Australia. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984.

Belenky, Mary F., Blythe M. Clinchy, Nancy R. Goldberger and Jill M. Tarule. Women's Ways of Knowing: the Development of Self, Voice and Mind. New York: Basic, 1986.

Benjamin, Jessica. "A Desire of One's Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and lntersubjective Space." Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

Bernikow, Louise. Among Women. New York: Harmony, 1980.

Blum, John Morton. V Was For Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Bogatyrev, Petr. "Semiotics in the Folk Theatre." Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions. Eds. Matejka, Ladislav and Irwin R. Titunik. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1976: 33-50.

Bordo, Susan. "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as Crystallization of Culture." Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Eds. I. Diamond & L Quinby. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988.

Bovenschen, Silvia. "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?" Feminist Aesthetics. Ed. Gisela Ecker. London: Women's Press, 1985.

Brown, C.L. and Olson, K., eds. Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1978.

Brown, Janet. Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis. New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1979. 242

Bradbrook, Muriel C. Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy. 1935. Cambridge: CUP, 1980.

Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste: or, Meditations on transcendental gastronomy. New York: Dover, 1960.

Brownmiller, Susan. Femininity. London: Hamish and Hamilton, 1984.

Bruch, Hilde. Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within. New York: Basic, 1973.

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988.

Bucknell, Peter A. Entertainment and Ritual 600-1600. London: Stainer and Bell, 1979.

Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch's Mythology. New York: Avenel, 1978 ed.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

Cameron, Deborah. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. London: Macmillan, 1985.

Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. London: Victor Gollancz, 1962.

Caputi, Anthony. Buffo: The Genius of Vulgar Comedy. Detroit: Wayne State U, 1978.

Carroll, Dennis. Australian Contemporary Drama 1909-1982: a critical Introduction. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.

Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Chapman, Clair. "Putting the Issue on the Boards." Fed Up and Hungry: Women Oppression and Food. Ed. Marilyn Lawrence. New York: Peter Bedrick, 1987.

Charney, Maurice. "The Imagery of Food and Eating in Corio/anus." Essays in Literary History presented to J. Milton French. Eds. Rudolf Kirk and C.F. Main. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1960: 37-55.

Chemin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity. London: Virago, 1986.

Chicago, Judy. The Dinner Party: a Symbol of our Heritage. New York: Anchor, 1979.

Chinoy, Helen Krich and Jenkins, Linda Walsh, eds. Women in American Theater. New York: Crown, 1981.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

Cline, Sally. Just Desserts: Women and Food. London: Andre Deutsch, 1990. 243

Cole, J.A. "Sunday Dinners and Thursday Suppers: Social and moral Contexts of the Food Imagery in Women Beware Women." Jacobean Miscellany4. Ed. James Hogg. Salzburg: Inst fur Anglistik & Amerikanistik, Univ Salzburg, 1984: 86-98.

Cousin, Geraldine. Churchill: The Playwright. London: Methuen, 1989.

Coward, Rosalind. "Female Desire and Sexual Identity." Women, Feminist history and Society In the 1980s: Selected Papers. Eds. M. Diaz-Diocaretz and I.M. Zavala. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985: 25-36.

Cozzolino, Mimmo and Fysh Rutherford. Symbols of Australia. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1987. 2nd ed.

Cross, Clare, Sondra Segal and Roberta Sklar. "Separation and Survival: Mothers, Daughters, Sisters - The Women's Experimental Theater." The Future of Difference. Eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, New York: Barnard College Women's <;enter G.K.Hall, c1980.

Curl, James Stevens. The Victorian Celebration of Death. Detroit: Partridge, 1972.

Curtin, Deane W. and Lisa M. Heldke, eds. Cooking, Eating Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Curthoys, Ann. For and Against Feminism: a personal journey into feminist theory and history. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988.

Dan, Mira and Marilyn Lawrence. "'Poison is the Nourishment that Makes One Ill': the Metaphor of Bulimia." Fed Up and Hungry: Women, Oppression and Food. Ed. Marilyn Lawrence. New York: Peter Bedrick, 1987.

Davies, Kath, Julienne Dickey and Teresa Stratford. Out of Focus: Writings on Women and the Media. London: Women's Press, 1987.

Dixson, Miriam. The Real Matilda, Women and Identity in Australia 1788 to the present. Melbourne: Penguin, 1976.

Douglas, Mary. "Deciphering a Meal." Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975: 249-275.

__ Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

Dover, Kenneth J. Aristophanic Comedy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.

Downs, Harold, ed. Theatre and Stage: an Encyclopaeidc Guide to the Performance of all Amateur Dramatic, Operatic, and Theatrical Work Vol 11, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978 (reprint).

Dugdale John. File on Shepard. London: Methuen, 1989.

Eisenstein, Hester. Contemporary Feminist Thought. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984.

Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980.

Erichsen, Ann. Anorexia: the Broken Circle. London: Faber & Faber, 1985. 244

Farb, Peter and George Armelagos. Consuming Passions: the Anthropology of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Fiddes, Nick. Meat: a Natural Symbol. London: Routledge, 1991.

Finkelstein, Joanne. Dining Out: a Sociology of Modern Manners. Oxford: Polity, 1989.

Firth, Raymond. "Verbal and bodily rituals of greeting and parting." The Interpretation of Ritual. Ed. J.S. La Fontaine. London: Tavistock, 1972: 1- 38.

Fisher, M.F.K. The Art of Eating. London: Pan, 1983.

Fitzpatrick, Peter. After 'The Doll': Australian Drama Since 1955. Melbourne: Edward Arnold, 1979.

"Myth Making in Modern Drama." The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Gen. Ed. Laurie Hergenhan, Melbourne: Penguin, 1988: 520-534.

"Styles of Love: Williamson in the Eighties." (1986) Contemporary Australian Drama. Revised Edition. Ed. Peter Holloway. Sydney: Currency, 1987: 409-427.

Williamson. Sydney: Methuen, Australia, 1987.

Foster, Verna. '"Tis Pity She's a Whore as City Tragedy." John Ford: Critical Re­ Visions. Ed. Michael Neill. Cambridge: CUP,1988: 181-200.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane, 1977

Freeman, Rosemary. English Emblem Books.1948. New York: Octagon, 1966.

Friday, Nancy. My Mother/ My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity. London: Sheldon, 1977.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique: What the married women has - and what she wants. London: Penguin, 1963.

Godshalk, W.L. The Marlovian World Picture. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.

Gottner-Abendroth, Heide. "Nine Principles of a Matriarchal Aesthetic." Feminist Aesthetics. Ed. Gisela Ecker. London: Women's Press, 1985: 81-94.

Greene, Gayle and Coppelia Kahn, eds. Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. London: Methuen, 1985.

Griffin, Susan. Women and Nature: the Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper & Colophon, 1980.

Griffiths, Gareth. "Australian Subjects and Australian Style." Louis Nowra. Ed. Veronica Kelly. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987: 91-98.

Grosz, Elizabeth. "Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the corporeal." Feminine/Masculine and Representation. Eds. Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990: 62-74. 245

Gunew, Sneja. "Home and Away: Nostalgia in Australian (Migrant) Writing." Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture. Ed. Paul Foss. Sydney: Pluto, 1988: 35-46.

Hainsworth, John. Hibberd. Sydney: Methuen, 1987. Halligan, Marion. Eat My Words. North Ryde: Collins/Angus and Robertson, 1990. Hammer, Signe. Daughters and Mothers: Mothers and Daughters. New York: New American Library, 1976.

Harmer, Wendy. It's a Joke Joyce: Australia's Funny Women. Sydney: Pan, 1989.

Hartnoll, Phyllis, ed. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Oxford: OUP, 1983. 4th Ed.

Henisch, Bridget Ann. Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society. Pennsylvania State UP, 1976.

Henkel, Arthur and Albrecht Schone. Emblemata: Handbuch Zur Sinnbildkunst Des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967.

Hilton, Julian. New Directions in Theatre: Performance. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Holly, Marcia. "Consciousness and Authenticity: Toward a Feminist Aesthetic." Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Ed. Josephine Donovan. Kentucky: UP, 1975: 38-47.

Humphries, Barry. More Please: An Autobiography. London: Viking, 1992

Huntington, Richard and Peter Metcalf. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Death. London: Cambridge UP, 1979. James, Thurston. The Theater Props Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Theater Properties, Materials and Construction. White Hall, Virginia: Betterway, 1987.

Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance Trans. Jeremy Whitely and Emma Hughes. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

Jones, Ann Rosalind. "Inscribing femininity: French theories of the feminine." Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Eds. G.Greene and C. Kahn. London: Methuen, 1985.

Jones, Emrys. Scenic Form in Shakespeare. London: Oxford UP, 1971.

Jones, Liz with Betty Burstall and Helen Garner. La Mama: the Story of a Theatre. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble/ Penguin, 1988.

Kapferer, Bruce. Legends of people, myths of state: violence, intolerance and political culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. 246

Kaplan, Sydney Janet. "Varieties of feminist criticism." Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Eds. G. Greene & C. Kahn. London: Methuen, 1985.

Keesing, Nancy. Lily on the Dustbin: Slang of Australian Women and Families. Melbourne: Penguin, 1982.

Kelly, Veronica. "A Mirror for Australia: Louis Nowra's Emblematic Theatre." Louis Nowra. Ed. Veronica Kelly. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987: 56-76. Kenton, Warren. Stage Properties and how to make them. London: Pitman, 1978. 2nd ed.

Keyssar, Helene. Feminist Theatre: an Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Klein, Melanie and Joan Riviere. Love, Hate and Reparation. London: Hogarth, 1953.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Leavitt, Dinah Luise. Feminist Theatre Groups. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1980.

Leeming, Glenda. Wesker on File. London: Methuen, 1985.

Lenk, Elisabeth. "The Self-reflecting Woman." Feminist Aesthetics. Ed. Gisela Ecker. London: Women's Press, 1985: 51-58.

Lever, Katherine. The Art of Greek Comedy. London: Methuen, 1956. Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Trans. J & D Weightman. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1986. 2nd ed.

Structural Anthropology. 1958. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Harmondsworth: England, 1972. Lomax, Marion. Stage images and traditions: Shakespeare to Ford. London: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Lowenberg, Miriam E., E. Neige Todhunter, Eva D. Wilson, Jane R. Savage & James L. Lubawski. Food and Man. New York: John Wiley, 1974. 2nd ed.

MacClancy, Jeremy. Consuming Culture. London: Chapmans, 1992.

McCallum, John. Buzo. Sydney: Methuen, 1987.

"The World Outside: Cosmopolitanism in the Plays of Nowra and Sewell." Contemporary Australian Drama. Ed. Peter Holloway. Sydney: Currency, 1987. Revised ed.

Mahon, John W. "'For now we sit to chat as well as eat': conviviality and conflict in Shakespeare's meals." "Fanned and Winnowed Opinions": Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins. Ed. John W Mahon and Thomas A Pendleton. London : Methuen, 1987: 231-248. Malpede, Karen, ed. Women In Theatre: Compassion and Hope. New York: Limelight, 1983. 247

Meir, Golda. My Life London: Futura, 1979.

Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.

Merrill, Lisa. "Monsters and Heroines: Caryl Churchill's Women." Caryl Churchill: A Casebook. Ed. Phyllis R. Randall. New York: Garland, 1988: 71-89. Milhous, Judith. Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695-1708. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1979.

Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.

Mitchell, Susan. Women: the Longest Revolution: Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis. London: Virago, 1984.

Modjeska, Drusilla. Inner Cities: Australian Women's Memory of Place. Ringwood: Penguin, 1989.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985.

Moore, Honor, ed. The New Women's Theatre. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Moore, Sally and Barbara Myerhof, eds. Secular Ritual Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977.

Moss, Jane. "Women's Theater in Quebec." Traditionalism, Nationalism and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec. Ed. Paula Gilbert Lewis, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1985.

Mulvey, Laura. "Feminism, Film and the Avant-garde." Women Writing and Writing about Women. Ed. M. Jacobus, London: Croom Helm, 1979. Nadel, S.F. Nupe Religion: Traditional Beliefs and the Influence of Islam in a West African Chiefdom. 1954. New York: Schocken, 1970. Natalie, Elizabeth J. Feminist Theatre: A Study in Persuasion. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1985.

Neill, Michael. "'What Strange Riddle's This?': Deciphering 'Tis Pity She's a Whore." John Ford: Critical Re-Visions. Cambridge: CUP, 1988: 153-179.

Nevile, Jenny. "The Musical Banquet in Italian Quattrocento Festivities." Food in Festivity: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium of Australian Gastronomy, Sydney 16-18 October 1988. Eds. Anthony Corones, Graham Pont and Barabra Santich. Sydney 1990: 125-135.

The New English Bible (With the Apocrypha) Oxford UP, 1970.

Oakley, Ann. Becoming a Mother. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979.

Olsen, Tillie, ed. Mother to Daughter: Daughter to Mother. London: Virago, 1984. 248

Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. London: Hamlyn, 1978.

Hunger Strike. London: Faber & Faber, 1986.

Ozick, Cynthia. Art and Ardour. New York: A. Knopf, 1983.

Palmer, Jennife, ed. Contemporary Australian Playwrights. Adelaide: Adelaide U Union P, 1979.

Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Patraka, Vivian M. "Mass Culture and the Metaphors of Menace in Joan Schenkar's Plays." Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre. Ed. Lynda Hart. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989: 25- 40.

Potts, E. Daniel and Annette Potts. Yanks Down Under 1941-45: the American Impact on Australia. Melbourne: Oxford U P, 1985. Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrief. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957.

Puckle, Bertram S. Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development. London: Werner Laurie, 1926.

Radie, Leonard. "State of Play in Australia." [1979) Contemporary Australian Drama. Ed. Peter Holloway. Sydney: Currency, 1987. Revised ed.

The State of Play: The Revolution in the Australian Theatre Since the 1960s. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1991.

Rees, Leslie. Australian Drama 1970-1985: A Historical and Critical Survey. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1987.

Ripe, Cherry. Goodbye Culinary Cringe. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993.

Robertson, Matra. Starving in the Silences: An exploration of anorexia nervosa. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992.

Roose-Evans, James. Experimental Theatre From Stanislavsky to Peter Brook. London: Routledge, 1989. 4th ed.

Russo, Mary. "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory." Feminist Studies /Critical Studies. Ed.Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986: 213-229.

Ruthven, K.K. Feminist literary studies: an introduction. London: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Schofield, Mary Anne, ed. Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture. Bowling Green, Ohio : Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1989.

Shank, Theodore. American Alternative Theatre. London: Macmillan, 1982. Sheridan, Susan, ed. Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism. London: Verso, 1988. Showalter, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 249

Smith, Lorna. "Women Beyond Culture.• Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies. Ed. David Punter. London: Longman, 1986.

Smith, Margaret. "The Sociology of Contemporary Australian Drama." Social Change In Australia: Readings in Sociology. Ed. Donald E Edgar. Melbourne: Cheshire, 1974: 57-66.

Spatz, Lois. Aristophanes. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Spignesi, Angelyn. Starving Women: A Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa. Dallas, Texas: Spring, 1983.

Steadman, Susan M. Dramatic Re-Visions: an Annotated Bibliography of Feminism and Theatre 1972-1988. Chicago: American Library Association, 1991 .

Stewart, Alan. "Need for theory in the study of food habits." Food Habits in Australia: Proceedings of the First Deakin/Sydney Universities Symposium on Australian Nutrition Eds. A.S. Truswell and M.L. Wahlqvist, North Balwyn: Rene Gordon, 1988.

Sturm, Terry. "Drama." The Oxford History of Australian History. Ed. Leonie Kramer. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1981.

Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God's Police, the colonization of Women in Australia. Melbourne: Allen Lane & Penguin, 1975. Sweet, Harvey. Handbook of Scenery, Properties, and Lighting. Volume 1. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1989.

Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. Adelaide: Duck Press, 1982.

Tait, Peta Orlglnal Women's Theatre: The Melbourne Women's Theatre Group1974-77. Melbourne: Artmoves, 1993.

Tedlock, Barbara. "Zuni and Quiche dream sharing and interpreting." Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Ed. B. Tedlock. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Tobin, Ronald W. Tarte a Ja creme : Comedy and Gastronomy in Moliere's Theater. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1990.

Turner, Victor. Process, Performance and Pilgrimage: a Study in Comparative Symbology. New Delhi: Concept, 1979. Visser, Margaret. Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal. London: Penguin, 1989.

The Rituals of Dinner: the Origins, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

Walker-Birckhead, Wendy. "The best scones in town: old women in an Australian country town." Australian Ways: Anthropological Studies in an Industrialised Society. Ed. Lenore Manderson. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985: 101-112. 250

Wandor, Michelena. "The Personal is Political: Feminism and the Theatre." Dreams and Deconstructions: Alternative theatre in Britain. Ed. Sandy Craig. Derbyshire: Amber Lane, 1980: 49-58. Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics. London: Methuen, 1981. Welldon, Estela V. Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood. London: Free Association, 1988. Whitman, Cedric H. Aristophanes and the Comic Hero. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1964.

Williams, Margaret. Drama. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1977.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto &Windus, 1990. Wood, Beverley, ed. Tucker in Australia. Melbourne: Hill of Content, 1977.

* * * * * * * * *

UNPUBLISHED ARTICLES, DISSERTATIONS and TRANSCRIBED INTERVIEWS

Barlow, Judith "Tina Howe: Food for Thought", [unpublished article, copyright 1988; personal correspondence with author from S.U.N.Y. Albany, N.Y.] De Berg, Hazel Tape 662: Transcript of interview with Alma De Groen, 12th March, 1973. National Library, Canberra, ACT.

Dunstan, Angus Michael "The Missing Guest: Dinner Parties in British and American Literature", [Unpublished Dissertation], University of California, Santa Barbara, 1986.

Gainor, J. Ellen "Susan Glaspell's The Verge and the Rejection of the Domestic in Creating Female Identity", [unpublished article; personal correspondence with author from Department of Theatre Arts, Cornell University, N.Y.1989.] Little, Nancy Glass "The lmagistic Feast: Feeding Imagery in Selected Plays of Shakespeare", [Unpublished Dissertation], Middle Tennessee State University, 1984.

Perkins, Elizabeth "A Perspective on Australian Drama 1941-1971: Aspiration, survival and expansion as themes in English, American and Australian stage drama", [Unpublished Thesis], University of Queensland, 1983.