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USING DELEUZE AND GUATTARI'S LOGIC OF SENSATION TO ANALYSE ’S , AND THE SEASON AT SARSAPARILLA IN PRODUCTION

AUTHOR Andrew Robert Fuhrmann

OCRID IDENTIFER 0000-0003-4272-6814

DEGREE Masters by Research

SUBMISSION DATE August 2017

DEPARTMENT School of Culture and Communication

STATEMENT Thesis is submitted in total fulfilment of the degree.

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ABSTRACT In this thesis I provide a sustained aesthetic analysis of three performances of plays by Patrick

White at the Theatre Company. These three performances are based on productions that are now regarded as major landmarks in the development of Australian theatre. The focus of my analysis is the operation of these performances at the level of sensation. In this thesis I argue that in order to fully appreciate the impact of these performances, analysis must extend beyond processes of meaning-making, beyond the identification of ideological and cultural criticism, and embrace the strategic capture and mobilisation of affects and intensities. In order to carry out such an analysis, I propose a model of performance analysis based on the aesthetic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and

Felix Guattari outlined in What Is Philosophy?. Using this methodology, live performance is reconceptualised as a 'bloc of sensations' that can be analysed in terms of three elements: figure, house and cosmos or universe.

Chapter One focuses on the element of the figure in the context of the 1979 production of A

Cheery Soul. This chapter highlights the radical approach to Patrick White's stage directions taken by the director and designer Brian Thomson. I argue that by isolating the character of Miss

Docker, the production's minimalist design enabled the performer to transform her into a powerful and ultimately revitalising aesthetic figure. Chapter Two focuses on director Neil

Armfield's 1989 production of The Ham Funeral, and the change of the setting from a boarding house to an animal enclosure. This chapter examines the element of the house and argues that the final moment of the production, where the Young Man exits the theatre through the audience, is an example of the necessary mediation of the house between the figure and the cosmos. Finally,

Chapter Three analyses the use of a single house to stand for the three houses of Mildred Street in the 2007 production of The Season at Sarsaparilla directed by and designed by

Robert Cousins. With the aid of Deleuzian ideas of amputation and prosthesis, this chapter examines the multiple ways in which this production opened itself onto the aesthetic cosmos and allowed some necessary fragment of chaos to enter, transform and mobilise the drama at an affective level. 3

DECLARATION I declare that this thesis comprises only my original work towards the Masters by Research. Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used. The thesis does not exceed the maximum word limit, exclusive of bibliography. The thesis is 30,000 words. 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank my colleagues, family and friends for all their advice, patience and encouragement. I thank my supervisor Denise Varney for her unstinting support and enthusiasm. And I thank Jess and Iris for everything. 5

TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...... 2 DECLARATION ...... 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... 4 INTRODUCTION ...... 6 1. Argument ...... 6 2. Performance Analysis ...... 7 3. Patrick White's Theatre in Performance ...... 10 4. Analytical Framework ...... 15 CHAPTER ONE: THE 1979 PRODUCTION OF A CHEERY SOUL ...... 24 1. Patrick White and Le Vieux Style ...... 24 2. The Problem of Cliché ...... 29 3. The Figure and the Scream ...... 33 4. The Redemption of Cheeriness ...... 37 CHAPTER TWO: THE 1989 SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY PRODUCTION OF THE HAM FUNERAL ...... 44 1. Mapping the House-Territory System ...... 44 2. The Damp and Crumbling House ...... 47 3. Two Becomings: Animal and Meat ...... 51 a. Becoming Animal ...... 52 b. Becoming Meat ...... 54 4. Toward Deterritorialisation ...... 56 CHAPTER THREE: THE 2007 SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY PRODUCTION OF THE SEASON AT SARSAPARILLA ...... 63 1. Problematising Mildred Street ...... 63 2. Three Houses into One ...... 67 3. The Revolve: An Amputation ...... 72 4. Surveilling Sarsaparilla: A Prosthesis...... 76 CONCLUSION ...... 82 BIBLIOGRAPHY – PRIMARY ...... 85 BIBLIOGRAPHY – PRESS ...... 85 BIBLIOGRAPHY – SECONDARY ...... 86

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INTRODUCTION

1. Argument In this thesis I will analyse the way in which sensations are generated, organised, assembled and presented in three landmark productions of plays by Patrick White. The productions analysed are the Sydney Theatre Company productions of A Cheery Soul (1979), The Ham Funeral (1989) and The

Season at Sarsaparilla (2007). I aim to develop and then to apply a framework of analysis that maps and records the production of moments of potential dramatic intensity within individual performances. Accordingly, the focus of the research engaged in this thesis, its governing problematic, is that of diagramming in terms of a Deleuzian logic of sensation the creative encounters between playwright and director, between designer and performer, and between audience and theatre space. By focusing on the production of sensations in theatre performances I aim both to offer a deeper appreciation of the plays of one of Australia's most influential playwrights and to suggest a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between written text and performance in Australian theatre.

This approach – with its focus on what a performance does, what it is, rather than what it means – necessarily involves a commitment to close and detailed description. Video recordings of the three productions considered in this thesis are held in the STC's extensive archive in Walsh Bay,

Sydney, and constitute the central research focus – and in empirical terms the evidential basis – of the thesis. This resource is supplemented with detailed references to historical and archival documents: to letters, production notes and sketches, to theatre programmes, to publicity releases and educational resources, to statements of artistic intention and interviews which may distort or disclose. The archives I have consulted include Patrick White's own papers, those of the director Jim

Sharman and the designer Desmond Digby which relate to White, all of which are held at the

National Library of Australia in Canberra, and those of the actress Kerry Walker in the Mitchell

Library in Sydney. All four archives, together with the STC's own archives, contain a multitude of 7

press clippings, production photographs and box office rundowns. My research has been shaped by, and benefitted, from these materials.

The genesis of this thesis was the 2007 production of The Season at Sarsaparilla directed by Benedict Andrews which I saw live in 2008 and which is discussed in this thesis. While it would be an advantage to have been present at the other two, the existence of good quality archival recordings goes a long way towards redressing this limitation. The distinction between historiographic research and performance analysis insisted on by Erika Fischer-Lichte and others is therefore deemphasised in this thesis. The method of analysis developed here aims to describe and analyse performance in terms of its potential to impact or transform the audience, rather than in terms of actual or subjectively experienced impacts. Personal experience of the live event is not regarded as essential for this approach. It is also worth pointing out that in this thesis there will necessarily be some slippage between the terms 'production' and 'performance' at least in the sense that different performances of the same production appear in different reviews or accounts or recordings. The performance of The Season at Sarsaparilla I attended was not the one the first-night critics commented on, nor the one which was recorded by the STC archives, and performances vary.

However, I will point to possible discrepancies where necessary.

2. Performance Analysis The thesis is informed by two recent and related movements in the humanities and social sciences: the so-called return to aesthetics and the so-called affective turn. By focusing on the strategic capture, scene by scene, moment by moment, of affects and intensities, the thesis eschews the extraction of meaning from art and ideological and cultural critique in the theory and methodology of performance analysis. I am not suggesting that structural or poststructural or deconstructionist approaches to performance analysis, approaches that ultimately privilege language, are necessarily inappropriate, only that such methodologies are, by themselves, insufficient. My guiding assumption is that: 8

[a]pproaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on

the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined ...1

If we treat theatre only as material for the study of meaning-making then we ignore its power to produce new affects on and in the body, an operation ultimately irreducible to signification or representation.

Theatre semiotics was the first general theoretical approach adapted for the analysis of live performance. The methodological focus of this theory, based on the linguistic model of signifier and signified, is the problem of how meaning is produced for the spectator. From the late 1960s and early 1970s, researchers such as Tadeusz Kowzan, Patrice Pavis, Elaine Aston, George Savona, Erika

Fischer-Lichte and Keir Elam developed a range of analytical tools for the analysis of stage sign- systems.2 Although different models systemise theatrical signs in different ways, the basic premise shared by all semiological approaches to performance analysis is that the staging of a play is readable by the spectator. That is, the sound design, the costumes, the lighting, the acting styles and the props, as well as the text of the play, all participate in a legible texture of signs. A key insight elaborated by these researchers relevant to the framework of analysis developed in this thesis is that the meaning of the text of a play is necessarily transformed by its performance.3 Although the cultural authority of semiotics, as with other structuralist methodologies, has waned, it remains a useful and widespread means of generating detailed descriptions of performance seen as a signifying system.4

With the end of what Keir Elam called the 'semiotic moment', theatre studies scholars, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States, increasingly focused their attention on the poststructuralist ideas of critical theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and others.5 These approaches eschewed the formalist inventories and taxonomies of earlier semiologists, the classificatory impulse, and instead developed analytical strategies that treated the way in which theatre sign-systems and codes reinforce, transgress or transform the dominant ideology or beliefs 9

of their cultural context.6 Many different analytical approaches can be described as poststructuralist, from theatre scholar and practitioner Herbert Blau's adaptation of the psychoanalytic theories of

Jacques Lacan to the feminist deconstructions of Sue-Ellen Case, to the new historicism of Stephen

Greenblatt. Ideas associated with Deleuze and Guattari were introduced into theatre studies as part of this general philosophically-inflected poststructuralist turn. Timothy Murray, for example, included Deleuze in his collection of French writings on performance, Mimesis, Masochism, and

Mime.7 Of special relevance to this thesis are Una Chaudhuri's deployments of the concept of

'becoming-animal' (discussed in Chapter Two), and Murray's development of the idea of a Deleuzian

'prosthesis' (discussed in Chapter Three).8

Poststructuralist approaches to performance analysis can render visible the discourse and the ideology of a performance in its cultural context by the general operation of a textual reading of that culture. While this facilitates the critique of received or habitual performance codes and encourages political analysis, it tends to underemphasise non-cognitive modes of experiences, the experience of presence, of flows of intensity and feeling, of emotions and pre-cognitive affects.9 As with semiotics, poststructuralism treats theatre primarily as an art of representation.10 In this sense, poststructuralist strategies of performance analysis can be understood as a continuation of the basic project of theatre semiotics. That is, they deploy the same general explanatory framework. Keir

Elam, for example, has suggested that the poststructuralist project, broadly defined, attempted to extend rather than simply do away with the methods developed by earlier semioticians.11

Phenomenology, of course, provides one alternative – or supplement – to the representational tradition of analysis. Recently, however, following a different research trajectory, cultural critics have invited a turn to affect. Thus, according to Peter Boenisch:

If we define theatre solely as a semiotic machine of representation and meaning,

transported from the written page via the stage to the audience, who have to decode this 10

message (the author’s 'meaning' and 'intention') in the 'right' way, we miss out as much as if

we fantasise about theatre performance as a pure pre-semantic phenomenal experience.12

This certainly echoes the position of phenomenologists such as Burt O States, but Boenisch is not invoking the pre-semantic in order to provide an account of subjective experience or to describe performance as it is presented to consciousness. In Directing Scenes and Senses, for example, he is more concerned with potentiality, with what the theatre may do for spectators at the level of sensation. Although working with a different theoretical framework – Deleuzian rather than

Rancièrian – this thesis advocates a similar research shift.

Over the last decade, affect has emerged as an important site of theoretical interest for theatre studies scholars, bringing a range of new analytical perspectives: from the neuroscience of emotions to the role of theatre-affects in developing political collectives.13 A key text in terms of developing the methodology used in this thesis is Performance Affects by James Thompson, a scholar and UK-based theatre practitioner. Thompson aims to revitalise the practice, research and politics of applied theatre through what he calls a return to the 'terrain of sensation' and the aesthetic concerns of beauty, joy, pleasure, awe and astonishment.14 For Thompson, the marginalisation of the study of aesthetic pleasure has meant the role that performances can play as a 'propellant' for social change is overlooked.15 In this thesis I make a related claim, suggesting that a focus on satire and social criticism in White's plays has meant that the aesthetic influence of productions of those plays has been neglected. That is, I argue that the aesthetic operation of productions of White's plays has been a major 'propellant' for change in mainstream Australian theatre.

3. Patrick White's Theatre in Performance White's work for the theatre has aroused more feeling than the work of almost any other Australian playwright. His plays, as the critic Roger Covell once observed, seem to have 'an extraordinary capacity to provoke violent disagreement'.16 From the early 1960s, he made a decisive break with the naturalistic depictions of Australian life favoured by playwrights such as Ray Lawlor, Richard 11

Beynon and Alan Seymour, and introduced to the Australian stage a range of innovative dramatic practices.17 He was, it has been argued, Australia's first modernist playwright.18 The premiere of The

Ham Funeral in Adelaide, 1961, is sometimes invoked as a defining moment of avant garde revolt against Australia's conservative post-War aesthetic culture.19 As the critic and theatre historian John

McCallum noted:

The early plays [of Patrick White] were an exultant rebellion against realism. In form and

style and subject White reworked the details of everyday life and invested them with a new

spirituality.20

Critics and commentators, however, from the beginning, have been divided on the viability of

White's plays as drama, irrespective of their cultural or historical significance. Though he has had many champions, he has also had a great many detractors.21 Indeed, even among his supporters there has been a tendency to excuse rather than extol, emphasising challenges and acknowledging perceived weaknesses.22 White has, in short, always been regarded as a challenging playwright.23

And yet, despite its difficulty, White's writing for the stage has attracted new generations of directors, designers and performers eager both to test themselves and to expand the aesthetic culture of Australian theatre.24 Across more than half a century, performances of White's plays – for example, the performances analysed in this thesis – have challenged locally dominant conventions of style and form and provided the inspiration for a new kind of theatre in Australia.25 Aesthetically,

White's plays challenge theatre makers in three key ways that I will identify and analyse in this thesis. First, there is the difficulty of the work at a formal dramaturgical level. By this I mean that

White's plays present staging problems that demand interesting and progressive solutions. These problems are most apparent in the relationships he proposes between the drama and the mise en scène, where the work suggests an incipient rift between what Lehmann calls 'the discourse of the text and that of the theatre'. This creates an imaginative space in which to test new aesthetic possibilities for the stage. Second, there is the extensive use of expressionistic and non-realist 12

dramatic devices or gestures. As May-Brit Akerholt writes in the introduction to her survey of

White's plays:

In thematic concerns his plays are of their time, but their innovative use of dramatic

techniques is of a kind which fosters new trends in the development of contemporary

theatre.26

Third, there is the language itself, which is highly poetic and crowded with descriptions of sensual experiences. In White, directors and designers find a sensibility in which 'impulses of the flesh' are more important 'than the tortuous workings of the rational mind'27. As White's first interpreter, the director John Tasker wrote:

In all of Patrick White's plays there is an extraordinary degree of sensuousness. They are

filled with references to sights, sounds, smells. This quality of direct animal awareness

'anchors' his plays in a dramatic reality.28

There is a troubled, ambivalent but sincere reverence for the immediacy of sensual experience which at times threatens to crack open the closed fictional world of the play.

White himself was dismissive of attempts to read his works in purely symbolical terms or to reduce them to satirical themes or social commentary; indeed, disdain for scholastic interpretation almost became a performative gesture with White, a way of securing his persona as an artist.29 'I am not an intellectual,' he insisted in his memoir, . 'There is nothing cerebral about me; if I have something to give it is through the senses and my intuition.'30 That is, White was interested in the operation of his plays on an asignifying level, in generating new intensive experiences in excess of representational content. This is not to argue that White's work is necessarily meaningless or that there is nothing to be gained from close readings of his plays at the level of signification. Although he mocked what he called the academic 'symbol-hunters' and did little to encourage them, White did not stand in their way.31 He may have teased director Neil 13

Armfield for holding long group discussions with cast and crew on the meaning of individual lines in

The Ham Funeral during rehearsals for the 1989 Sydney Theatre Company production, but he appears to have accepted these as necessary to Armfield's process.32 And it is not as though White was indifferent to the ostensible messages – or meaning effects – conveyed by his plays. The difficulty of communicating meaning is a major theme throughout his plays.33 But we should be aware of the extent to which White regarded legibility as an achievement of secondary importance.34 What he was most interested in was communicating affects – and in giving his audience a good laugh or a good cry.35

Although White's significance as a pioneer is often acknowledged, the influence of his work on the development of the Australian theatre has not yet been the subject of sustained scholarly analysis. In that sense, although visible, he remains a marginal figure. This is at least partly because of a preference among Australian theatre historians for what Julian Meyrick calls historical determinism 'with a nationalistic twist': in many cases, the story of Australian theatre is told in terms of the emergence and maturation of an Australian sense of national identity, with the stage treated more-or-less as a mirror on broader social and economic changes.36 Such histories tend to emphasise the development of naturalistic drama because it offers a more perfect reflection. Using the example of Leslie Rees's A History of Australian Drama, Meyrick writes that, in such an approach:

Sydney Tomholt, Douglas Stewart and Patrick White, though individually great, fail to affect

the broad direction of Australian dramatic development significantly, their strange interiority

having no influential place in the genealogy of stage realism.37

And thus we find, again and again in survey histories of Australian theatre, Patrick White, like an irascible goat, is separated off from the rest, occasionally with Dorothy Hewett for company.38

White's plays are presented as interesting artefacts, but of minor importance to the growth of a national theatre. 14

White's marginalisation can also be in part attributed to the relative lack of scholarly attention that performances of his plays have received. There have been two books-length studies of White's plays, by JR Dyce and May-Brit Akerholt respectively, and both contain limited discussion of the interpretation of his work by theatre artists. As recently as 2011, Elizabeth Schafer observed there has been little if any sustained analysis of White's plays in performance. Schafer's contribution to the field is an analysis of the same production of The Ham Funeral examined in this thesis. Using a traditional literary critical approach adapted for live performance, Schafer argues that the production invokes elements of the 'post-colonial gothic'. She also tests Armfield's claim that

'metatheatre' is the dramaturgical key to staging White's plays. Other articles which directly address particular productions and performance traditions include Anne Pender's descriptive article on actor

Kerry Walker's interpretation of White's 'difficult' roles. Pender and Schafer both make the point that the work of directors, performers and designers is important for understanding Patrick White’s plays, a theme picked up on in this thesis. Pender also draws attention to White's modernist aesthetic and its interpretation by theatre makers. The significance of White’s contribution to the discussion of theatrical modernism and modernity in the Australian context is also the subject of a series of articles by Denise Varney and Sandra D'Urso.39 In one of these articles, Varney analyses and compares two productions of White's The Season at Sarsaparilla, including the Benedict Andrews production analysed in Chapter Three of this thesis. Focusing on the mise en scène, Varney argues that Andrews's production offers among other things a critique of the 'mediatisation of personal experience and social life' in suburban Australia.40

White's engagement with modernist concerns and modernist writing in his plays, as described by Pender, Varney and D'Urso, is particularly relevant to the framework of analysis used in this thesis. Deleuze's philosophy, and much of his work with Guattari, has multiple connections with modernist literature, film, music, performance and visual art, and he often uses modernist artists to illustrate philosophical concepts. For example, he uses the paintings of Francis Bacon to elaborate his aesthetics of sensation, examined particularly in Chapter One of this thesis.41 Similarly, modernist 15

art has been used by researchers to help illuminate Deleuze's ideas. In this thesis, I will emphasise points of sympathy and potential correlation between the aesthetic theories of Deleuze and Guattari and White's modernist writing for the theatre, suggesting ways in which the two can be understood as mutually illuminating, and contributing to the on-going project of mapping relationships between

Deleuzian thought and modernist aesthetics.42

4. Analytical Framework Having narrowed my research focus to the production of sensations in theatre performances, and having underlined the usefulness of such an approach, I now need to develop a comprehensive and practical methodology for the analysis and comparison of individual works. Here I turn to the aesthetic concepts adumbrated in the last chapter of Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy?, entitled 'Percept, Affect, and Concept.43 This seems not only to be an interesting and original site for exploration in the context of the stage, but also an appropriate method for discussing key dramaturgical features of White's plays. Moreover, it provides a flexible framework for structuring detailed descriptions of productions of those plays and the passage from text into performance.

Crucially, the theory of art constructed by Deleuze and Guattari suggests a way of taking the analysis of performance beyond the point where signification disappears and there is only the fascination of presence, the point where, to use Hans-Thies Lehmann's expression, there is only an auto-sufficient physicality.44 It is this turn away from signification – and therefore away from analytical models inspired by sociology, anthropology and deconstruction – which indicates my methodology.

Deleuze and Guattari insist that art itself is nothing but sensation.45 Sensation refers to abstract relationships of intensity and capacity between bodies and not to embodied emotions, feelings or perceptions.46 That is, sensation is a measure of the potential for one body to affect or be affected by another. In the context of a work of art, it is a way of quantifying the capacity to impact or to move an audience: whether to thrill or to shock, to inspire joy, to terrify or to amaze. Theatre makers work on or with the various materials of their art, such as lights and costumes, props, 16

sounds, text and empty space, bodies and voices. This complex of encounters then in turn alters the capacity of those theatre materials to affect the audience. Sensation thus describes a modulating field of multiple becomings from the human to the nonhuman and back to the human.47 And it is this shifting capacity or power that is the focus of this thesis.

That does not mean that the affects or feelings of embodied subjects are irrelevant to this research methodology. The reactions recorded in contemporaneous reviews, for example, might provide what Anna Hickey-Moody calls a 'visceral prompt', suggesting particular scenes or moments during performances to focus on.48 In this thesis, however, I am less interested in what the audiences at each production might have felt than what the performance itself might be said to have experienced.

Deleuze and Guattari present their aesthetics as a methodology for analysing the autonomous 'being' of a work of art. What is essential is the composition of that being:

Composition, composition is the sole definition of art. Composition is aesthetic, and what is

not composed is not a work of art.49

For Deleuze and Guattari, the thing that is composed is a 'bloc of sensation'. These blocs are formed when a work appears to exceed its materiality and instead points to an independent life of connective intensities. That is, a work becomes art when matter becomes expressive.50 Thus, the aesthetics of Deleuze and Guattari – the logic of sensation – focuses on an examination of compositional processes, which in the theatre we might call the dramaturgy, by which a given artist or team of artists constructs the sensation-as-being of a work of art.

Deleuze and Guattari identify three elements necessary for the emergence of this autonomous 'being' of sensation: the figure, the house and the universe. Using these aesthetic concepts, which in this thesis I treat as organisational principles, we can describe and evaluate the development of sensations embodied in the material of a work of art. By analysing the relationship 17

between these three linked principles or coordinating ideas, we can understand how artists are able to render perceptible the otherwise imperceptible shifts between different moments and ways of being and relating.

The first element, the figure, is the immediate, sensible form of abstract or pure sensations; and it is through the figure that sensation impacts the nervous system of individual audience members, producing an instantaneous bodily reaction that connects the work of art to a substrate of potential pre-cognitive somatic responses.51 It is in our identification of the figure that a work of art's affective power is communicated. And it is through the figure that the artist is able to reveal unknown or unexpected relations between objects through the organisation of materials – of colour, line, light, contour, sound or gesture. Above all, the figure is an expression of an idiosyncratic style when working in a particular art form.52 Our relationship with the figure, and therefore the style of the artist or artists, gives art its unique power to make us see the world anew.

Deleuze and Guattari are careful to stress that the figure in a work of art does not necessarily correspond to a particular character or figurative representation. Figures, they say, have nothing to do with resemblance.53 The figure of a work might take in an entire chorus of ballerinas as they disperse and reassemble, or it might be the rhythmic line between performers and costumes and props revealed by a change in the lighting. And figures are always disappearing, becoming other, or escaping our complete understanding. In the performing arts, the figure is in a state of constant transformation. Nonetheless, a particularly vibrant or powerful character does occasionally appear to map directly onto the aesthetic concept of a figure. Deleuze and Guattari cite as examples of this the portraits by Francis Bacon, Macbeth, Mozart's Don Juan, and Kleist's Penthesilea. Then there are the creations of Herman Melville:

Melville said that a novel includes an infinite number of interesting characters but just one

original Figure like the single sun of a constellation of a universe, like the beginning of things, 18

or like the beam of light that draws a hidden universe out of the shadow: hence Captain

Ahab, or Bartleby.

In Chapter One of this thesis, I argue that in the case of Jim Sharman's 1979 production of Patrick

White's A Cheery Soul, the central character of Miss Docker has a similar kind of dominant vitality to

Melville's creations, overwhelming the total figural ensemble.

The relationship between the first element (the figure) and the third element (universe- cosmos) is mediated by the second element, the house. Art, say Deleuze and Guattari, begins not with the figure but with the house. This is because it is the second element – the house – which gives the work of art, the being of sensation, the power to stand on its own:

The flesh is too tender. The second element is not so much bone or skeletal structure as

house or framework. The body blossoms in the house (or an equivalent, a spring, a

grove).54

The house acts as a frame or series of frames, isolating the figure from the general confusion of the universe, subduing chaos and territorialising the uncontrollable forces of the earth or cosmos.55 In certain respects, the house has a similar function to Derrida's parergon, separating the inside from the outside and guaranteeing the autonomous being of the work-as-such.56 We might, for example, think of the proscenium arch stage as a conventional house-like architectural structure. And yet the house is not simply a shelter or a scaffold or a frame. It also joins together multiple intersecting figures into a single dynamic assemblage.

As with the concept of the figure, it is important not to equate the house with a representation of a house. Deleuze and Guattari also describe the element of the house as a territory, linking the logic of sensation with the theories of territorialisation developed in A Thousand

Plateaus. In the context of painting, Deleuze says that this territory might be indicated by nothing more than a contour or outline of a circle or oval, a bare armature. In some of Francis Bacon's 19

paintings, says Deleuze, we find the house indicated by a chair or a bed on which the figure is placed.

Even this much might be superfluous for the theatre. 'A man walks across this empty space,' says

Peter Brook, 'whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.'57 It is an act of territorialisation, transforming the empty space into an aesthetic house. Perhaps there does not even need to be a given space. In Kandinsky, for example, Deleuze and Guattari claim that 'houses are sources of abstraction that consist less in geometrical figures than in dynamic trajectories and errant lines, "paths that go for a walk" in the surroundings'.58 This description is suggestive of performance events such as pedestrian-based live art.

And yet it is nonetheless interesting to explore the metaphor of the house in the context of the theatre where so often it is a house or the rooms of a house that are represented on stage, as is the case in Patrick White's The Ham Funeral. In Chapter Two, I will examine how the concept of the house-territory system might help explain the dramaturgical effectiveness of key scenes in director

Neil Armfield's 1989 production of The Ham Funeral, giving particular attention to designer Brian

Thomson's transformation of the 'great, damp, crumbling house' described in the script into something resembling an animal enclosure at a dilapidated zoo.

The final element in the logic of sensation is the universe or cosmos, also called chaosmos.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, even the most shut-up house must open onto a universe. The frame must allow for a movement of exchange between the figure and the cosmos. '[T]he territory does not merely isolate and join but opens onto cosmic forces that arise from within or come from outside,' write Deleuze and Guattari, 'and renders their effect on the inhabitant perceptible.'59 In the theatre, we might think of the universe as the dark world on the other side of the footlights, a cosmos that is beyond the territorialised or codified space of the stage, the absent background to the performance. It is an unframed landscape, a plane that extends to infinity, seething with orders, forms and wills, forces that cannot be distinguished or differentiated from each other from the position of the stage. Between the figure and this obscure landscape, mediated by the house, there 20

is an obscure economy of exchange. If partially exposed to this cosmos, the figure will render perceptible the profound, unseen forces that act upon it, absorbing and being transformed by them, making them visible to the audience. Here we might think of the way in which durational performances makes visible a process of becoming-time in the body, a movement preliminary to a more profound becoming-imperceptible in which the aesthetic figure disappears altogether. Or we might think of the different ways in which the force of gravity is made visible in the body of a ballet dancer. Or there is the way that primal forces of distortion contort the figure of the Butoh dancer.

As Deleuze notes, there are many forces: uniting, dividing, isolating and deforming forces, forces of lightness and rotation, the vortex and the explosion, expansion and germination.60 There is a whole universe of unknowable and uncontainable forces, which we experience or recognise as chaos. And theatre must admit a little of this chaos, a little of this cosmic uncertainty. It must confront chaos and render it sensory in the aesthetic figure as a moment of non-human becoming, illuminating the imperceptible for a troubling instant. This is necessary because, for Deleuze and

Guattari, chaos is indissociably linked with life and with the vitality of art. Of course, if there is too much chaos, the work of art will flounder; it will be overwhelmed and cease to function as art.

Theatre makers must therefore find a balance, working with certain basic conventions, settled opinions about meaning and significance and established dramaturgical solutions, but also ensuring that a passage of sensation from the finite world of the stage to the infinite cosmos of universal flux and becoming remains open.61

In Chapter Three I will look at the 2007 Sydney Theatre Company production of The Season at Sarsaparilla, directed by Benedict Andrews, with sets by Bob Cousins, and performed by the STC

Actors Company. This chapter focuses on the ways in which the performers, the designers and the director break open White's play and expose the figures of his Mildred Street to the forces of the cosmos, revivifying them for a contemporary audience. In particular, I will examine the decision to stage the play in a single brick bungalow rather than in the three separate houses described in 21

White's stage directions, and the decision to use live-streaming video cameras to broadcast action from inside the house. With the aid of Deleuzian ideas of stuttering, amputation and prosthesis, this chapter will then consider how these strategies were developed dramaturgically, and how they facilitated the injection of some necessary fragment of chaos into the production, helping to mobilise the drama at the level of sensation.

Although all three elements – the figure, the house and the cosmos – are together present in every performance, the methodology of this thesis involves focusing on only one element in each of the productions selected, touching only incidentally on the other two elements. The three productions analysed have been selected because in each one a different element is more prominent or at least susceptible to analysis: the figure in the 1979 Cheery Soul, the house in the

1989 Ham Funeral and the cosmos in the 2007 Season at Sarsaparilla. This approach allows me to work out my framework of analysis more fully, describing separately the role of the three elements in the production and organisation of sensation.

To my knowledge, the tripartite Deleuzian model has not previously been used for the analysis of live performance. Although, as noted above, Deleuzian ideas have been current among theatre studies scholars for some time, it could be argued that the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari have rarely been applied in such a systematic way to performance analysis.62 Deleuze himself, although he spoke of his admiration for directors such as Robert Wilson and Carmelo Bene and referred often to the writings of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett, seemed disinclined to focus on the theatre.63 Nonetheless, it is clear that, for Deleuze and Guattari, all art that is worthy of the name conforms to a logic of sensation, not just literature, cinema and painting.64

1 B Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002, pp.26-27. 2 See: T Kowzan, 'The Sign in the Theatre: An Introduction to the Semiology of the Art of the Spectacle', Diogenes 61 (1968) 52-80; K Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (Second Edition), New York: Routledge, 2002; P Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982; E Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theatre, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 3 P Pavis, Theatre at the Cross Roads of Culture, London: Routledge, 1992, p.2. 22

4 See: R Knowles, How Theatre Means, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; E Rozik, Generating Theatre Meaning: A Theory and Methodology of Performance Analysis, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008. 5 See M Carlson, 'Semiotics and its Heritage' in JG Reinelt and JR Roach, Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007, p.17: poststructuralist ideas were influential from the early 1970s, but it was only in the late 1980s that became hegemonic. 6 Ibid. p.20. 7 T Murray (ed), Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: the Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997, pp.239-258. 8 U Chaudhuri, 'Animal Rites: Performing beyond the Human' in Reinelt and Roach, pp.506-520; T Murray, 'Like a Prosthesis' in L Cull, Theatres of immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp.203-220. 9 But see: J-F Lyotard, 'Critical Reflections', Artforum 24(8) 1991 92-93, p.93. 10 S O'Sullivan, 'The Aesthetics of Affect', Angelaki 6(3) 2001 125-135, p.125. 11 Elam, p.214. 12 P Boenisch, Directing Scenes and Senses: The Thinking of Regie, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015, p.9. 13 See: N Shaughnessy, Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being, London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013; E Hurley (ed.), Theatres of Affect: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2014. 14 J Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p.117. 15 Ibid, p. 128 16 R Covell, 'Patrick White's Plays', Quadrant, 8(1) 1964 7-12, p.8. 17 See D Carroll, Australian Contemporary Drama, Sydney: Currency Press, 1995, pp.127, 134. 18 D O'Donnell, 'Staging Modernity in the "New Oceania"' in S Ross and AC Lindgren (eds), The Modernist World, New York: Routledge, 2015, p.283: 'When the word "modernism" is used in histories of Australian drama, it is almost exclusively associated with the Nobel prize-winning novelist/playwright Patrick White.' 19 D Marr, Patrick White: A Life, Sydney: Random House Australia, 1991, p.394: 'The Ham Funeral had become a rallying point for those who were unhappy with the boring, official culture of Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and hated the philistine power of the Establishment – the power, especially, to determine what was written and read in a country where books, films and plays continued to be censored and banned.' 20 J McCallum, Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century, Sydney: Currency Press, 2009, p.95. 21 See L Rees, Australian Drama 1970-1985: A Historical and Critical Survey, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1987, p.234: Rees argues that White's talent is that of a novelist's imperfectly transferred to the medium of drama, a widespread belief. 22 See L Radic, Contemporary Australian Drama, Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2006, p.127. 23 See P Fitzpatrick, 'After the Wave: Australian Drama Since 1975', New Theatre Quarterly, 2/5 1986 54-67, p.62: 'White's plays, as someone once said in another connection, are the kind of work which give failure a good name.' 24 McCallum, pp.92-93: 'White is one of the few Australian playwrights to attract new generations of theatre artists eager to test themselves on his work.' 25 A Fuhrmann, 'A Theatre of His Own: The Problematic Plays of Patrick White', Australian Book Review, November 2013, p.35. 26 M-B Akerholt, Patrick White, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988, p.1. 27 McCallum, p. 93. 28 J Tasker, 'Notes on "The Ham Funeral"', Meanjin, 23(3) 1964 299-302, p.301. 29 Marr, Patrick White, p.128. 30 P White, Flaws In the Glass: A Self-Portrait, London: J Cape, 1981, p.236. 31 D Marr (ed), Letters: Patrick White, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.216. 32 N Armfield, 'Patrick White: A Centenary Tribute', Meanjin, 71(2) 2012 18-28, p.25: White describes this process as 'little Neily's search for meaning'. 33 See P White, Four Plays, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965, p.327: 'We'll never get through,' cries Professor Sword in Night on Bald Mountain, 'never ... never ... however long we live ... however many messages we send.' 23

34 But see: E Schafer, 'A Ham Funeral: Patrick White, Collaboration and Neil Armfield', Australian Studies, 3 2011: n. pag., p.19: Schafer quotes Julian Meyrick arguing that White's plays are primarily works of social criticism and do not require excessive 'theatricality'. 35 Marr, Letters, p.212: '… and where I have my cry I know I have got my audience!' 36 J Meyrick, See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave, Sydney: Currency Press, 2002, p.2. 37 Ibid, p.3. 38 See Radic, pp.123-127: one could also point to the general histories by Peter Fitzpatrick, Dennis Carroll, Leslie Rees and John McCallum, all of which emphasise White's separateness. Radic make his ostracism explicit in the title of his chapter on White – 'Odd Man Out'. 39 See D Varney and S D'Urso, 'Patrick White and Aesthetic Modernism in Mid-Century Australia', Australasian Drama Studies 66(2) 2015 63-80; D Varney, 'Mixmasters and Lino: Iconic Australian Modernity in Patrick White's The Season at Sarsaparilla', ACCESS Critical Perspectives on Communication, 31(2) 2012 5-14. 40 D Varney, 'Australian Theatrical Modernism and Modernity: Patrick White's Season at Sarsaparilla' Australasian Drama Studies 62 2013 25-40, p.38. 41 See E van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London: Reaktion Books, 1992, p.51: 'Whereas Bacon's implicit philosophical position can be aligned with postmodernists like Lyotard, his aesthetic position remains emphatically modernist'. 42 P Ardoin, SE Gontarski and L Mattison (eds), Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, p.7. 43 G Deleuze and F Guattari, What Is Philosophy? New York: Verso, 1994, pp.163-200. 44 H-T Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, New York: Routledge, 2006, p.95. 45 Deleuze and Guattari, p.163. 46 Massumi, p.25. 47 M Gregg and GJ Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010, p.6 48 A Hickey-Moody, 'Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics and Affective Pedagogy', in R Coleman and J Ringrose (eds) Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, p.79. 49 Deleuze and Guattari, p.164. 50 Ibid, p.167. 51 G Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, New York: Continuum, 2003, p.34. 52 J-J Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p.219. 53Deleuze and Guattari, p.66. 54 Ibid, p.179. 55 E Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, p.11. 56 J Derrida, The Truth in Painting, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p.9. See also Deleuze and Guattari, p.189: 'compounds of sensation, sonorous blocs, equally possess sections or framing forms each of which must join together to secure a certain closing-off.' 57 P Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate, London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968, p.9. 58 Deleuze and Guattari, p.183. 59 Ibid, p.186. 60 Ibid. 61 Deleuze and Guattari, p.197: 'Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite.' 62Cull, p.2. 63 See Gilles Deleuze from A to Z. Dir. C Parnet. MIT Press, 2012. Film: 'Theatre is too long, and too disciplined,' says Deleuze, 'an art that remains entrenched in the present and in daily issues, while never advancing beyond dimensions of the present.' But see G Deleuze, 'One Less Manifesto' in Murray, Mimesis, Masochism and Mime, p.205. 64 Deleuze and Guattari, pp.202-206. See also, Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p.54: 'But in the end, why should all this be peculiar to painting? Why could not music also extricate pure presences, but through an ear that has become the polyvalent organ for sonorous bodies? And why not poetry or theatre, when it is those of Artaud or Beckett?' 24

CHAPTER ONE: THE 1979 SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY PRODUCTION OF A CHEERY SOUL

1. Patrick White and Le Vieux Style A Cheery Soul: A Comedy in Three Acts was adapted by White from a short story of the same name, and is set against a similar suburban background to The Season at Sarsaparilla. It is, however, darker and more poetical in tone than the earlier play, closer in its mystical or quasi-religious transfiguration of suburban life to the novel (though without the same sense of exaltation) than to the domestic charade of Sarsaparilla. White himself described it as a play about the 'destructive power of good', a power embodied in the figure of Miss Docker, an energetic pensioner, wilfully blind to the chaos her well-meant meddling inspires.1 In the first act, a decent, respectable married couple, young and considerate, invites Miss Docker to move into their glassed- in veranda room. The arrangement cannot be sustained. Miss Docker soon upsets the couple's easy contentment, trampling their privacy and attempting to reform their domestic habits. In Act Two, we discover Miss Docker burrowing her way into the Sundown Home for Old People. 'She's only been here a couple of days,' complains one resident, 'and her name beats in my head like a gong.'2 Here the play moves in and out of the present, dramatically manipulating memory, as the women of the home recall past lovers in a combination of choric set pieces and on-stage flashbacks. Again, Miss

Docker is cast as the busybody, creating discord and causing chaos among the residents with her carefree talk and relentless good cheer. We also spy the meanness of Sarsaparilla locals. In one scene Miss Docker is abandoned by her comrades on the way to a funeral and forced to walk several miles home. In the last act of the play, Miss Docker confronts the local clergy man for his failings as a communicator and torments the mild-mannered man so much that he collapses in the pulpit.

Outside the church, when a stray dog pisses on her leg, a characteristic collision of scatology and black comedy in White, Miss Docker wonders if God is judging her for the zeal with which she is forcing her charity on others. After a moment of tears and self-doubt, she collects herself and in her matter-of-fact way vows to carry on as she is, undaunted. 25

The play premiered on 19 November 1963 at the Union Theatre Repertory Company in

Melbourne, directed by company artistic director John Sumner, with sets and costumes by Desmond

Digby. Although his production of The Season at Sarsaparilla sold well and was admired by critics,

Sumner had considerable misgivings about A Cheery Soul, not least because it called for such a large cast and would therefore almost certainly run at a loss. He also found it 'very straggling to follow'.3

However, because of his respect for Patrick White, he felt compelled to persist with it.4 In fact, the production turned out even worse – financially – than he imagined, with the four-week season running at just over 20% capacity.5

In his 1993 memoir, Sumner reflects on why his production of A Cheery Soul failed to excite audiences while Jim Sharman's production 16 years later was such a popular success. He blames the inadequate size of the venue, old lighting equipment that was unable to cope with the rapid scene changes demanded by the script, the relatively narrow tastes of audiences in in 1963 and the hesitant quality of his own direction. 'And then,' he adds:

because Patrick was expounding 'the destructive power of good' through a relentless Miss

Docker, he upset prevailing morality. Maybe I should have made more of her moments of

possible self-doubt, but these were fleeting.6

White himself, writing immediately after the event, blamed the hostility of 'the pretenders of society and would-be intellectuals' for the play's failure.7 He maintained that the play was his best 'in spite of what the hack journalists have said about it'.8 And, in fact, not everyone was blind to the play's merits, and not all the critics dismissed Sumner's production out of hand.9 But a common theme in the reviews – even the positive ones – is the production's lack of formal cohesion. In the most sympathetic appraisal the play received, Roger Covell, a Sydney-based theatre critic and later an eminent musicologist, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: 26

White's play is not a unity and partly for this reason I think it will not rank in its present form

as among his most successful works for the stage.10

Even White appears to have conceded this much.11 As many critics have noted, it isn't clear how the three apparently discrete and self-contained acts of A Cheery Soul form a dramatic whole.12 The play requires a strong directorial vision, and a production team capable of bringing the disparate or

'straggling' parts of the play into aesthetic coherence. The play calls for an articulated structure of feelings and intuitions to balance the dramatic monumentality and the appearance of autonomous life.13 John Sumner's production was, in its way, and within its limitations, struggling toward the expression of something new, but the sort of totalising and transformational artistic vision which A

Cheery Soul cries out for was not in his line.14 He was a sensitive and diligent director, and when the form of the thing he wanted to achieve was familiar he could be great; but he was not, in Patrick

White's words, a 'stylish or brilliant' director.15

This want of stylishness is significant. In this context, style does not mean adornment or slickness, but refers instead to the principle by which material elements of a work achieve artistic definition and form. As a play, Patrick White's A Cheery Soul was stylistically challenging because it pushed against the accepted limits of dramatic expression. Written at a time when Australian playwriting was dominated by 'naturalism and reportage', A Cheery Soul offered something new and unfamiliar to Australian audiences.16 It demanded a new conception and a different style of performance which would transform the use of the stage. But for John Sumner, Nita Pannel and

Desmond Digby, in Melbourne, in 1963, there was only what Jean-Jacque Lecercle calls le vieux style: a style that proved inadequate to the potential vision and music of White's play.17 In 1964, reflecting on the experience of directing White's work, Sumner admitted:

Patrick White needs a style of presentation and acting which is not yet adequately

developed here. If I had another chance I would direct The Season at Sarsaparilla on three

rostrums only, making greater use of mime, light and language. A similar economy of 27

approach might also be used with A Cheery Soul, thus offering the audience a better chance

of listening and understanding.18

As we shall see, this anticipates in part the approach of Jim Sharman as director and his designer

Brian Thomson in the 1970s.

His experience with the Union Theatre was a turning point in White's career as a playwright.

He went from the relative success of The Season at Sarsaparilla in 1962, which played in three cities to full houses, to A Cheery Soul, which languished ignominiously in Melbourne in 1963. In 1964, his next play, A Night on Bald Mountain, premiered in Adelaide as an unsubsidised fringe event at the

Festival, with Nita Pannell as Miss Quodling. It too received mixed reviews, and the always volatile relationship between White and John Tasker broke down completely. White withdrew from working in Australian theatre and began writing a new novel – , his first in five years – refusing all offers to restage his work.19 In 1964 he said:

I've lost interest in theatre because you can't get what you want ever. I used to think it

would be wonderful to see what you had written come to life. Here in Australia it's very hard

to get an adequate performance because of the state of the theatre; but even if you have

the best actors in the world it's never what you visualised. One can't say all one wants to

say; one can't convey it.20

In this thesis I argue that what White's plays need are theatrical interpreters capable of accommodating this difficult striving toward the limits of what is sayable.

As a high-school student, Jim Sharman had seen John Tasker's productions of The Ham Funeral and The Season at Sarsaparilla in Sydney, and cites both as formative artistic influences.21 After graduating from the two-year NIDA production course in 1965, Sharman directed a series of more- or-less experimental productions of plays, which attracted attention for their sophisticated minimalism and shaping of dramatic space.22 He crossed paths with Patrick White for the first time in 28

1966, when White attended an 'abrasive, shit-slinging' political revue that Sharman directed at

Sydney's Jane Street Theatre.23 White was so impressed with its 'vitality, originality and wit' that he wrote a letter in support of the show that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.24

Sharman's rise was rapid. Soon he was directing for the Old Tote in Sydney. His stripped-back chess-board production of Don Giovanni for the Elizabethan Trust Opera in 1968 was described by

Curt Preraurer, music critic for the Nation and a man who had experienced European modernism first hand, as the first truly Australian reimagining of an opera.25 By the early 1970s, Sharman was travelling the world, directing the new generation of international rock musicals – , Jesus Christ

Superstar, and .26 In 1975, he returned to Australia. His Old Tote production of The Season at Sarsaparilla was produced in November 1976, and gave strong emphasis to the play's underlying spirituality, an emphasis that greatly impressed Patrick White. As White's biographer David Marr writes, 'He found all his faith in Sharman justified once he saw the play. They loved the same kind of theatre, a place of myth and magic with a dash of vaudeville.'27

The success of this revival encouraged White to start writing for the theatre again. Sharman, this time with Brian Thomson as his designer, produced a new play by White called in 1977.

Then, after multiple setbacks, Sharman's revival of A Cheery Soul opened on 17 January 1979 as part of the interim World Theatre programme which launched the Sydney Theatre Company at the

Drama Theatre in the Sydney Opera House.28 Robyn Nevin, who had played Girlie Pogson in

Sharman's production of The Season at Sarsaparilla three years earlier, and was now 36, was cast as

Miss Docker.29 Brian Thomson again did the sets, Anna Senior the costumes and John Hoenig the lighting. The production had two development seasons and a brief rehearsal period, with a relatively modest budget of $5000.30

The STC archive has succeeded in preserving a full recording of this production. It was previously believed that archive recordings went back only as far as 1992, but in late 2012 a milk crate containing a number of U-matic tapes was discovered at a Sydney Theatre Company 29

warehouse in Western Sydney, and among these were three cassettes containing one act each of the Sharman production of A Cheery Soul. The recording was made in colour and with two cameras.

One camera was positioned at the back of the theatre, centrally placed. The view from this camera is sometimes partially obscured by the silhouettes of the seated audience. The other camera was nearer to the stage in the right-hand lateral aisle and was mostly used for close-ups and tracking shots. The sound quality is fairly good, with most of the dialogue intelligible, although some of composer 's incidental music, played by Sharon Calcraft at a grand piano just visible in the wings, is inaudible. The quality of the editing and camera work suggests the recording was made by professionals. These three tapes have now been restored and converted to digital mpeg format and transferred to three separate DVDs by the STC archives. The first act is 44.48 minutes; the second act is 42.31 minutes and the final act is 52.30 minutes. The date of the recording is unknown.

The DVDs are available for viewing at the Sydney Theatre Company archives, located at the company's Hickson Road offices, Walsh Bay.31

2. The Problem of Cliché Act One begins with the fire curtain down. On it, like an enormous vaudeville playbill, are printed the names of cast and crew. It rises to reveal 11 cast members in costume as the residents of

Sarsaparilla, standing some meters apart along the length of the Drama Theatre stage. Jim Sharman made a number of small cuts to the script and used doubling – including some cross- gender casting

– to reduce the required cast from 36 to 13. A section of the stage, almost a quarter of its length is raised as a low rostrum. The five central characters – Miss Docker, Mr and Mrs Custance (the respectable married couple) and the Wakemans (the local clergyman and his wife) – stand on this raised area. Behind them is a billowing, white half-curtain running the full length of the stage, emphasising the shallow letterbox design of the Drama Theatre's stage, giving the scene a horizontal almost panoramic effect. Apart from the performers, the rostrum and the curtain, the stage is bare. 30

This first tableau – invented by Sharman and not part of the script – is the production's key note, establishing its aesthetic and unifying character: the rhythmic arrangement of figures against a minimalist ground. Stage directions in the published text of A Cheery Soul describe a dramatic scheme which begins in full naturalism and dwindles scene by scene to an empty stage. Jim Sharman and Brian Thomson's approach was to begin with a bare stage and indicate scenes only by curtains, placards and a few necessary props in order to let the play flow and reveal its most powerful feature: the language.32 After the prelude, Act One begins with a Brechtian half-curtain of a thin, dark reddish material hung from a wire about seven feet off the stage drawn across by one of the cast, and then almost immediately drawn back. A small sign flies in stage-right and announces the setting: 'Kitchen at the Custances'. The scene's few furnishings are brought on by the cast, including a kitchen sink, a bench top and a kitchen table and chairs, all grey-blue and all disappearing into the bulky shadows of the background. A sign on a canvas sheet hung stage-left reads 'little veranda room', in order to indicate the glassed-in veranda where Miss Docker is to be lodged. Compare this with White's description of the mise en scène in the Custances' kitchen in the published text:

A pleasant room, obviously lived-in. Door R. to rest of house. Door L. to drive. Stove against

wall R. FORWARD. Sink against wall BACK R. Dinette BACK L. Window behind, opening on

veranda. Double doors BACK C. open on veranda. The CUSTANCES' veranda room door,

when ajar, is visible from the kitchen. Steps from veranda lead down to garden and rows of

over life-size tomato vines. The light through their spires reaches the kitchen greenish and

slightly mysterious.33

While clearly more detailed, this does strive for a theatrical effect of sparseness, though not persuasively.

In the second act, the scene is again announced by way of a sign lowered from the flies:

'Sundown Home for Old People'. The furnishings here are limited to a large grey-blue tea chest centre-stage and a few chairs and benches. Two large vases stand on either end of the chest, with 31

blue hydrangea and sprays of cherry blossom. Residents of the home are dressed in black and stand against a black background, all heavily made-up in white face. The third act opens with a reprise of the silent prelude, with the chorus of old ladies from the home, some now carrying umbrellas, arranged before the white half-curtain. There are few props in the eight scenes of the final act, and the use of placards to title each scene continues. In Scene Two, back in the Chinese Room of the

Sundown Home for Old People, there are chairs for Miss Docker and Mrs Hibble and nothing else, except for a telephone. In Scene Four, which takes place in a rectory, a desk and two chairs are placed stage left, all in greyish black. The scene on the way to church, Scene Five, is announced by a sign that reads 'On the Way to Church' with a series of Hill's Hoists silhouetted in the background.

In his director's note, Sharman links his scenic 'minimum of fuss or decoration' with a desire to put 'maximum emphasis on performance', warning his audience that the directness of this emphasis may 'be a little confronting'.34 His aim was to stress the purity and simplicity of the figure at the centre of the drama, to strip everything in the play that is cluttered, or constraining, that is literal in its realism or prosaic or merely charming, and to highlight and concentrate on Miss Docker as the dramatic centre of the play. In a letter addressed to Brian Thomson, dated 1978, Sharman writes:

For this play I have a strange notion for you to consider. How to make the stage almost

invisible so that no memory will linger on any firm reality but Miss Docker.35

The letter lays out Sharman's vision for a radically minimalist Cheery Soul, with the bare stage, short curtains and placards.36 And with the removal of all scripted sound cues, the process of 'stripping back' extends to the sound design as well.37 The overall effect of eradicating scenery and disrupting illusionistic conventions is to isolate the figure of Miss Docker.38 This allows Sharman to focus on her spiritual progression toward what he calls 'a place beyond sanity'.39 This is the first step in a process which eliminates illustration and narration, imagining instead a space free from the snares of cliché where the dramatic figure can interrogate its own self-involvement through a derangement which is enacted in a stripping away of the conventions of theatrical representation. 32

White's aim was always to launch something new on Australian stages: a theatre of magic and sensation, a theatre of atmospheres and poetry. Actually achieving this was a constant struggle in the face of fascination and difficulty and incapacity. It is the struggle of all artists, but, paradoxically,

White's life-long obsession with the theatre worked against him. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write:

This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their

wishes summon forth) than against the 'clichés' of opinion. The painter does not paint on an

empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page or canvas is

already so covered with preexisting, preestablished clichés that it is first necessary to erase,

to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us

the vision.40

The stage, too, no less than the canvas or the page, is dead with cliché. Rhythms of characterisation and plotting, of dialogue and gesture, of setting and design – crowd like a cavalcade of shades onto every stage and ghost each performance. Patrick White himself was steeped in these pre-established creative possibilities with their repetitions, whispers and their hackneyed recital of old certitudes. As a nine-year-old White wrote picaresques and melodramas; in his teens he was seduced by the world of Sydney's amateur dramatics; in his early twenties he was a London stage-door-Johnny; and through the late 1930s and intermittently thereafter his ambition was to be a major successful playwright, to create drama that would succeed in the West End or Broadway.41 Much of what critics of White's plays call their awkwardness or unpleasantness or 'attitudinising' stems from the tension in his dramatic work between a desire to create something radically new and his reverence, even his sentimental fondness, for what already exists – for le doux vieux style.42 And it is this quality in his writing which cries out – like a silent scream – for intervention, for the creative betrayal which will lead to the articulation of a drama that he can only stammer towards by himself. Great novelist 33

though he was, he knew that on the stage he needed his interpreters to bring him to fulfilment. In

Jim Sharman and his 'troupe' White sensed this fulfilling and necessarily obliterating potential.43

A Cheery Soul's striking minimalism of design is the most manifest instance of Sharman and

Thomson's broader project of breaking with the repertory company traditionalism that was the Old

Tote's house style, symbolised by the stock naturalism of its sets.44 In terms of the history of the play itself, this radical minimalistic reinterpretation must be seen as a necessary resuscitative act of violence. It is only through violence – which is really a potential violence, a violence of sensation, and ultimately a feat of aesthetic liberation – that cliché can be overcome. This is a violence which is felt rather than depicted or signified; it is a violence which explodes the dominant clichés of representation and reveals the intensity of the reality beyond.

3. The Figure and the Scream The break with the constraints of naturalism and the isolation of Miss Docker against a minimalist background was a necessary, but not in itself sufficient step in Sharman's transfiguration and dramatic realisation of A Cheery Soul. It is only through the aesthetic figure, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, that the intensive power of the work of art – its capacity to move and inspire – passes to the audience. The last section analysed a movement from the material structure of the stage toward the central dramatic figure; in this section, the move is in the other direction, from the figure back to the theatre. In particular, this chapter focuses on a particular moment of dramatic intensity, of acute affective force which has become an enduring icon of the Australian theatre – the silent scream of

Robyn Nevin as Miss Docker.

During the prelude, Miss Docker stands centre stage with her back to the audience. The rest of the town's residents face out to the audience. As the fire curtain disappears into the fly space, they hold the tableau, silhouetted black on white. Then we hear a series of soft chords. One. Two. Then on the third Nevin as Miss Docker throws her head back, with one hand up and holding the brim of her hat, the arm closest to the audience pulled back sharply to reveal her face in quarter profile. Her 34

mouth is contorted in a frozen vaudeville scream, which might also be a laugh. She holds the pose while the rest of the cast quickly evaporate into the off-stage shadows as if scattered by a mighty wind. Then the red curtain is pulled across and Robyn Nevin makes her exit for the first scene.

The image of Nevin's Miss Docker with her head thrown back and her face contorted by a scream is a recurring motif in Sharman's production. We see it next at the end of the third scene of

Act One, when the Custances are sitting down to their first meal with the newly installed cheery nightmare. As Miss Docker, Robyn Nevin is constantly indulging in little pieces of comic business. She gesticulates and lurches about as she talks; she absent-mindedly rubs her padded belly; she shuffles and stoops: but she does it all with the greatest rapidity, an accelerated vista of comic absurdities.

During the dinner, she dominates the table with her quick, relentless chatter and her sprawling, slatternly manners. Having driven away Mr Custance with a torrent of advice and mockery, she makes an exhibition of her charity for the benefit of Mrs Custance:

MISS DOCKER It's that Mrs Apps. Pernicious anaemia! If you ask me she's starved for love.

Well, I'm going to make Mrs Apps a basinful of broth.

MRS CUSTANCE (genuinely impressed, though at the same time humouring a child) I think

that's a wonderful idea, Miss Docker.

MISS DOCKER (smiling, childlike) Eh? (Growing serious) There are so many professing

Christians. ... Mind you, I think a lot of things just don't cross their poor minds. (Her voice

rising almost hysterically to a note of desperation) But you can't leave people to starve. Can

you? Now, can you?45

The directions are White's, and in this scene and throughout the performance descriptions of stress and intonation are faithfully interpreted. In the first act, Pat Bishop and Peter Carroll as the

Custances perform in a relatively subdued, closely observed style, not as a contrast to Nevin's Miss

Docker, but as if to register the vérité limitations against which she kicks and rebels. On her final 35

lines, Miss Docker turns to the audience, her mouth agape, with a terrible look of anguish etched on her face, an expression which she holds into the blackout.

We see the same expression in Act Two, when Mrs Lillie, one of the women of the Sundown

Home for Old People, recalls in 'flickering pictures' the long illness and eventual death of her husband. The couple's last days together, she remembers, were spoiled by the officious ministrations of Miss Docker:

MISS DOCKER (fanning and hitting, to MRS LILLIE) You, dear, are the kind that dispenses

passive charm. I am the practical one. (Laughing) Perhaps there should be two women in the

life of every man...

MRS LILLIE (smiling and trembling, fascinated by the patient) Oh, my darling ... my breath ...

my life-blood ... is flowing out of me!

MISS DOCKER (laughing) ... one to bear the brunt, the other to radiate ...

CHORUS ... one to bludgeon, the other to close the eyes. ...

MRS LILLIE (in great anguish) Because love ... love is dead!46

On the word 'radiate', the scene freezes, with Miss Docker again caught in quarter profile, head thrown back, mouth gaping. Claire Crowther as Mrs Hibble, another of the residents, is leading the chorus at this point and all but shouts the words, 'One to bludgeon'. Mrs Lillie then shakes off her immobility to announce the death of her husband. Miss Docker, however, remains motionless, still in the tableau of her scream for another few moments.

How does the scream work? Why is it such a powerful dramatic image? One way into this question is to compare the figure of Miss Docker with the 'Screaming Popes' in the paintings by

Francis Bacon, the series of around 50 distorted and expressionistic variations on Velazquez's

Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) which Bacon painted in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some of these 36

are painted with a screaming mouth based on a production still of the dying nurse on the Odessa

Steps in the celebrated sequence in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), and all of them are disturbing. How is it that these images make such a thrilling impression? In Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation, Deleuze argues that Bacon's extreme violence of line and colour brings forth, as we stand in front of the fixed canvas, not merely the resemblance of a scream, not its mirroring, but the scream as pure sensation, as a shocking fact and apparition.47 Patrick White knew Francis Bacon through Roy de Maistre, an expatriate Australian who was mentor to both Bacon and White, and the two often met during the 1930s.48 We could, however, point to other instances where a screaming figure functions to reveal intensities or forces that would otherwise remain invisible.49 For example, in the performing arts, there is Helene Weigel's silent scream in the 1951 Berliner Ensemble revival of Bertolt Brecht's Mutter Courage.50 And it is possible that Sharman, who directed an in-house production of Brecht while studying at NIDA in 1965, as well as a production of The Threepenny

Opera for the Old Tote in 1973, was consciously referencing the Weigel image.51

The mind staggers at the appearance of a violent or catastrophic disruption of the norms of theatrical expression, at a vision which plunges the familiar rhythms of aesthetic comprehension back into chaos.52 Images such as Bacon's screaming popes, in which Deleuze identifies an extreme violence of reaction and expression, make visible the churning chaos beneath the rhythmic surface of things, an experience of pure sensation unmediated by the faculty of imagination, which in its turn demands new kind of thought. In a comparable way, the scream of Robyn Nevin's Miss Docker, considered in its asignifying register, is the seething darkness made visible: chaos, forces of the future and the power of the spirit of negation in a theatre which defies hand-me-down meanings.53

Thus Nevin's frozen scream is the icon of this production of A Cheery Soul, and beyond that the icon of a new dramaturgy or way of thinking about the Australian theatre. 37

4. The Redemption of Cheeriness Cheeriness is the name Patrick White gives to the force that we see revealed in the screaming figure of Miss Docker.54 Indeed, cheeriness is a recurring theme in White's work, central to his general critique of Australian society and culture. After the publication of his novel The Aunt's Story in 1948, his mother, Ruth White, apparently reproved him for not writing about a 'cheery aunt'.55 And White believed such a disappointment was shared by the majority of his Australians readers. As he explained in his essay 'The Prodigal Son':

The Aunt's Story, written immediately after the War, before returning to Australia, had

succeeded with overseas critics, failed as usual with the local ones, remained half-read, it

was obvious from the state of the pages in the lending libraries.56

He regarded this cheeriness as the Australian way.57 It is linked to what White later describes, in the

'Great Australian Emptiness', the Australian attitude of Philistine heartiness:

in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human

teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and

steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the

average nerves.58

White and Sharman sought to dramatise the dissipating effect, the malign power of this materialism and shallowness, and in doing so to reveal Australian society to itself.59This, then, is the compositional logic of A Cheery Soul, moving as it does in Sharman's formulation from 'sanity to madness, from reality to fragmentation, from naturalism to operatic anarchy', tracing out the spiral course of a spiritual crisis.60 That is, the screaming figure of Miss Docker presents us with an image of the distorting power of Australian cheeriness.

In the play's final scene, after she has all but killed the faltering parson with an inspired – perhaps demonically inspired – tirade, Miss Docker returns alone to the cold and windy streets of 38

Sarsaparilla. Here, in Sharman's production, we are returned to a stage completely bare except for the low rostrum and white curtain which was now being shaken by off-stage figures who also imitate the whistling of an ominous wind. Rejected by Sarsaparilla, Miss Docker attempts to befriend a stray dog, which remains invisible to the audience. The dog, however, is unimpressed and urinates on

Miss Docker's leg, an outrage which Nevin mimes with extravagant hand waving. With this final and unequivocal rejection we come to realise the full weight of what Nita Pannell – the actor who the part was originally written for – meant when she described Miss Docker as a woman 'completely unloved'.61 Voices from off-stage, like emanations or personifications of the wind, continue to tear at the forlorn figure and deride the very possibility of her survival:

SOPRANO VOICE The wind, the wind...

BASS VOICE ... the wind is circular...

SOPRANO VOICE It slashes with razor blades!62

In the play's last scene, Miss Docker meets a swaggie, played by Peter Carroll. He advises her not to take the judgement of the dog – or even the judgement of God, if that's what it was – too much to heart. Nevin stands silent for a moment, her mouth hanging open, before she pulls herself together: 'Oh, I'm not going to make a song and dance about it!' she declares. 'I was never ever one to cry.' The final image of the production is of Miss Docker alone, stooped, braced against the wind, and the mirthless laughter of the swaggie, now off-stage, still ringing through the theatre like a last laugh, as devoid of warmth as Beckett's risus purus.63 Once more, as in the opening tableau, Miss

Docker is just a black silhouette against the billowing white curtain, though now the residents of

Sarsaparilla have been scattered every which way and Miss Docker, all alone now, is herself at risk of being carried away by a remorseless breath that seems to come from beyond the world.64

This seems like a bleak end for a comedy. As May-Brit Akerholt says: 39

Ultimately the play offers no hope even for those who have the courage to 'ask the glass';

the 'comedy' A Cheery Soul ends on a note of bitter despair, as the delusion of life goes on

endlessly, irrevocably.65

Although she admires the play, Akerholt describes the text in almost wholly negative terms – degeneration, corrosion, disruption, self-defeat, narrowness and strangulation – and says of Miss

Docker that she 'lacks the ability to turn destructive elements into constructive actions'.66 And yet, this 1979 production seems to have had a quality of joy rather than bitterness or disappointment.67

Why such pleasure in so much darkness? How is joy conjured from the hard earth of White's text?

To understand the capacity of a work of art to produce intensities of mood and feeling intuitively counter to those suggested by its representational context – by what happens in it – we have to consider the intensiveness of its dramatic quality, the multiplicity of micro-perceptions, which, as

O'Sullivan puts it, can operate beneath or beyond or even parallel to any of the platitudes of signification.68

Considered in its purely affective aspect, Jim Sharman's production reveals a crucial point about White's plays. Although White once described himself as 'the greatest pessimist on earth', and there are certainly aspects of miserabilism in his pricking at the ever-buoyant Miss Docker, as

Deleuze says of Francis Bacon, his art transmutes a pessimism of the intellect into an optimism of the nerves and senses.69 There is always the possibility with his drama that, between the text and its performance, despair might become hilarity, and that dissipative energies of Australian cheeriness might be redeemed as something joyful. This is the old truth about great art: that it can rise above its putative subject matter.

Sharman's discovery is actually announced in the programme for the 1976 production of The

Season at Sarsaparilla – the first production on which he and White collaborated. There he includes two quotes from , both taken from a section toward the end of the novel after the ill-fated 40

explorer's death. In the first, a colonial music master addresses the 'invertebrate' genius Willie

Pringle:

If we do not come to grief on our own mediocrity as a people. If we are locked forever in our

own bodies. Then, too, there is a possibility that our hates and our carnivorous habits will

unite in a logical conclusion: we may destroy one another.

Well, Miss Docker, that smiling wrecker of Sarsaparilla, might seem to manifest this logical conclusion: she amplifies the mediocrity of the Australian people to the point of cannibalism. But

Willie Pringle – and, indeed, Jim Sharman – senses an enlightening paradox. The programme continues the quote:

I am confident that the mediocrity of which he speaks is not a final and irrevocable state;

rather is it a creative source of endless variety and subtlety. The blowfly on its bed of offal is

but a variation of the rainbow.70

And so with Miss Docker. At the level of sensation, amid all the thrills of Robyn Nevin's caricature,

Miss Docker always gestures toward this invisible creative source of energy, and her real struggle is the struggle to give it a visible dramatic embodiment, to shape from her hideousness a dramatic presence that will give delight. In the spasms of her progress toward dissipation, we sense the possibility that something new will emerge from beneath the screaming organism. Is this a glimpse of pure sensation, a body immersed in a sublime plurality of inhuman becomings, what Deleuze calls the body without organs?71

The 1979 production of A Cheery Soul shows how a performance can create a joyful dramatic encounter in spite of – and without undermining – the seriousness of the cultural critique indicated in its original, the dramatic text by releasing it from cliché. At the level of feeling, parallel to its narrative and thematic content, and running beneath them and around them, A Cheery Soul invites a style of performance that breaks the limitations of scenic naturalism and conventional stage 41

representation: it makes le vieux style of theatre stammer and sing, it makes it flow and escape cliché and come together in a new logic of sensation, an original expressive totality. The Sydney

Theatre Company production of A Cheery Soul shows one method – informed by expressionism and

Brechtian minimalism– in which this paradoxical intensive potential might be realised, a style famously characterised by David Marr as 'myth and magic with a dash of vaudeville'.72 Robyn Nevin's exaggeration and caricature, epitomised in the recurring motif of the frozen scream, unsettles the merely representational and narrative aspects of the dead literalism of Miss Docker's character, and offers a fleeting and luminous experience of the transcendental, of pure intensity, which functions, as dramatic art must, as a declaration of faith in life. Of course, such a solution can fall into its own form of cliché. In a 1996 production of the play for the Melbourne Theatre Company, director Neil

Armfield consciously reprised a number of stylistic features from the earlier Sydney Theatre

Company production, including cross gender casting, Brechtian techniques of alienation and a minimalist design sensibility. Although it was respectfully received, it did not achieve the popular success or have the broader artistic impact of the 1979 production, despite another fine performance by Robyn Nevin as Miss Docker. For theatre makers, as indeed for all artists, the fight against cliché is a continuous one, and the struggle to devise original and surprising visions, to illuminate new sensations is a constant battle against stereotypes and the lures of the old dead music.73

1 J Sumner, Recollections at Play: A Life in Australian Theatre, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1993, p.144. 2 P White, Four Plays, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965, p.214. 3 JR Dyce, Patrick White as Playwright, St.Lucia: UQP, 1974, p.137. 4 D Marr, Patrick White: A Life, Sydney: Random House Australia, 1991, p.405. 5 Sumner, Recollections at Play, p.145. 6 Ibid. 7 D Marr (ed), Letters: Patrick White, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.244. 8 P White to E Bray, 1.xi.1963, State Library of Manuscripts and Pictures, Letter from Patrick White to Errol Bray, MLMSS7606. 9 See The Jewish Herald, 22.xi.1963, p.15: '... a play of shattering impact; savage and merciless – but dramatically exciting.' 10 R Covell, 'White Play Opens in Melbourne', Sydney Morning Herald, 20.xi.1963, p.14. 11 P White in Marr, Letters, p.243: 'Only the Sydney Morning Herald gave what one could call a serious review, and one which I can accept on most points.' 42

12 See L Rees, The Making of Australian Drama: A Historical and Critical Survey from the 1830s to the 1970s, Melbourne: Angus and Robertson, 1973, pp.346-7; J McCallum, Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century, Strawberry Hills, Currency Press, 2007, pp.99-100. 13 G Deleuze and F Guattari, What Is Philosophy? New York: Verso, 1994, pp.167-8, 178. 14 See L Rowe, 'The Golden Age of Russell Street', Meanjin, 64(1-2) 2005 263-269, p.266. 15 P White in Marr, Letters, p.213. 16 HG Kippax, 'Australian Drama Since "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll"' Meanjin 23(3) 1964 229-242, p.242. 17 J-J Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p.7. 18J Sumner, 'The Rewards of a Producer', Meanjin, 23(3) 1964 310-311, p.311. 19 Marr, Patrick White, pp. 436-7, 559. 20 P White quoted in C McGregor (ed), In the Making, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1969, p.222. See also P White to D Digby 5.vi.1963, National Library of Australia, Papers of Desmond Digby Relating to Patrick White 1962-2000, MS10056: '[theatre] is too destructive, too second-rate and not worth all the pains.' 21 J Sharman, Blood & Tinsel: A Memoir, Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2008, p.68. 22 See R Constantino, 'A Taste of Honey', Sydney Morning Herald, 7.x.1965, p.11. 23 Transcript, J Sharman Oral History Interview 1, 25.xi.1976, by H de Berg, pp.12,983: described by Sharman as an 'attack' on the audience. 24 P White, 'Theatre', Sydney Morning Herald, 16.iii.1968, p.2. 25C Preraurer, 'A New "Don Giovanni"', Nation, 7.x.1967, p.20. 26 I Maxwell in S Mitter, M Shevtsova (eds), Fifty Key Theatre Directors, New York: Routledge, 2005, p.212. 27 Marr, Patrick White, p.529. 28 Ibid, pp.539, 544. 29 P White in Marr, Letters, p.509. 30 A Barclay, 'Jim Sharman Directs Patrick White's Most Challenging Play' Theatre Australia, March 1979 15-17, pp.15-16; J Sharman to B Thomson, 1978, Papers of Jim Sharman, National Library of Australia, MS.Acc10.103. 31 J Seef, personal communication, 4.iv.2015. 32 D Marr to J Sharman, 23.x.1989, Papers of Jim Sharman, National Library of Australia, MS.Acc10.103. 33 White, Four Plays, p.183. 34 J Sharman, 'Director's Note' in Sydney Theatre Company, A Cheery Soul, National Library of Australia, Papers of Patrick White, MS9982, Series 22, Folder 4, 17.i.1979. 35 Sharman to Thomson, Papers of Jim Sharman. 36 A Fuhrmann, 'A Theatre of His Own: The Problematic Plays of Patrick White', Australian Book Review, November 2013, p.42: as Thomson remembers it, the idea of stripping back the play was his. 37 Barclay, pp.15-16. 38 See also McCallum, p.100: 'The freeing of stage design from the constraints of realism since 1963 has been particularly important in allowing the symbolic significance of White's sets to be explored more imaginatively than his old-fashioned stage directions suggested.' 39 Sharman to Thomson, Papers of Jim Sharman. 40 Deleuze and Guattari, p.204. 41 P White in M Le Moignan, White Light: A Film Portrait of Patrick White, unpublished documentary transcript, National Library of Australia, Papers of Patrick White, MS9982, Series 9, Folder 22, p.13: 'In the thirties in London I was always at the theatre, almost every other night. I'd queue to get into the cheap seats, sit on a stool, and I got to know quite a lot of actors. Yes, I wanted to be an actor really. Then I became too self- conscious and so I thought I'd try writing for it and I wrote endless bad plays which I'd push at people and nobody wanted them.' 42 See Marr, Patrick White, p.385. 43 P White, Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait, London: J Cape, 1981, pp.243-249. 44 Maxwell, p.212. 45 White, Four Plays, p.198. 46 Ibid, p.222. 47 G Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, New York: Continuum, 2003, p.60; Deleuze and Guattari, p.167. 48 White, Flaws in the Glass, p.60; M Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996, pp.80-1. 49 S O'Sullivan, 'The Aesthetics of Affect', Angelaki 6(3) 2001 125-135, p.126. 43

50 J Rouse, 'Brecht and the Contradictory Actor' in JG Reinelt and J Roach, Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007, p.303: 'One of the best-known "emotional" moments in Brecht's theater work'. 51 A Fuhrmann, 'Beginnings', http://www.jimsharman.com.au/ (accessed 10.i.2017). 52 G Deleuze, Third Lesson on Kant, 28.iii.1978, http://www.webdeleuze.com/pdf/uk/Kant/210378.zip (accessed 17.ii.2016). 53Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p.51. 54 Ibid, p.53: Deleuze names as 'dissipation' the comparable force in Bacon's 'Screaming Pope' paintings. 55 White, Flaws in the Glass, p.58. 56P White, 'The Prodigal Son', Australian Letters, 1(3) 1958, 37-40, p.37. 57 White, Flaws in the Glass, p.86:'the Australian myth that you must face the camera with a grin'. 58 White, Australian Letters, p.38. 59 J Sharman 'Director's Note' in Old Tote, The Season at Sarsaparilla, National Library of Australia, Papers of Patrick White, MS9982, Series 22, Folder 4, 3.xi.1976, p.4: 'If it is the function of the dramatist to reveal a society to itself, to confront and to entertain, then Patrick White's The Season at Sarsaparilla must stand as a towering landmark in the short history of the Australian drama.' 60 J Sharman, unsorted pre-production notes, 1978-79(?), Papers of Jim Sharman, National Library of Australia, MS.Acc10.103. 61 Marr, Patrick White, p.408. 62 White, Four Plays, p.263. 63 S Beckett, Watt, London: Faber and Faber, 2009, p.56. 64 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p.16: 'the shadow is the body that has escaped from itself through some localized point in the contour'. I will discuss this idea of a vanishing point in the contour in more detail in chapter two of this thesis. 65 Akerholt, p.67 66 Ibid, pp.65-6, 67, 97. 67 HG Kippax 'A Cheery Soul to Cheer Us Up' Sydney Morning Herald, 19.i.1979, p.8: Kippax wrote that it sent him 'singing into the night'. But see K Healy, The Canberra Times, 16.ii.1979, p.5: Healy calls it a 'harrowing' experience. 68 O'Sullivan, p.126. 69 Marr, Patrick White, p.13. See also G Worby, 'Signal Driver – Interview Patrick White', Theatre Australia, March 1982 12-15, p.13: White says that while he himself is 'not an optimist', his plays are 'not necessarily pessimistic'. 70 Old Tote, The Season at Sarsaparilla, National Library of Australia, Papers of Patrick White, MS9982, Series 22, Folder 4, 3.xi.1976, p.3. 71 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p.45: 'sensation, when it acquires a body through the organism, takes on an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic activity.' 72 Marr, Patrick White, p.570. 73 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p.96: 'One can fight against the cliché only with much guile, perseverance, and prudence: it is a task perpetually renewed with every painting, with every moment of every painting. It is the way of the Figure.' 44

CHAPTER TWO: THE 1989 SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY PRODUCTION OF THE HAM FUNERAL

1. Mapping the House-Territory System This study of The Ham Funeral begins with an account of director Neil Armfield's artistic relationship with Patrick White and his plays, then moves to a close description of the set of the 1989 Sydney

Theatre Company production, designed by Brian Thomson. It then concludes with an analysis of a performance of that production using the aesthetics of sensation described in the introduction. The special focus of this chapter will be the operation of the second of the three Deleuzian aesthetic elements – the house. The purpose of the historical narrative is to highlight the willingness of Patrick

White to allow his chosen collaborators to imaginatively remap the stage-territory – the aesthetic house – of The Ham Funeral for this new production. I then turn to a description of the house- territory system itself, focusing on Brian Thomson's decision to present the boarding house of Mr and Mrs Lusty as a vast animal enclosure. Critical attention will focus on the way in which this design supports the aesthetic figure as a kind of armature, a monumental scaffold that 'envelops the singularity of the place'.1 Finally, I examine the role of the house in mediating the movement of sensation between the figure and the cosmos. In particular, I will focus on the role of the house in key dramaturgical operations of becoming other.

Written in 1947 when he was living in London, The Ham Funeral is Patrick White's earliest surviving play. It is set in London, in a lodging house and surrounding streets, and to the extent that it reflects any historical time it is set some time before the Second World War. Upstairs, a young man lies on his bed and dreams of lilac blossoms and of the poems and plays that he is not sure he is capable of writing. In the next room there is a young woman who has become a symbol for the young man of his own flickering artistic sensibility. He senses her presence behind the torn wallpaper and listens for her murmurings at the keyhole. Downstairs, in the basement, the landlord and his wife, Mr and Mrs Lusty, sit mouldering amid dry crusts and potato peelings. In the first act of the play, the landlord, large and sallow, dies suddenly during an argument with his wife. While she 45

makes the necessary funeral arrangements, the young man is sent to fetch the landlord's relatives.

On his way he encounters two former prostitutes who scrounge in rubbish bins and perform a knockabout comic routine. In the second act, four ghoulish relatives descend upon the lodging house where they feast with Mrs Lusty and farewell her husband. The young man hides for a while in his room, but is soon drawn back to the basement by the pricking of his conscience. After the guests have left, Mrs Lusty attempts a rough seduction. The young man fights her off with some difficulty and threatens to strangle her. He leaves her in the basement and retreats again upstairs where he continues to debate with his imaginary interlocutor in the next room. Eventually, the hero feels that he is ready to take on the real world and make something of himself as an artist. In a final reconciliation scene, he wishes goodbye to Mrs Lusty, then opens the front door and is on his way.

Neil Armfield's revival production of The Ham Funeral for the Sydney Theatre Company opened at the Wharf Theatre in Sydney on 14 November 1989. It was the first professional production of the play in 28 years, and the first production of any kind – whether amateur or student – in more than 20 years. As a student Neil Armfield had seen Jim Sharman and Brian

Thomson's productions of Big Toys in 1977 and The Cheery Soul in 1979, and had been impressed by their clarity and theatricality, and by their moments of otherworldly power. He was particularly impressed with the opportunities that White offered for theatrical experimentation. He later recalled of White's Big Toys:

As set designer Brian Thomson's glittering view of Sydney broke open to the 'black westerly',

it was as if in that inky void an apocalyptic vision of judgement was taking possession of the

theatre.2

Here Armfield saw the example of what could be done with a White script on stage, and saw how the text could be transformed. If it was not necessarily a formative influence on his approach to directing, it nonetheless provided its own a revelation. 46

When Jim Sharman was appointed artistic director of the 1982 , he commissioned Patrick White to write Signal Driver and Armfield to direct it. As Sharman wrote in his memoir: 'I passed the baton to my younger colleague Neil Armfield'.3 In 1987, White wrote

Shepherd on the Rocks and asked Armfield to direct it. Shepherd was also the first time Armfield worked with Brian Thomson as his designer. When STC artistic director asked

Armfield to propose something for the 1988 season, he suggested The Ham Funeral, though White's boycott of the Australian bicentenary meant the production had to wait until the 1989 season.

By this time, Patrick White had become used to Armfield's rehearsal process and to the audacity of Thomson's designs.4 As Walsh points out, like all White's early plays, the text of The Ham

Funeral suggests a lack of confidence on the part of the dramatist in his theatrical collaborators because he spells out each step and shade of the action.5 In Deleuzian terms, the text of the play implies a tracing operation, a demand that theatrical interpreters represent an already existing territory. The script, for example, includes highly detailed stage descriptions which elaborate and specify exhaustively. Here is a description of the Young Man's room in Act One, Scene Three:

There is a window, BACK, a black branch with a few early leaves cutting across the pane. A

narrow iron bed with head against the wall, L. A crimson plush arm-chair, with comfortable,

rounded shoulders, R. FORWARD. Against the 'fourth wall' there would be a dressing-table.

The YOUNG MAN's coat is hanging from a hook on the door leading to the hall.6

By the late 1980s, White appears to have felt he had found collaborators that he felt he could trust.7

He was more open to experimentation, to the creation of new theatrical maps – opening new imaginative territories that in turn might generate new sensations.8 In the next section I will describe the map created for the 1989 production of The Ham Funeral.

The production was shown on ABC TV on 22 January 1990 with a simulcast on ABC-FM. A copy of the broadcast recorded to video from television and later digitised is held at the STC archives 47

where I watched it for this thesis. And so are stage manager Elly Kamal's nightly reports, in which, among other things, she describes the audience responses. Kamal described the audience for the night of the ABC television recording as 'absolutely dead' despite a 'very good performance'. It's hard not to agree with Elizabeth Schafer that this seems a tough assessment given the amount of laughter that can be heard on the audio.9 The recording was made with three cameras: one stage left near the front row, another stage right near the back of the theatre and the third just off the centre aisle, stage right. Act One goes for 67 minutes, Act Two for 57 minutes.

2. The Damp and Crumbling House After reading the script, Brian Thomson decided – instinctively and with absolute certainty – that the play was about human-animals and encagement, and should therefore be set in a zoo.10

Accordingly, he and Neil Armfield went on a research trip to Taronga Park Zoo, Sydney. Armfield described the design which Thomson's subsequently developed as the open pit of an animal cage:

It looks as if all the walls have been made from old concrete, weathered by the years. We

wanted that 'underground' feeling in the basement. There's half a wall around the front of the

stage that comes up against the audience, like a fence – you look over the wall. The floor is

soil, which goes to a wet mud at the edges. Most of the characters pad around in this very

dirty environment.11

In fact, the design looks less like a cage and more like an open pit, the kind of large sunken yard often used for a monkey or primate enclosure, with the suggestion of an invisible moat separating the audience from the half-wall at the front of the stage. Many of the detailed stage descriptions from the published version of the script have been ignored. The fact that this is nonetheless a house is asserted in large bold letters – about 60 centimetres high – on the wall of the enclosure and apparently carved from the same stone, next to the front door of the house, more or less at centre stage:

A GREAT, DAMP, CRUMBLING HOUSE 48

In this way, like an enormous Ed Ruscha statement painting, the set names itself in defiance of its appearances. These words, taken from the Young Man's prologue, effectively transform the space into a kind of non-representation of a house that is nonetheless not an abstraction. It is, rather, a laboratory for experimentation on the tracings articulated in White's script.12

In his prologue, the Young Man introduces himself and warns the audience about the sort of show they're in for:

YOUNG MAN [...] Probably quite a number of you are wondering by now whether this is your

kind of play. I'm sorry to have to announce the management won't refund any money. You

must simply sit it out, and see whether you can't recognize some of the forms that will squirm

before you in this mad, muddy mess of eels.

The published text says the prologue should be delivered from in front of the lowered curtain. The

1989 STC production retains the prologue but not the curtain. Instead, the Young Man, played by

Tyler Coppin, delivers his speech from the staircase inside the lodging house, slowly, hesitantly making his way down into the basement where he eventually climbs onto the kitchen table. Without a curtain or a revolve – which White had wanted to use in 1961 – the play begins not with the Young

Man and his prologue but with the house, visible to the audience before any character enters. In fact, the Wharf One theatre has no proscenium and no permanent front-of-house curtain. For The

Ham Funeral, the seating was arranged in the theatre's standard U shaped configuration around the sunken pit area. This thrust arrangement was in keeping with other elements suggested by circus spectacles played in the round, such as the comic drum roll and jolly Wurlitzer music at the beginning.13 This is a place where caged animals can be observed prowling and howling and occasionally fighting.

The opening monologue is a gesture of friendly connection, creating a link between the stage and the auditorium, as May-Brit Akerholt has pointed out.14 It also works to assert the 49

metatheatricality of The Ham Funeral. Armfield suggests that in the prologue the Young Man is announcing that he is the author of the play, and that it's only by appearing in the play, and undergoing the ordeal of the requisite rituals of theatre, that he can realise himself and at some level release himself.15 And there is therefore a great advantage in having the Young Man first appear, as it were, outside the play, in front of the curtain. If he is placed in the house from the beginning then the postulate of his authorship is diminished. He is already a character; definitionally, he is already domesticated, already placed in his fictional milieu. Armfield and Coppin negotiate this problem by having the Young Man begin his monologue on the stairs. Throughout the play the staircase functions as a kind of diary room, a place for characters to reflect on the action of the play and give voice to their doubts and fears; it functions as what Katherine Mansfield called a neutral ground, a liminal space where figures linger, suspended between possibilities, unprotected.16

And yet even though the details of the décor in White's house have been stripped and simplified, and the setting of the play made ambiguous, in this Armfield production it is still, structurally speaking, White's house. The four necessary sections outlined in the text's preliminary note are all retained. There is the basement area, where the landlord and landlady live, with all the furnishing which White describes (including the invisible ones, which are mimed). There is a central stairwell connecting the basement with an antechamber at street-level, and there are two front bedrooms, also at street level connecting to the antechamber. The only significant change is that the

Girl's room appears to sit above the Young Man's room, rather than at the same level on the opposite side of the front door.

White himself, at least in 1989, was pleased for the setting to be less representational and for the link with animality and the zoo metaphor to be emphasised. Indeed, as early as Sharman's production of The Season at Sarsaparilla in 1976 he appears to have accepted the importance of giving his creative collaborators their way in bringing his work alive on stage. Brian Thomson, for example, reports that White allowed him to write the set descriptions for Big Toys in 1977.17 And, 50

again according to Thomson, White appears to have been comfortable with the way the designer developed his ideas and brought them to fulfilment in The Ham Funeral:

I thought we had to set this thing in mud and we had to set it in a zoo. And so when I had it all

done in the model, I had to take it to Patrick and I was thinking, 'Oh well, here goes – he'll hate

it'. But Patrick saw it and went, 'Hmm, that's perfect, that' always what I had in mind – I didn't

know when I was writing the stage directions that that is what I wanted'.18

In this production Thomson's overall design seems to suggest a kind of monumental simplification rather than the subtractive minimalism of his design for The Cheery Soul.

The stage directions for the actors have also been simplified. In Kerry Walker's rehearsal script, held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, all the stage directions for Mrs Lusty have been whited out and new ones pencilled into the margin. They appear to be consistent with the originals, but streamlined. Where, for instance, in Act One, Scene One, the script requires Mrs Lusty to go her husband and put 'her hand on his shoulder, so that for the moment they make a monumental, if primitive whole', Walker's substitute marginal note simply reads: 'Go to him / walk hand along back of chair'.19 It is arguable, however, that White's novelistic stage direction, which is part ambiguity and part metaphorical fancy, remains present in this production in the stage design, in the soaring monumentality of the walls and the suggestion of something rough hewn and primitive. The large slab-like walls of the boarding house which isn't a boarding house seem to curl around the contours of the theatre itself, embracing the figures in the basement, confining them, isolating them.

And we should emphasise the monumentality of the setting. The walls of the house are an edifice which stands in contradiction to and is a bulwark against whatever lies beyond. It is a shelter for the Young Man and the Lustys, as well as an enclosure or trap: it imprisons and it protects and nurtures, shielding the figure of the Young Man from the unseen forces of the universe, and the confusion which threatens to destroy him.20 The great, damp, crumbling house is that which situates 51

this figure in a certain place, a place which is distinguished from and set against the seething complexities of the cosmos. Where, after all, is the great house located in Neil Armfield's production? It is located not in London but in a kind of universal indeterminacy, somewhere that could be anywhere.21 Indeed, the STC programme declares: 'SETTING. A GREAT. DAMP. CRUMBLING

HOUSE. ANYWHERE'. And yet the insides of the house provide a specific territory, one in which the

Young Man may progress toward self-understanding, towards development and his becoming:

The important point is that [Houses] do not consign the Figure to immobility but, on the

contrary, render sensible a kind of progression, an exploration of the Figure within the place,

or upon itself.22

I have shown in Chapter One that a powerful aesthetic figure such as Miss Docker, who is at once a destroyer and a creator of life, is able to support herself as the subject of her own trial and experience. Her depicted progression is self-reflexive: it is an exploration of the figure upon itself.

Motivated by an intense play of contradictions, Miss Docker requires only the most minimal contour, the most shadowy outline of a house for support or shelter.23 It is not like this for the Young Man. In contrast to Miss Docker, he does not have sufficient vital energy to escape through his own scream.

Indeed, his character is not, or not initially, co-extensive with the formal element of the aesthetic figure in the way that Miss Docker appears to be. The Young Man begins the play as only one part of the larger figural composition, an ensemble which includes both individual characters and other non-human flows activated in the performance. And the more substantial armature provided by

Thomson and Armfield not only supports him and shields him, but also to joins him with other intersecting figures, bringing together the single dynamic assemblage.

3. Two Becomings: Animal and Meat The previous section described the basic contour of the house-territory system in the 1989 production of The Ham Funeral. According to the Deleuzian framework of analysis utilised in this thesis, the territory or house provides a staging ground for the transformation of the aesthetic 52

figure. The house participates in a movement of sensory becoming, an intensive process whereby the aesthetic figure is becoming 'other' while continuing to be what it is.24 That is, at one level the figure persists in its representational function, at another – the level of sensation – it enters into a line of continuous variation, deepening the audience's experience by freeing up new affective possibilities in a movement toward and against the limits of the house, ultimately moving from the finite to the infinite, from the house-territory to the city-cosmos. In dramaturgical terms, as Patrick

White himself puts it, the problem of sensory becoming in The Ham Funeral is the problem of how

'to dissolve [the] stubborn groups of statuary into the fluid lines of workable theatre'.25 In this section I argue that it is possible to map two preliminary stages of sensory becoming in the 1989 production of The Ham Funeral: becoming animal and becoming meat. These are moments where the molar groupings of symbolic representation tied to stiff characterisations are changed into a new fluency, into a flux of ceaseless and present becoming, restoring the quality that Artaud saw as definitional of theatre: 'a passionate and convulsive conception of life'.26 a. Becoming Animal First there is the becoming animal. Deleuze describes this process as a transformative deterritorialisation of fixed identity. It is the attempt to connect with an element of animality in order to create some kind of composite otherness, a process that is performative but not representational or imitative. From the beginning, Brian Thomson's design highlights a potential for an animal transformation congruent with the humid sensuality of White's writing. Taking inspiration from the image in the Young Man's prologue of a 'mad, muddy, mess of eels', Thomson's set emphasises a feeling of enclosure, with the animals thrown dangerously together. In his prologue, the Young Man explains that his own problem is how to participate in the 'conflict of eels'. He is not yet animal enough for this enclosure. His first challenge is that of becoming-eel, the problem of how to be an eel-in-the-making, which he understands to be one way of becoming-artist or becoming- poet. In Act One, Scene Four, he gets his chance during the first great brawl on the floor of the enclosure. Mrs Lusty has coaxed the Young Man down to the basement with the promise of bread, 53

dripping and company. The Landlady's maternal interest in his welfare disturbs the delicate balance of conjugal harmony and in the ensuing animal combat between the Landlord and the Landlady the

Landlord dies.

As Mrs Lusty, Kerry Walker is in pale pancake face, with angry slashes of dark red for eyebrow and lighter ones on her cheekbones. Her lips are a different red again, somewhere between the two.

She wears a faded pink sheepskin jacket over a padded fat suit, though she still appears much slimmer than Joan Bruce in 1961. Max Cullen as the Landlord sports a buzz cut and thick moustache.

He wears ancient corded woollen underwear and incessantly chews on his thick pipe. He is a hulking presence, with his forearms on show with his pushed up sleeves. He is well cast as an old wrestler.

Throughout the fight, triggered by Alma Lusty asking her husband to tell the story of his youth, the Young Man is an attendant figure. 'Am I the chorus to this play?' he wonders. 'No one ever cursed the chorus.'27 The Young Man describes the brawl as 'two fat people in a basement, turning on each other'. While they struggle on an emotional level, trading insults, their attacks are paralleled by recollections of the Landlord's past wrestling triumphs: 'I threw Joe 'Arris, and Billy Doyle, and

Patsy Lonergan. I 'eld 'em to the ground till their ribs and thighs was crackin'. I could feel the whole world give in me hands.'28 It's a theme taken up by the choric youth:

YOUNG MAN (mock heroic) Then she threw 'im on the grass, 'is muscles turned to fat!29

But Max Cullen as the Landlord is impassive, without nostalgia. He sits as stout and pale and settled as a figure carved from lard:

I sit 'ere. I am content. Life, at last, is wherever a man 'appens to be. This 'ouse is life. I watch

it fell with light, an' darken. These are my days and nights. The solid 'ouse spreadin' above

my head.30 54

Only occasionally does he remember the possible life which is beyond the house, the life from which he is sheltered, and this remembrance makes him vulnerable: like a wound, a breach in the defences, a slit in his umbrella, something his wife exploits in their struggle. The Young Man notices:

YOUNG MAN And my lungs are bursting, with enthusiasm and excitement ... now that his

flesh has opened, and I look inside.31

Peering into the wound, he glimpses a possible world beyond the house. He moves closer to the

Landlord, as though the wound were an escape hatch. The Young Man's interest in the Landlord infuriates the Land Lady. She advances on the Young Man. The Wurlitzer organ begins to play, signalling the first movement of becoming. The Landlady slips her arms around his neck, involving him intimately in the bestial encounter. Breaking her embrace with the Young Man, the Landlady flings at her husband the memory of her infidelity. He hits her, and then, as the basement darkens he dies.

The Young Man involves himself in a process of becoming-animal, a mode of occupation corresponding to the basement milieu and the struggle between the Landlord and the Landlady.

With the death of the Landlord, however, he sees that becoming-animal is only the first intensive movement. Although eely struggle initially liberates the Landlord's desires, stirs him back into life, animality fails to prevent their re-territorialisation as bitter memories of his wife's affair.32 The

Landlord instead follows a new and more radical line of flight, as meat, one that finally allows him to escape the basement: an end of becoming that points to the immanent mystery of the play and the

Young Man's ultimate destination. b. Becoming Meat Act Two of the play begins with the Landlady entertaining the four relatives of the dead

Landlord at a wake in the basement. Will Lusty's body, placed on the bed during the first act, has been removed. By way of substitute or transformation, his body has been swapped for a large boiled ham, which sits on the kitchen table surrounded by glasses and two bottles of stout. Symbolically, 55

the Landlord is now the food of renewal and regeneration in an absurd enactment of the ritual of eating the gods.33 As Mrs Lusty observes, the eating of the ham-landlord signals a new beginning:

'everything begins ... over and over again.' That some sort of metamorphosis has taken place is underlined in a story told by the Landlady in Scene Five of Act Two, shortly after the Young Man has returned to the basement and joined the feast. The ham she says coyly, stifling a belch, reminds her of her wedding night. Will Lusty smuggled a 'tre-mend-jous' wedding ham into their nuptial bed as a joke. When Alma awoke the next morning and discovered the remains of the baked meat in Will's place, it was as though she saw her new husband transfigured. The company all agree that Will was

'always a jokey one'.34 The Young Man at this point starts to show compassion for what the Landlord is and for the tormented Landlady.

The ham is also an expression of a simultaneous movement of affective becoming, a formal operation at the level of sensation, beneath or beyond any enactment of its signification or meaning.

It is a transformation or spasm of the figural composition. The Landlord aspect of the figure is transforming into meat. Following Deleuze, we can name this movement 'pity' for the meat:

Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a

'fact,' a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his

compassion.35

If we accept Armfield's suggestion, noted above, that the Young Man is the author of the play, then it is possible that in this scene the Young Man is also – like the painter described by Deleuze – identifying with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The ham is in any case the intensive focus of the scene; and the aesthetic figure is attempting to escape toward the material structure of the theatre through the meat.36 Here the aesthetic figure in one of its component parts is revealed as participating in a state that is common to humans and animals alike: a universal meat.37 Mrs

Lusty, even deep in her cups, sees the change in the Young Man: 56

LANDLADY (holding her temples) Wasn't it something about the moon? Didn't they put the

moon out, Jack?

YOUNG MAN If they didn't, they'll have a good try. But I shouldn't worry.

LANDLADY You sound kind, young man.38

The Landlady is slumped at the table, her figure is distorted and partially hidden behind the glasses and the bottles, but on this last line Kerry Walker's voice is very clear and sounds very gentle, very maternal. Down the stairwell, the relatives offer a parting shot:

FIRST RELATIVE (aping LANDLADY, his hand cupped to his mouth, calling down into the

stairwell) Another slice of 'am, young man? Another slice of 'am?39

That is how it is written in the script. In fact, in the Sydney Theatre Company production, all four relatives speak the final question together, shouting it less as an imitation than as a jeer, a mock, a tease. Then the relatives leave for good, stomping through the front door, blaring and braying.

In the next scene, the Landlady drunkenly tries to seduce the Young Man. He in turn tries to strangle her. During their awkward and humiliating struggle, where neither is successful, the Young

Man experiences an epiphany. At last he realises that he must leave the house and become an artist.

'I shall possess the infinite,' he declares as he races up the stairs to his room to pack his bags.

4. Toward Deterritorialisation A number of critics have attempted to read The Ham Funeral biographically. David Marr, for example, sees the play as a double allegory: first of White's struggle to free himself from his mother's influence, and then as a formal goodbye to London. He describes it as 'a poet growing up and fighting his way out of the smothering embrace of his landlady, Alma Lusty, and her great, damp, crumbling house.'40 This can be read as a declaration of White's own determination to be an artist on his own terms, but a performance of the play will only succeed if it can also communicate the movement of becoming-artist or becoming-poet beneath the spectacle of the Young Man 57

breaking free. This requires the construction of a 'rhizomatic' map of the play, revealing its lines of deterritorialisation and undoing the rigid tracings of the oedipal triangulation.41

The last step toward re-thinking a performance in terms of a logic of sensation is to describe that final movement toward deterritorialisation, away from the overdetermined, the always already coded stage space, and toward the fluid and disintegrated plane of composition, that realm of dissipation, where there is an audience, a theatre building and a great world elsewhere. This is a becoming-imperceptible, passing into the invisibility where it is beyond perception and is unseen.

For the figure of Young Man it is the flight out, the migration away from the Great Damp Crumbling

House, and a homecoming, where coming home is an indwelling with the audience itself.

After the Landlady's thwarted seduction, the Young Man retreats upstairs to talk with his

Anima, and realises that he has to escape the house:

Well, here we are ... back where we began ... amongst the ever-lasting furniture. This bed on

which the nights creak ... The washstand's not ambiguous. Or dressing-table... except

perhaps the refection in the glass. But the bones are there. The eyes can see. And all the

time, life of a kind has been seeping through the cracks in this house... flowing through the

streets in waves of faces.42

After he delivers this speech, which in Neil Armfield's Sydney Theatre Company production is accompanied by rising chords on the organ (as though pointing to some imminent epiphany), Tyler

Coppin's Young Man steps out into the hallway and meets the woman who rents the room next to his. She is played by Pamela Rabe, who also plays the Anima but is utterly transformed in her 'real' female aspect.43 Instead of the personification of his artistic ambitions, upright and free-flowing in her movements, she is now a caricature of a frowzy, somewhat adenoidal young woman, hunched and graceless. Their meeting seems to make Tyler Coppin's Young Man even more determined to leave the house. It is as if her appearance is a sign that, yes, life has indeed been all the while 58

entering unnoticed through the cracks of the house, and that another movement, one toward the material structure of the house – and then beyond it – is necessary .

Without a word to Phyllis Pither, the Young Man dashes downstairs to say goodbye to Mrs

Lusty, who has recovered from their earlier struggle. Mrs Lusty is a tough nut, an abiding figure, and the Young Man has already predicted that she will live to relish her bruises and survive her confession. In the final scene the Young Man scampers up the stairs from the basement toward the street:

Young Man (thoughtfully) How warm her face was ...

(He goes towards the front door.)

... and touching...

(He opens the door on a night placid with moonlight.)

....lovely in its way ... the way of those who've lived, and confessed, and survived their own

confession. Well, here's the street. (Looking out through doorway) The night was never

stiller, or closer, I could put out my hand and touch it... like a face ... (He leaves the house,

goes into the street. As the door closes the whole of the back wall dissolves, so that the

Young Man is seen walking into the distance through a luminous night.)

Tyler Coppin tone is poetic and rhapsodic as he shapes in the direction of hushed ecstasy. A light shines almost horizontally through the doorway. When the Young Man points outside, as if to touch a face, his hand falls directly into the light and seems to glow.

The final stage directions just quoted have an overreaching ambition and caused difficulties in the earlier Sydney production.44 But the difficulties go beyond the technical. The stage directions don't have the Young Man actually escaping the house, at least in a material sense. Why? Because he remains on stage, within his territory. They require him to exit through the mere representation 59

of a door. Even if he goes backstage, he is in a sense only disappearing further into his territory. It is the illusion of an escape. And so long as the Young Man remains within the structure of the house, the play won't have achieved itself in terms of dramatic movement. It won't ultimately flow and the figures will remain fixed in their various 'stubborn groups'.

The Young Man has already tried to escape the house once before, at the end of the Act One when he went to fetch the relatives. On this first attempt he was confronted by another house, which was of course the same house, or at least joined together according interfaces.45 It is the contrast between his first 'aborted' attempt and his successful final escape which ultimately sustains the work and allows the spectator to take satisfaction from the drama. In the first act, the Young

Man, trying to make himself useful to the grieving Landlady, fumbling towards empathy, goes off to fetch the relatives. When he leaves the house, he first encounters the 'knockabout women of the piece', then arrives at the house of the hammy relatives. It is as though the Young Man remains circumscribed by the Great Damp Crumbling House. He has simply opened a new door on his captivity.

At the end of the Act Two, at the end of the play, his escape from the house must not only be an escape from the lodging house, but from the theatre itself. In Armfield's production, on Coppin's final line there is a pause, and then the sound of drums. He realises that if he leaves through the front door (which is only the representation of a front door) he will only end up at the threshold of another house, as he did in the first act. So, instead, the Young Man turns around and runs helter skelter down the stairs and back through the basement. (The deliberate clamour and clatter on the steps create a neat symmetry with the opening of the play, where we hear a recording of slow tentative footsteps echoing from every which way.) He vaults the low front wall into the audience, and then runs up the centre aisle toward the glowing exit sign. There is no other way out of the labyrinthine great house that is also the theatre. 60

It is worth comparing this scene to Deleuze's analysis of Francis Bacon's paintings, where he describes bodies moving towards a 'vanishing point' in the contour:

It is no longer the material structure that curls around the contour in order to envelop the

Figure, it is the Figure that wants to pass through a vanishing point in the contour in order to

dissipate into the material structure.46

By taking the figure out of the frame and placing it on a new trajectory, transforming the drama and sending it into a void constituted by the world beyond the play, the 1989 production of The Ham

Funeral created something original and renewed the play's striking originality. It is worth noting that this was the second time that Armfield had employed such a solution in his interpretation of White's plays. When Armfield directed Signal Driver at Belvoir Street Theatre in 1985, the performance finished with 'the chorus of two dragging open the back wall of the Belvoir Street Theatre and dancing into the grotty night of Clisdell Street, Surry Hills […] a wonderful and strangely shocking exit for two irksome characters'.47

The critical consensus was that the play was done as well as anyone could wish. 'I cannot imagine a stronger case for The Ham Funeral,' wrote Ken Healy, 'than Neil Armfield's production on

Brian Thomson's set.'48 Bob Evans, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald was among the most enthusiastic reviewers:

From the first ringing chords of the vaudevillian organ music and the encircling echoes of the

Young Man's footsteps, to his final ascent of the stairs from Mrs Lusty's basement to the

street and the stars, The Ham Funeral presents an enthralling affirmation of life.49

And White himself was pleased, saying: 'I can't hope for a better production than this.'50

The STC production of The Ham Funeral demonstrates how it is possible for a performance to creatively re-map the house-territory system of a given theatre text, and to imagine a new and more experimental territory for the play, amplifying its impact at the level of sensation. As a theatre text, 61

The Ham Funeral is a journey of self-discovery involving a young poet's attempt to leave a squalid boarding house. An analysis of the STC production shows how this dynamic of discovery and departure can be amplified at the level of sensation. First, Brian Thomson's design for a boarding house that resembles a monumental animal enclosure helps to isolate and define the aesthetic figure. It also fosters connections between fields, revealing new openings from the house to the cosmos, lines of deterritorialisation linked inspired by the animal sensuousness in White's text.

Second, the figure encounters these lines and engages in a flight toward and then beyond the material structure of the mise en scène. At one level this directly linked to the spectacle of becoming-artist or becoming-poet. At another more fundamental level it is an intensive movement of becoming-imperceptible. The aesthetic figure breaks free of the territory of the house, and indeed the theatre, and is finally dissolved in the universe-cosmos, signalling the conclusion of the performance. This successful re-mapping of the play had a major impact on subsequent productions.

Even negative reviews acknowledged that the production confirmed the play's place in the repertoire of Australia's theatre classics.51 After this production, it became part of the Australian theatre landscape.52

1 G Deleuze and F Guattari, What Is Philosophy? New York: Verso, 1994, p.187. 2 N Armfield, 'Patrick White: A Centenary Tribute', Meanjin, 71(2) 2012, p.18. 3 J Sharman, Blood & Tinsel: A Memoir, Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2008, p.278. 4 Armfield, 'A Centenary Tribute', p.25. 5 See W Walsh, Patrick White's Fiction, Hornsby: Allen and Unwin, 1977, p.79. 6 Ibid, p.20. 7 P White to D Moore, National Library of Australia, Papers of Patrick White, MS9982, Series 1.1, File 42, 9.xii.1978: 'This production won't be the least bit naturalistic, nor will it make any concessions to the audience. I'm all for that!' 8 F Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, New York: Semiotext(e), 2011, p.171. 9 E Schafer, 'A Ham Funeral: Patrick White, Collaboration and Neil Armfield', Australian Studies, 3 2011, p.5. 10 N Armfield, 'Extracts from a Briefing for Subscribers' in Program notes (Schoolsday Program), The Ham Funeral, Sydney Theatre Company, 14.xi.1989, p.27. 11 Ibid. 12 Guattari, p.172. 13 Schafer, p.12. 14 M-B Akerholt, Patrick White, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988, p.10. 15 Armfield, 'Director's Note', p.10. 16 JM Murray (ed), The Letters of Katherine Mansfield v.2, London: Constable & Co, 1928, p.391. 17 A Fuhrmann, 'A Theatre of His Own: The Problematic Plays of Patrick White', Australian Book Review, November 2013, p.43. 62

18 M Heckenberg, 'Continuing Threads of Modernist Minimalism in the Contemporary Practice and Discourse of Australian Scenographers', Australasian Drama Studies, 58 2011 88-106, p.104. 19 P White, The Ham Funeral, Kerry Walker Papers Relating to Patrick White, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS.7566. 20 See P White, Four Plays, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965, p.21: 'Sometimes I stand in the street and watch them. Then my ignorance begins to choke me.' 21 See Schafer, p.8: discusses Thomson and Armfield's relocation of play from 'a lodging house and streets, London' to somewhere more ambiguous. 22 G Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, New York: Continuum, 2003, p.2. 23 Ibid. 24 Deleuze and Guattari, p.177. 25 P White, 'About the Play', in Program notes, The Ham Funeral, University Union Hall, Adelaide, 15.xi.1961, p.1. 26 A Artaud, Theatre and Its Double, New York: Grove Press, 1958, p.66. 27 White, Four Plays, p.28. 28 Ibid, p.25. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid, p.27. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid, p.29: 'Only once I set eyes on Him…' 33 JR Dyce, Patrick White as Playwright, St.Lucia: UQP, 1974, p.19. 34 White, Four Plays, pp.58-62. 35 Deleuze, p.23. 36 Deleuze, p.18. 37 D Olkowski, 'Deleuze's Aesthetics of Sensation' in D Smith and H Somers-Hall (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p.280. 38 White, Four Plays, p.61. 39 Ibid, p.62. 40 D Marr, Patrick White: A Life, Sydney: Random House Australia, 1991, p.252-3. 41 Guattari, p.171. 42 White, Four Plays, p.71. 43 See J Carmody, 'Brilliant Play Bristles with Life', Sun Herald, 19.xi.1989, p.133. 44 'Author on the Set', Sydney Morning Herald, 5.vii.1962, p.21. 45 Deleuze and Guattari, p.189. 46 Deleuze, pp.16-17. 47 F Gauntlett, 'Review of Signal Driver', Daily Mirror, 29.v.1985, p.20: Gauntlett described this moment as the production highlight. 48 K Healey, 'An educating nightmare', The Sydney Review, 1.ix.1989, p 22. 49 B Evans, 'Timely Production of an Extraordinary Play', Sydney Morning Herald, 16.xi.1989, p.16. 50 Marr, p.641. 51 R Neill, 'Drama Falters in House of Words', The Australian, 16.xi.1989, p.12; V Kelly, 'Old Patterns, New Energies' in V Kelly (ed), Our Australian theatre in the 1990s, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, p.21. 52 G Milne, Theatre Australia (un)limited: Australian Theatre Since the 1950s, Amsterdam: New York: Rodopi, 2004, p.304. 63

CHAPTER THREE: THE 2007 SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY PRODUCTION OF THE SEASON AT SARSAPARILLA

1. Problematising Mildred Street This analysis of the 2007 Sydney Theatre Company production of The Season at Sarsaparilla focuses on the cosmos, the third compositional element of Deleuze and Guattari's aesthetics of sensation, and the importance of maintaining a dramaturgical relationship to chaos without in fact becoming chaotic. Although the cosmos will be the focus, there will necessarily be further discussion of the other two elements, the house and the figure, as it is through the material structure of the house- territory system that the figure extracts from the intensive forces of the cosmos a pure being of sensation. The chapter begins by framing Patrick White's play in terms of a Deleuzian paradigm of a problem-question complex. Analysis then turns to the mise en scène of the STC production, emphasising the ways in which this production broke with previous interpretations of the play and how Andrews and his team generated an atmosphere of heightened excitement by combining the three houses on Mildred Street into one. I then introduce two related Deleuzian concepts, amputation and prosthesis, to account for the impact at an affective level of the deployment of the revolve and the network of on-stage cameras.

On 14 April 1961, White's play, The Ham Funeral, was officially rejected by the organisers of

1962 Adelaide Festival. In a letter to the critic and historian Geoffrey Dutton on 2 May 1961, White wrote:

I find, after all, I got rather a battering over The Ham Funeral. My final reaction has been to

sit down on May Day and start a new play, the first for fourteen years. The last two days it

has been pouring out in almost an alarming way, and will probably shock more than the

Funeral, as this one is purely Australian, and at the same time has burst right out of the

prescribed four walls of Australian social realism.1 64

This was The Season at Sarsaparilla, a play which gave a suburban Australian form and pressure to the 'sordidness and bad language' to which the Governors and their supporters had objected in The

Ham Funeral.2 White wanted his audience to see that the so-called filth was not only a part of everyday life, but that it was its most vital and creative part. A background to the action of the play is the offstage sound of a pack of neighbourhood dogs barking as they pursue a bitch in heat. White thought of these dogs as transforming agents or as a kind of catalyst. According to White The Season at Sarsaparilla is about 'the effect a bitch in season has on a certain suburban street'.3 The dogs confront the residents of Sarsaparilla, huddled in their suburban boxes, with the daily spectacle of autonomic animal desire, an overflowing and deranging power that introduces for an extended moment some quality of chaos into their lives. This interpenetration of sensuality culminates in Nola

Boyle, a former barmaid, betraying her husband, the local nightsoil man, with his best mate.

The play is a seriocomic study of life on the fringes of Australia's post-World War Two urban sprawl, focusing on three families from somewhat different social strata living side-by-side on

Mildred Street in the fictional suburb of Sarsaparilla during the summer of 1960. This was familiar territory for White. A number of his stories set in Sarsaparilla and later included in were written at this time, and his 1961 novel Riders in the Chariot also takes place in and around

Sarsaparilla. White satirises the rigid and coercive conventionality and creeping materialism of life behind the picket fences, and makes it the material for his drama; but he also seeks to disclose something strange and beautiful. In his essay, 'The Prodigal Son', he wrote how he:

wanted to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which

alone could make bearable the lives of such people, and incidentally, my own life since my

return.4

And there is evidence in the recently released literary notebooks of Patrick White in the National

Library of Australia that as early as 1958 White was sketching out ideas for a play with metaphysical 65

themes set in the suburbs. This, for example, is a fragment of verse to be read by a chorus of 'good mothers':

I have a Santa Claus in the house.

Some kind of a pale male,

to bring home the washing machine.5

Compare this with Girlie Pogson's declaration in Act One of Sarsaparilla that: 'It's a man and a washing-machine that counts.'6

The Season at Sarsaparilla also enacts Patrick White's ambition to create a more sophisticated theatre, one which could treat Australian subjects in a way that was not inertly reflective in its naturalism. That is, he wanted a theatre that could relate to its milieu as a problem: a theatre where form was a response to the problem and not a reproduction of it. During the late 1950s, White had privately expressed disgruntlement at the popular success of Ray Lawler's Summer of the

Seventeenth Doll because he thought Lawler's play pandered to its audience's desire for sentimental banalities. 'The reproduction', he wrote in his notebook on the pages immediately following the fragments of the suburban chorus quoted above, 'has not the faintest tinge of great art. It remains a rather boring version of the real.'7 At the same time, White was conscious of the significance of The

Doll in depicting real Australians on the stage with a recognisable vigour and authenticity. In The

Season at Sarsaparilla, White attempted to combine the soap-opera naturalism of The Doll, its deployment of idiomatic dialogue and its presentation of familiar domestic images and types, with the kind of expressionistic effects that he had developed in The Ham Funeral.8

The new play was first produced at the Union Guild Theatre in Adelaide by the same semi- amateur company that premiered The Ham Funeral. It opened on 14 September 1962. Fully professional productions followed in Melbourne and then Sydney in 1963. After this, The Season at

Sarsaparilla was not performed again at anything like a professional level until it was revived at 66

Sydney's Old Tote in 1976 with Jim Sharman directing. Working with designer Wendy Dickson, Jim

Sharman sought to highlight the play's deeper mythical implications, and to bring out the seriousness of White's vision and its implicit religious intensity. Whereas the designs used in 1962 for the three kitchens of the three houses on Mildred Street had a lot of naturalistic detail, as if to confront the audience with something familiar but private, Sharman's production tended toward the abstract and minimalist.9 According to the director:

The origins of a play like The Season at Sarsaparilla are medieval morality plays, where you

wheeled three carts into a market square, heaven, hell and earth. We understood that what

we were dealing with was something very ancient.10

In this production of Sarsaparilla, the three kitchens were indicated by three sparsely furnished platforms, one pink, one blue and one beige. And the characters wore colour-coded costumes, depending on which house they belonged to.11

The three plays of Patrick White examined in this thesis all impose formal and stylistic constraints in which potentially new theatrical experiences are imagined or conjured. They present staging problems which have a challenging fascination: they are experiments to be conducted, dramatic theorems to be worked at. They require theatre makers to go beyond the conventional process of adapting a dramatic text to new theatrical conditions. In The Season at Sarsaparilla the formal difficulty at the heart of the play is the problem of the three houses. How should they be presented on stage? In the published text of the play, White gives a detailed plan for one possible solution to the problem. His description is an imprint of the implicit conditions for making theatre in

Australia in the late 1950s, but it would be wrong to see it as an imperative. In fact, it is no longer a viable schema for the staging of the play. Directors and designers in the presence of this play have been forced to respond otherwise – to remap the play and make it new. In Sharman's production, the problem was engaged head on by eliminating the naturalistic detail of the set and by adding a 67

highly stylised design concept. The houses were no longer three panels in a social panorama, but rather three stations in an ascent towards spiritual progress.

Benedict Andrews first encountered the plays of Patrick White when he was a student at

Flinders University Drama School in the early 1990s. In 1994, he directed White's Netherwood as his graduation production. This was at the suggestion of Jules Holledge, then a Senior Lecturer in Drama at Flinders, who had seen the play directed by Jim Sharman at Lighthouse Theatre in 1983. The next year, Andrews assisted Sharman on a production of Strindberg's Miss Julie, and the year after that he was Neil Armfield's assistant on a production of Patrick White's Night on Bald Mountain. Both productions were staged in Adelaide. From the beginning, his work showed considerable visual sophistication, incorporating experimental design and multimedia elements into his productions.12

He began working with the Sydney Theatre Company in 1999, and between 2000 and 2005 he directed nine productions, including work by Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, Marius von Mayenburg,

Shakespeare, Chekhov, Calderón and Beckett.

Benedict Andrews's production of the Season at Sarsaparilla for the STC opened at the Drama

Theatre in the Sydney Opera House on 3 March 2007 after five previews. It was created with an in- house ensemble of actors known as the Actors Company. Robert Cousins was the set designer and

Alice Babidge was the costume designer. Nick Schlieper did the lighting and Alan John the music. The production had a successful four-week run in Sydney, and came to Melbourne in 2008 at the Arts

Centre Playhouse, where it was included in the Melbourne Theatre Company's general season. I saw the MTC production on 6 February 2008. I have also watched a recording of the Sydney production from the STC Archives, which was filmed with a single back-of-house camera on 27 March 2007, the last week of the initial season.

2. Three Houses into One The STC production of The Season at Sarsaparilla situates the action of the play inside and around a detailed imitation of a brick veneer home of the kind that proliferated across Australia in the years 68

following the Second World War.13 What we see is a suburban box, built with actual blond bricks, dark brown glazed roof tiles, a hipped roof and brick chimney, and with shallow eaves. This standalone house is built on a revolving stage, with two screens for video projections on either side.

A Hammond organ sits stage right. Act One begins with a view of the rear of the house, which measures roughly eight metres in length. Facing the audience are two long picture windows, a flyscreen door, and narrow double awning windows above a kitchen sink. The video screens are rectangular panels roughly one and half metres high by two metres wide, and raised off the stage about one and half metres on two thin black poles. They look a bit like miniature highway billboards.

Otherwise, the space around the house is dark and featureless; it seems to be nothing but absence, blackness, a void.

This is a striking departure from the design stipulated by Patrick White in the published text of the play. White describes the scene as 'three platforms representing the three kitchens of three homes in Mildred Street, Sarsaparilla'.14 He also suggests the director and designer use a skeleton of a suburban house to frame each platform 'provided the audience's view is not obstructed'. White's visual conception brings to mind, in a general way, the tradition of the New Comedies in Hellenistic

Greece, most famously those of Menander, which were typically set as a street scene in front of the façade of two or three houses inhabited by middle-class Athenian citizens. The tripartite division of the stage is also consistent with White's tendency, especially in his early plays, to make the structure of the set integral to the meaning of the play.15

The design of the three houses dictates and gives form to the interaction between the different families. Benedict Andrews describes this as the theatrical motor of the play and the source of its dramatic energy:

The simultaneous presentation of the three backyards and kitchens envisaged in the stage

directions generates a kind of machine for the play. This machine causes the lives lived in 69

boxes to overlap, and it allows an overlapping of mundane routines and the dream-life of the

play.16

Every professional and semi-professional production of this play before this one placed the three houses side by side, dividing the stage space into three roughly equal segments. Andrews claims that he broke with this approach because he felt that the friction between the three families, the feeling of lives and dreams rubbing up against one another, needed to be exacerbated and amplified for contemporary audiences.17 Andrews belongs to the first generation of Australians who have no direct experience of the world described in White's play, the world of bright linoleum and hire purchase whitegoods, semi-rural suburbs dotted with small brick boxes.18 And unlike previous directors of this play – for example, John Tasker, Jim Sharman and Neil Armfield – he came of age as a director after the death of Patrick White and after the disappearance of fringe suburbs like

Sarsaparilla. He claims to have no nostalgia for the world of mixmasters and formica-topped breakfast tables, a nostalgia (or impulse to recapitulate) that was evident even in the productions of

Jim Sharman and Neil Armfield. Instead, with designer Robert Cousins, Andrews presents his suburban box as a kind of museum object, objet trouvé or cultural artefact, coolly displayed on a bare stage.

By using only a single house, Andrews and his team set for themselves a complex staging puzzle. The three families criss-cross in the one kitchen all the while sustaining the pretence that they are in different kitchens. It is as if three identical rooms were viewed simultaneously. This charade is sustained by the careful orchestration of entrances and exits, and by the use of framing devices such as open doors, windows, special lighting effects and the video cameras installed in the house. These frames separate the performers, isolating them from one another, creating a border or limit which makes it easier for the spectator to imagine that the figures are in different houses. This effect of isolation is used primarily for stylised moments of lyrical rumination. In Act One, for example, when Girlie Pogson, played by Peter Carroll, reminisces about her childhood in Rosedale, 70

we see her standing framed by one of the picture windows, illuminated by a soft white spotlight. At the same moment, Nola Boyle, played by Pamela Rabe, is sitting on the step in front of the door, lit by the same kind of soft white spotlight, and Clive Pogson, played by John Gaden, completes the trinity because he can be seen on the two video screens sitting at the kitchen table. All three stare out at the audience from their temporary enclosures.19

At other times, when the tempo is faster and there is more cross-dialogue and more movement, the figment of the three houses becomes more obviously factitious. For example, in the early parts of Act One, where Roy Child (Eden Falk) and Judy Pogson (Hayley McElhinney) are both sitting at the small kitchen table, eating breakfast, the imaginary partition seems almost to dissolve, though it never unambiguously does. The performance of this scene in the STC production requires that first Clive, then Nola, then Harry Knott (Martin Blum) – all ostensibly in different houses – exit through the same door at the back of the kitchen. We also see first Judy and then Roy both sit down at the same kitchen table. Girlie Pogson cleans up in the kitchen area, while to her right Mavis Knott

(Emily Dawe) stands looking out of one of the picture windows; Nola wanders between them, dreaming about the circus and high-wire performers with their strong wrists and precision timing.

This elision of the three houses into one is every bit as audacious in those scenes where

White's script indicates that the characters should speak to one another across their picket fences, as in Act One, for example, when Mavis, Nola and Girlie, the three housewives, call to one another from their respective backyards. In the script the scene is set like this:

(THREE WIVES have reached their back doors: MAVIS eating her banana and relaxing, GIRLIE

sweeping out the dirt, NOLA shaking out her heather-duster. GIRLIE catches sight of NOLA,

and ignores. NOLA catches sight of MAVIS beyond GIRLIE.)20

In the STC production, all three performers are gathered at the same point, at the flywire door.

Mavis stands just outside the door, leaning against the wall, Girlie stands just inside the house, and 71

Nola stands on the step, holding the door open. Rather than looking at one another as they talk, the three women look out toward the audience. Throughout the conversation, Nola is threatening to slam the door, just as Girlie is about to step through it. Eventually, on the words, 'I can't stand picking!' Nola goes into the house and slams the door behind her. It is immediately caught and opened by Girlie who goes out of it.

Patrick White describes The Season at Sarsaparilla on the title page as 'a charade of suburbia'.

At one level, charade here evokes a comedy or farce, a performed bit of nothing or thing without substance; but it is also a dumbshow or pantomime riddle, as in the parlour game. And White does suggest that some part of the performance should use mime:

In each kitchen there is a minimum of visible furniture. Producer and designer will have to

decide how many actual props may be omitted. It is suggested mime should be resorted to as

much as possible, and wherever it would not make the action too tricky and distracting.21

In this production, by omitting two of the houses, Benedict Andrews and Robert Cousins have discovered a new outer limit for 'trickiness and distraction', and in doing so have transformed the entire play into a kind of elaborate charade in which three houses are indicated by one. It is a stage world where we see two characters making for the one door. They are on a potential collision course but at the last moment one of them veers off to check her make up in a mirror. It is all managed so rapidly and so deftly that the audience has little time to register these near misses but they do contribute to a feeling of heightened excitement, which is at the edge of anxiety, a highwire act of potentially colliding worlds.

If the actors were to collide or get in each other's way, the image of the three houses would collapse. Each near miss is therefore a critical moment – what Brian Massumi calls a bifurcation point.22 The continuity of the narrative is suspended for an almost imperceptible instant and the disintegration of the production is experienced by the audience as a potentiality at the level of 72

sensation.23 This potentiality is what makes the STC production of The Season at Sarsaparilla so effective not in spite of but precisely because of this threat of dysfunction. These bifurcation points, or flashes of 'virtuality', keep open an economy of exchange in what Deleuze calls the universe- cosmos, a territory beyond the stage in which each dramatic moment is re-configured, re-composed and re-connected to infinity.24 In practice it creates a much greater sense of theatrical danger, of things bumping into each other, and gives sinister glamour and a sense of potential to the production.

3. The Revolve: An Amputation In 2014, Benedict Andrews directed A Streetcar Named Desire for the Young Vic in London with

Gillian Anderson as Blanche Dubois. As with his production of The Season at Sarsaparilla, Andrews largely ignored the long stage directions at the beginning of the play which describe the street on which drama is set. He justified this by arguing that the image of New Orleans sketched by

Tennessee Williams now conforms too much to cosmopolitan middle-class tastes:

The things Williams is trying to grab, with jazz and with a dangerous part of the town, this

has become gentrified: doing the play in a period way can lead to an automatic

gentrification. I've never seen a production of it where a kind of gentility doesn't overtake

the play – and I don't think it's a genteel play.25

Rather than a white frame house with outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables, the Kowalski flat is represented in the Young Vic production by a steel cuboid skeleton with almost no period ornamentation. It is the sort of drastic procedure of overt abridgement which, following

Deleuze, we might call an 'amputation' or 'subtraction'.26 The idea is that by cutting away visual and auditive gestures or signifiers which are now associated with the retro taste of a bohemian gentrified grouping, the play regains something of its original force and power to shock. Similarly, the subtraction of two of the houses in the 2007 production of The Season at Sarsaparilla is meant – and effectively works – to create a more visceral enactment of Patrick White's drama of the three 73

families in Mildred Street. It is a way of releasing a potentiality of theatre that only an abstracting and non-representational act of animation can achieve: an act of directorial defiance which refuses to accept an inert aspect of the play's realism.

And like his Season at Sarsaparilla, Andrews's Streetcar Named Desire for the Young Vic places the entire set on a revolve, which is in constant motion throughout the performance, slowly spinning the house and its occupants. This also – the continuous movement of the set – is a kind of amputation because mobility creates a world of new angles and sightlines. It means that the audience's view of the action is constantly being interrupted by the large frame and furniture within the space. Sightlines are blocked, subtracted, and placed at variance.27 Although the revolve is not used as aggressively or dynamically by Benedict Andrews in his production of The Season at

Sarsaparilla, it nonetheless serves a similar critical function. It is first used when Ron Suddards (Dan

Spielman) from the post office arrives in Act One to invite Judy Pogson to a concert. Judy steps out of the back door to meet Ron and the two walk stage right, heading around the side of the house.

The stage rotates anticlockwise about fifteen degrees so that Ron and Judy remain more-or-less centre stage as they walk. Observing them through the picture windows, Roy leaves the kitchen, circles around the house and meets them from the other direction. All three then stand at the corner of the house. The scene is lit so that it looks as if the morning sun is striking the side of the house which has now been more fully exposed to the audience. A sustained chord is played on the

Hammond organ with slow, deep vibrato. Julia Sheen (Helen Thompson) arrives on the scene, and, as she exits again, the house spins back to its original position, moving now at half speed.

This kind of small variation, an almost cinematic movement of perspective, occurs throughout the production. Sometimes the adjustments are striking. In Act Two for example, when Nola is seeing Ernie Boyle (Brandon Burke) off to work after their reconciliation, the house turns almost ninety degrees, revealing the Boyles in their bedroom.28 The revolve shows off the hyper-realism of the construction of the house as a stage artefact. It shows the solidity of the suburban box as a kind 74

of coup de théâtre, and its function both as a shelter and as a place of confinement, a haven and a jail. And the revolve is sometimes used in an even more ostentatious way as part of the so-called razzle-dazzle, drawing attention to itself and to the frontal quality of the audience experience and to the directorial presence as the supreme showman of this experience. The first instance of this is when Roy, stepping out of the drama for a moment to act as narrator, announces:

Of course, We-Who-Know-All-This hate it, and promise ourselves to escape to something

better. But wonder if that exists … and depend on those twin dazzlers, time and motion, to

help us believe we are doing and being. Who can resist deceiving himself when the razzle-

dazzle 's on?29

And at this point the razzle-dazzle is switched on. The house spins, the organ plays and the lighting becomes lurid with an intensification of purples and blues. As the house turns and as Roy's monologue goes on we see through the various windows. At the front, a long picture window reveals Girlie Pogson, still in her apron, standing in the livingroom watching a small colour television.

On one side of the house, a glass sliding door reveals a master bedroom where the heavily pregnant

Mavis Knott is catching her breath. There are comparable moments at the end of Act One and at the beginning of Act Two, after the interval. The climax of the first act, as the house spins, gives us a glimpse, through the glass sliding door, of Nola Boyle leading her husband's friend into the bedroom.

Toward the end of Act Two, Roy again withdraws himself from the dramatic narrative to turn on the razzle-dazzle:

In Mildred Street there's practically no end to the variations on monotony. The Iceland

poppies replace the glads, the dahlias take their turn with the chyrsanths. At weekends,

Pogsons are painting their house a shade of French-grey they've seen on someone else's.

Boyles are indulging in a daring splash of red. Nothing stands still. Not in the razzle-dazzle of

time.30 75

Roy sits in a chair that Judy earlier took from the kitchen and watches the house spin as if he were watching a TV show. Short strips of tinsel paper slowly rain down over the house, filling the air with sparkle and shine. With brisk stylised gestures, Ern, Harry and Clive perform a pantomime of leaving for work and coming home from work, leaving for work and coming home from work, Clive and

Harry heading one way, Ern the other. The house goes still, the revolve stops, giving the audience a view of the livingroom as a static image. Girlie, Pippy, Judy and Mavis are all standing with their backs to the audience, leaning against the long picture window. Nola is sitting next to the television.

One by one the women turn around. They all make room for Nola and then all five stare out, their hands against the window. The tinsel keeps falling, it rains down like the moving thing in a still world, and then the house begins to spin again, returning to its original position with the kitchen facing outwards. Roy just keeps watching, lost as we watch him.

The revolve implies that the suburban house is a dynamic thing, a sort of clockwork or machine with wind-up residents moving through it. It also seems to refer to and remember the image of a carousel or, a bit differently, a treadmill: a form of ritualised repetition which earlier productions also picked up on.31 Roy reveals this vision to the audience when he turns on the razzle- dazzle, accelerating the progress of the daily routine to a frenzy of motion. Benedict Andrews adds to it the effect of falling tinsel, a histrionic gesture that is a variation on falling soap flakes or confetti.

In terms of a postulated aesthetics of sensation, the spinning of the house, the lights and the tinsel serve to reinvigorate the play by restoring it to a state of stimulating disequilibrium. As with the near collisions between characters, the revolving house effects breaches and breaks and upsets the audience view of the stage. The amputation of sightlines and perspectives in fact contains multitudes, creating vectors which link the people in the houses with the larger town of Sarsaparilla, and the aesthetic element of the house with what we might call, following Deleuze, the cosmic neighbourhood. 76

4. Surveilling Sarsaparilla: A Prosthesis One last feature of the STC's production of The Season at Sarsaparilla worth remarking is the extensive use of video cameras to transmit pictures from inside the house to two large screens. The live video feeds operate throughout the performance. At the beginning of Act One, as the lights come up and we hear the barking of the dogs and Alan John on the Hammond organ, the house seems sealed up. The Venetian blinds on the picture windows are closed and the door is shut. But already there is communication because a camera inside the house is transmitting an image of the empty kitchen area which is projected onto the two screens that stand at either side of the house.

As the dogs continue to bark, Pippy Pogson (Amber McMahon) skips into the dining room and peers through the blinds, looking out at the audience. We see her from two angles at once: through the window and from behind on the screen. Then she checks her reflection in a mirror on the wall

(which is in fact the lens of one the cameras). There are six cameras set up throughout the house.

We see a close up of Pippy pulling silly faces, and we also see that she is wearing a miniature microphone. The microphones are used so that the actors can be heard even when they are behind closed doors. Finally Pippy pulls up the blinds and dashes out of the house through the flywire door.

It is a brief prelude, lasting less than a minute, but it makes it clear that even when the house seems shut up there are multiple ways of opening it up, ways of getting inside the house and out of it.32

If the collapsing of three houses into one can be called an amputation, then the two screens together with the cameras and microphones might be called a prosthesis. Deleuze describes prosthesis as the addition of a line of continuous variation on the basic matter of the theatre: a series of metamorphoses and deviations which effectively mask the amputation.33 This offers a framework for analysing the operation of digital and other electronic technologies and new media art practices in live performance at the level of pure sensation.34 In the STC production of The Season at Sarsaparilla, the two screens positioned on either side of the house can be seen as constructed substitutes for the absent houses. These screens create digital simulacra which preserve and extend 77

and energise the pattern of the triptych, even as they disrupt the illusion of a street scene.35 As

Benedict Andrews says:

[The house] becomes the centre of a triptych, surrounded on either side by large screens

showing the actors inside the house, like television's Big Brother. […] The screens are not

wallpaper. The cameras are part of the actors' stage [...] 36

The cameras and screens aggregate a new intensification of physical actorly presence, and as

Andrews notes, they are plugged directly into the total mise en scène assemblage. Now these new bodies do not work as simple representations, as in the three-house structure of John Tasker's production, but instead open up and provide a vista on new intensities, on movements and repetitions that problematise the play's image of suburbia and the audience's hypothetical expectations of The Season at Sarsaparilla as a modern Australian classic.

The production was described by critics and journalists as a Big Brother Sarsaparilla, in reference to the reality TV show where contestants are placed in a house and subjected to twenty- four hour surveillance.37 Benedict Andrews denied that Big Brother was an inspiration, although he acknowledged the connection.38 The cameras and microphones do work as signifiers, linking the play and all its rich prying preoccupation with the sordidities of life to the controls which can operate in a mass surveillance society.39 However, they also challenge the form of the play and, indeed, the form of theatre itself, incorporating it into a system of verism reproductions. As Andrews explains:

It is all to do with penetrating private space […] I wanted to get inside that house even more

than in the original, to get closer. The surveillance idea allows that to happen. This way,

there is the distant, painterly view, a wide shot, and within that other view points. If the play

creates a tension about looking into people's windows, which it does, then this is a way of

playfully intensifying that.40 78

That is, the cameras intensify the experience of the play at the level of sensation by exaggerating the exposure of the families of Mildred Street, creating an unexpected opening into the brick house, which in turn takes its occupants back to the material structure of the theatre: the black void in which the house appears to hover. We see the performance framed by an indeterminate and indistinct reality, a brief moment of order in the midst of dark and silent nothingness; but the radical illusionism of the camera also ensures that some passage with the darkness and the silence remains open.41

This process of metatheatrical exaggeration is powerfully felt in those scenes where the spectacle is most intimate and the figures of Sarsaparilla most vulnerable. In Act Two, after Ern Boyle has discovered that Nola and his best mate have spent the night together, there is a desperate encounter between husband and wife. Ern enters the kitchen wearing his good suit. He is planning on going out on a spree to drown his sorrows. He turns to look at himself in the mirror and sighs.

Nola enters the kitchen just as Judy and Ron leave through the back door. Now the Boyles are alone and the kitchen is all their own. Nola closes the Venetian blinds so that the house again appears shut up. Only the flywire door remains open. For the rest of the scene, which lasts eight minutes, the audience's only view of the couple is via the two screens, and in the fragments glimpsed through the door. John McCallum wrote in The Australian:

One of the great scenes of the play, when the sensuous Nola Boyle has her final confrontation

with her husband, Ernie the night-soil man, is played behind closed venetian blinds, but on the

screens we can see the pain on their faces.42

Both Ern and Nola weep and clutch at each other as they argue and accuse and finally forgive.

Toward the end of the scene Ern suddenly remembers his neighbours:

ERN: (dully) Better get up, Nola. Somebody might come in. (Tries to free his ankles by

motions of the feet, very stiff) Go on! That prissy old cow from next door…. 79

NOLA (still crying, spasmodically) She don't need to come in. She was born with imagination.

And a thousand ears.

(She sits up sniffing. Awful. ERN goes and looks out of the back door. He is shattered.)

ERN We both showed up pretty well.43

In fact, very little had been visible through the open door, but they 'showed up', notwithstanding.

Throughout these eight minutes, this scene of accusation and reprisal and eventual rapprochement, still evening has come on. The theatre around the house is in darkness, barely lit, but the light in the kitchen has the hard whitish blue glare of an interrogation room. On the screens, we see close-up images of Nola and Ern; through the open door we catch only fleeting glimpses. The screens themselves become necessary actors in the drama, part of the total rhythmic ensemble, digital extensions of corporeality and liveness and presence. The video transmitted from inside the house, in dialogue with production elements such as the lighting and the microphones, makes manifest the occlusion of the actors by substituting for them, and reveals the extent to which the conventions of the theatre – and the coherence of the representation of a quarrelling couple on stage – have been disrupted and re-problematised.

The Season at Sarsaparilla is play teeming with artistic potentialities. As Deleuze said of Paul

Klee:

All that is needed to produce art is here: a house, some postures, colours, and songs – on

condition that it all opens onto and launches itself on a mad vector as on a witch's broom, a

line of the universe or of deterritorialisation...44

The folk of Sarsaparilla take refuge in their houses, hiding behind brick veneers and the flyscreen doors, wary of the possibility of a self-destructive encounter with the purely intensive forces of the universe. Patrick White demands that these shelters crack, exposing the dreaming occupants in their kitchens. Meanwhile, he sets a bitch in heat to trace a frenzied line of flight, upsetting the 80

neighbours, disturbing their settled territories. The play is no longer contemporary and what might have once seemed daring in White's stage directions no longer has the same energy. A new method is needed to pry open the houses of Mildred Street, and the problem at the heart of The Season at

Sarsaparilla needs to be reframed. The use of live digital video feeds, introduces a radically extended theatricality which is a response to the stuttering or the instability of the play created by the blending of the three houses on Mildred Street into one, and the use of the revolve. It is a necessary operation to keep the play open and in communication with what lies beyond the footlights, to keep it as a live problem at the level of sensation, activated by a double exchange with the cosmos beyond the material structure of the theatre.

1 D Marr (ed), Letters: Patrick White, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.186. 2 See N Dekyvere, 'My Week', Sunday Telegraph (Sydney) 15.vii.1962, p.51: 'I couldn't bring myself to like Mr White's strange play. In fact I hated it. To my mind, the play was in very bad taste, with its sordidness and bad language.' 3 D Marr, Patrick White: A Life, Sydney: Random House Australia, 1991, p.391. 4 P White, 'The Prodigal Son' Australian Letters, 1(3) 1958 37-40, p.37. 5 P White, Literary Notebooks, National Library of Australia, Papers of Patrick White, MS9982, Series 2, Item 4, Parts 8-9. 6 P White, Four Plays, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965, p.87 7 White, Literary Notebooks, Part 35. 8 See D Marr in J Dawson, Season at Sarsaparilla: Teacher's Resource Kit, Sydney: Sydney Theatre Company, 2007, p.13: the link with soap opera was explicit in the Adelaide premiere, which opened with the theme to Blue Hills, a long-running Australian radio serial. 9 M-B Akerholt, Patrick White, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988, p.39. 10 A Fuhrmann, http://www.jimsharman.com.au/ (accessed 10.i.2017). 11 M Wilkinson, 'Memory Replaced Research for this Designer', Sydney Morning Herald, 2.xi.1976, p.12. 12 K Gallasch, 'Benedict Andrews: A Rigorous Vision', RealTime, 28.vi.2010, http://www.realtimearts.net/feature/Archive_Highlights/9892 (accessed 10.i.2017). 13 B Andrews in Dawson, p.10: 'In the brick boxes of expanding early 60's Sydney suburbia, he confronted The Great Australian Emptiness.' But see M Connor, 'Two Plays, Two Directors: Rock 'n' Roll and The Season at Sarsaparilla', Quadrant, 52(4) 2008 32-35, p.34: Connor suggests that the kind of houses which White had in mind were fibro cottages or post-War weatherboard, not 'brick boxes'. 14 White, Four Plays, p.78. 15 D Douglas, 'Influence and Individuality: the Indebtedness of Patrick White's The Ham Funeral and The Season at Sarsaparilla to Strindberg and the German Expressionist Movement', in L Cantrell (ed), Bards, Bohemians and Bookmen: Essays in Australian Literature, St Lucia: University of Queensland, 1976, pp.271-2. 16 Dawson, p.16. 17 A Taylor, 'Fear and Loathing in Suburbia', Sun Herald, 25.ii.2007, p.21. 18 B Andrews in Dawson, p.15: 'The Season at Sarsaparilla was written 10 years before I was born and so, although it might remind me of meals in my Nana's kitchen, I don't really approach it with any kind of nostalgia for the period.' 19 White, Four Plays pp.84-5. 20 Ibid, p.94. 21 Ibid, p.78. 81

22B Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p.32. 23 Ibid, p.41: 'At that point, the mime almost imperceptibly intercalates a flash of virtuality into the actual movement under way.' 24 G Deleuze and F Guattari, What Is Philosophy? New York: Verso, 1994, p.180. 25 S Hemming, 'Benedict Andrews revolutionises traditional theatre', Financial Times, 11.vii.2014 (accessed 10.i.2017, from Factiva). 26 G Deleuze, 'One Less Manifesto' in T Murray (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: the Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p.205. 27 See Hemming: The revolving set is 'aimed at continually altering the audience's engagement with what appears to be real'. 28 White, Four Plays, pp.171-173: in the script they are in the kitchen. 29 White, Four Plays, p.99. 30 Ibid, p.173 31 See HG Kippax, 'Razzle-Dazzle over Dog Pack', Nation, 22 September 1962, p.15. 32 Deleuze and Guattari, p.180: 'Not only does the open house communicate with the landscape, through a window or a mirror, but the most shut up house opens to a opens onto a universe.' 33 Deleuze, 'One Less Manifesto', pp.205-7. 34 Ibid, p.207. See also T Murray, 'Like a Prosthesis' in L Cull (ed) Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 35 B Massumi, 'Realer than Real', Copyright 1 1987 90-97, p.91: simulacrum here in the Deleuzian sense of a copy of a copy which breaks out of the copy mould and takes on a life of its own. 36 R Usher, 'Benediction on Patrick White', The Age, 12.i.2008, p.16. 37 See J McCallum, 'Suburbia Sizzles in a Wry White Season' The Australian, 6.iii.2007, p.10: 'a Menzies-era version of Big Brother'. 38 B Hart, 'Poor White Folks' Herald-Sun, 14.i.2008, p.80. 39 D Varney, 'Australian Theatrical Modernism and Modernity: Patrick White's Season at Sarsaparilla' Australasian Drama Studies 62(1) 2013 25-40, p.26: cameras critically reflect on the 'twenty-first century’s concerns with its mediated present'. 40 Ibid. 41 See Deleuze and Guattari, pp.202-203. 42 McCallum, p.10. 43 White, Four Plays, p.167. 44 Deleuze and Guattari, p.184. 82

CONCLUSION In conclusion, I would like to emphasise the main themes of this thesis. First, I have argued that methodologies of performance analysis are incomplete if they are addressed only to representational or semiotic processes and do not also engage the world of moving intensities and the potential for sensual, affective and embodied experiences. Theatre and the performing arts generally are not simply about conveying meaning or providing information. Something is lost if we treat everything that happens on the stage as a language system susceptible to interpretation or ultimately reducible to discourse. Although the principle that performance style is more than just an ornament used to make the communication of meaning more effective or agreeable is now well established among theatre studies scholars, in this thesis I have argued for its special importance to the analysis of performances of the plays of Patrick White, where the stylistic and formal innovations in the communication of sensation have been so influential in the development of Australian theatre.

Second, following this non-representational approach, treating the theatre as an affective space or logic of sensation, I developed a method of performance analysis based on the aesthetic theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This method involves the creation of detailed descriptions of the form and structure of the total mise en scène and the performances of the actors during moments of particular affective intensity. These descriptions are informed by three aesthetic concepts elaborated in the figure, the house and the universe. This thesis develops these concepts in a specifically theatrical context, modifying Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetic theories for the analysis of performance.

Third, I have attempted in each of the three performances analysed to align formal and stylistic features of performance with the three Deleuzian aesthetic elements in order to map their operation at the level of sensation. In Chapter One, I focused on the figure. I showed how the aesthetic figure could, at crucial moments, seem almost co-extensive with Miss Docker, who is such 83

a powerful affective presence in that production. Nonetheless, the aesthetic figure should not be mistaken for a dramatic character. In the 1989 production of The Ham Funeral, for example, the figure is revealed as a more complex ensemble transformed in a series of energetic becomings. And in the 2007 production of The Season at Sarsaparilla, the aesthetic figure encompasses the residents of Mildred Street with their cycles of life and death, love and betrayal. The stage expression of the house – the spatialising material structure – also varied considerably. In A Cheery Soul, all that was needed was a simple contour composed with Brechtian devices such as a thin half-curtain and some benches on the side of the stage. In The Ham Funeral, a more substantial (even monumental) house is given – a great, damp, crumbling house that resembles a sunken animal enclosure. In the 2007

Season at Sarsaparilla, the house-territory system is partially aligned with a hyper-realistic representation of a suburban house, but also encompasses the dark theatre in which it seems to hang, as if in a void. Finally, there is the element of the cosmos. What we perceive on stage is not the cosmos itself, but intensive passages in a double exchange.

This leads to the fourth theme, the dynamic double relationship in which the figures are caught up. This thesis identifies and analyses a range of dramaturgical strategies used by theatre makers to express two basic patterns of affective movement. The first movement is from the material structure, or the house-territory system, toward the figure. This movement is chiefly expressed in the mise en scène of a production; and it is experienced as the tendency of the design elements to isolate the figure and to give it definition. For example, the sheer walls of the boarding house seem to imprison its occupants in Neil Armfield’s Ham Funeral, to compel their transformations and to unify the various performance styles indicated by White’s performance text.

Another example is the falling tinsel used by Benedict Andrews in The Season at Sarsaparilla.

The second pattern of movement, which co-exists with the first but is in the opposite direction, is from the figure out toward the universe-cosmos. The question for theatre makers is – how can the body of the figure escape from the enclosure of the house? In Sharman’s production of 84

A Cheery Soul, the figure of Miss Docker attempts to escape through her mouth in an astonishing silent scream. In Armfield’s Ham Funeral, the Young Man escapes through a secret aperture in the mise en scène, leaping from the stage and running out through the audience. And in Season at

Sarsaparilla, the total assemblage of figures participate in a complex exchange with the cosmos through a system of amputation and prosthesis. Openings are revealed in the staging of near collisions and in the manipulation of sightlines; and figures disappear into prostheses-cameras, which constitutes a passage of escape.

All three productions analysed in this thesis have the potential to generate powerful feelings of aliveness and vitality. This potential emerges from the struggle to release Patrick White's performance texts from aesthetic clichés in the transition to an art of the stage. The analysis in this thesis involves a comparison between the performance and the staging conventions suggested by

White in published versions of the scripts. The process of transforming these texts and freeing them from le vieux style requires an intensive remapping of White’s own stage directions and stage descriptions to allow for the necessary invention of new sensations and new possibilities of perception. And it is the success in this that makes these productions landmarks in the rise of the director and the designer in Australian theatre and part of an alternative tradition to the dominance of realism and naturalism on Australian stages.

85

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Fuhrmann, Andrew Robert

Title: Using Deleuze and Guattari's logic of sensation to analyse Patrick White’s A Cheery Soul, The Ham Funeral and The Season at Sarsaparilla in production

Date: 2017

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/194365

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