Idealism Versus Conservatism in Australian Theatre and Politics At

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Southern Queensland ePrints Facing Reality: Idealism versus Conservatism in Australian Theatre and Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. PhD Dissertation Ben Payne, BA (Hons). Abstract This dissertation aims to provide an analysis of mainstream Australian playwriting at the turn of the 21st Century. It will argue that mainstream theatre in the 1990s and early 2000s in many ways reflects the concurrent national political developments, in particular the revision of many of the dominant ideals of previous eras, such as those of the sixties. In this dissertation, I will attempt to outline briefly some of the hallmarks of the theatre of the New Wave, and their relation to the broader social movements occurring in Australia at the time. I will trace the beginnings of disillusionment and revising of these ideals in the late seventies and early eighties. The majority of the argument will then discuss the ways in which early nineties theatre engages with and frequently rebuts these earlier ideals, just as nineties politics saw a revision of many of the ideals of the sixties in society as a whole. I will argue that in the latter nineties, mainstream playwrights begin to reverse this conservative shift, reinstating a number of the ideals of the earlier period. I will demonstrate that Australian mainstream theatre at the turn of the century is integrally related to the politics of the society of the time, and that mainstream theatre demonstrates both radical and conservative tendencies through the period under consideration. ii Certification of Dissertation This is to certify that this dissertation is all my own work, and that it has not previously been submitted for any award. To my knowledge, this dissertation does not contain any material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement or reference is made in the dissertation to that work. Ben Payne 25/5/5 Signature of Principal Supervisor Associate Professor Kate Foy PhD. iii Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the help of my supervisor, Kate Foy, as well as Jocelyn McKinnon and Greg McCart for their feedback and help in editing this manuscript. I would also like to express my gratitude to members of the Australasian Drama Studies Association for their feedback on various segments of the work. Thanks for support and advice are also due to Jennifer Phillips, Anna Hayes, Darryl Chalk, Brian Beasley and Cath Darcy. iv Contents Title Page i Abstract ii Certificate of Dissertation iii Acknowledgements iv INTRODUCTION 5 Literature Review 5 Theory and Methodological Process 14 Limits of the Study 19 Section Breakdown 25 SECTION ONE: 1968-1988 39 Chapter One: 1968-1975 41 Political Context 41 Drama, 1968-1975: The New Wave 51 Conformity 53 Social Regulation 58 Nationalism 60 Women and Minorities in the New Wave 67 Socialism 75 1 Chapter Two: 1976-1988 82 Political Context 82 Drama: The Decline of the Left 90 Caught Up in the System: Stephen Sewell and Louis Nowra 94 Generational Conflict, Families: Sewell, Gow, Nowra 102 Women and Minorities in the 1980s 110 INTERLUDE: Chapter Three: The Return of Conservative Politics 116 The Fall of Communism 117 Political Correctness 120 The “Radical” Right 124 The Power of the Poor 129 SECTION TWO: 1988-1995 137 Chapter Four: Economic Rationalism 141 Money and Friends … David Williamson 141 Diving for Pearls… Katherine Thomson 146 The John Wayne Principle… Tony McNamara 151 Chapter Five: Compassion 156 Cosi… Louis Nowra 157 Sweet Phoebe… Michael Gow 161 Sanctuary… David Williamson 166 2 Redemption… Joanna Murray-Smith 173 Chapter Six: Feminism 180 Wallflowering… Peta Murray 180 Falling from Grace… Hannie Rayson 186 Love Child… Joanna Murray-Smith 192 Chapter Seven: Generational Conflict 200 It’s My Party (and I’ll Die if I Want to)… Elizabeth Coleman 200 Dead White Males… David Williamson 204 The Garden of Granddaughters… Stephen Sewell 213 Honour… Joanna Murray-Smith 219 SECTION THREE: 1995-2004 229 Chapter Eight: David Williamson 230 Heretic 231 After the Ball 240 Corporate Vibes 247 Face to Face 252 The Great Man 257 Chapter Nine: Hannie Rayson 266 Scenes from a Separation 267 3 Competitive Tenderness 275 Life After George 282 Inheritance 288 Chapter Ten: Joanna Murray-Smith, Stephen Sewell 296 Nightfall 296 Rapture 303 The Sick Room 310 Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America 317 Chapter Eleven: Ben Ellis 328 Post Felicity 328 Falling Petals 333 These People 340 CONCLUSION 346 References 358 4 Introduction Literature Review Studies of Australian drama written over the last thirty or forty years are somewhat symptomatic of the times in which they were written. They range from the optimistic articles of the early seventies, through the more canon-centric and increasingly disillusioned accounts written in the eighties, to the diffuse and overview-rejecting scholarship which dominates the nineties. The genesis of recent Australian trends, both theatrically and politically, is often traced to the year 1968, a watershed year politically in many countries, and the year which saw the initial stirrings of interest in La Mama in Melbourne, the venue for many of the subsequent theatrical developments, following its inception in 1967. Articles in 1967 from Alexander Porteous and Leslie Rees (“Australian Drama: The Outlook in 1967”) on contemporary theatre, and playwright Alan Seymour’s parting shot at Australian conservatism before relocating to Britain (“The Temperament of Generations 5: To the Gutless Wonders”), reveal little critical awareness of any upsurge at the time, concentrating instead on the lack of successes in the wake of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), The One Day of the Year (1960) and the plays of Patrick White (1961-64). The mood is one of pessimism, particularly compared with the cautious optimism evident in Meanjin’s Drama issue in 1964 (although even here, the optimism seems attributable almost entirely to White’s recent work- see Kippax, Brissenden and Heseltine for example). 5 The revolution in Australian theatre, and the political radicalism which accompanied it, is perhaps most clearly evident in Margaret Williams’ series of essays for Meanjin in 1972, “Snakes and Ladders: New Australian Drama”; “Mask and Cage: Stereotype in Recent Drama”; and “Australian Drama- A Postscript: Some Comments on Recent Criticism”. Williams focuses on the authors who emerged during this period through La Mama and the Nimrod in Sydney, and who became known as the “New Wave”. Authors such as Jack Hibberd, David Williamson, John Romeril, Alex Buzo, Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy, and theatres such as La Mama, the Pram Factory, and the Nimrod, would come to be regarded as having redefined the Sydney and Melbourne theatre scenes in the decades to come. Williams draws out a number of common themes: the depiction of inarticulate masculinity, power relations within relationships, and a focus on social relationships. Williams also notes recurring stylistic tendencies, such as the preference for non-naturalistic forms, in particular the use of archetypal characters without the traditionally “psychological” background of “realistic” depictions. These thematic and stylistic convergences were to become recurring touchstones for the more lengthy analyses of the years to come. As I will argue in Chapter One, these elements can be largely linked to the philosophy of the emerging movements of the early seventies, and indeed, the same might be said of Williams’ celebratory articles, which combine a sense of an enthusiastic grass-roots movement with a look toward a bright future filled with potential. Alan Seymour‘s article “You Can Go Home Again?” (1973) provides a telling contrast to his earlier article. Seymour writes about the feeling of excitement in the air amongst theatre-makers and audiences in the early 1970s, and links this to the “new spirit” in Australian political life under Gough Whitlam, a “progressive 6 socialist vigour”(“You Can Go Home Again?”) under which the intelligentsia found itself being taken seriously for the first time. It is perhaps no accident, then, that it is “by the mid-1970s,” that is, the period following the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975, that “there was a distinctly post-boom feeling about theatre in Australia” (Fitzpatrick, After the Doll 157). Timlin notes in 1975 the Whitlam government’s increased funding of smaller theatres such as La Mama and the Nimrod at the expense of larger companies, a trend which was to reverse under subsequent governments. As early as 1976 Dorothy Hewett describes an emerging nostalgia for the early days of La Mama, the Pram Factory and the Nimrod (“Shirts, Prams and Tomato Sauce: The All-Australian Theatre”), while Katharine Brisbane writes in the same year in her section on “Australian Drama” in The Literature of Australia (Ed. Geoffrey Dutton) that by the time of writing many members of the Melbourne group had found themselves drawn into the commercial theatre “in spite of themselves” (279). Tom Markus (1976) took the step of blaming the increase in subsidies following the New Wave’s emergence for what he saw as an increasingly uninteresting theatre scene, although replies (published with the article) from Rodney Fisher, John Mostyn and Alex Buzo disputed this. His remarks are indicative of something of a backlash against the New Wave movement, already becoming thought of as the dominant rather than an alternative theatre force. It is evident in the theatre scene, as in society, that the revolution was to some extent over before it began, and this is reflected in the pessimistic tone of criticism. Just as Australian society as a whole in the eighties saw the rise of the Boomers1 but a dilution of their earlier rebellion, so the drama of the 1980s saw a 1 Throughout this dissertation, “Boomers” is a term used to refer to the generation of Australians, popularly known as the Baby Boomers, the generation of Australians who came of age during the 7 consolidation of the impact of the New Wave, but without the enthusiasm or broad inclusiveness of the movement in its infancy.

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