[Review Of] Dennis Carroll," Australian Contemporary Drama"(Rev. Ed

COVER SHEET Makeham, Paul B. (1994) Dennis Carroll, Australian Contemporary Drama. Sydney: Currency Press. Accessed from http://eprints.qut.edu.au Copyright 1994 Currency Press Dennis Carroll, Australian Contemporary Drama (rev. ed.) (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994). The original version of this book, published in 1985, was Australian Contemporary Drama 1909-1982, and it was well on the way to becoming a standard and widely- referenced text by the time Currency published this 'completely revised and updated' edition ten years later. John McCallum, writing in 1988, considered the original to be 'the best available general critical history of twentieth-century Australian drama',1 and the same is probably true of this edition, although the extent of revision is questionable. In terms of broad theoretical perspectives, Peter Holloway's anthology of essays Contemporary Australian Drama (rev.ed.) (Sydney: Currency Press, 1987) is a better book, but it isn't a critical history as such. That said, Carroll's study is by any standard a fine achievement, with succinct and perceptive readings of scores of plays, an accessible, engaging style, and a carefully sustained examination of what the author proves are distinctively Australian(ist) themes. To cite McCallum once more, the book 'tells you what it is going to do, and then it does it, no bullshit'.2 It has always struck me, though, that the word 'contemporary' is something of a misnomer in the title of a text which deals with the whole twentieth century, and that something like 'Modern Australian Drama' might have been more appropriate. The historical scope of the original has been extended here by 12 years, ranging from William Moore's first Australian Drama Night in 1909 up to 1994, though the close detailed readings really only cover plays up to 1991; the period 92-94 was tacked on following delays in publication, and there is evidence of this in a certain frantic quality towards the end. Each of the book's 13 chapters discusses plays by two or three key writers (the exceptions being Douglas Stewart and David Williamson, who get a chapter each), and is introduced by a brief overview of theatrical trends and a consideration of other significant writers of the period. Carroll is Professor and Chair of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaii at Manoa, but he was born and raised in Sydney. The book is intended for a non- Australian readership (the author finds himself explaining the vernacular significance of 'rooted', for example, and refers to the novice drover in Esson's The Drovers as a 'greenhorn'), but it is surely of equal value to Australian readers. Carroll brings a comprehensive general theatre knowledge to bear on his analyses, and he makes useful comparisons between the subject material and works from abroad. His declared interest is in 'structure, style and thematic features...rather than qualities of characterisation and language'. (p.ix) The use of technical terms to describe dramatic structure - opening exposition, inciting mechanism, obligatory scene, 'strong curtain' and so on - is useful, as are terms like 'aria' (to describe a set-piece monologue). Especially persuasive are Carroll's judgements concerning dramatic form and style, and he argues that a number of Australian plays (by Esson, Dann and Hewett for instance) are compromised by an 'inorganic' relationship of content to form. Kenna's A Hard God (1973), by contrast, is 'remarkable not only for its formal innovation, but the organic connection between its shape and structure and its rich variety of themes'. (p.209) Indeed, such structural analyses produce some of Carroll's own best insights: Sumner Locke Elliott's social realism, he argues, accommodated 'naturalistic interaction and a structure that could breathe with the rhythms of this [Australian] milieu and characterisation and dialogue that could relax with these rhythms, not merely bristle with purposefulness'. (p.65) The extent of international influence on Australian drama is made apparent throughout, from Esson's contact with the Abbey Theatre to contemporary multiculturalist projects. And whilst duly acknowledging the predominance of realist dramaturgy on the Australian stage, Carroll also conveys the depth and vitality of non-realistic playwriting throughout this century, and he traces links between both these lines of stylistic development and overseas models. The book is not a general survey, however, and the author makes some unconventional inclusions (as well as some notable omissions). One of the most interesting chapters 'recovers' three relatively obscure dramatists from the 20s and 30s - Sydney Tomholt, E.J. Rupert Atkinson and Hugh McCrae - writers who 'made the first, tentative contributions to modern non-realistic Australian playwriting...[but whose] plays were utterly neglected in the theatre'. (p.45) Taken together, their work represents the influence of the European Symbolist, Expressionist and Surrealist movements, though Carroll also notes some specifically Australian motifs in their plays. The imported influences on their writing re-emerge later in the plays of White and Hewett, as well as of Buzo, Kenneally and Reed, and again, blended with Brechtian conventions, in the 'theatricalist' experiments of the New Wave. ('Epic' techniques had earlier appeared, the author points out, in plays by writers such as Prichard and Brand.) The realist tradition in twentieth-century Australian drama, similarly conditioned by overseas models, has always had greater commercial viability. And although its conventions have sometimes constrained the full exposition of key Australian concerns, realism also enabled the great dramas of the 1950s - Rusty Bugles, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, The Shifting Heart and The One Day of the Year. Since then, Carroll argues, the 'most individual playwrights' to use realism (including Porter and Kenna) have 'dissected' it, colouring its conventions with a 'certain self-reflexiveness and irony' (p.199); David Williamson in particular 'becomes a dissector and transformer of structure as potent as his dissection of social patterns of behaviour'. (p.219) Again, Carroll discerns international influences here, this time in the Absurdist representationalism of Pinter, Albee and others. Williamson is also credited with being amongst the first playwrights to dramatise an 'extreme manifestation of the old Australianist "bushman"...the young, middle-class urban male who was aggressive, confident, nationalistic, affluent, upwardly mobile and anti- Establishment in his politics. This was the so-called "ocker".' (pp.221-2) In terms of a unifying project, Australian Contemporary Drama conforms to a kind of sustained 'growth' metaphor ('seminal'...'had been born'...'coming of age'...'youth'...'adolescence'...'maturity'), and it does propose a progress or evolution narrative in Australian drama. But this line of argument isn't overworked, and Carroll shows that new forms emerge as reactions against, as well as extensions of, preceding models. In fact the recurring theme underlying most of Carroll's arguments is that of 'Australianism', and the ways in which this set of characteristically (male) Australian values has been both endorsed and problematised throughout the twentieth century: The legacy of the Australianist tension between the heroism of individual action, admired because heroic but sometimes suspect because accomplished alone, and mateship with its outgoing acquiescence often on the verge of conformity, produces a leitmotif which is in its intensity and frequency unique to modern Australian drama. (p.6) Carroll locates the 'Australianist' influences in writers as stylistically diverse as Esson, Stewart, Buzo and Hibberd. But even the most recent additions to the national repertoire, including the 'internationalist' works of Nowra, Gow and Sewell, explore older concerns; such plays reflect a 'greater acceptance of cultural pluralism in Australian society - but at the same time even very recent Australian drama shows preoccupations which result from the heritage of Australianism'. (p.8) Most prominent among these concerns is the tension between individual action and group conformity, but Carroll also identifies a ubiquitous 'man vs nature' thematic, as well as the recurrence of the 'withheld self' in many (almost exclusively male) Australian characters, from Esson's Briglow Bill, through Lawler's Roo and on to Romeril's Les Harding. Many dramatists, though (and significantly, many of them women) have been critical of Australianist values, even as they present them in their plays: Kenna and Porter were less interested in Australianism, and Dymphna Cusack was 'one of the first Australian playwrights to concentrate on woman (sic) chafing against Australianist values in a bourgeois, male dominated society'. (p.68) In this she had been preceded by Katharine Susannah Prichard, who 'questioned most of [Australianism's] catechisms, including its exclusion of Aboriginal culture and its ambivalent attitude to sexuality'. (p.33) Prichard's Brumby Innes was written in 1927 but not staged until 1972, three years after the playwright's death, and Carroll suggests that the 'failure of a single theatre to respond to the challenges of Brumby Innes might well have robbed Australia of her first major dramatist'. (p.39) It has to be observed, though, that Carroll's own patterns of selection and exclusion raise questions at times. Of course a book like this can't do or say everything, and it doesn't want to, but you have to wonder about the inclusion of just three women playwrights (Prichard, Cusack and Hewett), and one Aboriginal playwright (Jack Davis), amongst the text's 27 featured dramatists. Certainly writers such as Mona Brand, Oriel Gray, Alma de Groen and (fleetingly) Jill Shearer, Hannie Rayson and Eva Johnson are mentioned, but someone as important in her time as Millicent Armstrong doesn't register at all, and nor do Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Kylie Tennant or Debra Oswald. It might be that Carroll sees less merit in some of these playwrights' work, but from an historiographical point of view, there is much significance in the sheer fact of their being women writers who got their plays produced, and in many cases, published.

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