A Ham Funeral: Patrick White, Collaboration and Neil Armfield ELIZABETH SCHAFER Drama, Royal Holloway, University of London E.Schafer@rhul.ac.uk The work of theatre practitioners – especially directors, performers, designers – has much to add to the field of Patrick White studies; however, there has been little sustained discussion of White’s plays in performance and the insights theatre practitioners can bring to White scholarship. This article focuses on the White productions of director Neil Armfield, especially his 1989 Sydney Theatre Company Ham Funeral and examines Armfield’s theatrically tested thesis that metatheatre is the key to White’s dramaturgy. The article also looks at the deployment of comedy and the gothic in Ham Funeral and Armfield’s later White productions – A Cheery Soul and A Night on Bald Mountain. Keywords: Patrick White, The Ham Funeral, Neil Armfield, Jim Sharman, Australian theatre, metatheatre. There is plenty of evidence to indicate that theatre was very important to Patrick White. In the brief autobiography posted on the Nobel Prize website, White talks of being ‘in love with the theatre’; and White wrote plays during much of his creative life.1 But, for some, the plays are not important; for example, the biography that prefaces the Penguin edition of Voss, despite listing White’s novels and detailing his short stories and memoirs, makes no mention at all of his plays.2 This not only marginalises an important aspect of White’s creative output but, critically for my argument, also guarantees a failure to acknowledge sufficiently the insights that result from the ‘collaborations’ that have taken place between White and the theatre practitioners who have worked with his play texts, both whilst White was alive and, rather more safely, after his death. Whilst my concern here is primarily with theatre directors who collaborated with White, of course, other theatrical collaborators – set, costume and lighting designers, performers, composers – could also contribute insights into any conversation about White’s dramaturgy. Detailed criticism of White’s writing takes place every time his plays are scrutinised during the processes of rehearsal and performance. Those working on text for production have to examine it, and then own it, inhabit it, and embody it, more fully than even the most scrupulous of scholarly readers or editors. Performers may end up knowing the words of a play better than the playwright themselves and the actor Simon Russell Beale once identified acting as ‘three-dimensional literary criticism’.3 This is a useful and challenging idea, but directing is another form of ‘three-dimensional literary 1 criticism’ and my focus here is on the direction, or ‘three-dimensional literary criticism’, of director Neil Armfield with particular reference to his production of Ham Funeral for the Sydney Theatre Company in 1989.4 Armfield is especially worth attending to in relation to White, simply because he has directed so many of White’s plays:5 six of the eight extant plays and two of them, A Cheery Soul and Signal Driver three times.6 Given that his engagement with White’s plays, and their theatricality, spans nearly twenty years, Armfield’s expertise in the area of White’s dramaturgy has to be unrivalled and this impressive body of work has allowed Armfield to evolve, and put to the test, a critical, but theatrical, thesis that metatheatricality is key to White’s dramaturgy. Armfield’s first production of a White play was Signal Driver in 1982, and he followed this with two more productions of the same play in 1983 and 1985. However, when he came to direct the STC Ham Funeral in 1989, Armfield’s most recent White production was the premiere of that most difficult of White plays, Shepherd on the Rocks. John McCallum has called for a critical reassessment of this late play, claiming that ‘Looking back now, it is clear that White’s dramaturgy has been lurking, for more than four decades, waiting for the Australian theatre to catch up, which it eventually did’;7 however, not everyone shares McCallum’s confidence in the theatrical virtues of Shepherd on the Rocks and certainly a motif that emerged in the reviews of the premiere production was that Armfield’s direction was stronger than the play. Some reviewers were polite about Shepherd on the Rocks: Diane Beer, in the News, noted that ‘all the components of SA’s best theatre crafts’ helped make ‘the play look good’,8 while, in the Advertiser, Samela Harris thought ‘a strange and absorbing play’ was ‘somewhat eclipsed by the breathtaking artistry of its staging’.9 However, Barry Oakley, in the Times on Sunday, was direct: ‘much of the writing is flat and some embarrassingly bad’ and he specifically identified too much respect for White as a major production issue.10 In relation to the post show discussion he attended, Oakley commented that ‘Criticism became more and more difficult in an atmosphere that increasingly resembled a prayer meeting’. Crucially, Oakley quotes one of the performers as stating: “Patrick was with us for the first and last week” said one member of the cast, putting one in mind of Christ after the Resurrection. “We didn’t tamper with the text. Every word, we realised, was there for a purpose.” 2 “We thought of changing a line or two, but in the end we realised Patrick was always right.” (my emphasis) Such reverence can be risky in the theatre. The playwright is part of a collaborative team, not the source of all wisdom, and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that in the theatre ‘Patrick’ was not ‘always right’. Murray Bramwell, in the Adelaide Review, certainly thought this was the case and wanted more Armfield, and less White. He commented, ‘Neil Armfield, incontestably one of the best directors working in Australia, baulks for some reason at taking full control of the enterprise. Instead he fills the stage with theatrical busyness hoping no-one will notice’.11 While Bramwell blamed both the director and writer for refusing ‘to push the material to the fierce expressionistic end-point that the misanthropic undertows in the play suggest’,12 nevertheless, his strictures usefully illuminate what was to happen with Armfield’s subsequent White productions, when he was increasingly willing to ‘push the material’, and take more control, particularly in terms of tone. Certainly more of a ‘push’ from Armfield can be seen in his 1989 STC Ham Funeral. This production took place shortly after the bicentenary, with its strenuous marketing of Australia’s theatre culture;13 the production was sponsored by QANTAS, ‘the spirit of Australia’; it was hosted by a leading, subsidised theatre company; it featured a headline grabbing director, Neil Armfield, whose recent STC production of The Country Wife had caused a media ruckus, or, in marketing terms, free publicity. Armfield’s landmark production of Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman, starring Geoffrey Rush, had only just closed, and Belvoir Street, the theatre with which Armfield is most usually associated, was building in reputation.14 It must also have crossed some minds that this might well be the last time the 77 year old White would see his own work in the theatre. This sense of occasion may have helped in relation to one of the most significant aspects of this production / collaboration: the casting, which had amazing depth in even the smallest roles; for example star actress, and later STC artistic director, Robyn Nevin was cast as one of the Ladies, only appearing in one scene. Several reviewers saw the production as a successful riposte to the original rejection of the play by the Governors of the Adelaide Festival.15 Bob Evans, in the Sydney Morning Herald, pronounced the Governors’ actions ‘a monumental misjudgement’ that ‘is vigorously discredited afresh by Neil Armfield’s production’.16 Evans argued that Ham Funeral is ‘an extraordinary play’ and Armfield’s ‘a timely, 3 comprehensive production that completes the enormous circle of Patrick White’s contribution to literature and theatre in our language’. The reference to ‘our language’ by a Sydney-based writer is worth noting, given the location of the play in London as well as White’s phonetic rendition of London accents. John Carmody’s review, in the Sun Herald, found ‘delights’ that were ‘too numerous to catalogue’ but also, like many reviews, looked towards the literary: ‘This production is so finely crafted I now realise that this play provides the epigrammatic key to the closing sentence of White’s seminal work The Tree of Man: So that in the end there was no end’.17 For Barry Oakley, the play’s characters had ‘not been given total dramatic life. They have a shadowy immobility that is both their limitation and the source of their strength’;18 and White himself, in an essay reproduced in the programme, describes the play’s characters in untheatrical terms as ‘my stubborn group of statuary’.19 Most performances in this Ham Funeral went far beyond ‘statuary’ and were bursting with theatrical life; for example, Robyn Nevin and Maggie Kirkpatrick were rollicking as ‘the knockabout girls of the piece’, the First and Second Ladies, Mrs Goosgog and Mrs Fauburgus.20 Figure 1: Robyn Nevin and Maggie Kirkpatrick in Ham Funeral, dir. Neil Armfield, Sydney Theatre Company, 1989. 4 However, while Oakley found that Tyler Coppin’s performance of the Young Man, in a ‘nervous, ironic style’, allowed for laughter, others were not so sure.21 Laughter is not entirely in the gift of the playwright, as it depends so much on the actor, director and the audience. The ABC television recording suggests that the audience, at least on the night of the recording, found the Ladies and the Relatives funny, challenging and entertaining; however, they were far less certain about laughing at the Young Man. Figure 2: Pamela Rabe and Tyler Coppin in Ham Funeral, dir. Neil Armfield, Sydney Theatre Company, 1989. A useful resource in accessing audience response is available in the stage manager’s nightly reports.22 There were 42 performances and Elly Kamal, the stage manager, characterised audiences as ranging from ‘warm’ (often) to ‘very warm’ (quite frequent) or ‘charming’. On the night she records ‘Patrick White in the house’ they were a ‘Very lovely audience’ (4 December). Often ‘The audience loved’ the relatives’ scene. On 22 November the audience were ‘A quiet house, but a thinking house. Gave a warm response at curtain call’. For the ABC Radio broadcast (28 November) ‘The audience were 5 very responsive’. However, sometimes the audience were less co-operative or collaborative: on 29 November ‘The cast did very well considering there was no reaction from the audience. I would say the majority of the audience had no idea of what was happening’. On 1 December ‘They didn’t seem to realise that it was the end of the play. It took what seemed like an eternity for them to start clapping’. Audiences were sometimes ‘a little dull’ but, unfortunately, for the ABC television broadcast, despite ‘A very good performance’, ‘The audience were absolutely dead!’ This is, of course, the only performance that can be viewed now, but while any rereading of that ‘very good performance’ risks being inflected by the ‘absolutely dead’ audience, Kamal’s description seems slightly harsh; the recording includes quite a lot of laughter even though some members of the audience had ABC cameras parked right next to them (seats were taken out to accommodate cameras) which must have made an impact on their experience of, and response to, the production. Importantly, however, Kamal expands on what she considers a ‘lovely audience’ in the report for 7 December: ‘A lovely audience tonight. Lots of laughter’. This indicates that, for Kamal, laughter could be used to measure the relative success of the production every night. For Paul McGillick, in the Financial Review, Ham Funeral received a dream production, but this still did not dispel all doubts about the theatricality of the play.23 McGillick commented that, while ‘It is hard to imagine a better production’, he still ‘found the play more than a little tedious’ as ‘the words never stop and the dramatic action never begins’.24 The Newcastle Herald was more resistant, dismissing Ham Funeral as ‘not very good, despite the efforts of some Patrick White devotees to give it status as an absurd masterpiece’.25 However, Ken Healey, in the Sydney Review, stated ‘I cannot imagine a stronger case for The Ham Funeral than Neil Armfield’s production’.26 Healey goes on to conclude that ‘Neil Armfield here confirms his place at the pinnacle of his profession’.27 This sense, in Healey’s ‘pinnacle’ image, of Armfield proving his mettle with this production is something that has been taken even further by John McCallum when he suggested ‘White is one of the few Australian playwrights to attract new generations of theatre artists eager to test themselves on his work’ (my italics),28 and ‘Most of our boldest and brightest young directors have wanted to cut their teeth on White’.29 What McCallum does not confront, however, is that, while quite a few young male directors have, in his phrase, ‘wanted to cut their teeth on White’, women directors have not, possibly because White’s theatrical representations of women are so deeply grounded in misogyny. 6 The undertow of misogyny may be one reason that one reviewer who was definitely resistant to Armfield’s Ham Funeral was Rosemary Neill, in The Australian.30 Neill acknowledged the attempt ‘to confirm the place of The Ham Funeral in the repertoire of Australia’s theatre classics’ but, for her, Armfield’s ‘valiant’ production cannot overcome ‘the dramatic deficiencies of the play itself’. Neill is one of several reviewers who read the play before the performance, and her view is that it read as better drama than it performed because ‘on opening night, I felt that it frequently proved dramatically and comically lethargic’. Neill’s resistance to the comedy cannot be put down to first night nerves as the stage manager’s report for opening night, that is 14 November, records: ‘Late start – the usual opening nighters clinging to the bar! Performance went very well – particularly Act II. Wonderful response. Cast came back for second curtain call’. So, in the view of the stage manager, reviewer Rosemary Neill did see the production on a good night. Assessing Armfield’s collaboration with, or ‘three-dimensional literary criticism’ of, White in the STC Ham Funeral is also complicated by the fact that the 1965 published text, reissued by Currency in 1985, was already marked by a previous theatrical collaboration, that between White and John Tasker, the first director of the play.31 Ham Funeral was written very soon after White’s active service as an intelligence officer working for the RAF in World War 2, and in many ways the play seems very marked by the moment of its cultural production. White wrote the play while he was lodging in London, in Ebury Street near Victoria, and he set the play in the present of 1947. The London that was in White’s mind, at least when he originally wrote the play, was post Blitz London, a city that was crumbling or falling down in many places, with bomb damage visible on all sides and some houses actually left gaping open, like many a theatrical set, with the fourth wall open to the audience, as White’s stage directions indicate the Lusty’s house will be onstage. However, White records that, at the time of the play’s premiere, Tasker suggested ‘setting the play farther back, in the 1918 period’ for ‘visual reasons’ and White agreed as ‘I felt it might increase the air of surrealism and timelessness which I had been aiming at’.32 The published text specifies the date of 1919, but the programme for the STC production is less absolute: ‘TIME About 1919, perhaps’, (my italics) although a 1919 dating is borne out by the costume design. Where Armfield’s, and / or designer Brian Thomson’s three-dimensional literary criticism can be seen at work is in the change of location. Armfield’s production altered the play on one fundamental level as it was set not, as the published text announces, in ‘A 7 lodging-house and the streets of London’ but, as Brian Thomson’s set declared, in huge letters on the stage, quoting from the Young Man’s opening speech, ‘a great, damp, crumbling house’;33 indeed Tyler Coppin’s Young Man pointed to the words in the set when he came to speak them. The programme took this relocation further, specifying ‘SETTING. A GREAT. DAMP. CRUMBLING HOUSE. ANYWHERE’. Figure 3: Tyler Coppin in Ham Funeral, dir. Neil Armfield, Sydney Theatre Company, 1989. In 1989 it made marketing sense for Armfield to relocate the play to ‘ANYWHERE’ – at least for those in the audience who bought and read their programmes – given that ‘ANYWHERE’ could include Australia, in the way that the play text’s ‘London’ could not. However, no changes are recorded in the prompt copy to the London specific place names that pepper the play text.34 In addition the performers’ accents got some reviewers confused. Bob Evans asked why Tyler Coppin played the Young Man as ‘American’ while Kerry Walker’s Landlady was ‘Australian when her role seems so painstakingly written in a working-class English dialect?’35 Ken Healey was more positive: ‘Alma Lusty’s dialogue reads like pure cockney, but Kerry Walker delivers it in uneducated Australian […] The point is that each of these characters is rooted in a reality far more universal than any accent’.36 But what is crucial for my argument, is that, in terms of setting and accent, the production was less unAustralian than White originally envisaged. 8 While all White’s other plays can be located very securely in terms of Australian contexts, especially Season at Sarsaparilla, A Cheery Soul and Night on Bald Mountain, which were written partly in response to White’s theatrical experiences in Adelaide, Ham Funeral is far more a play about an Australian reacting to, and farewelling, Britain than it is about Australia; and for Australians not interested in relating to Britain, this play would only benefit from being relocated to ‘Anywhere’. Armfield has stated that speaking to an Australian audience is critical in White’s theatre: I think that [White’s] plays have their true connection with Australian audiences. I don’t know why. The novels may have connected internationally, whereas the plays don’t seem to have. I think the plays aren’t as fully successful in their form as the novels are in theirs, but I think his plays relate to an Australian audience. I think that it would also be interesting to see if the right productions were to happen on an international stage what would happen.37 Armfield’s relocation of Ham Funeral may have helped the ‘connection with Australian audiences’, but it was also helpful that an important Australian theatre thematic, the postcolonial gothic was being invoked. As a rites of passage play, Ham Funeral is crammed full of classic post-colonial devices: a focus on processes of growing up: the big journey/ voyage of discovery: ‘home’: identity: hauntings/ the Anima; and the big house standing in for a nation or culture. The Young Man, with his Australian childhood memories of ‘parrots … screaming… the wedge of black cockatoos…’,38 is trapped in a house in the decaying, damp and gothic centre of empire, a location he must leave in order to become mature artistically; when White wrote this play, he was, of course, planning to leave London for related reasons. The gothic was invoked visually in Thomson’s designs for the production (for example, in the appearance of the Ladies) and a gothic aesthetic seems to fit well with a play peopled with non naturalistic, excessive characters, including an Anima, and a speaking house.39 9 Figure 4: Robyn Nevin and Maggie Kirkpatrick in Ham Funeral, dir. Neil Armfield, Sydney Theatre Company, 1989. Armfield’s ‘three-dimensional criticism’ is also articulated in the ‘Director’s Note’ that appears in the programme, which locates the production in relation to Armfield’s then recent production of Diary of a Madman. The connection Armfield made between that production and his Ham Funeral was their common grounding in ‘metatheatre’ or ‘theatre which refers back to theatre itself as its way of analogising life’. Armfield argues that when the Landlord dies, ‘For the Young Man it is like being abandoned by his co-star: / …leaving me holding the stage, alone, in this ridiculous farce’, it is beyond the Young Man’s theatrical ingenuity to keep the stage alive, and the theatre itself begins to improvise until he can find his feet again. New characters are ‘auditioned’ […] They serve their function and remind us of our fears, finally leaving the stage clear for the Young Man and the Landlady to find the rhythm of their dance. 10 But the phrase ‘alone, in this ridiculous farce’ is not in White’s published text, it is an addition.40 Armfield quotes his own rewrite of, addition to, or, perhaps, his agreed collaboration with, White, in the programme to support the interpretation he puts forward in his director’s note, an interpretation which increases the emphasis on comedy, or ‘farce’. Armfield’s essay, however, is also a clear articulation of what was to become his theatrical ‘thesis’ about White: that metatheatre, or theatrical self-consciousness, sometimes even the sense of a puppet play is critical to White’s dramaturgy. Despite the change noted above, Armfield’s production, as documented by the prompt copy, was mostly a respectful one. There were a few small cuts, such as the blue pencil through the classical allusion to the serpents who killed Laocoon.41 Many stage directions were observed, despite the fact that the play as published is characterised by interventionist stage directions which speak specifically to a conventional proscenium arch theatre circa 1947; White envisages that there is a ‘curtain’, a ‘drop’ and the stage is envisaged as end on;42 White frequently attempts to direct tone and inflection in the performers’ delivery and he offers detailed, novelistic, stage directions concerning furniture and stage properties. The dramaturg on Armfield’s production, resident STC dramaturg, May-Brit Akerholt, took White to task about some these stage directions in her monograph on White’s plays, published in the previous year, 1988, and dedicated to ‘the directors and the actors’.43 In this monograph Akerholt points out that Ham Funeral contains some stage directions that are completely untheatrical; Akerholt asks tellingly, for example, how performers could ever ‘make a monumental, if primitive whole’.44 Akerholt also characterises the Landlady’s use of the mirror,45 gazing directly at the audience as if the mirror is on the ‘fourth wall’, as very indicative of end on dramaturgy. It is reasonable to assume that Akerholt’s critical and contextualising work on White’s plays influenced Armfield’s production, as a reworked extract from her book was printed in the production programme. Akerholt is well known as a translator, particularly of Ibsen and Strindberg, and her work on White might well be seen as inflected by her interest in dramaturgy and European theatre. White himself, in an interview immediately before the opening of the production, claimed that ‘my greatest influences were Strindberg and Ibsen’, although he conceded the German Expressionists were also important.46 Akerholt also specifically puts the case that White anticipates Beckett and Ionesco,47 something picked up by several reviewers.48 Akerholt’s reading of White is classically liberal humanist, a position that is often far more useful in the theatre than other, then more fashionable, theoretical approaches. 11 She stresses ‘universal’ themes and offers character studies, which could be helpful to character based actors, that is, the majority of actors trained in Australia. There is an avoidance of, for example, a robustly feminist examination of White’s theatre, or its class politics, race politics, etc.49 Akerholt’s liberal humanist agenda is at its clearest in her claim that White portrays ‘a universal humanity of which Australians are intrinsic members’.50 While Akerholt also argues that White can ‘manipulate the audience’s emotional response through humour’,51 and in the reworked section from her book which appeared in the STC programme, Akerholt is even more categorical: ‘White’s plays are also very funny’, nevertheless, the Stage Manager’s reports suggest the audiences sometimes resisted White’s humour. Another indication of the commitment to comedy in Armfield’s Ham Funeral was evident in the soundscape: jolly Wurlitzer music at the beginning, end, and at significant breaks in the action. A comic drum roll sounded at the opening just before the audience heard the Young Man’s feet running down the massive stage staircase. There was fairground or circus music for the entrance of the Ladies, but this also underscored the fact that everything livened up immensely when the Ladies came on; they even entered in style, by means of a trick revolving door. Indeed, the sense of energy and verve the Ladies injected really emphasised how much of a dramaturgical risk White took in opening and spending so much theatrical time with the Young Man. Armfield also used music filmically to colour some scenes: ‘melodramatic’ organ music in 2.6, when the Landlady is making advances to the Young Man, becoming Hammer House of Horror music as this section heads into violence. There was also another, non musical soundscape: the breathing of the landlord (and sucking of the pipe) became a disgusting motif, playing alongside a wealth of burping, breathing, and sobbing noises, plus heavy panting after the Landlady’s chase sequence with the Young Man. The most sensational sound effect that White’s text actually calls for, when the house speaks, was simply a distorted echo effect. But speech stress is also telling and the Anima’s line ‘Those who live also create’ was particularly emphasised. Armfield’s exploration of metatheatricality in Ham Funeral continued on into his subsequent White productions, A Cheery Soul and A Night on Bald Mountain. Indeed, in an essay in the programme for the 1996 A Night on Bald Mountain, an essay entitled ‘Patrick White’s Puppet Theatre’, Armfield not only grounds his production of A Night on Bald Mountain in metatheatricality but specifically looks back to his Ham Funeral and the metatheatricality ‘implicit as the characters came and went in their human zoo’. In this 12 essay, Armfield also discusses the metatheatricality of his 1992 Cheery Soul where ‘a puppet theatre was our starting point for that production’. Armfield’s essay positions ‘Patrick White’s stage’ as ‘an enchanted space’ and comments: the more I play with the actors (designers and composers) – in that space, the more it feels like we’re playing in something derived from a child’s doll house, lit by the spooky glare of the footlights in which the ritual of a morality play is acted out according to the determined pattern of the storyteller. It is a marionette stage, and although the puppets sometimes pull against their string and get hopelessly entangled in them, that sense of artifice is somehow part of the essential nature of the work. In Armfield’s productions of both Cheery Soul and Night on Bald Mountain the balance of the artistic collaboration between playwright and director in determining tone had also, inevitably, changed because White had died, and been much obituarised; David Marr’s biography had been published and reviewers often acknowledge they had read this biography; White had become theatrically safer in the sense that he was not going to interfere any more and, in some ways, his work had become more securely ‘classical’ theatre because he was dead. Armfield’s more interventionist directorial approach in his 1992 Cheery Soul can be seen in the cross casting in terms of gender, and the fact that White’s three acts were ‘neatly compressed […] into two well-balanced acts’.52 Most crucially the set design, which self-consciously framed the action, emphasised overt theatricality, and bound the audience into a very particular relationship with the performers. Alison Cotes, in the Brisbane Review, commented that the play’s ‘mixture of realism and mysticism’ makes it ‘very hard to stage’, but offered a usefully detailed evocation of Armfield’s approach:53 The kitchen is a Women’s Weekly dream of the late fifties […] But by placing it all on a revolve and exposing the lights and props at the sides of the huge Suncorp stage, we are in a world of alienation, where we observe from afar and are therefore allowed to judge. 13 The invocation of the word ‘alienation’ is a useful reminder that Brecht was still working in Germany when White was there in the 1930s, and that Brecht was a master at deploying metatheatre.54 Armfield’s use of cross casting certainly helped place one element of this Cheery Soul that caused debate: gender politics. For Alison Cotes the production is ‘fine and sensitive’ enough for her to ‘forgive the interpretation of Miss Docker, whose hideousness is so complete that it undercuts the pathos of her emptiness and the validity of her epiphany’.55 Reviewing the 1994 Adelaide Festival revival of the production, Tim Lloyd, in the Advertiser, thought it ‘true to Patrick White’s misogyny’;56 and Leonard Radic, writing for the Age, characterised White as a ‘crusty misogynist’ and Miss Docker as symbolising ‘for White all that was worst in Australian womanhood’.57 Murray Bramwell was able to see Miss Docker more positively: she is ‘Miss Falstaff, Signora Gloriosus, Mrs Malaprop, the Moonee Ponds Edna’.58 While there is certainly great potential in the role of Miss Docker for actresses, in terms of energy, drawing focus, and the opportunity for heightened performance, the balance, in terms of confirming or challenging misogynist stereotypes will vary from night to night, from performance to performance. The most commented upon theatrical moment in this Cheery Soul, one which nearly all the reviewers singled out as theatrical magic, was certainly a ‘collaboration’ between Armfield and White. In White’s text, in the tableau of Mr and Mrs Lillie as young lovers, Mrs Lillie is ‘Dressed in pure white, décolletage, a single-strand choker of diamonds, an aigrette’.59 Armfield had Mrs Lillie bare breasted, something which helped create ‘a hair-tingling moment’,60 and, for some, was the peak of the production ‘visually’.61 Meanwhile Adrian Kiernander’s review for the Australian hailed ‘The first production of a Patrick White play since his death’ as proof that we should see more of them. His theatre is challenging to performers and audiences but it has its roots deep in an instantly recognisable Australian society and the plays are, in the best sense of the term, classics.62 However, Kiernander also indicates how much the production helped the play text: ‘The script’s extraordinary stylistic transitions remain disconcerting but here, accompanied by a lone violinist high in the wings, they seem inevitable’. This issue of stylistic transitions is perhaps the aspect of White’s dramaturgy that is hardest to manage, and that audiences struggle with most: sudden changes in style, plus the breaking of theatrical decorum result in transitions from the surreal to naturalism, to aria, to vaudeville. It is here the director needs to become a kind of conductor and Armfield has 14 consistently used music strategically to manage these transitions, to ‘collaborate’ with White’s text.63 Armfield’s Cheery Soul also, like his Ham Funeral, clearly evoked the gothic. By the 1990s Australian gothic was fashionable in the theatre and reviewers were quick to identify it.64 Tim Lloyd, in the Advertiser, thought Armfield’s Cheery Soul ‘definitive’ in being ‘true to Patrick White’s, gothic sensibilities, miserableness and mad humor’.65 Murray Bramwell felt Armfield had ‘heightened White’s symbolist reverie into a kind of gothic pantomime’, but that this was too comfortable: ‘Rather than pleasing the eye Patrick White might have preferred that it stick in the throat instead’.66 For Geoff Shearer, in the Westside News, Armfield presented the funeral scene as one ‘that weaves through tragedy and humor with a road-map of gothic intricacy’ which produces ‘the best piece of theatre I have seen from the RQTC. It grips then claws; with director and White expert Neil Armfield keeping a tight and educated hold on the reins’.67 ‘Gothic’ is not a new term to use in relation to Patrick White but there is a particularly significant gothic genealogy to be identified in relation to this Cheery Soul because the rehabilitation of this play in the 1970s is linked to the success of that great 1970s post-colonial gothic theatre text:68 The Rocky Horror Show, an empire writes back fantasy created in a great centre of empire, London, by New Zealander Richard O’Brien and Australian director Jim Sharman. The gothic in the sense of the grotesque, the weird, the extreme, is something which Sharman, as a director, often quarries and his theatrical work is often characterised by exuberance and slightly crazy excess. Stefan Haag’s suggestive wordplay – ‘Sharman / showman / shaman’ – is telling in its characterisation of Sharman’s theatre, and showmanship plus theatrical shamanism can certainly be detected in Sharman’s 1979 pioneering Cheery Soul.69 A Cheery Soul had not been received well at its 1963 Melbourne premiere. 70 But while Sharman’s production stunned reviewers with its virtuosity, it also stunned Patrick White, and Sharman’s account of the work processes is important: it was full of what Murray Bramwell might have described as ‘push’. By 1978, Sharman was ‘confident about directing Patrick’s work and no longer felt the reverence that had informed earlier revivals and sometimes constrained my approach’.71 Sharman had directed a seminal production of Season at Sarsparilla in 1976, with Robyn Nevin as Girlie Pogson, and a production of White’s new play Big Toys in 1977.72 For A Cheery Soul White was excluded from the rehearsal room and he ‘initially baulked, especially at my plan to use a small ensemble cast and ignore gender in the distribution of roles’.73 Sharman, the 15 showman, was wary of the literariness of Cheery Soul, stressing ‘the play was originally adapted from a short story’ and that White’s ‘stage directions require this world to begin naturalistically and slowly abstract to echo the character’s growing isolation. This idea is fine in a story, trickier to realise onstage. After much thought, Brian [Thomson] and I did exactly the opposite. Beginning at endgame, we started with nothing’.74 Despite his reservations about its literariness, Sharman considers Cheery Soul to be ‘Patrick’s best writing for the stage’ featuring ‘a barnstorming protagonist, who thrills and engages audiences, inspires actors and drives the narrative’.75 His production concept was ‘King Lear in clown-face’.76 Sharman saw his production of Cheery Soul ‘as a personal gift’ to White,77 and he argues that the play ‘once dismissed, despised and discarded, was revealed for what it is – a classic of the Australian stage’.78 Sharman is, as he declares in his memoirs, anti naturalism, pro ‘magic’, and he vividly sums up his collaboration with/ three dimensional criticism of, White thus: ‘He wanted showbiz; I wanted art house’.79 While Sharman’s Cheery Soul was critical in demonstrating to 1978 audiences, reviewers and producers what could happen when White’s plays met ‘showbiz’, the input of designer Brian Thomson was also vital. Sharman and Thomson’s previous collaborations at this time included not only The Rocky Horror Show but also Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. In handing his play over to Sharman and Thomson, White had agreed to leave the realisation of his play to two theatre practitioners well known as strong-willed, flamboyant enfants terrible. Indeed Thomson, who has designed a significant number of White plays, has always consistently, and creatively, ignored White’s stage directions.80 Thomson has tended to modify the strait jacket of White’s end on theatrical vision, to emphasise the surreal, and to place the real: for example, the floor plan for Ham Funeral indicates that it included a ‘Real Mud Floor’, something which deploys a realistic surreal approach. Sharman was also an important figure in Armfield’s early career, and he gave Armfield an extraordinary opportunity to take risks as a director in the short lived, very expensive, sometimes poorly attended but, in retrospect, completely ground breaking and seminal Adelaide Lighthouse Seasons.81 In his memoirs Sharman comments that, in relation to White’s plays, at Lighthouse ‘I passed the baton to my younger colleague Neil Armfield, inviting him to premiere Signal Driver’, which Sharman commissioned for the 1982 Adelaide Festival.82 He adds ‘Between us, we kept Patrick’s theatrical flame burning bright for two decades’.83 But it is important to remember that Sharman himself picked up the White ‘baton’ from director John Tasker, who directed three out of four of 16 the first productions of White’s early plays. Indeed the young Sharman saw, and was very impressed by, what he considered John Tasker’s ‘brilliant’ Season at Sarsaparilla.84 This production, and the play, spoke to Sharman about how theatre could be really relevant to Australia, although he was also mesmerised by the staging, specifically of the razzledazzle effects.85 By 1978, Tasker’s achievements were being forgotten but the Tasker, Sharman, Thomson, Armfield genealogy is important to acknowledge in relation to White’s theatre. While Neil Armfield does not have the ‘showbiz’ profile of Sharman, there were intersections between his 1994 Cheery Soul and Sharman’s 1979 production, most obviously in the use of cross gender casting. But with Armfield’s return to Cheery Soul in 1996 for the MTC, in a new production which nevertheless revived many features of the 1994 show, these intersections became more pronounced. The MTC Cheery Soul deployed a new cast, and Miss Docker was played by Robyn Nevin; as Helen Thomson, in the Age, commented: ‘Robyn Nevin’s 1979 performance as Miss Docker in Jim Sharman’s Sydney production of A Cheery Soul has gone down in theatre history as a brilliant, landmark occasion’.86 It is hard to imagine that, with Armfield directing that same performer as Miss Docker in 1996, Sharman’s production was not, for some in the audience, in circulation, as Robyn Nevin burst onstage ‘via the front rows on the audience’, an ‘enlivening, sardonically drawn close vaudeville cousin to the grand theatrical dames of Barry Humphries and Reg Livermore’.87 Armfield’s MTC Cheery Soul also kept both the gothic and the comic in play: Sue Ingleton played Mrs Lillie ‘like a decayed Gothic heroine’ and many of the cast were ‘particularly gifted comics’, which suggests casting was deliberately aimed at enhancing the laughs.88 While, in the programme, Armfield described the play as a ‘magical human puppet show’,89 there was also a Brechtian dynamic: Steven Carroll, in the Sunday Age, records that: ‘The audience sees the whole of the Playhouse backstage, the banks of spotlights, the stage hands operating them, the props waiting to be wheeled on’.90 In terms of comic tone, Rachel Brighton, in the Sunday Herald-Sun, comments that ‘director Neil Armfield and a strong cast wrangled a giggle a minute from an audience who may have presumed comedy and White did not make for good bedfellows’.91 For Fiona ScottNorman, in the Bulletin, the production was ‘substantial’ and ‘brimming with stagecraft and skill’, but ‘A Cheery Soul is a high-maintenance play that has been tackled by those equal to the task. Everyone involved has worked until their fingers bled; and the result is theatre that takes your breath away’.92 The kind of collaboration that is implied in the 17 phrase ‘worked until their fingers bled’ suggests a play that needs hard graft in order to work in the theatre. Comedy was less to the fore in the final Armfield / White production / collaboration to be considered here, the 1996 Night on Bald Mountain at Belvoir Street; this is appropriate given that in this play White was setting out to deal with the ‘goat-song’ of tragedy. Armfield set up the terms of engagement immediately for the audience by boldly underscoring his commitment to anti-realism in the opening of the production; all the performers, except Carole Skinner, the Goat Woman, came onstage as Miss Quodling’s goats. This is completely not what White wrote – he specifies ‘Goats heard, but not seen’93 – but Armfield’s tactic stressed the stylisation of the production in a humorous way as well as being usefully emblematic; each individual goat’s behaviour foreshadowed the character the goat performer was about to play. While this was far more Armfield than White, by 1996 Armfield was acknowledged as a cutting edge director and was working on his home ground, Belvoir Street theatre. He had the confidence to emphasise his anti illusionistic reading of the play and, for example, cross gender cast Ralph Cotterill as Mrs Sibley. Many were impressed by this: James Waites, in the Sydney Morning Herald, felt Cotterill gave ‘a gorgeous performance, gently dolled up in fluffy lilac cardigan (presumably angora), boasting to-die-for crimped white curls’.94 It is worth noting again, however, the use of cross gender casting, which necessarily in the modern theatre is in tension with realism; such casting has featured in several successful productions of White’s plays. Armfield’s programme essay insisted that despite ‘the profundity of its psychological explorations’ Night on Bald Mountain is ‘utterly playful’. However, working against the ‘playful’ in this production, was a gesture in the direction of realistic psychology. The challenge of Stella Summerhayes’ death, which seems weakly motivated, was transformed when the performer playing Stella, Essie Davis, and/ or Armfield, found a compelling reason for Stella to commit suicide: Hugo Sword’s suggestion that Stella was incestuously attracted to her father released suppressed memories of child abuse. Child abuse was far more in the public domain as a subject for discussion in 1996 compared with 1964 when the play premiered, but the suggestion that Stella Summerhayes was abused as a child made Night on Bald Mountain far more of a tragedy and, indeed, illuminated, possibly improved, the play.95 The ending of Armfield’s Night on Bald Mountain also stressed the threat of nuclear destruction. This again is something that may have read more successfully in 18 1996 than in 1964. By the time of his death White was known as a campaigner against nuclear armament. When Night on Bald Mountain premiered in 1964, although Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more recent memories, CND had only been formed in 1958 and testing at Maralinga (1955-63) was seen very differently from now. Armfield was mobilising a Patrick White who was not in existence when Night on Bald Mountain was written: White the warrior against the nuclear industries. White’s biographer, David Marr was so impressed by the production that, in the Sydney Morning Herald, he apologised in print for thinking the play ‘was a dud’ and only being interested in the fact the play led White ‘to abandon the theatre’.96 For Marr, reading the play had not suggested ‘how it could hang together’ but Neil Armfield ‘who so often served the old man well by disobeying him’ had found a way for it to work.97 Many reviewers were equally positive: for example, Pamela Payne, in the Sun-Herald, felt that Armfield’s production ‘is perfectly pitched. He juxtaposes sound, meaning, characters caught or in motion, creating theatre that is utterly arresting’.98 However, the production first opened in Adelaide, and Peter Ward, in The Australian, still felt there were moments ‘that cry out for blue pencilling’ although he comments significantly, in comparing the production with John Tasker’s premiere of the play, that ‘Neil Armfield’s direction has given the play a pace and substance that Tasker, in rehearsal sometimes subject to the intimidating, glowering presence of White, missed’.99 In the Bulletin, John Edge found comedy, seeing the production as ‘a reminder that White is a comic writer’ and feeling that ‘it is the sense of bitter comedy that stays in the mind’, comedy that ‘frame[s] and undercut[s] the tortured maunderings of the “gothic” story’.100 Meanwhile, Murray Bramwell claimed the play ‘has a pace and a madcap aspect which this production ignored at its peril’ and characterises the play as ‘A mix of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Castle of Otranto and an episode of the Addams Family’.101 Bramwell’s resistance to the opening ‘let’s-be-goats impro exercise’102 suggests that the production worked much better at more intimate Belvoir Street venue than at the larger Playhouse in Adelaide. Read together, Armfield’s productions of Ham Funeral, Cheery Soul and Night on Bald Mountain, combined with his programme essays, make a strong case for the metatheatre of White’s dramaturgy and can be read as constituting considered, careful and sustained ‘three-dimensional criticism’ of White’s plays. Not everyone is persuaded by Armfield’s approach: for example, director and theatre historian Julian Meyrick is not convinced ‘that White requires a ‘theatricalist’ staging to live, regardless of his expressionist proclivities. He was both a social critic and a social satirist, and these veins, 19 coded into his characters, are as extant in his drama as any non-realist devices’.103 However, Armfield’s theatre work, as well as responses to it, such as Meyrick’s, suggest something of the ‘three-dimensional criticism’ that could offer new insight into White’s work, if theatre practitioners, prompt copies, reviews and theatrical ephemera, were to add more of their testimonies, and their analysis, to White scholarship. 20 1 Patrick White: Autobiography, Nobelprize.org, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1973/white-autobio.html, accessed 14 December 2010. Early plays by White include the comedy Bread and Butter Women (January 1935) which was staged at Bryant’s Playhouse, Sydney, when White was still living in the UK; La Grande Amoreuse (June 1940), a sketch in the revue Swinging the Gate, Gate Theatre, London. Return to Abyssinia was due to be staged in London in 1939 when the declaration of war prevented the production going ahead. See David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (London, 1991). 2 Although my reprint of the Penguin Voss (London, 1957, Harmondsworth, 1960) is not precisely dated, White’s death in 1990 is mentioned, so it clearly postdates a great many important productions of his plays in Australia. 3 Quoted, for example, in the Observer, 16 November 2003; Michael Billington’s Theatre Blog, posted 22 June 2009. 4 ABC radio also broadcast the production live to air from the Wharf Theatre on Tuesday 28 November 1989 as part of a National Theatre season. The presenter of the National Theatre season, John West ‘at certain intervals’ had to ‘discreetly describe what’s happening on stage’. Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 1989. 5 The only two Whites Armfield has not directed are Big Toys and Netherwood. For other productions of White’s plays see the appendix. 6 John McCallum, Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century (Sydney, 2009), p. 92 states that all three Signal Drivers were ‘very different’; he discusses the three different productions in more detail in ‘The Late, Crazy Plays’, in Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas (eds.), Remembering Patrick White: Contemporary Critical Essays (Amsterdam, 2010), pp. 141-43. 7 McCallum, ‘The Late, Crazy Plays’, p. 140. 8 Diane Beer, The News, 12 May 1987. 9 Samela Harris, The Advertiser, 11 May 1987. 10 Barry Oakley, Times on Sunday, 17 May 1987. 11 Murray Bramwell, Adelaide Review, June 1987. 12 Ibid. 13 White boycotted the bicentenary. 14 This legendary production was revived in December 2010 to mark Armfield’s farewell to the artistic directorship at Belvoir Street. 15 For example, Paul McGillick in the Financial Review, 24 November 1989; Brian Hoad in the Bulletin, 28 November 1989. 16 Bob Evans, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 1989. 17 John Carmody, Sun Herald, 19 November 1989. 18 Barry Oakley, Independent Monthly, December 1989. 19 The phrase ‘my stubborn group of statuary’ comes from White’s ‘Author’s Note’ in the programme for the 1961 Adelaide premiere. 21 20 Ham Funeral, p. 42. All references to The Ham Funeral are to Patrick White: Collected Plays, Volume 1 (Sydney, 1985). 21 The stage manager’s reports indicate that this performance varied from night to night. McCallum felt Coppin demonstrated that the character could work if played ‘with enough insouciant charm and flair’. Belonging, p. 96 22 Research for this article was immeasurably helped by the assistance of Judith Seeff, archivist for the Sydney Theatre Company, who enabled me to access materials such as the prompt copy, stage manager’s reports etc. 23 Paul McGillick, Financial Review, 24 November 1989. 24 Ibid. 25 Newcastle Herald, 20 November 1989. 26 Ken Healey, Sydney Review, December 1989. 27 Ibid. 28 McCallum, Belonging, pp. 92-3. 29 McCallum, ‘The Late, Crazy Plays’, p. 139. 30 Rosemary Neill, The Australian, 16 November 1989. 31 Patrick White, Four Plays by Patrick White (London, 1965; reprinted Sydney, 1985). 32 ‘Author’s Note’ in the STC programme, reproduced from the 1961 Tasker production programme. 33 Ham Funeral, p. 15. 34 For example, the reference to Highgate. Ham Funeral, p. 17. 35 Evans, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 1989. 36 Healey, Sydney Review, December 1989. 37 Armfield’s comments are taken from Jim Sharman’s 1993 documentary about White, The Burning Piano, http://www.abc.net.au/arts/white/opinions/armfield.html, accessed 29 August 2011. 38 Ham Funeral, p. 31. 39 More recent examples of the Australian gothic ‘big house’ play include Beatrix Christian’s 1997 The Governor’s Family, and Stephen Carleton’s 2006 Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset. 40 See Ham Funeral, p. 36. 41 Ham Funeral, p. 28. 42 Ham Funeral, p. 38. 43 May-Brit Akerholt, Patrick White (Amsterdam, 1988). 44 Akerholt, Patrick White, p. 11, note 4. For the stage direction see Ham Funeral, p. 18. 45 Ham Funeral, p. 10. 46 White states ‘I suppose the German expressionists did influence me in some ways […] I saw a lot of German expressionism in my youth’. Sydney Morning Herald, 11 November 1989. The interviewer, Angela Bennie, makes the link to the German expressionists’ exhibition then on at the Art Gallery of NSW. 47 Akerholt, Patrick White, p. 29 also refers to Pinter’s The Room, which has an important intersection with Ham Funeral. 48 Evans suggests that White’s plays might, in 1989, be more accessible as ‘audiences have seen the plays of Beckett, Ionesco, Osborne, Pinter and Ibsen’. Evans, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 1989. Barry 22 Oakley also places Ham Funeral as remarkable for anticipating Ionesco and Beckett. Independent Monthly, December 1989. 49 The physicalisation that casting for performance demands can emphasise the assumed whiteness of the plays; to take an obvious example, if the Anima were cast as Aboriginal this could import meanings that would skew White’s original concept. 50 Akerholt, Patrick White, p. 3. 51 Akerholt, Patrick White, p. 20. 52 Des Partridge, Courier Mail, 5 June 1992. 53 Alison Cotes, Brisbane Review, 11 June 1992. 54 This design decision is also suggestive when set alongside the UK opening, later that year, of Stephen Daldry’s long running National Theatre production of An Inspector Calls. This opened 5 September 1992 and set a rather overworn play in a frame that could be described as a Brecht/ Expressionism combo, something which connects with the dynamics of Armfield’s production. 55 Cotes, Brisbane Review, 11 June 1992. 56 Tim Lloyd, Advertiser, 28 February 1994. 57 Leonard Radic, Age, 3 March 1994. 58 Murray Bramwell, Adelaide Review, March 1994. 59 Patrick White: Collected Plays, Volume 1, p. 218. 60 Des Partridge, Courier Mail, 5 June 1992. 61 Brett Debritz, Sunday Telegraph, 7 June 1992. 62 Adrian Kiernander, Australian, 8 June 1992. 63 Michael Morley for Theatre Australasia, April 1994, also comments on ‘the use of inserted music’. 64 See, for example Beatrix Christian’s Blue Murder (1994) and The Governor’s Family (1997), both directed by Neil Armfield at Belvoir Street. 65 Lloyd, Advertiser, 28 February 1994. 66 Bramwell, Adelaide Review, March 1994. 67 Geoff Shearer, Westside News, 10 June 1992. 68 For the significance of ‘genealogy’ in theatre history see Jacky Bratton’s discussion in her New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge, 2003) of ‘Genealogy as women’s history’, pp. 178-80, and her suggestion that genealogy can be used ‘to unpick some of the previous academic narratives of power’ within theatre, p. 196. Without wishing to essentialise in any way, it is worth noting that the ‘genealogy’ I am constructing here is one focussed around gay men. 69 Sharman quotes Stefan Haag’s phrase in Blood and Tinsel: A Memoir (Melbourne, 2008), p. 141. 70 See e.g. Keith Macartney in Meanjin Quarterly, (1964), pp. 93-5 who praised the production as ‘worthy and reverent’ but felt ‘reasonably certain that, if A Cheery Soul had been offered by an unknown playwright, it would have been rejected out of hand’, p. 95. Audiences were also sparse. The play was produced by the BBC in 1965 but the Times, 28 April, was not impressed. 71 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 270. 72 Sharman also directed the premiere of the opera of Voss, the film The Night the Prowler and Netherwood. 73 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 271. 23 74 Ibid. 75 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 269. 76 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 270. 77 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 271. 78 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 272. 79 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 260. 80 Thomson has designed Sharman’s Big Toys (1977) and Cheery Soul (1978); Armfield’s Shepherd on the Rocks and Ham Funeral. 81 For Lighthouse see Geoffrey Milne, ‘Lighthouse: A “Mainstage” Ensemble Experience’, Australasian Drama Studies, Vol. 53 (2008), pp. 42-57. 82 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 278. 83 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 279. 84 Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 68. 85 Sharman also saw Ham Funeral as a teenager, although he was less overwhelmed by this production. Sharman, Blood and Tinsel, p. 258 86 Helen Thomson, Age, 9 May 1996. 87 Bryce Hallett, Australian, 10 May 1996. 88 Thomson, Age, 9 May 1996. 89 A negative review of the 1994 production, by Krissie Scudds, also quotes Armfield as saying that ‘The wings are open […] so that the audience can achieve a sense of the creation of the “magic” being performed in its working sense as well as the finished product. He draws comparisons with the puppets of the Wayang Kulit, and, to be honest, this human puppet play felt like it was about nine hours long, too’. Rip It Up, 3-9 March 1994. 90 Steven Carroll, Sunday Age, 12 May 1996. 91 Rachel Brighton, Sunday Herald-Sun, 12 May 1996. 92 Fiona Scott-Norman, Bulletin, 21 May 1996. 93 Patrick White: Collected Plays, Volume 1, p. 269. 94 James Waites, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 July 1996. 95 McCallum comments on the impact of this reading in Belonging, p. 102. Certainly many of the University of Wollongong students whose reviews of this production I was marking, commented on how much this motivation improved the play’s ending for them. 96 David Marr, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July 1996. 97 Ibid. 98 Pamela Payne, Sun-Herald, 7 July 1996. 99 John Tasker, Australian, 11 June 1996. 100 John Edge, Bulletin, 25 June 1996. 101 Murray Bramwell, Adelaide Review, July 1996. 102 Ibid. 103 Email. I would like to acknowledge several lively email conversations I have had with Julian Meyrick, on the subject of Patrick White’s plays, in the process of writing this article. 24