Jack Hibberd
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Obituary: Jack Hibberd
Jack Hibberd, 12 April 1940–31 August 2024
Jack Hibberd, 1981. Photo by Rennie Ellis. State Library Victoria, Melbourne.
There is nothing resembling a Hall of Fame for Australian playwrights, of course. They’re used to battling for that prized first production, which very rarely leads to a second; their expectations mostly don’t run to a living wage, let alone celebrity status.
If there was such a Hall, it would still be a pretty small gallery. And it would have recently lost two of its most distinguished members. Jack Hibberd’s death at the end of August followed closely Ray Lawler’s in late July. We would all have our own pecking order for the notional Hall, but for me the loss of those two leaves only one shoo-in candidate for nomination as ‘living legend’, David Williamson. It’s been a grim year.
Lawler’s career as a writer had been over for some time when he died at the age of 103; the last of his thirteen plays, Godsend, appeared in 1982. In 2020, Williamson, the most prolific of the three, declared Crunch Time, his fifty-seventh premiere in a fifty-six year career, his last (though he was persuaded to write The Great Divide for the Ensemble early this year). The natural heir to Lawler in his delight in the close observation of Australian myths and manners, Williamson has been clearly the most commercially successful of the three; though he and Hibberd began their writing careers together in the gloriously gritty environment of Melbourne’s La Mama and the Pram Factory, their trajectories and interests quickly diverged. Williamson’s grand themes were tricky relationships, and the poignancy and comedy of the awkward interactions they produced; the evolution of his work had less to do with style and subject than with context, as his people moved from the grimy inner-city flats in The Removalists and Jugglers Three, through the supposedly authentic middle-class mudbrick of Don’s Party, to the glorious harbour views in Emerald City, and the luxuriously rural superannuants’ retreats in Travelling North and Money and Friends. Along the way, Williamson’s plays created a wonderfully rich tour of the shifting moral and political preoccupations of their times.
Jack Hibberd’s last play, Killing Time, appeared in 2023. The grim pun in the title is characteristic, as is the suggestion of a homage to Beckett’s Endgamein the ‘action’. Appropriately, it was staged at La Mama, where for Hibberd it all began in 1967. It was Hibberd’s fortieth play, which is a surprisingly prolific record for a playwright who spent quite long periods of disenchantment or impatience with theatre-making (and who, throughout his long writing career, worked fairly consistently as a medical practitioner). Appropriately, too, it was a play about the End of Days. But wasn’t a reflection of the immediate concerns of an octogenarian playwright (as Williamson’s farewell play, Crunch Time, with its discussions of euthanasia and of finally making amends, clearly was). Eschatology was an element in Hibberd’s work almost from the beginning; the focus in Killing Time seems less a matter of personal priorities than insatiable metaphysical curiosity.
Jack Hibberd’s work is harder to pin down than that of Williamson, his great contemporary and rival, and Lawler. As a writer he was never much interested in sociological observation and topical issues; accordingly, perhaps, he was never taken up, as Lawler and Williamson were, by the subsidised state companies and their well-heeled subscribers. It would be true to say that he stayed on the edge; at the same time, it is a fact that he produced the work that has been staged more often, and seen by more people, than any other Australian play—Dimboola, the grand parody of a nightmare country wedding reception, has been performed in theatres, town halls, Mechanics’ Institutes and theatre restaurants all over the country. For a writer often seen as challengingly cerebral, Hibberd found a remarkably broad audience for his rude and riotous script; his favourite among its many productions was an amateur one in Ararat, a smallish Victorian town some two hundred kilometres from Melbourne.
Hibberd is a playwright who defies easy categorisation. While Dimboolais his most popular work, the one that has had most critical acclaim is the Beckettian monodrama, A Stretch of the Imagination, which follows the octogenarian Monk O’Neill as he spends his dying days in a pared-down world populated by his friends the ants, and by a rich array of characters real and imagined. Margaret Williams boldly declared the play in 1972 “the first unmistakable Australian theatre classic”; the pronouncement may have been a little premature (and a touch dismissive of Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, to which I would still award that title), but Stretch is—unmistakably—a classic. Placing it beside Dimboola immediately reflects the complexity of Hibberd’s career, and it’s between those poles of erudition and rambunctiousness that his work moves.
White with Wire Wheels (1967), Hibberd’s first play, exploits those contradictions. At one level, it’s an exploration of young Aussie blokehood, catching the ocker idiom and culture to perfection. At another, it’s a revelation of existential emptiness. One of the lads describes his mates to a potential female conquest in enticing terms: “They’re real individuals. You’ll never have met anyone like them.” But they’re indistinguishable in their commitment to birds and booze, and their occasional glimpses of anxiety as to whether that’s all there is. At the end of the play, when their hopes of a big night have been dashed, Mal completes their identification of themselves and their women with cars: they’re going to “go up in the Valiant. I’ll thrash it to death,” and to “Really write ourselves off.” But at the end, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, they find that there is nothing to be done:
MAL. Let’s go!
ROD. Which way?
MAL. The same way we went last time, naturally.
SIMON. No short cuts?
MAL. No short cuts.
ROD. The same route for everybody. It’s easier that way.
MAL. Let’s go!
[They stand still. Darkness.]
As Hibberd notes in his introduction to the volume in which White with Wire Wheels was first published in 1970:
None of these plays stoop to psychological explanation, something I am not very good at; it also bores me to death. They strive to work emblematically through scenic action and extroversion, and agglutination of facts, fibs, images, songs, occasions, jokes, straight lefts, and inexplicable distemper.
It’s not a bad outline of the theatrical values that drove his subsequent career.
While Hibberd’s remarkably self-confident manifesto at the age of thirty catches the eclecticism of what was to come, it left out two of its most striking components. One was his fascination with language, and the juxtaposition of a distinctive Australian vernacular with other more high-falutin' idioms. It’s this verbal energy that drives A Stretch of the Imagination; Monk is a virtuoso talker, and, in a play with a sparse set and a single character who finds it painful to move, the colour and disconnections of the language are the source of its vitality. He summons his imaginary waiter with ‘Wo ist il garcon de house?” and dismisses him with “immediatement, turd-face!”; he laments his old companion, the snap-frozen Mort Lazarus, with a fusillade of adulatory cliches:
You’re a tower of strength to me, Mort. Two minutes of silence for Mort, a man who was once the life of the party, who always did the right thing, a digger who has ceased to shovel, an Einstein of the stab pass and brindle chuck, a knuckler of pansies who always wore the pants, old silver-tongue, a man’s man, the first off Gallipoli, one of nature’s policemen. Mate.
Monk’s meanderings are a relentless riff on the richness and absurdity of words.
The monodrama is an obvious vehicle for that fascination with language, and Hibberd produced two for a female actor—Lavender Bags (1980) and Mothballs(1981). The roles of the garrulous ladies (respectively Desdemona Jones and Jocasta Vaudeville-Smith) were both first performed by the playwright’s wife, the remarkable Evelyn Krape.
The other departure from the distinctively Australian contexts of Hibberd’s early work is his increasing preoccupation with European modernism. The influence of Beckett and Pinter, and of 1960s English absurdists like N.F. Simpson and Charles Wood, was there from the beginning, but the first clear signs of that more developed focus appear incongruously in his tribute to a true-blue Aussie sheila, A Toast to Melba(1976), which features cameo appearances from some of Nellie’s notable contemporaries—Wilde, Shaw and Wedekind mingle in burlesque with Caruso, Buffalo Bill, and a host of other funny accents. It is more evident still in Hibberd’s very Brechtian stage adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat(1977), and in his reworkings of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1999) and a Maupassant short story in Odyssey of a Prostitute (1984).
Alongside this more explicitly literary approach was another new development, the integration of original music; Hibberd’s collaborations with composer Martin Friedel on The Overcoatand Odyssey of a Prostitute, and on Sin(a Victorian State Opera Company commission in 1978) are the most notable examples of this.
Most of these initiatives came to fruition after the Pram Factory began its slow demise in 1979. Until that point, Hibberd remained committed to the collectivist principles of the company, and served as Chair of its organising committee for two years. David Williamson left early in 1972, finding the writer unacceptably low in the group’s pecking order; Hibberd, like John Romeril, gave every impression of welcoming the collaborative input of others.
The tonal complexity of Jack Hibberd’s work directly reflects his temperament; I remember him as mostly a study in black—the lock of black hair falling over his forehead, the severe black horn-rimmed spectacles, the heavy black moustache. It gave him a saturnine presence that matched his intellectual assertiveness. But Hibberd always had one foot in popular culture as well. It was conspicuous not only in the rough-and-ready interactions of his blokes and blokesses, but in the breadth of reference of his work; this unusually esoteric author also produced (with Garrie Hutchinson) The Barracker’s Bible (1983), a dictionary of Australian sporting slang. Similarly, the sardonic intensity of manner could switch in an instant to wholehearted hilarity. He was a complicated man.
At the end of A Stretch of the Imagination, Monk, now unable to stand, looks up at the entrance to his hovel and muses “I must remember to lower the height of this portal.” The line has been given very different interpretations by the fine actors who’ve played the role, from Peter Cummins’ savage self-mockery and Max Gillies’ pragmatic resilience to, most recently, John Wood’s rueful melancholy. Only a very good writer could offer that range of strong choices to an actor and leave the audience with such a compelling double-image of bodily decrepitude and the defiance of the human spirit.
Jack Hibberd was a exceptionally good one.