DOROTHY HEWETT’S DRAMA, MEMORY AND AUSTRALIAN THEATRE by Peter Beaglehole, Brill, 2024
‘The pathway to understanding Hewett’s plays is a dramaturgical pathway,’ argues Peter Beaglehole in his book Dorothy Hewett’s Drama, Memory and Australian Theatre released by Brill earlier this year. While this is indeed so, the question arises: whose pathway is it, the playwright’s or the director’s? This is the key point of contention addressed in the context of memory studies.
The introduction written by the author himself indicates that the book originates from a PhD Thesis. The style of writing in this chapter abounds with statements of intention like ‘I aim to’ and ‘I view ... as’, it contains justification of choices like chapter length, and it includes a chapter-by-chapter synopsis. To take the writing beyond the format prescribed for a doctoral thesis, a complete rewrite was necessary. The failure to do it has resulted in the inconsistency of style and language register between this and the chapters that follow.
In every other respect this is a well-written book which offers valuable insights into the issues Hewett reflected upon in five of her plays. What is more, it provides ample evidence of the critical reception of their professional productions. As such, it is a welcome addition to the decades-old-studies of Hewett’s works for theatre, one by Margaret Williams (1992) and another, a collection of essays, edited by Bruce Bennett (1995). A longer historical perspective permits Beaglehole to investigate the effects of cultural memory on play reception, the goal set in his introduction.
Like many scholars before, Beaglehole compares Hewett’s style of dramaturgy with Patrick White’s, but his qualification of the Nobel laureate as ‘a rebel dramatist’ is contentious to say the least. White pioneered in 1960s Australia the structural composition defined in the theory of the avant-garde as ‘non-organic’, since it breached the rules of a ‘well-made play’, traditionally associated with a linear plot, the beginning, middle and the end, and an unambiguous closure. Hewett did the same, but the similarity stops there. For, White was a private person, whereas Hewett was a rebel ‘in word and deed’. She courted publicity and actively agitated against the double standards set for men and women in patriarchal societies. What she shared with White was only the method of play composition with which to uncover that every view of the world or reality is constructed. Beaglehole rightly argues that ‘simplistic narratives have serious implications for practitioners’, warning against ‘too direct parallels’ between Hewett’s plays and ‘her life experiences’. This has broader implications than it seems at first glance and cultural memory clearly illustrates the point.
For a definition of cultural memory, Beaglehole goes to the recently deceased German Egyptologist and cultural historian Jan Assmann, who posits that ‘[t]he concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize and convey that society’s image’ (5). While this is just the opening sentence of Assmann’s definition, it captures the essence of Hewett’s practice as a dramatist. Cited in more detail, however, is Assmann’s wife Aleida Assmann whose concept of ‘mnemonic cannon’ permits Beaglehole to highlight the importance of not only ‘[w]hat is remembered, [but] how that past is remembered also’. Complementary to this principle is Astrid Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ according to which, what is remembered ‘will be the result of the routes it [memory] takes in specific contexts and of the uses made by specific people with specific agendas’ (2-3). So defined, the theory of cultural memory opens a vast space for the investigation of issues surrounding Hewett, but more specific aspects of that theory get barely a mention from Chapter One onwards, giving precedence to critical reception. The problem with such a methodology is that the connection between reception and cultural memory needs to be supported by evidence. Citations are not enough. If missing, the focus gets redirected on reception alone and for it to have more depth than a mere survey, the main principles of reception theory against which to decipher the newspaper reviews and other critical reflections on Hewett’s work need to be established too. None is provided in this or any other chapter of the book.
Quite the opposite must be said about the coverage of the changing critical reception of five of Hewett’s plays composed between 1967 and 2001. Documented in unprecedented detail, the reviews and other secondary sources for the study of Hewett testify to the author’s thorough research of all databases available in Australia, from media outlets and academic journals to AusStage and Hewett’s papers held at the National Library of Australia. But as soon as the reader reaches one play synopsis or the other, the deciphering of them becomes problematic again. Contentious propositions alternate with strong ones, especially in the analysis of This Old Man Comes Rolling Home and Hewett’s expressionist plays, revealing the common limitation of Australian literary and theatre studies: the sole focus on meaning and no explanation of how that meaning is made. In other words, hermeneutic analysis, which seeks to 'interpret' the subjective meaning of a given text within its socio-historic context, is privileged over structural analysis. And yet, it is by structural analysis that the artistic means and procedures used in the process of play composition are uncovered. Those in turn provide precise information to prospective directors about the imagery and mise en scène envisaged by the playwright in performance. In Hewett’s theatre, both carry the meaning complementary to the meaning conveyed verbally, that is, through the dialogue. The insight Beaglehole provides into successive professional productions of the selected plays demonstrates that those guidelines are mostly ignored. One of the possible reasons for it is Australia’s long obsession with naturalism. The alternatives explored by rebel artists in Europe from as early as the beginning of the 20th century breached all the rules of Aristotelian aesthetics. The fragmentation of narrative, the use of montage or collage in plot construction, the substitution of allegory for the symbol, those were just some artistic means and procedures appropriated by ‘the historical avant-garde’ with the aim of destabilizing the formerly uncontested concepts of truth and objective reality.
On This Old Man Comes Rolling Home
Hewett began questioning the patriarchal perspective on reality and the system of values enshrined in it from the moment she returned to playwrighting with This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1967). But her method of composition still betrayed a heavy influence of classical tradition with origin in myth. In a form adapted to the modern age, it was advocated by one of her favourite poets, T. S. Eliot, who held that ‘[i]nstead of narrative method, we [writers] may now use the mythical method,’ which is ‘simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the intense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (in Select Prose of T. S. Eliot: 177-8). This Old Man thus opens with the little children dancing down the steps in a single file. They have a macabre quality and are described as little witches. Hewett writes: Then, hand in hand, still singing, [they] circle round the street lamp as if it were a terrible city maypole, circle the OLD MAN, still asleep on the bench, twitching off his newspapers till he rises in wrath and chases them round and round the street lamp. The growing darkness, a macabre appearance of children portrayed as little witches, their dance which follows a circular pattern, the Old Man described in Hewett’s character list as ‘Father Time perhaps’, they are all indications of the use of the mythical method, which continues for the duration of the play. Yet none of the reviews retrieved by Beaglehole makes any reference to the opening scene, prompting the question: was it ever played in performance? There is indeed evidence that numerous directors considered it redundant having failed to find any connection between the phantasmagorical opening and the rest of the play which they deciphered in the naturalistic vein.
For Beaglehole, Hewett’s Redfern—the setting of This Old Man Comes Rolling Home—is ‘a site of contested and contestable cultural memories’ and he rightly posits that ‘[t]ensions in the memory of Redfern are located in the characters’ (39). The three ladies in their sixties who always come together onto the stage are perceptively identified as ‘the Greek chorus’ who carries ‘the history of the place’ (40). But the young Pet’s return to her parental home with a newborn baby is not ‘a tragedy’. She does not fall ‘victim to cycles of birth and rebirth’ (40). Those cycles are central to the renewal of life and are, as such, both a blessing and a burden to women. Hewett had six children but lost her first born to leukemia. She was aware that the perpetual renewal of life is an imperative. This is why the paradigm of fertility sits at the centre of her mythical projection of the working class and humankind in general. Beaglehole astutely discerns that Hewett ‘was striving to find a balance [in This Old Man] between something distinctly Australian in its vocabulary, and something richer than conventional realism in its style’ (42). He, however, fails to challenge Carmel Dunn, a former play reader for Melbourne Theatre Company cited in Chapter One as saying that ‘Hewett’s language “is literary rather than dramatic”’ (28), which is the reading of a person nurtured on realism and naturalism. Would Dunn say the same about Shakespeare’s language? This goes a long way to explaining why plenty of clues for deciphering that ‘something’ can be found in Hewett’s play-text, rather than in the respective productions. A notable exception is the 1992 Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of This Old Man, which brought together Hewett, director Gale Edwards and designer Richard Roberts. Beaglehole cites an excerpt from his interview with Roberts, who recalls:
whenever those three women came out...we had tiny little pea lights so that the whole thing could be flooded with blue light and all these little stars came out. So the whole set could sort of be like a cosmos. So I suppose we let the audience into the sense that on the surface there’s a naturalistic world, but there [was] a whole other magical dimension to it as well (52).
The word ‘magical’ is key here, as it is one of the defining features of literary myth.
On The Chapel Perilous
Hewett’s play The Chapel Perilous (1971) provides more evidence of the use of the mythical method. It opens with an unambiguous reference to the myth of the Holy Grail, acknowledged by Hewett herself, by Peta Tait and Elizabeth Schafer in their jointly edited collection of selected drama by Australian women authors, and by other scholars. Yet in Beaglehole’s analysis, the play opens and closes with Sally’s funeral service. The circular form is indeed characteristic of the fertility myth (in reference to the cyclical renewal of nature) as is ‘a ritualistic tone’ of the prologue (62). In combination, they serve as evidence of Hewett’s use of the mythical method in play construction. Beaglehole calls for accepting ‘Hewett’s writing as a performance text’ (62), but an explication of the function these two elements have in the play-text, which would then inspire further reflection and their contextualization in performance, is missing. This is all-the-more important given that a ritualistic tone is not specific to The Chapel Perilous alone. The circular movement in the opening scene of This Old Man Comes Rolling Home and requested throughout the play-text, as well as in Hewett’s other plays with music has the same connotation.
It is in this section which examines Hewett’s play as a performance text that the theory of cultural memory is briefly brought back into the discourse. Citing Daniel Schacter, Beaglehole argues that the ‘biographical’ aspects of The Chapel Perilous permit Hewett to demonstrate that ‘memory constructions are both fragile and powerful ... because the memories, though ephemeral and distorted, can be compelling and influential’ (64). This salient fact is forgotten later in the book when relevant the most.
Tied to memory constructions is the argument that ‘the dominant cultural memory promotes Hewett’s controversy’, even though the reception of Hewett’s plays ‘shifted with each production’ (66). The question is, ‘dominant’ when? Cultural memory of Hewett has not been static either. Over time, it has shifted from misunderstanding to recognition to neglect to rejection, even pillorying. Beaglehole takes the parallel Sylvia Lawson draws between The Chapel Perilous and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in her introduction to the first edition of the play to suggest that this connection ‘aligns’ Hewett’s play with ‘the activism of the women’s liberation movement’ (69), with the ‘unintentional consequence’ of tightly framing Hewett’s drama. To qualify such a reading as contentious would be an understatement. Precisely the opposite is the case. The Quester figure borrowed from Malory’s romance gives The Chapel Perilous the quality of a timeless story. Roughly seven centuries that separate the two works, Malory’s and Hewett’s, testify to the universal significance of the quest for the Holy Grail, a metaphor for any sacred object or idea pursued in the Christian world. Laurence Coupe demonstrates in his book Myth that ‘the body of inherited myths in any culture, is an important element of literature, and that literature is a means of extending mythology’ (1997: 4). Hewett is a notable example, except that she sought to subvert patriarchal myths in which woman was either a witch/tart or a victim and promote instead the idea of New Woman which, because it had yet to fully materialize, was still a myth. It is precisely the absence of the mythical framework that, ’[i]n spite of strong emotional engagement of audiences,’ made it possible for a student to view Suzanne Chaundy’s direction of The Chapel Perilous at La Mama, Melbourne, ‘through a fixed historical lens’ (68). Recorded in 2007, the student’s response permits Beaglehole to suggest ‘that The Chapel has been reduced to a specific historical moment’ (68). It is necessary to remember that this was a response to a specific production. Beaglehole’s proposition made earlier in the book, under the sub-heading Cultural Memory in Australian Theatre and stating that ‘Hewett’s work looks toward the past' (30), is a reference to her entire body of work. Surprisingly, it follows a quote from Hewett taken from the feminist literary journal Hecate, ‘I’m stuck with the past and present, out of which I construct my view of human society’ (my emphasis).
A curious proposition that ‘mnemonic roadblocks ... prevent reading The Chapel in terms of theatrical traditions from Europe’ (73-74) also invites a critical comment. ‘By turning to the production histories,’ Beaglehole writes, ‘it becomes apparent that it was Hewett’s experience of writing for the New Fortune Theatre’s open stage that contributed most to the aesthetic development of The Chapel’(74). This argument neglects the fact that The New Fortune Theatre at the University of Western Australia’s Nedlands Campus is modelled on Shakespeare’s Fortune Playhouse and that the open stage is also a defining feature of Brecht’s epic theatre. In her essay ‘On the Open Stage’, first published by Pergamon Press, Oxford, in 1980, Hewett writes:
All the winter [of 1970] I paced the New Fortune in the rain, going back to Shakespeare, Jonson, the Jacobeans, Brecht, and finally decided that the epic theatre with its loose sequence of scenes, each one self-contained, moving like flashes across the stage, could best tell my story. (in Morrison, ed., 2011: 252)
To have to point out that all the dramatists Hewett refers to are Europeans is embarrassing. What the production histories of The Chapel Perilous uncover is other theatre makers’ interpretations of The Chapel Perilous, not Hewett’s experience of writing it. The play reception, in turn, stands testimony to the changing trends in social values. No production can be taken ‘as the default reading’. Every single one offers a new reading of Hewett’s play and this openness to interpretation is what keeps theatre tradition alive.
Closely bound up with the question of ‘default reading’ is the suggestion that ‘Hewett’s drama needs a performance-vocabulary to articulate her relationship with ongoing feminist theatre practices’ (67). That relationship can be contextualised without inventing a new performance-vocabulary. Hewett’s language is visual, poetic and thus theatrical, and the imagery she calls for in her play-text is symbolic, culturally non-specific and timeless. For instance, the three authority masks placed for the play figures to hide and emerge from behind are universal symbols. They are responsible for the constitution of subjects in social reality, not at the time of performance but at any time. This is not to say that the performance vocabulary must always faithfully reproduce the imagery, soundscape and mise en scène requested in the play-text. But the theatre makers’ new concept must foreground feminist issues without being reductive. To paraphrase the designer Peter Corrigan, questions implicit in the play’s progression may necessitate a redefinition, but they should be posed in plastic terms by a designer and choreographer too, they should spring naturally from scene to scene to signal that the personal is political, always.
On The Tatty Hollow Story
The chapter on The Tatty Hollow Story (1974) in which Hewett shines a new light on the role that psychology plays in culturally legitimized projections of woman is the weakest part of the book. Two particularly contentious sections are: the analysis of the Tatty Hollow figure, and the moralistic tone in response to the allegation that Hewett ‘facilitated’ the sexual abuse of her daughters, Kate and Rozanna Lilley. The play’s main theme is an apt point of departure. For Beaglehole, this is a play concerned ‘with bodies and their surrogates’ (82), which is a common theoretical perspective in feminist and contemporary non-feminist literatures alike. No evidence of familiarity with the expressionist avant-garde’s (not Brecht’s) artistic techniques and their method of character building transpires from the analysis. This is highly important given that The Tatty Hollow Story is a unique example of the aesthetic construction of subjectivity in Australian drama. For, Tatty is built as the profusion of emblems grouped around the figural centre - a female dummy featured as an adulterated image of a femme fatale. The dummy stands in a half-globular Perspex telephone box lighted throughout the play with a golden glow. All the stories told about Tatty up to the closing scene come from the supporting figures. They are memories mutually contradictory and irreconcilable suggesting that they are simply psychological projections that gradually turn into a collective paranoia. It is only in the closing scene that Tatty, now an old woman, finds the strength to express and assert her own identity or, rather, her sense of Self.
Such treatment of the central figure unprecedented in Australian drama springs from a ‘revolution in perception’ brought about by the expressionist avant-garde’s ‘onslaught on the familiar’. It called for a ‘de-automatizing renewal of vision’ (Murphy 1998: 62) in recognition of the existence of ’a multiplicity of consciousness and perspective’ (Murphy 44). Beaglehole suggests that ‘while on first reading Tatty Hollow might appear to be about deconstructing Tatty’s identity, it can also be read as calling the mythology of the femme fatale into question’ (84-5), failing to see that the question of identity and ‘the mythology of the femme fatale’ are interconnected. He also writes about ‘a ritualistic funeral’ of Tatty without making the connection between the performance of ritual and the mythical method either. Yet these are just a few artistic techniques among a vast array of others Hewett uses to make the routine that obliterates the plurality of perception visible in performance and at the same time raise awareness of the social construction of reality, which makes every ‘authoritative’ opinion and every memory little more than a myth. Instead, the Lilley sisters’ experience is interpolated in the discourse to, as Beaglehole writes, ‘better understand Hewett’s legacy’ (96).
The high moral ground from which this issue is viewed sits awkwardly in a scholarly study. This is even more so given that it is precisely the kind of attitude Hewett rejected and actively opposed all her adult life. Beaglehole makes no attempt at interrogating the media reports of the sisters’ public confession nor is there a reminder of Erll’s proposition that what is remembered is ‘the result of the routes [memory] takes in specific contexts and of the uses made by specific people with specific agendas’. And yet Kate and Rozanna’s statement that ‘the #MeToo movement played some role in their choice to speak so publicly’ followed by Beaglehole’s conclusion that ‘wider cultural moves must have contributed to creating a new mnemonic-schemata’ (99) strongly suggest that additional investigation is required. Another indication that the sisters’ joint statement is indeed a mnemonic schema is the quotation from Jane Jervis-Read’s lengthy postscript to her 2018 article in Meanjin: ‘Despite her trauma, Kate Lilley claims that she and mother “loved each other hugely” and supposes that she [Hewett] gauntly believed she was offering this unfettered, uninhibited lifestyle to us’ (100). Jervis-Reid’s essay is written from the expressly personal perspective, it tells the reader more about the essayist than about Hewett, the poet-playwright.
The tendency to judge Hewett’s legacy as a writer by her life style has deep roots. Kirsten Green (wife of David Williamson) wrote as early as 1979, ‘Dorothy Hewett has lived on the edge of public outrage all her life’. For an informed critique of Hewett’s upbringing of her daughters, it is necessary to recall what exactly motivated her, as mother, and where the values she espoused came from. Hewett read Freud while studying for her degree at the University of Western Australia, and Herbert Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization was one of the most popular among the New Left. It is a study of Freud that calls for a radical transformation of consciousness to be achieved by subverting the idea of progress, which was traditionally associated with affluence and the repression of primary instincts. Marcuse’s call for the rehabilitation of ‘the “asocial” autonomous Eros’ not only legitimized the liberation struggles launched by the Beatniks in the 1950s, but it also suggested what needed to be done to turn a historical protest into a way of life for all. Theodore Roszak reviewed this theory in his book Making of a Counter Culture by pointing to the weakness of Marcuse’s theory and by bringing other voices into the discussion. This segment of history is veiled over in Beaglehole’s book, testament to cultural amnesia.
Instead, Beaglehole brings the theoreticians of cultural memory back into the discourse beginning with Aleida Assmann, who argues that ‘memories become enshrined by repeated presentation’ and then concluding that ‘mass produced publications, like newspaper articles or editorials, impact the way Hewett is remembered’ (96). This well-documented principle of cultural memory does not prevent Beaglehole from using the personal pronoun, as in: ‘I too have read Hewett’s plays enthusiastically’ (100); ‘I still feel ambiguous about Hewett’ (100); ‘I see a play that embodies the gender politics of the 1970s, but also reveals Hewett’s generational short-sightedness’ (100). In all of these statements, the author puts himself before the argument, reducing its significance to a single person instead of pointing out its universal relevance. What Beaglehole calls ‘the generational short-sightedness’ was in fact an attempt to find, in Roszak’s words, ’the saving image our endangered civilization requires’. Hewett stated in a quote included in Beaglehole’s book, ‘making predictions for the future is not an exercise I’m really interested in’ (89-90). Yet he accuses Hewett of failing to set new standards bemoaning ‘her incapacity to envisage a different gendered experience for her heroine’ (100). This task Hewett assigns to the spectator who alone can find an answer in keeping with the changing views on gender, morality and all other contentious issues addressed in the play. Only sci-fi envisages a future and Hewett was not a science fiction writer. Beaglehole contends that ‘Tatty becomes a symbol of possibilities’ but he fails to apply the same logic of reason when discussing the question of the Lilley sisters’ sexual abuse and Hewett’s role in it.
On The Man from Mukinupin and Other Plays Set in a Small Town
If the previous chapter was the weakest in the book, those that follow are the strongest. The plays explored there are fictional records of Hewett’s cultural memory, an ideal object of study within the framework of cultural memory theory. The analysis begins with The Man from Mukinupin (1979) written for the sesquicentennial celebrations of Western Australia and set in a small town, arguably a metaphor for Australian culture, whose development Hewett continues investigating in her Jarrabin Trilogy (December 1994) and in her last play Nowhere (2001), where the representation of a small town undergoes a radical change. Beaglehole traces its origin back to Hewett’s short story ‘The Wire Fences of Jarrabin’, failing to give credit to Novaković who did a far more detailed analysis of the play’s provenance in her 2006 PhD thesis and in her essay ‘Dorothy Hewett’s Sacred Place’,1 both included in Beaglehole’s list of references.
The structural composition of The Man from Mukinupin derives from Shakespeare. Hewett openly admitted more than once that she sought to compose a drama which, in Beaglehole’s words, ‘communicated directly to her audiences’ (112). To the writer of this review she once said: ‘I read all of Shakespeare’s comedies over and over again ... and it sort of seeped into my head, and that’s how I wrote the play (unpublished interview with Novaković, 2 March 2000). Featured in Mukinupin are two sets of characters, day figures and night figures. For Rodney Fisher, the director of Sydney Theatre Company’s 1981 production of the play and the one Hewett loved the most, the ‘completely Shakespearean’ (109) style was self-evident. He reminisces in an interview with Beaglehole: ‘an actor would struggle to portray one character without playing their double as well, [for] the duality is the play’ (108). Fisher, however, changed one detail in Hewett’s play-text. He got rid of the Morris Dance in the opening scene which, according to some mythographers, is a vestige of seasonal pre-Christian agricultural fertility rites, and replaced it with an image of the cosmos. This is how Fisher describes the scene to Beaglehole: ‘what I wanted was stars as far as the eye could see.’ He went on to say:
Then it happened ... that huge strange iron curtain went up in the Opera House and slowly you began looking into that deep, deep distance with stars as far as eye could see and very slowly, slowly, the lights came up on a group of women...they were completely still... and then Jane Harders, who was Clemmy [the ex-rope dancer, crippled after a fall] suddenly walked slowly forward and struck the stage three times with her staff and then the town sort of happened (119).
The context was that of a magical event and magic is, as posited above, one of the defining features of myth. This was a variation acceptable to Hewett because it set the right tone to her play and at the same time offered the first clue to being a literary myth.
The last clue was the Mukinupin carousel which, for Beaglehole, ‘despite a stage direction that describes it as circular and reconciliatory in mood, leaves unsettling questions lingering over the action’ (109). This is only so if the connotation of ritual and its function is missed. While there is no doubt that Hewett ‘invites the audience to reflect on the contestable representations of Australian history’ (108), the mood meant to bring the day and night characters together in the carousel serves also as strong evidence of Hewett’s anticipation of reconciliation. Carousel is again a circular dance deriving from folk traditions or, more precisely, from fertility rites associated with the natural cycles of death and rebirth. They were believed to have the power to bring revivification of land about, in the case of Mukinupin, Hewett’s land.
Yet Suzanne Spunner’s review of Fisher’s production at the Sydney Opera House sends the reader down a foggy pathway. She describes The Man from Mukinupin in her review for Theatre Australia ‘as an Australian classic’. In an excerpt cited by Beaglehole, she notes ‘that its structure and the romantic form served as a sturdy vessel for Hewett’s blend of literary illusion and popular reference’ (116). Spunner surely meant ‘theatrical illusion’ but, more importantly, her attribution of ‘the romantic form’ to the play betrays complete unawareness of the influence of Shakespeare on Hewett’s choice of form for Mukinupin, and Shakespeare was certainly not a romantic.
A fine example of a new and socially relevant take on The Man from Mukinupin is Wesley Enoch’s production for the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2009, with a pronounced accent on racial issues that Australia has been grappling with since its foundation. In an interview with Beaglehole, the director points out that in his adaptation of the play, ‘Mukinupin isn’t a place, it’s a magical place constructed for us’ (126). Perhaps one should add, it is both magical and real enough to be convincing. Beaglehole informs the reader that this was amplified ‘by colour-conscious casting’ (122, 124, 126), and a dose of irony as the actors’ white-face makeup ‘wore off during performance’ (126). The conclusion that ‘[t]he performance histories, and embodiment of ethnicity, were brought to the fore by Enoch’s intelligent direction’ (126) brings out the essence of this production.
With his focus on Hewett’s play-text, Beaglehole astutely states that ‘Mukinupin presents two visions of Australia’s colonial past’ (109). In his analysis clearly informed by the cultural memory theory, ‘[c]entral to the dramaturgy is the way in which the histories of the characters and place have been remembered and forgotten (and the performance of such memories)’ (109). It builds on the proposition that Hewett ‘invites the audience to reflect on the contestable representations of Australian history’ (108). That invitation she extends in The Jarrabin Trilogy which opens in 1920, the same year The Man from Mukinupin closes. Both are set in historical time, indicating that every mythical projection of people and events has its footing in the real.2
The fact that Hewett’s trilogy remains unproduced in its original form and is her only unpublished play-text among those studied in the book has driven Beaglehole to open the chapter dedicated to this colossal work with Aleida Assmann’s perspective on remembering and forgetting. ’In the same way that an individual cannot remember everything, privileging working memory, cultures curate a cannon and an archive’ (131). Assmann cautions that this is a flexible model since ‘what is forgotten can still be remembered’. She further explains:
Nevertheless, cultural remembering’s active elements function to preserve the past as present, so a public commemoration ceremony ... is an example of activity that forms a canon. The active elements of forgetting can be described as the thrashing or destroying of memory, seen most clearly in censorship, while more opaque passive elements see memories neglected or dispersed in a community (131).
From this, Beaglehole draws a sound conclusion that Hewett’s trilogy ‘falls into an archive in both a real and mnemonic sense’ (131). The reasons for it are explored in quite some detail in the book but here, there is only space for the key point.
The Jarrabin Trilogy (December 1994) opens with an image of a ghost town in allusion to the lost potential, the view Donald Horne also expressed in Death of the Lucky Country (1976), a sequel to The Lucky Country (1964). There is, however, an important point of difference: Hewett’s outlook is never entirely pessimistic. In Beaglehole’s reading, ‘Novaković suggests that, unlike Mukinupin, the sense of reconciliation in Jarrabin is gone and Hewett’s “optimism fades away”’ (147). This quote obliterates the end point which states that recorded in the trilogy is an era that follows the rhythm of temporal experience. With the passage of time, that experience turns into an approximation to myth and so a timeless paradigm. ‘What each new generation will make of a permanent possibility that such a paradigm connotes is largely the question of vision’, writes Novaković (2010: 216) evidently in agreement with Beaglehole. Hewett’s trilogy ‘offers a productive, rather than a pessimistic, outcome’ (148) indeed.
A detailed account of numerous drafts Hewett made of The Jarrabin Trilogy is one of Beaglehole’s important contributions to the field of theatre/performance studies. Original and unavailable in any other academic source, it stands testimony to Hewett’s willingness to take on board the suggestions for revision that kept coming from various sides in the second half of the 1990s in the hope that her trilogy might eventually find a producer and become an event, rather than an archival material.
In contrast, Hewett’s last play Nowhere (2001) took only a few days to write. It happened so quickly due to the support of one man, Aubrey Mellor, who was at the time the artistic director of the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne. An interview with Mellor along with interviews with other directors of Hewett’s plays is another valuable contribution of this book to scholarship. Also exceptional is a meticulous compilation of play reviews and journal articles that permit a comprehensive insight into the reception of Hewett’s plays over several decades. The following quote makes the complexity of deciphering evident:
Hewett plays with time in Nowhere. It asks the audience to actively connect and reconstruct memories around a mythologised past, but there are two features which inhibited an open response: the way that Hewett was positioned in a canon and her engagement with non-naturalistic drama. (160)
This is not to say, as Beaglehole has it earlier in the book, that Hewett’s plays of the 1970s ‘dispense with plot and character’ (89). Rather, they dispense with the idea of Cartesian identity and the Aristotelian drama structure in response to the new currents of thought in 20th century theory and avant-garde art.
While Beaglehole’s proposition that Nowhere ‘culminates in a flood that could be a gesture to Jarrabin’ seems a valid one given that the last play of the trilogy ‘ends in a fire that serves as a cleansing metaphor’ (162), this is not how the trilogy ends, for it has an Epilogue. In it, Kel, the larrikin but pragmatic figure who brought the wind of change to Jarrabin, is shown watering the trees planted years before by Jack Brand, the visionary estranged from his wife and the community by total dedication to the idea of environment restoration that would have Jarrabin become a sustainable, green town. This, by extension, calls for another look into the closing scene of Nowhere.
For Beaglehole, ‘the central image in the play [is that] of a town flooded and disappearing underwater, [which] suggests that the remembrance of the past is a floodgate. There are places and ideas that are drowned in Nowhere and a real irony in the image of Snow and Vonnie who follow a sign to nowhere’ (162). Hewett saw a road sign to Nowhere while travelling with her family across the Nullarbor Desert, in a dilapidated Mercedes. In her imagination, it became a mythical place. More on this will be revealed elsewhere. Here, it is necessary to emphasize that, for Hewett, Nowhere is a mythical place in the desert and it is from the desert that the prophets come. The closing image in Nowhere is that of old man Josh standing up on the roof triumphantly, sensing that ‘[t]he Torrent’s coming! She’s comin’ to sweep us all away, sweeten the waters and green the land agen.’ This is an image not only of cleansing but also of salvation of younger generations and renewal as in the Genesis flood narrative. It is as close as Hewett, the poet, could get to saying: after big floods rebuilding begins, regeneration of nature begins. It is not her nostalgic look into the past, as the unfortunate request for ‘Rustle of Spring’ in the published play-text leads the reader to conclude. Rather, it is a look forward called for by the soft sound of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring requested in Hewett’s manuscript that this reviewer obtained from her literary agent, Hilary Linstead and Associates, while Hewett was still alive. Stravinsky’s is an avant-garde ballet that shows a way forward for music and dance, while the church bells playing ‘faintly’ mark a sacred ceremony of burial of the old, allowing for the new to emerge. Thus connoted in the closure of both The Jarrabin Trilogy and Nowhere is the fertility paradigm with an implication of permanent possibility of rebirth, regeneration and renewal. It is Hewett’s main paradigm.
On The Conclusion
Out of many suggestions made in the closing chapter of the book Dorothy Hewett’s Drama, Memory and Australian Theatre, the following stands out. Beaglehole posits that the ‘study of ongoing productions can radically reconfigure understanding of Hewett’s development as a playwright’ (173). Arguably, all such a study can do is uncover different levels of understanding of Hewett’s play-texts, as attested by director Alexander Hay’s decision to remove altogether the fixed image of woman in the telephone box (requested in the play-text) in his production of The Tatty Hollow Story at The Stables in Darlinghurst, in 1976. Indisputable, however, is that ‘the study of plays in production creates a vocabulary that values different approaches as a matter of ongoing historical intergenerational dialogue’ (173).
Beaglehole rightly emphasizes that ongoing production was vital for Hewett’s development. With this book, he achieves the intended goal to deepen the reader’s understanding ‘of the way cultural memory is constructed and reconstructed, and how cultural narratives form’. Each new production offers a fresh glimpse into ‘how stories about Australia have been told’. Beaglehole elaborates: ‘In an active and conscious process of memory making, Australian theatre reveals the ambiguities and complexities of contemporary society. This is the pathway to a more mature vocabulary to describe Australian theatre and its values’ (177). For such a vocabulary to evolve, especially in the case of playwrights like Dorothy Hewett, crossing the boundaries of theatre/performance studies is required. Hewett’s poetic language, her use of intertextuality and the mythical method on one hand, and her exploration of bold themes and unprecedented techniques of play composition on the other, all have their basis in modern history of art and theory that seek to better (or more fully) define human experience. Hewett’s search for meaning, life’s purpose and fulfilment is universal. Australian culture is only her case in point.
Endnotes
1. An erratum is acknowledged in issue No. 57, October 2010, p. 9. It mysteriously occurred after Geoffrey Milne, the then president of ADSA and editor of the issue No. 56 of the Australasian Drama Studies Journal, had sent the copy out for printing.
2. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Hill and Wang, New York, 1995 (twenty-ninth print)
References
Bruce Bennett, Dorothy Hewett: Selected Critical Essays, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, South Fremantle, 1995
Fiona Morrison (ed.), Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett, Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2011
Frank Kermode, (ed.). Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1975
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, The Beacon Press, Boston, [1955] 1974
Jasna Novaković, ‘Dorothy Hewett’s Sacred Place’, Australasian Drama Studies, No 56, April 2010
Kristin Green, ‘Dorothy Hewett: A Censored Look at a Revolutionary Romantic’, Theatre Australia, April 1979, pp. 16-17, 38
Laurence Coupe, Myth, Routledge, London, 1997, 2009
Margaret Williams, Dorothy Hewett: The Feminine as Subversion, Currency Press, Sydney, 1992
Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity, Cambridge University Press, 1998
Copies of the book may be obtained from the publisher, Dorothy Hewett’s Drama, Memory and Australian Theatre | Brill
