Elizabeth Jolley Drama Analysis
Elizabeth Jolley is an important writer whose critical reputation keeps increasing. Her radio plays were very popular in Australia when produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 1975 to 1992, and the audio and scripts deserve to be more accessible to the reading and listening public. Jolley navigates skillfully between the realist tradition and the narrative experiments of postmodern fiction. Her deviation from the historical/biographical style of much fiction changed the direction of Australian literature in the later decades of the twentieth century.
Often comic and with frequently eccentric characters, Jolley’s works always have a serious subtext. Major themes explore the effects on individuals of differing from social norms, the valuation of the worth of a life, the role of women in a patriarchal society, and the intersection of life and death as individuals confront imminent death. Jolley’s long interest in drama and the dramatic form influence all her work. She is particularly alert to the nuances of language and to the speaking voice. Her radio plays and also her novels and short stories emphasize monologue and dialogue. Action is typically structured around single dramatic moments.
Night Report
Jolley’s first produced radio play, Night Report, was highly recommended by all the judges of the Soundstage competition and was immediately accepted for production in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Perth studios.
The comic dialogue in the short play is not spoken; it appears in the form of notes written between Night Sister M. Shady and Matron A. Shroud at a dismal hospital for the aged. In her written instructions the Matron is quick to criticize the subordinate nurse rather than accept her own responsibilities. Nurse Shady in turn excuses herself in equally repetitive reports after her night shift. The inane notes between the two reveal the shoddy care the patients receive. The Matron’s brother arrives and is admitted to the ward. Soon he is heavily in debt for gambling long into the nights with the other patients and Nurse Shady. A total reversal in the two women’s roles ends the play.
Satirical in its portrayal of lack of compassion, the play uses one specific situation to indicate patterns of the larger world. The play eventually became part of the opening of Jolley’s novel Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, and its characters appear in the short story “‘Surprise! Surprise’ from Matron.” Such re-use or elaboration of material and characters is common throughout Jolley’s works.
The Performance
Based on a short story of the same title, The Performance is set in a ward in a large psychiatric hospital. The main character is a middle-aged postal carrier, identified only as “Man,” who carries on a long monologue about his life, part meditation and part confession. A ward orderly, Michael, occasionally makes an irrelevant comment.
What emerges is a slow revelation of the postal carrier’s life and his mental breakdown. However, the “revelation” is more question than answer. What led to his inability to act? How did his relationship with his outgoing wife, always “performing” before her creative writing students, contribute to his sense of inadequacy? Is his guilt from not delivering a letter to an old woman who desperately awaited a letter from her son, or is it from more sinister events? Is it ever possible to present only one answer? What is the purpose of life anyway? His is a tragic monologue, somewhere between a moan and a howl of the frustration felt by character and listener alike.
Unlike Jolley’s first play, the script gives precisely detailed instructions for voices, for background sounds in the hospital, and for specific music to be used in...
(This entire section contains 1713 words.)
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the scenes or between scenes. All elements are designed to reinforce each other in the service of dramatic effects. Jolley continued this pattern in subsequent plays.
By this second play she was also including in the script optional cuts (“opt.cut” and “end opt. cut”), identifying sections that could be omitted according to the time requirements or the editorial decisions of the producers.
The Shepherd on the Roof
The play is based on Jolley’s short story of the same name. The title refers to a major symbol in the text: The main character, Mrs. Clark, has noticed that in the afternoons some combination of shadows and features in the roof of a neighbor’s house forms an image that looks like a shepherd tending his sheep.
Jolley says that the setting of the play is “somewhere in the mysterious shades between life and death.” In the literal sense, Mrs. Clark is at the edge of the road where her car has crashed into trees along a paddock (enclosed field) where she has always wanted to stop, but her husband has always reminded her that it was restricted land. Two young passengers are already dead, though Mrs. Clark keeps saying (thinking) she will help them as soon as she is able to move. The final words of the play are in keeping with the rest of her very moving monologue following the crash:I want to walk now and go on walking to the far end. I’ve never seen what’s at the other end of the long paddock. (pause) (louder) Are you there Shepherd? Come down off the roof, Shepherd. Are you there my good Shepherd? (fade)
The Well-Bred Thief
Originally titled “Dear Neckless, Dear Barbara,” the short-story version and the radio script both take the form of letters between two former schoolmates. The supposedly sophisticated Barbara is in England working for a publishing company; Mabel Morgan, whom Barbara insists on addressing as “Neckless” as she called her years ago, still lives in Medulla, Western Australia. Mabel has written a book-length manuscript, which she mails to Barbara. As the exchange of letters painfully reveals, Barbara claims the manuscript as her own, telling the innocent Mabel that it is lost. The play is filled with dramatic irony, as the audience understands more than the characters do, and is brilliant in its economical revelation of character and its depiction of misplaced trust.
Woman in a Lampshade
Atypically, Jolley wrote this play and then developed it as a short story. This is the only play published before the collection Off the Air: Nine Plays for Radio. The main character, a woman aged about forty-five, is an egotistical writer who claims to write better when she is wearing a lampshade. She picks up a young man and takes him to her house for a night, not caring about him but using him as inspiration for lines in what she is writing. Traditional values here are indicated by the lack of them. It is a humorous play with an unlikable cast: The woman is predatory and dominating, and she dismisses the young man because she says that he is boring.
Two Men Running
Again, Jolley subverts the listeners’ expectations. What first appears to be a dialogue between two prisoners is one man’s internal monologue, the second “voice” another side of his personality. Enderby “talks” obsessively as he runs but has no words at all for the prison psychiatrist. There are several Oedipal references throughout the play: Enderby had murdered a woman he learns is his own mother. It is a bleak commentary on one of Jolley’s frequent topics, the dysfunctional family.
Paper Children
While moving between reality and fantasy, Jolley continues to look at families, here the angst and guilt of an Austrian gynecologist, Clara Shultz, who sent her baby daughter to Australia during World War II. In the last moments of Clara’s life, she acknowledges that she did nothing to prevent the crimes of the Nazi regime and that it is too late to visit her grown daughter.
Little Lewis Has a Lovely Sleep
This is Jolley’s only play that does not appear in another form or as part of any other work. Miss Vales is a middle-aged baby-sitter for six-year-old Little Lewis, whose rich father is called Big Lewis. The play opens with Miss Vales writing a note to the parents to warn them there is blood under the bathroom door. It then flashes back to a few hours earlier when a man breaks into the house to kidnap the child.
The suspense is equaled by comedy. Miss Vale is still looking for Mr. Right, so when The Intruder appears, she remembers that the head of the baby-sitting agency, Mrs. Porter, has always reassured her that the right man will show up. She chatters about anything and everything, endlessly quoting clichés from Mrs. Porter, all the while playing hostess, giving the kidnapper several kinds of liquor, then pills for his drunken headache. He ties her up in a chair so she cannot phone anyone when he goes to the bathroom, but she gets loose and heads after him. She sees blood seeping under the door.
She goes to write the note that started the play. What happened to The Intruder? Why is she bothering with a note when the parents will be home soon? All that is clear is that both she and The Intruder fail to achieve their goals.
The Well
Written after the successful novel of the same title, the play presents a key section. Miss Hester Harper, about sixty, has raised an orphan, Katherine, now (as the cast description says) aged “sixteen to twenty-two.” The vagueness of her age is suggestive of Miss Harper’s possessive desire to keep Katherine a little girl who cannot leave her.
As the two return from a rare party, Katherine hits something with the car. Miss Harper gets out and throws what she says is a man’s body down into an unused well, supposedly to protect Katherine. She then discovers that a large sum of money is missing from the house and tells Katherine to go down into the well and get it because the man must have stolen it before they came home. Katherine instead speaks of him as a handsome prince who will come out of the well to marry her.
In The Well, as in many of her other plays, Jolley portrays problems in family life, dramatically indicates more than the characters understand, blurs boundaries between reality and fantasy, upsets expectations, and gives the listener much to ponder.