Patrick White Drama Analysis
Patrick White’s plays address the same thematic concerns as his novels: the role of the artist, the conflict between the visionary and the materialist, and the moral desolation and decay prevailing in modern life. Their language and structure intensify and heighten experience by combining the poetic with the mundane, the experimental with the traditional, the events of ordinary life with the metaphysical quest for truth. In general, the plays owe much to the European tradition of expressionism, which depends on the use of antinaturalistic stage devices, compression of language, symbolic picture sequences achieved through short unrealized scenes, lofty themes of spiritual regeneration or renewal, and a declamatory tone.
Although White’s plays will not gain the kind of recognition his fiction has achieved, they should not be discounted or ignored. They stand as accomplished works in their own right, especially in their author’s original handling of techniques that made expressionism so vital a force in twentieth century theater. An understanding of the dramas will lead to a richer appreciation of the novels, for both literary forms show how the artist can meld opposites: symbolism that employs the trivial to clarify the universal; characters who emerge as both real human beings and metaphysical abstractions; settings that rely on the tangible, which are microcosmic, but suggest the elusive, the universal.
The Ham Funeral
The best known of the plays, The Ham Funeral, illustrates these points. The Young Man, the only name given to its major character, reveals in the prologue that he is a poet and, like all poets, knows too much but never enough. He proceeds to explain that the audience must enter with him into the house before which he stands and there learn what it means to be a poet. The scenes that follow bring together the disparate parts of The Young Man’s psyche and give him direction as an artist. In the first scene, he lies on his bed in silence, considering “the great poem,” when the Landlady interrupts to tell him that her husband has died. He assists in preparation for the funeral, at which the relatives eat the ham the widow has provided to give the funeral class. Later, the Landlady attempts, unsuccessfully, to seduce The Young Man, who returns to his room and carries on a long conversation with The Girl, actually his anima. At the end of the play, The Young Man leaves the house—its back wall dissolving, the stage directions say—and walks into the “luminous night.”
Through this fluid series of fragmented scenes, the self-absorbed artist has learned to identify himself with the raw stuff of life: love and lust, hate and compassion, the beautiful and the ugly. Henceforth his poetry will no longer resemble “self-abuse in an empty room” but a discovery of the human condition in all of its forms.
The Season at Sarsaparilla
If The Ham Funeral may be taken as an autobiographical statement—and there exist substantial grounds for such an interpretation—then The Young Man (White) set his hand to the novel, forsaking poetry altogether and not returning to the drama for almost fifteen years. When he did, he took up in The Season at Sarsaparilla the plight of the visionary thrust into a world that is mundane, respectable, conventional, materialistic—but altogether lacking in awareness. An imaginary Sydney suburb, Sarsaparilla, comes to life on the stage through a setting that represents the kitchens and backyards of three adjoining houses. As the action moves from house to house, the families’ lives intertwine in the most ordinary of ways, thus giving the outward texture of the play a deceptive air of naturalism....
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A dog in heat, or in season, interrupts the quiet lives of the three families when she goes under one of the houses, pursued by a pack of excited dogs. This ironic use of “season” in the title extends to the growing awareness of the central character, Pippy, a young girl on the verge of womanhood, who learns through the dogs’ natural actions that life embraces passion, violence, birth, and death, that it goes through its seasons, as she will hers.
A Cheery Soul
A Cheery Soul takes for its setting the Sundown Home for Old People and centers its action on Miss Docker. This at once comic and bitter portrayal of a cheery soul, the very soul of suburban respectability and morality, offers a superbly drawn character in Miss Docker, who destroys herself and others as she goes about doing good and remaining cheerful in the face of every disaster. The destructive force, which she manifests unknowingly, stems from an absolute belief in the rightness of her actions, an attitude so pervasive that it leaves no room for sensitivity toward other people.
Night on Bald Mountain
Probably the least successful of all the plays, Night on Bald Mountain sets out to portray the disintegration of Western civilization. The means it uses, however, fail to rise to the loftiness of its theme: A woman more devoted to a herd of goats than to humankind, an embittered professor, his alcoholic wife, and a young woman with incestuous longings lack the universal appeal to make convincing so significant a message. Still, the play’s artistry in language and structure and its striking use of setting lend it a pure theatrical excitement in spite of the defects.
Big Toys
Disheartened by the reception of his plays, White left the drama for the novel and shunned playwriting for fourteen years. Some critics believe, though, that his early plays, so different from anything native ever produced on the Australian stage, sowed the seeds for the new theater movement that got under way there in 1967, when several young writers demanded that Australian theater make room for the country’s linguistic vigor, concern itself with matters contemporarily Australian, and liberate the imagination to experiment with new forms. Whereas these playwrights moved in directions different from White, they surely benefited from his earlier attempts to establish a distinctly Australian drama.
In 1977, Big Toys opened in Australia to a new breed of theatergoers, ones who not only took Australian drama seriously but also accepted work that ignored the conventions of theatrical realism. Set in a fashionable Sydney suburb, Big Toys depicts the empty lives of Mag and Ritchie Bosanquet, who have what should make life full—wealth, beauty, social position, every imaginable material possession, indeed all the “big toys.” As they rise in the material realm, they are actually rushing to their downfall: In White’s world, outward success leads to inward failure. Big Toys employs the elegant form of comedy of manners and relies on a conflict created by industrial exploitation to draw this bleak picture. Yet the realistic conflict and the stylized form that frames it expand in such a way that they merge into White’s earlier devotion to the expressionistic mode. The three characters—as real as those who appear in the daily newspaper with their personal, social, and business connivances—move into abstract and symbolic dimensions to declaim the moral bankruptcy that dominates the lives of those who determine the course of the late twentieth century.
Signal Driver
Signal Driver is White’s purest dramatic venture into expressionism and one of his most impressive plays. Taking its title from Sydney bus signs that instruct potential riders to “signal driver,” the play follows Theo and Ivy Volkes from youth to old age, the telling of their stories amplified by two music-hall characters who serve as the Volkeses’ alter egos. The entire action takes place at a bus stop, its environs and conditions changing to show the passage of time. Buses go by, but the Volkeses never board; when old age levels them, they realize that they have metaphorically missed the bus of life. Simplistic though the concept might sound, the talented application of the expressionistic techniques governing language, character development, staging, and handling of theme turns the play into a powerful and memorable statement on the desolate human condition.
Netherwood
Netherwood follows theatrical conventions more closely than Signal Driver, at least on the surface. The action takes place in a once-grand Australian country house, called Netherwood, where a group of half-comic, half-mad characters live together on parole from the local mental institution, Bonkers Hall, under the supervision of a couple who are determined to do good. During act 1, the events unfold on a believable level and suggest that this play might be an Australian version of the English manor-house comedy. In the second act, however, all pretense toward representation of reality vanishes. Characters take on multiple identities and serve as one another’s alter egos, thereby revealing to the audience their sexual repressions and perversions, their hidden failures, suppressed fears, and inability to grasp life’s meaning. When the personal struggles of the characters cannot be solved by a tidy plot, the play ends on an apocalyptic note. Amid gratuitous gunfire, one of the characters says: “Comical bastards, us humans. Seems like we sorter choose ter shoot it out . . . to find out who’s the bigger dill.” At the end, White appears to voice his rising concern with nuclear armament through this statement, so very Australian in its syntax and diction. In Australia, a “dill” is a fool—a condition that suggests White’s view of humankind.
Shepherd on the Rocks
White’s final play, Shepherd on the Rocks, was given a Sydney production in 1987. In the play, described as an “epic religious revue,” the action follows the adventures of a priest named Danny Shepherd, who serves an Australian parish called Budgiwank. Through his “Budgiwank Experiment,” he plans to convert prostitutes and junkies, then move them to his suburban parish so they can mix with the virtuous parishioners. Shepherd loses his position and moves to Jerusalem, where he becomes a performer in the Jerusalem Easter Show. Although not up to the standards of the earlier plays, Shepherd on the Rocks elaborates once more a theme that runs through all White’s work when the ruined priest says: “At the gates of death—which is not hell, . . . I hope to shed my doubts, fears, obstinacy, lust. I do not expect an easy transition.” So the young poet in the play The Ham Funeral has come to the end of his experience in the “luminous night,” still knowing too much but never enough.
