Patrick White's Theatre offers rich perspectives on White's dramatic works, framed within a careful methodological commitment to close reading, less concerned with evaluating White's status or quality as a playwright, than with understanding what it is that his plays do, ‘in terms of their dramaturgical composition’, and ‘how they have been done on stage’ (p. 185).
While the book goes to the legacy and impact of White's dramatic oeuvre in a conventional sense, Varney reads the plays in the context of an argument about the disjunction between Australian experiences of modernity – the global concatenation of industrial, technological and economic changes – on the one hand, and modernism – in particular the unmooring of dramatic form from the conventions of naturalism and realism – on the other. This is the primary structuring tension (if not contradiction) echoed – ‘embodied’, in Varney's word – in White's own ambiguities: ‘a social and political conservative; a gay man; a radical disrupter of artistic form, and a consumer of modern culture’ (p. 22).
A carefully crafted Introduction proposes a methodological framework concerned with performativity in two respects: first as a mode of analysis, reading White less as a literary figure than as a theatre-maker, and, second as a model for thinking and understanding White less as a singular, stable authorial subject than as performative accomplishment, contradictions reconciled in the obscure economy of sustained experimentation. ‘The dynamic qualities of performativity’, Varney explains, ‘replace the idea of theatre as the rendition of the literary dramatic text [as] the principal driver of the event’ (p. 16). No longer the ‘privileged stage signifier’, text takes its place amidst the complexity of ‘the technologies of the theatre’ (p. 17).
The performative critique extends to Varney's account of White himself. She cites Erika Fischer-Lichte's (post-Butlerian) claim that ‘performative acts (on stage) do not express a pre-existing identity (stipulated by the text) but “engender identity through those very acts”’ (p. 16). The suggestion is that we might, too, construe an artist – and particularly an artist such as White, deeply imbricated in the ‘throes of modernity’ (p. 13) – as performative accomplishment. Shifts in White's artistic work were not simply driven by his emergent political consciousness, Varney explains, and cannot be understood in terms of experiments in aesthetic expression developed to express a stable political position. Rather, White's politics ‘came to be closer aligned with [his] artistic practice over time rather than the other way around’ (p. 22). White's aesthetics and his politics – his world view – are understood in terms of a hermeneutic complexity (if not a pure dialectic), shot through with the contradictions, inconsistencies and disruptions not of White as a biographical psychology, but as a performativity.
The care with which Varney makes these arguments addresses the book's placement in a series focused on Australian literary studies. For Varney, White was a ‘playwright who turned to the novel and returned to theatre’ (p. 2), rather than a literary author who ‘dabbled in the demi-monde of theatre’ (p. 4), cautioned by friends and literary figures, including his New York agent, against ‘wasting’ his talents in ‘other fields’ (p. 2).
The close readings constituting the first two chapters address White as a theatre-maker, showing how his ‘texts anticipate life on stage, even as they also occupy the bookshelf or digital repository’ (p. 18), attending to the affordances those texts offer, taken up by directors. Subsequent chapters track through what Varney concedes is the somewhat uneven archive, developing performance analyses. This unevenness stems in part from factors such as the controversy surrounding the early productions of The Ham Funeral (written in 1948, first performed 1961), and partly from the sheer numbers of productions of the early plays, such as The Season at Sarsparilla (1962) and A Cheery Soul (1963). Each of these is given a discrete chapter; subsequent works are paired: 1964's Night on Bald Mountain and 1983's Netherworld in their thematic address to rural outsiderness; Big Toys (1977) and Signal Driver (1982) considered, together, in the context of White's involvement with the nuclear disarmament movement and with questions of sexuality. The final reading is of White's last published play, Shepherd on the Rocks (1987), the hostile reception to which spoke, Varney suggests, not to critics’ failure to acknowledge the burgeoning of a post-narrative theatre, identified by Lehmann as postdramatic, but to the absence, in general, of an Australian theatrical culture of experimentation.
