'‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ details the rejection of two Patrick White plays by the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in the early 1960s. In 1961 the board of governors rejected a proposal to include the world premiere of White’s first major play ‘The Ham Funeral’ for the 1962 festival. In 1963 it rejected a proposal to premiere a subsequent play ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ for the 1964 festival. These two rejections were taken up in the press where the former was referred to as the ‘affaire “Ham Funeral”’ and the latter was greeted as ‘here we go again’. ‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ documents the scandal that followed the board’s rejections of White’s plays, especially as it acted against the advice of its own drama committee and artistic director on both occasions.
'Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso analyze the two events by drawing on the performative behaviour of the board of governors to focus on the question of governance. They shed new light on the cultural politics that surrounded the rejections, arguing that it represents an instance of executive governance of cultural production, in this case theatre and performance. The governing body was a self-appointed private board comprising wealthy men, who were representative of an Adelaide establishment made up of business, farming, newspaper and military interests.
'The central argument of ‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ is that aesthetic modernism in theatre and drama struggled to achieve visibility and acceptability, and was perceived as a threat to the norms and values of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The authors argue that when modern drama entered the stage, its preference for aesthetic experimentation over commercial considerations challenged regimes of value based on the popular appeal of musicals, touring productions and overseas imports. The resistance to that prevailing theatre culture and the provocation of Patrick White’s plays provide a prime example of Australia in transition between its colonial heritage and modern future. The 1960s set the scene for the confrontation between modernist experimentation and arts governance, and between aesthetic and commercial values.' (Publication summary)
'In March 2012, the Adelaide Festival of Arts staged an exuberant steampunk version of Patrick White's comic play The Ham Funeral, originally written in London in 1947 and first performed in Adelaide in 1961. The 2012 production celebrated the centenary of the writer's birth and marked 50 years since the Board of Governors of the 1962 Adelaide Festival had refused to stage the play's world premiere. Amid claims of philistinism, paternalism and amateurism, the Board had determined that the play's unsavoury themes, modernist form and poor box-office outlook made it unsuitable for a festival production. In recognition of the troubled history between the Adelaide Festival and White, 2012 Artistic Director Paul Grabowsky announced that the new production, directed by Adam Cook, would pay 'tribute to our Nobel Laureate' and finally see 'unfinished business finished'.' The Festival production, presented by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, made amends with a dazzling interpretation that drew out the flamboyant theatricality, humour and pathos of the play.' (Introduction)
'The rejections of The Ham Funeral and Night on Bald Mountain by the Adelaide Festival's Board of Governors were not random events but were linked to structures of governance and a presumption of sovereignty. Although the Board was not a statutory or corporate body, the Adelaide Festival's Board of governors and committees held regular meetings and kept formal and, at times, extensive minutes. Members of the Board and committees and Festival staff communicated to the outside world through written correspondence, press releases and Festival advertising and programs. This archive allows us to, reconstruct key events in Australian cultural history and address the critical questions they raise about the confrontation of a colonial culture with the emergent dynamic of modernism in the post-war period. ' (Introduction)
' The venue recommended for the premiere of The Ham Funeral at the 1962 Festival was the University of Adelaide's Union Hall theatre. The Board of Governors had an agreement with the venue's management, the University Theatre Guild, to stage the Festival's productions of Australian-authored or small-scale new plays from overseas in this space. In the 1960s, Union Hall was what we would consider today to be an off-Broadway or fringe venue, attracting small but drama-literate audiences. The Drama Committee was confident that the proposal to stage the premiere would be accepted, if not welcomed, by the Governors. In the wake of the proposal's unexpected and hostile rejection, the Guild went ahead with the production three months prior to the Festival. The publicity around the rejection of the play ensured that the premiere was a gala social event, attended by Patrick White, local dignitaries, friends of White's and several interstate critics.' (Introduction)
'Parsing the documents in the archive gives us a sense that the rejection of Night on Bald Mountain took place slowly and with odd turns. The story quietly assumed it shape in late September 1962, with Harry Medlin's enthusiasm for Patrick White's playwriting style - 'the play is excellent', he write. As Chair of the University of Adelaide's Theatre Guild (1961-66), and as a member of the Festival's Drama Advisory Committee, he had already mounted an impressive defence of Australian content in the Festival of Arts and was a significant agitator for modernist theatrical aesthetics more generally. As an advocate of The Ham Funeral a year earlier, such was his belief in the strength of White's modernist plays that he noted, 'The quaint Australian custom of always looking elsewhere can safely be abandoned.' On 26 April 1963, the Governors delivered their fateful words. Of course, the narrative and embodied history is not as neat as all that.' (Introduction)
'As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the Governors rejected The Ham Funeral and Night on Bald Mountain; yet the plays were not passive objects. They had the power to create affects of disgust and anger in some, notably Glen McBride and Neil Hutchison, and joy and enthusiasm in others, such as Harry Medlin, Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris. Reaching beyond the field of politics, Carl Schmitt recognizes the power of theatre when he ascribes something akin to sovereignty to the lifeworld of plays...' (Introduction)
'Dramas of rejection and artistic opposition rarely play out as neat didactic narratives where the weak are overpowered by the strong, as in Carl Schmitt's friend—enemy distinction. The inevitably messy alliances, collusions, eruptions and flows of affect cannot be contained by applying easy binaries. When we consider the governing bodies involved in the Patrick White Affair, there were disagreements and tensions between members of the Board of Governors and tempers to be assuaged. While affect was projected onto Sir Lloyd Dumas in Harry Medlin's recollections decades after the fact, it is often scripted out of the adversarial negotiations documented in the Adelaide archives.' (Introduction)
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