Cirrus@Austlit

'Patrick White's relationship with the Australian stage has been tumultuous, to say the least — from the early controversies surrounding his plays The Ham Funeral and The Season at Sarsaparilla at the Adelaide Festival in the early 1960s to the great series of revisionist revivals that has been going on in the Australian theatre for many years since that time. For more than forty-five years, most of our boldest and brightest young directors have wanted to cut their teeth on White, and if this is not the sign of a playwright who has become a classic, then I don't know what is. No other Australian dramatist has been so often revisited theatrically in so many different ways.' (Introduction)