Australian Metatheatre on Page and Stage

An Exploration of Metatheatrical Techniques

Rebecca Clode

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000600667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book offers the first major discussion of metatheatre in Australian drama of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It highlights metatheatre's capacity to illuminate the wider social, cultural, and artistic contexts in which plays have been produced.

Drawing from existing scholarly arguments about the value of considering metatheatre holistically, this book deploys a range of critical approaches, combining textual and production analysis, archival research, interviews, and reflections gained from observing rehearsals. Focusing on four plays and their Australian productions, the book uses these examples to showcase how metatheatre has been utilised to generate powerful elements of critique, particularly of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. It highlights metatheatre's vital place in Australian dramatic and theatrical history and connects this Australian tradition to wider concepts in the development of contemporary theatre.

This illuminating text will be of interest to students and scholars of Australian theatre (historic and contemporary) as well as those researching and studying drama and theatre studies more broadly.

1The metatheatre of Dorothy Hewett’s The Man from Mukinupin

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242284-2

First performed in 1979, The Man from Mukinupin is a thoroughly meta‑ theatrical play, now canonical in the history of Australian drama.¹ Written by Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002), it was commissioned by Stephen Barry, then Artistic Director of the National Theatre Company of Western Australia, for the occasion of Perth’s sesquicentenary, commemorating the settlement of the British colony of Swan River.² The premiere was well received by critics and audiences and within 2 years Mukinupin had been performed by major theatre companies around Australia. It has subsequently been produced on other occasions of national and cultural significance, notably the Bicentenary of Australia (1988) and the thirtieth anniversary of its own premiere (2009).³ Hewett’s play is an important work of Australian metatheatre, remarkable insofar as its historicising metatheatrical approach not only encourages audience reflection upon Australian history but also incorporates theatre itself into the examination of that history. In this chapter, I examine how Hewett’s use of metatheatre throughout the play facilitates a simultaneous celebration and critique of Australian society. In doing so, I explore her use of Brechtian dramaturgical devices including character doubling, the use of narrators and historicisation. I also consider certain “carnival” elements embedded within Hewett’s play. While these are more literal (scenes of performed folk carnival) than literary (as in Bakhtin’s theories), there is some inevitable overlap between the two, and as such, Hewett’s carnival scenes mobilise a subversive social commentary.

The Man from Mukinupin is a two-act musical play set before and immediately after World War I. The action revolves around life in “Mukinupin,” a fictional small town in the outback West of Australia. In alternating night- and day-time scenes, Hewett depicts her colourful array of characters as they go about their lives in what could, ostensibly, be any Australian small town. Superficially, the play is a romantic comedy. Town sweetheart “Polly Perkins” is pursued by store boy “Jack Tuesday” under threat of rival suitor, travelling salesman “Cecil Brunner.” But here and throughout, Hewett complicates the action. As Jack turns soldier and subsequently returns from war, it is not he, but his no-hoper twin brother, Harry, who has turned out the war hero. Meanwhile, in a series of carnivalesque night-time scenes, Hewett gives voice to members of Australian society typically unseen in the surface, day-time, world. Among these are “Lily Perkins” (Polly’s half-Indigenous half-sister, known colloquially as “Touch of The Tar”), Harry and the twin boys’ mother “The Widow Tuesday” and a host of eccentric marginal characters. Although the play ends on a celebratory note, with the wedding of Polly and Jack, Hewett metatheatrically complicates the play’s celebration and, thus, the celebration of Australian history and culture.

Mukinupin is both poetically intertextual and thoroughly metatheatrical; these elements contribute jointly to the way Hewett complicates celebration. Her dialogue incorporates poetry from British canonical and other writers – Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Randolph Stow, and more. In notes to the first published edition, Hewett acknowledges the literary and theatrical traditions which she has woven into her work. As she explains:

Mukinupin makes many references to popular and classical works familiar to the reader, particularly Shakespeare. Besides the Montebellos’ travesty, “The Strangling of Desdemona,” the reader will have recognised Lady Macbeth behind Edie’s sleep-walking scene and the marriage ceremony of Miranda and Ferdinand from The Tempest in the “wedding” of Lily and Harry. Quotations from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are also to be found.⁴

These references operate as part of Mukinupin’s broad literary landscape. Re-worked throughout the play, source texts take on hybridised and heteroglossic qualities which reflect the town’s, and in turn Australia’s, identities as a post-colonial British nation.⁵ War poetry and poetic reflections on Australia’s Indigenous genocide are also interspersed in such a way as to undercut surface comedy. As we shall see, moments of celebration are frequently punctured by a much darker historical perspective, an effect further enhanced by Hewett’s use of music. Often overlooked in critical analyses of the play, music is both metatheatrical and integral to its cultural critique, informing the work both non-diegetically, through a “weird night [soundscape],” and diegetically in performed songs.⁶ These songs serve a Brechtian alienating function as they interrupt and fracture the play’s action. Ironic lyrics work in tandem with this to juxtapose upbeat celebratory moments. This is seen in the patriotic war song performed for Jack Tuesday, “Your Country Needs you in the Trenches,” to give just one example.⁷ Additionally, the play’s metatheatrical incursions contribute to the joint celebration and critique of Australian culture. These include Shakespeare – for example, in the play-within-the-play, but also ceremonies, improvisations, and performed folkloric rituals. The use of all these techniques contributes to Hewett’s examination of Australian history, identity, landscape, and race. In fact, The Man from Mukinupin incorporates each of the metatheatrical classifications offered by Richard Hornby in Drama, Metadrama and Perception.⁸ Hornby, as readers will recall from my Introduction, categorises metatheatre under six broad headings; I refer to these not in order to schematise Hewett’s use of metatheatre but rather to demonstrate the pervasiveness of metatheatre to her work. Thus, Mukinupin offers examples of the play-within-the-play, the ceremony-within-the-play, real-life and theatrical reference, dramatic self-reference, role-playing, and the depiction of perception as a theme.

Previous analyses of Mukinupin’s metatheatre have typically come from post-colonial criticism, a fact that is hardly surprising given the histories with which the work engages.⁹ Symptomatic of the late-twentieth-century academic interest in this field, itself relevant to the historical context of the 1988 Bicentenary, such perspectives have been offered by several critics, including Bill Dunstone, Lekkie Hopkins, and Helen Gilbert. Dunstone considers the play’s metatheatrical deployment of Shakespeare as “writing-back” to the centre, highlighting the re-working of scenes from Othello as a “The Strangling of Desdemona” as an abrogation of the “privileging of the canonical English text.”¹⁰ This, coupled with the hybridised delivery of Othello’s lines “in an Austral-Italian accent,” repositions the texts in relation to the dominant cultural hegemony.¹¹ Hopkins’ examination likewise focuses on the play’s metatheatrical uses of Shakespeare, with particular respect to themes of language and culture.¹² Hopkins discusses the play’s deployment of metatheatrical character doubling in relation to the theme of reconciliation. By engaging with the black/white cross-over implied through this technique, it is possible, she suggests, to envisage the possibility of both cultural/racial reconciliation and a reconciliation between people and landscape. Helen Gilbert foregrounds post-colonial feminist dimensions, examining how character doubling and the on-stage costuming of female characters are used to demonstrate the constructedness of social roles.¹³ Costuming, she contends, highlights processes of gender and racial mapping. The metatheatricality of staging such processes upon the performing body is, in her analysis, vital to the play’s examination of post-colonial Australian culture.

Critics have also linked Hewett’s use of metatheatre to a Brechtian influence.¹⁴ Hewett acknowledged this, noting Brechtian echoes in her use of crowd scenes, on-stage narrators, and “the historical and social voice.”¹⁵ These can in turn be connected to the playwright’s left-wing political leanings and long-time membership of the Australian Communist Party.¹⁶ Brechtian historicisation, outlined previously, is also employed in a number of Hewett’s works and is integral to this play with its pre- and post-World War I settings. The historicised setting of The Man from Mukinupin, as this chapter will demonstrate, elicits audience reflection upon connections between past and present. This aspect of the play has partially been examined by Bill Dunstone who, in developing his post-colonial analysis, considers the way in which the conspicuous creation of fictional space in Mukinupin “countervails the closed narratives of history and identity.”¹⁷ By signalling these narratives as theatrical constructs, Dunstone argues, the play invites audiences to re-view time and history beyond the play as being open to reconstruction.¹⁸ Dunstone’s approach is similar to that of Richard P. Knowles and, more recently, Alexander Feldman on the subject of historiographic metatheatre.¹⁹ Though Knowles’s examples are drawn from the Canadian context, his work offers a possible reading of Hewett’s metatheatre, whereby Mukinupin can be viewed not (or at least not only) in relation to the project of national myth construction, but rather as re-working existing myths (and indeed, history itself ) in a manner which actively involves the viewer.

Related to Hewett’s metatheatrical depiction of the Great War setting, it is important to contextualise her play in view of emerging literary perspectives at the time it was written. Throughout the 1970s and in the years immediately preceding Hewett’s commission, Australia had seen a growing cultural awareness of war’s complex legacies. This was salient in the aftermath of two major World Wars, the Korean War and Vietnam. As Christina Spittel explains, this period also generated a cor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The metatheatre of Dorothy Hewett’s The Man from Mukinupin
• 2 The metatheatre of The Man from Mukinupin on stage
• 3 Louis Nowra’s Royal Show
• 4 Sideshow Alley as metatheatre in Louis Nowra’s Royal Show
• 5 Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good
• 6 Our Country’s Good: the metatheatre of rehearsal, backstage, and the “Aboriginal Australian”
• 7 Peta Murray’s Things That Fall Over – an (anti-)musical of a novel inside a reading of a play, with footnotes, and oratorio-as-coda
• 8 Peta Murray’s Things That Fall Over: Con(texts), paratexts, metatheatre
• Conclusion: Swansongs and other sideshows
• Index