Playwright with dazzling ability to reconfigure dramatic form
By Peter Craven
JACK HIBBERD: 1940 - 2024
Jack Hibberd, one of Australia’s greatest playwrights, died last Thursday, August 30, at the age of 84. He was a master of theatre with an instinctive command of vernacular idiom but at the same time a dazzling ability to transform and reconfigure dramatic form in a way that asked for comparison with the greatest dramatists.
This latter tendency is marked with his most ambitious play, A Stretch of the Imagination, the one-hander that drew comparisons to Beckett, and from which Hibberd tended to back away. But the pull towards populism in his work is every bit as striking and is, in fact, an aspect of the same impulse to rethink the language of the tribe by exhibiting the natural richness of the argot. This aspect of Jack Hibberd’s work runs deep.
Playwright Jack Hibberd and director Peita Collard, 1999.Credit: Fairfax
His first play, White With Wire Wheels (1967), was staged at Melbourne University – where it was directed by David Kendall – and caused an immediate stir because of the uncouth ockerisms that leapt from the mouths of the characters in strident violation of the tradition of how Australian speech should be represented on stage.
It was the language of the street, the language that had for so long been repressed or streamlined or tarted up, and White With Wire Wheels caught the speech of the unspeakable while exhibiting an elegance of form that caught fire with a new breed of actors, of whom Kerry Dwyer was one.
Jack Hibberd talking about Dimboola, 1973.Credit: Fairfax
It’s worth remembering that the author of A Stretch of the Imagination – with its juxtaposition of memories and merriment and stark melancholy, its weird and gargantuan verbal energy at the very door of the light growing dim, this strange elegiac farce that will keep Hibberd’s name alive forever in the history of drama – is also the author of Dimboola.
Dimboola is Jack Hibberd’s wedding play, and it’s a play that gets its driving force from the tactic of having the audience sit down to a wedding dinner at which the best man makes various disparaging remarks about the virginity of the bride. It was first done at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre in 1969 and was directed by Graeme Blundell and then in 1973 at the Pram Factory directed by that master naturalist, David Williamson. It says something for the richness and variety of the renaissance of Australian drama that there could be this kind of versatility and open mindedness in the face of different aspects of theatre.
Dimboola is an extraordinary rollicking farce, and it’s been established that 1.4 million people saw the show one way or another – everywhere from the Chevron in Sydney to hundreds of country towns. Dimboola featured a dodgy duo, Mutton and Bayonet, played by Max Gillies and Uncle Jack Charles, respectively. They were characters in the show, but their antics worked to lighten the sense of boisterous ockerdom.
The play heightened the way an urban group of actors, armed with a Hibberd script, could conquer a nation that was happy to recognise its affinity with a bunch of loudmouthed yobs. The urban Carlton connection was highlighted when Dimboola was made into a film by John Duigan.
Hibberd was a playwright who understood the folk and also understood the ways in which the theatre and its dramatic cousins (Duigan made films ranging from The Year My Voice Broke to Wide Sargasso Sea) could shift and reconfigure.
The first production of A Stretch of the Imagination was staged in 1972 and reminded a lot of people – but not Hibberd – of huge and looming influences.
The original production of Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola at La Mama in 1969 featured Bruce Spence and Lindy Davies.
“[At] the time of writing this play, I was never conscious of Beckett, his concerns and techniques. Indeed, I had not read the fellow for some years, finding his work a great silencer of creativity. It is impossible then for me to allow that A Stretch of the Imagination is either derivative or adaptive; it possibly explores a different mount in similar territory.”
It’s remarkable that a play as apparently offbeat as A Stretch could appear at the same time that David Williamson could be taking the world by storm with The Removalists and Don’s Party.
Most people who saw the original production with Peter Cummins as the old bush savant and loner, that old Xaverian Monk O’Neill, see the performance as so formidable and so terrifically realised that it is without peer – so crisp, so dry, so heartbreaking.
It will always be remembered and it retains its status as the definitive performance of what has high claims to be the most original characterisation in the history of Australian drama. The control of the voice, the homage Cummins pays to Hibberd’s irony and wit is definitive and clearly perceptible on the ABC radio version.
None of which is to deny that others have shone in the role of Monk O’Neill and that Gillies’ mid-’80s performance was buoyant and brilliant. It represented such a theatrical inhabitation of Hibberd’s brilliance that for some theatregoers it will be a first choice because of the way it glowed in the memory – unlike some subsequent attempts.
Hibberd was always a master of the strange unsteady gangway between the experimental and the popular. A Toast to Melba was a homage to one of the great Australian legends who did this, and it allowed the second Mrs Hibberd, Evelyn Krape, to parade her high and mighty vocal talents in this area in a sumptuous show that managed to conjure up the spirits of the mighty theatrical dead from Buffalo Bill to Oscar Wilde while highlighting the career of the legendary soprano.
Jack Hibberd was born in The Mallee, north-western Victoria, but lived in Bendigo as a child and was schooled by the Marist brothers. He lived at Newman College at the University of Melbourne and practised medicine until a Literature Board grant freed him up to concentrate exclusively on his writing.
Actor John Flaus reads a book showing an early picture of Jack Hibberd.
In 1988 he published The Genius of Human Imperfection in which he uses traditional rhyme schemes to produce versions of Baudelaire, among others. The upshot is heavier than the original he honours, but poet Peter Porter was right to say “These poems give pleasure and there can never be too much skill at large in the world.” They are clearly the work of a major artist who is the spiritual cousin of Monk O’Neill. It’s hard to resist this summing up of Beckett: “Play it again Sam. / A bloke who never changed his tune: / a twelve-tone bagpipe among colossal ruins.”
Peter Craven is a literary critic.
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