'Mad, Muddy, Mess of Eels': Modern Theatre and Patrick White's Sensuous Dramaturgy

'Mad, Muddy, Mess of Eels': Modern Theatre and Patrick White's Sensuous Dramaturgy

The line, ‘mad, muddy, mess of eels,’ spoken by the Young Man in his opening soliloquy (White 15) of The Ham Funeral, possibly conjures Patrick White’s own inner monologue regarding the state of dramatic censorship and stasis in Australian theatre in 1961. Although the play itself was written in 1947, and all but abandoned by White, its debut on the Australian stage (Adelaide, 1961) was fraught (messy and muddy) with artistic and moral differences that are well documented by scholars and biographers. And yet, the collaboration between White and John Tasker, White’s anointed director for the original performance of the play, provides some insight into how the internationally renowned novelist translated and transformed language for the stage. According to Robert F. Brissendon (290), it is a feat only several novelists have successfully achieved (where is it not an adaptation of a novel for the stage or film). He did not translate his novels, but acknowledged a hankering for the stage, no doubt encouraged by his mother who took him to see as much live theatre as possible in his youth. This chapter will consider the little-discussed use of dramaturgy as an active literary criticism method that renders a narrative live, through embodiment, the playwright’s intentions. Julian Meyrick asserts that White’s early plays demonstrate a ‘sense of the future’ of Australian theatre (1) and this chapter thus uses White’s The Ham Funeral as a case study for how he specifically defied traditional Australian dramatic convention of the mid-twentieth century in order to enhance new ways of writing plays for Australian audiences. His focus on the somatic rendering of the language in The Ham Funeral specifically requires live bodies to realise crucial dramatic meaning occurring at the interface between language and liveness.