2009: BELONGING: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century. By John McCallum. Book review reproduced as published in the Canberra Times.

BELONGING: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century. By John McCallum.  Currency Press. 484pp. $49.95.

Reviewer: FRANK McKONE


It was Hannie Rayson who wrote Life After George and the well-known play and film Hotel Sorrento, each a powerful drama of conflicting relationships. But did you know she also wrote "a wild, rather elaborately plotted, satirical farce" – Competitive Tenderness – in which "Dawn Snow, a Thatcherite character who claims to have made her name reforming the Ugandan police service, is appointed CEO of the city of Greater Burke . . .    There is a lot of mad business with a savage pit-bull terrier, owned by Dawn, and lots of running in and out of doors and hiding in cupboards.  It all ends in chaos, but with Dawn rising". 


Not quite the Rayson I thought I knew.  McCallum surprises on many occasions from 1912 (Louis Esson's The Time is Not Yet Ripe and the first stage version of Steele Rudd's On Our Selection) to the State Theatre Company of South Australia's 2004 adaptation of Robert Dessaix's novel, Night Letters, in which "all the characters were on stage, occupying the same space, but in different stories".  As Robert, dying of an AIDS-related illness, sat writing his letters home from "Europe, with its crowded corruption, petty restrictions and suffocating past" he was "framed as if in a painting, and . . . the characters from his past moved with and around him.  In the theatre ghosts are never ethereal, they are always present, bodies on stage".


McCallum is a Sydney-based academic, senior lecturer in the School of English, Media & Performing Arts at University of NSW, and also a long-standing and highly respected theatre reviewer for The Australian newspaper.  I think I found the awful Performance Studies word "trope" only twice in over 400 pages.  The rigour of his research is exemplary and he is not afraid to write in a clear, imaginative style befitting the directness of Australian theatrical playwriting and stage production.


The distinction between plays being written and plays being staged is of key importance to McCallum's purpose.  He begins by pointing out that "For much of the twentieth century, Australian drama had very little to do with Australian theatre – local plays were not often performed".  At the same time, by examining the storylines, theatrical styles, writers' themes and intentions, even of playscripts some of which were never performed, McCallum successfully develops the through-line of our culture: we are always concerned with the way we belong to our country.


Each phase, like a century-long 16-Act drama, represents a change in point of view, often opposing the previous period while growing from it, sometimes diverging into previously unexplored directions.  At first sight Australian drama might look like it all ends in chaos, lots of running in and out of doors and hiding in cupboards.  But Dawn does rise as we have gone from separating ourselves from our colonial European crowded corruption, petty restrictions and suffocating past, establishing our own voice in the 1950s and '60s, waving not drowning in The New Wave, finding ourselves in the global scene, and diversifying our playwriting among all the kinds of intellectual, social and personal communities that are the Australian reality.

Chapter headings, like "Bush and city", "The new internationalism", "Immigrants and exiles", "Aboriginal theatre", may seem ordinary enough, but the excitement is in the detail.  As McCallum describes each play, from a list 51 pages long, in the context of its time and place, with just enough larger analysis but never too much, gradually it dawns upon the reader what belonging is all about.  It's not about sentimental flag-waving patriotism, not about believing in myths of heroism or defeat, ideals or failures.  Belonging is about accepting, exploring, critically examining, appreciating and enjoying our place in the world just as we are.


The book has an important role as a compendium of Australian drama.  It's a book to search through for the many plays which should be revived.  It will be good, for example, to see Bran Nue Day again soon, hopefully with the same positive energy and humour on film as it had on stage.  It's a book in which to fill in gaps between plays you have seen, read or read about, and so to understand, for example, the full impact of a playwright like Nick Enright. 


And, much more than a compendium, it's a book written with feeling.  However much we may fear for the future of our theatre, McCallum uses Dessaix's Night Letters to ground us in his conclusion.  "At the end [Robert] returns home.  He is dying.  [His partner] Peter is preparing for a new life without him, but they are both still looking for an exultation based on being there in a place.  Of belonging."



Frank McKone is a retired drama teacher and an occasional theatre reviewer for The Canberra Times.  He is author of FIRST AUDITION How to get into drama school.  Currency Press 2002.

©Frank McKone, Canberra