Netherwood

Robert Dickerson, In the Park (1958)

“Padlocks never stopped thoughts from being picked.”

Plot: At a rundown, once grand, country house, treechangers Alice and Royce Best care for three mentally ill patients – the gloomy Mog, the invalid Harry, and the pianist Dora Pilbeam. But when the mysterious Dr Eberhard arrives, it becomes clear that Alice and Royce are also not quite what they seem…

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History: PW began writing this play in 1982, after the financial – if not critical – success of Signal Driver. By this point, his partner Manoly was doubtful of the purpose of writing these plays; PW had several times attempted to write a “final novel” but kept getting distracted by the easier, more immediately satisfying creation of theatre. PW wrote that the play “is about the sanity in insanity, and insanity in sanity.”

The play premièred in Adelaide. The same production toured to Sydney the following year. The reviews in both cities were largely terrible. Many of the critics felt that PW’s didactic nature had only increased, with comments that the play was not really a drama but a lesson. May-Brit Akerholt feels that the “Marx Brothers” ending “seems ridiculous, meaningless; but that is exactly its point. Wanton annihilation is senseless. It is based on ignorance, fear, apathy. Australia’s tragedy is that she self-destructs from a way of life which holds conformity…as an ideal, and builds a society which suppresses visions and creative thinking in the name of democracy.”

Aside from a one-night staged reading in Canberra in 1994, Netherwood hasn’t been seen since.

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Productions:

Lighthouse Acting Company, South Australia – 11-25 June 1983

Director: Jim Sharman, composer: Alan John, design: Ken Wilby

With Robynne Bourne (Flo), Peter Cummins (Harry), Robert Grubb (Sgt Bell), Alan John (Dora), Gillian Jones (Miss Jelbart), Melita Jurisic (Police Woman), Russell Kiefel (Fred Stubbs), Stuart McCreery (Constable), Jacqy Phillips (Alice Best), Geoffrey Rush (Dr Eberhard), Kerry Walker (Mog) and John Wood (Royce)

Reviews:

• Peter Farrell, Advertiser, 13/6/1983
• Peter Ward, “Netherwood is White magic”, Australian, 13/6/1983
• Harry Kippax, “White play dwindles into thesis”, SMH 14/6/1983:
  • “It is asserted, illustrated and dissected, not dramatized.”
• Barry Oakley, SMH(?), ??:
  • “When a writer with so powerful an imagination loses the capacity to transmute its energies, the result, for all the symbolic elaborations being presented on stage, is an uncomfortable transparency. The deus, splenetic and obsesses, becomes more and more visible behind the machinery. Netherwood is not a play but a parade.”
• Michael Morley, “Too much and yet too little”, National Times 17/6/1983
• Elizabeth Perkins, LiNQ 11.1 (1983)
• May-Brit Akerholt, Australasian Drama Studies, 3.1 (October 1984)

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Festival of Sydney 1984, Seymour Theatre Centre, 19-28 Jan 1984

Above production on tour.

Reviews:

• John Moses, “Ship of fools becalmed by odd lack of mystery”, Australian, 23/1/1984
• Harry Kippax, “White Play still disappoints”, SMH, 23/1/1984:
  • “I did feel more warmly about [this] production… [t]he acting is very good indeed… I again found its main characters intrinsically of great interest… The patients are colourful subjects for development too. But Mr White’s development is clinical, not dramatic – a set of sketches enacting the past and its implications… I was reminded uncomfortably of the bad, middle-period pieces of Eugene O’Neill… its force, for me, is of dogma, not drama.”

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Rawcus Productions – Street Theatre, Canberra: 30 May 1994

This was the final production in a two-year project to stage readings of all of White’s plays. The project was conceived by Ralph Wilson, who died two days before the reading. The production was staged in his honour. Wilson was a key figure in mid-20^th century Canberra theatre. He was pivotal in the campaign to build the Australian National University Arts Centre, which drama students (such as the author of this website) attended for decades until its demolition in the mid-2010s. This one-night only performance was directed by Catherine Mann. 

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