Early plays

Early plays

Anne Wienholt, Wind Birds (1948)

Patrick White’s legendary – if unconventional – role in Australian theatre is based on the eight plays he wrote between 1947 and 1987. However he had five other pieces performed in his lifetime, as outlined below.

See also the unfinished works page, for other pieces which didn’t make it to the stage.

Bread and Butter Women (1932)

UNPUBLISHED, NOW LOST

Plot: A 3-act comedy about the life of a family in which the men are artistic idlers and the women are the breadwinners. The characters include an English couple named Mr and Mrs Winwood, their poet son Timothy, and his friend, also a poor artist. The women are left to look after the family while the men pursue unlikely careers.

Written: 1932-33

Produced: Bryant’s Theatre at St Peter’s Church Hall, Darlinghurst, Sydney, 23 Jan – 6 Mar 1935 (performances once a week).

Director: Frank Crago. Cast included Harry Harper (Andrew), Tom Vary (Timothy Winwood), Suzanne White (May), with W.E. Anderson, Marie Hemingway, Pat Mackenzie, and Kay Wells.

History: Produced by an amateur theatre company with which PW’s mother was involved, the cast included sister Suzanne as the maid. PW was still at Cambridge so did not see this production back home in Australia. Advertised in the SMH on 19 and 23 Jan 1935, as well as advertised there each week a few days before the performance.

Reviews:

  • Sydney Morning Herald (24/1/1935): “A clever comedy full of smart quips and epigrammatical passages. It is the first play of a young Australian, Patrick White, now in England.”
  • Sydney Mail (30/1/1935)
  • Smiths’ Weekly (16/2/1935)
  • Melbourne Playbox 13 (March 1935)

School for Friends (1935)

UNPUBLISHED, NOW LOST

Plot: 1-act comedy. David Marr reports it was about “three bitching females”, with one reviewer noting the play’s style was “all built on the modern trend of thought.”

Written: 1935/36

Produced: Bryant’s Theatre Sydney, Apr-Jun 1937 (four irregular performances during this period)

History: This was written by PW while in England and sent back home where it was entered into the Bryant’s Theatre one-act play competition.

Reviews: T.W. Whitelock, Everyone’s, 9/6/1937

Peter Plover’s Party (1937)

Plot: Sketch. Peter Plover is a parody of a high-flying, empty-headed socialite who sees it all, says most of it, and cares about nothing.

Written: 1937 

Produced: Arts Theatre Club London, September 1937, as part of the revue Copyright Reserved (performed by Edward Cooper). Then incorporated into Herbert Farjeon’s Nine Sharp revue at the Little Theatre (performed by Cyril Richards), which opened 26 January 1938. The skit was played in over 400 performances of the broader revues.

History: PW originally wrote the with his lifelong friend, the actor Ronald Waters, in mind. It was a smashing success and gave PW a level of fame in a certain type of London society. Reportedly around 1950 it reappeared in amateur revues.

Publication: Six sketches including Peter Plover’s Party were published by theatre script publisher Samuel French in 1938, “French’s Acting Edition No. 1093: Sketches from Nine Sharp“.

Published in Patrick White: Selected Writings (1994, ed: Alan Lawson)

Reviews:

  • Sketch, 29/9/1937
  • Times 27/1/1938.
  • Punch 16/2/1938
  • SMH 26/3/1938:
    • “During the week the writer has heard of two encouraging successes by Australian playwrights. Patrick White, who has lived in London for some years, has two [sic] of his sketches in Nine Sharp, the show which is having such a success in London. In one of the sketches Cyril Richard has a part. Mr White’s success has elated the members of Bryant’s Playhouse, for it was in that snug little crypt in Darlinghurst that Mr. White’s first play Bread and Butter Women was produced by Miss Beryl Bryant and gave such promise of better things to follow.
  • Home, May 1938

Return to Abyssinia (1939)

UNPUBLISHED, NOW LOST

Plot: Play in three acts. Englishman Morland and his daughter Lucy live in St Jean de Luz in the the South of France, in proximity to the Spanish Civil War. Two visitors arrive: the first is Manuel, a conservative Spanish maquis with whom the naive Lucy falls in love, unaware that she is merely a diversion in this casanova’s life. He is followed by Beauval, a highly-regarded (especially by herself) French actress who sees through the façade of the Spaniard, and becomes a mentor figure to the young woman to navigate her love problems.

The Stage notes that much of the play is made of wit and character study rather than plot, noting the elderly French maid Mathilde as a source of much humour.

Written: 1939.

Produced: Boltons Theatre Club, London, 11-30 March 1947, dir: John Wyse, starring: Barbara Shaw (Beauval), Alan Robinson (Morland), Joyce Cummings (Lucy), Richard Carr (Manuel), Violette Morice (Mathilde), Robert Green (Jacques), Gilbert Grant, Raymond Duveen (Villagers)

History: Originally planned to open in the West End in late 1939 but this was scuppered, unsurprisingly, by the outbreak of war. On its eventual opening in 1947 (by which time White was moving back to Australia), the play received some positive reviews, including the thumbs up from Queen Mary. However reviewers acknowledged it was rather dated. The three weeks of performance were apparently successful, but as it was running in a small theatre dedicated to new works, it was not going to receive a longer run.

The title is from the final lines of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, which takes as its final moral that unhappiness is an inevitable part of life and we should accept the surprises and vicissitudes of existence without believing our ideals will come true. The final known copy was burned in 1964 as White moved out of Dogwoods. St Jean de Luz, the setting of the play, was where PW revised his novel Happy Valley in 1938 prior to its publication.

For the 1974 book Patrick White as Playwright, J.R. Dyce attempted extensively to track down a copy of this play – but to no avail. PW advised Dyce that he “did not regard it as a work of any importance”.

Laurie Hergenhan, writing in Australian Literary Studies 7.4, conducted exhaustive research of surviving documents regarding the play, which have informed much of the above.

As Hergenhan notes, the play’s focus on an inexperienced young person torn between a safe but closed-off way of existence and a more open but realistic life reflects other works of this era of PW’s career, primarily The Living and the Dead and The Ham Funeral.

Reviews and writings:

  • Boltons Theatre Club News, March 1947:
    • “This is the author’s first play, although he has written one or two successful novels. Mr. White is an Australian, and is at present back in his own country after being demobilized from the R.A.F.”
  • Daily Mail, 12/3/1947
  • Daily Telegraph, 12/3/1947
  • Times 13/3/1947 (p. 10):
    • “A disarmingly ingenuous little play which turns to mild amusement…”
  • Stage, 13/3/1947:
    • “Plot and situation are negligible… that the author can keep it going for three acts is a tribute to his skill in writing dialogue that avoids the obvious without being affected and is often brilliant, and to his ability to invest bookish characters with a life that holds the interest even if it does not unfold to much purpose.”
  • Observer, 16/3/1947
  • R.F. Brissenden, Meanjin 23.3
  • Laurie Hergenhan, ALS 7.4, features production information
  • The programme survives at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

La Grande Amoureuse (1940)

Plot: Sketch. An old, faded glamorous woman who has kept a book of the many stories of her lovers.

Written: 1939

Produced: In the revue Swinging the Gate, which opened 22 May 1940, performed by Hermione Gingold, who kept this piece in her repertoire for many years. There does not appear to be information about whether the revue ran for multiple performances.

Publication: Not published in PW’s lifetime although the script was kept by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office as – for hundreds of years since Elizabethan times – all theatre scripts had to be reviewed by representatives of the Crown.

Published in Patrick White: Selected Writings (1994, ed: Alan Lawson)

Confused? Keen to use some of my content? Check out my Terms and Conditions.