Here we have the last days of CUMHAL, a gleeman, a travelling man who sings and recites poetry He wear a particoloured doublet, has sockless shoes, and unruly grey hair. CUMHAL carries a large knapsack, which all but weighs down his frail body. He comes across the abbey of the White Friars. He encounters a lay brother at the front door, after reciting a poem.. He is placed in cold quarters with some smouldering peat, and provided with hard mouldy bread. Attempting to sleep, he is attacked by fleas and lice. At dawn he and the lay brother argue and fight. After this CUMHAL sings loudly.

The ABBOT appears, fuming with anger at the singing and CUMHAL’s blasphemies. He is brutally forced to carry a large cross and perform the Stations of the Cross. He is then crucified.

He rambles poignantly and ironically about past torments and disasters, whether domestic or social. At a deeper level the play captures the ruthless treatment of Scots by the English. DONALD’s mental condition could be a metaphor for this. The style of the work mingles some comedy with a gravity bordering on the tragic

The play revolves around the ancient but healthy METHUSELAH who resides on a cedar throne. He boasts a dense grey beard streaked with yellow. The beard descends and spreads to the floor, covering his feet. Methuselah entertains a number of females: EVE, the QUEEN OF SHEBA, BRIDGET (a latrine hand and servant), SALOME and CLEOPATRA. He is sexually active in various degrees, but not with the heart-broken CLEOPATRA. All these women appear at the conclusion, and celebrate METHUSELAH’s one thousandeth birthday.

GLYCERINE TEARS

Two widows, Carla and Lulu, enjoy afternoon tea with panache and scrupulous ritualism . Carla is recently bereaved, but is quite insouciant about this. The ceremonies of high tea are more important to them than the deaths of husbands and lovers. In relation to the last they swerve from the flippant to the sadistic.

Their conversations about fatal mishaps are entirely detached, witty, catty, frothily cruel, and exulting in the absurd. The inner life of Carla and Lulu’s (if any) is a mystery. Nevertheless, they seem glued by misandroid appetites..

The is playlet owes not a little to Genet and Beckett.

THE OULD TRIANGLE

The play takes place within a dilapidated and grubby hotel. An Irish woman, Earwig, controls the understocked bar. She fled Ireland owing to an affair with a voluptuous Italian nun, Sister Gorgonzola, who is ‘defrocked’ and compelled to return to her home: Naples.

A ‘bull dyke’ enters: Mag. She is tall, muscular, and tough, with short hair, bizarre make-up, and a brace of rings which pierce her lips, tongue, nose and ears. She and Earwig engage in personal and racist insults. Mag complains about the lack of clientele when Cicely enters, having just returned from Royal Ascot. She is exclusively attired and sports a wildly exuberant hat.

It transpires that Cicely relishes ‘rough trade’, and Mag loves bringing toffs down to earth. They warm to one another, and embrace on a seedy sofa. We jump in time, and Earwig appears as a newly graduated celebrant. She weds the two. They in turn invite Earwig to join them in their honeymoon: to Naples.

NATURE STRIPS

Three well-formed women, naked except for their differently coloured knickers: blue, apricot and brown: those of Antoinette, Madeleine, and Glenys. Antoinette is high posh and supercilious. Madeleine is middle- class and opportunistic. Glenys is street-smart working class, and a dissembler.

Antoinette sits upstage centre at a table. Madeleine and Glenys sit at opposite sides, angled.

Champagne is poured, which Glenys abhors. She is forced to remove her knickers etc., then watch Antoinette and Madeleine dildo one another. Glenys refuses further involvement, and suffers at the hands of violent male homosexual backroom staff and enforcers.

The episodes are linked by through-characters and ripples from other events.

The director, John Duigan, eviscerated the dramatic sub-plots, making the film one-layered and more Hollywood in style, especially the ending which undermined the detached comic role of the Englishman. It was not a success.

In this political satire and serious dramatic fantasy, Uncle Sam gathers around him a unique campaign team: Daniel Boone, Black Hawk, Eleanor Roosevelt, Zorro, Jack Johnson, Charlie Chan, Superman, Helen Keller, Janis Joplin, Curt Cobain etc.

While they campaign in their constituencies Uncle Sam (flying on the back of Superman) works every state, flies to Afghanistan and has a tense meeting with Bin Laden, then to Cuba and meets (more amicably) Castro.

He successfully debates the Democrat and Republican candidates, putting forward economic, educational, health and public transport reforms that are progressive and socially just.

Given his platform (entirely independent of the Washington snake-pit, Wall Street and corporate baronage) Uncle Same attracts a record voter turn-out (mainly from Afro-Americans and Latinos), and clinches the presidency.

As a character Uncle Sam is a populist Solomon figure, an Everyman on a political Pilgrim’s Progress.

Examples:

1. An emu… a racecourse scavenger who picks up discarded betting tickets in the hope of finding an uncashed winner.
2. Umpire….can be called a white maggot…
3. A barnacle…a batsman who merely hangs around… a limpet and bore.

Jack Hibberd has written short stories over the years, such as Christ Stopped at Echuca,
Nil Desperandum etc.

“Hibberd has a professional’s skill, an amateur’s openness…I should say he is writing threnodies. That seems appropriate to the formality which he finds congenial, the grief at loss which pervades many of the poems, and the spanning of both public and private experience.”

- Peter Steele

Siamese Love

How sweet it is, sweet,
to have loved
and been loved
for a long time.
Like two close trees,
one shortish, one tall,
we stand,
side by side.
Often our branches
caress, rub, touch;
but not quite as often
they thrash.
But down below
it is altogether different:
we now enjoy
one deep stump,
one meshwork of roots,
absorbing, sharing,
osmosing up
in twin towers,
the nutrients of our love

COPY of cover of ‘Madrigals for a Misanthrope’

“Jack Hibberd has produced a distinctly original and enjoyable collection of poems – his poetic is to do with rhythm, sharp-edged language, proverbial utterance, oracle. His humour is wry and sensual, a form of the intellect in its wooing shape. The raunchy side of the collection gets broader as it progresses, especially in “Camperdown Dichotomies”, a scabrous sequence which imagines from moral Melbourne a Sydney bequeathed by Cavafy. I recommend all into whose hands pass to read The Genius of Human Imperfection with care.”

- Peter Porter

Byzantium

When you lose your mother, your father,
Existence can never quite be the same.
It’s not that life becomes incorrigibly starker,
more you find yourself standing out in the rain,
counting the drips, absorbed,
feeling the earth mass beneath prehensile feet.
It’s not that life becomes a Rousseaunian breeze,
more you find yourself looking up at the sky,
feeling the holes, absorbed,
feeling the air insufflate your barbaric brain.
It’s no that life becomes lonely
more you find yourself gazing out to sea,
counting the rafts, absorbed,
feeling the water consume amphibian cells.
It’s not that life becomes deathly,
more you find yourself staring, staring, the sun,
counting rays, absorbed,
feeling the flames torment recoiling genes.

Death of a Father

He didn’t know what had struck him,
poleaxed on my bed:
Moira my mother calling out Jim,
half of his heart half-dead.

Then he knew what had struck home;
I’ve done it this time he said
sorry, his last words an apologizing groan,
half of his heart not dead.

Originally commissioned by the University of NSW Drama Foundation in 1968, and rejected for production, it languished for over two decades. A troublesome, mysterious piece, I revised it in 1993, and the thing seemed to gain more shape.

The play deals with theatre itself and public taste, but also more sinisterly about who dictates what we see. Beyond a ‘free’ society lurks dictators of public ‘morality’. Stylistically Epic (the name of the central character) embraces Realism, the Absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty and Restoration Comedy, and rejoices in misfit characters such as Ferret, Nostril, Bottom, Poignant, Sir Velvet Pump, La Gorganzola, Angst of India, and Judas!

These plays are meant to be coupled, as TRIOS, and clearly theatrically dwell on dysfunctional parents.

‘…as ever full of low comedy and high spirits.’

- Stephen Knight

‘The jokes fly thick and fast: the verbal barrage is unrelenting. For his way with names, Hibberd deserves to rewrite the Australian Who’s Who….Along the route Hibberd travesties many of the modes of Australian writing from Lawson to Patrick Shakespeare: Thelma’s coathanger shoulders echoed that ultimate coathanger: Sydney Harbour Bridge. Despite the sweep of her kangaroo muzzle, the shortness of her upper arms and lower legs, the impression Thelma gave was one of tall primness. Yet behind there lurked a sexuality, for the discerning observer, of the kind exuded by the chaste giraffe or ambivalent emu. As low priapic farce, The Life of Riley outdoes all its analogues, whether Clive James, Howard Jacobson or Barry McKenzie, and makes Casanova look slow. It is outrageous, over-the-top, crude and larded with erudition, offends all literary and social decorum….If Riley is Australian manhood, it’s a worry, and if The Life of Riley is the Australian novel, it has swept the pieces off the board. But until the real thing comes along, what better way to spend the hours between midnight and dawn.’

- Nicholas Jose (The Australian, 1991)

‘…a sumptuous satire of high and low life among our literati, glitterati, and gutterati. The characters are suitably grotesque: the plot piquantly picaresque.’

- Giles Hugo (Hobart Mercury)

‘….a festival of fragmentation…This is a strange book, but then Hibberd is a strange sort of writer. Never sliding into crowd-pleasing like Williamson, never set in an ideological mode like some of the other Melbourne dramatists of yore, Hibberd remains, in fiction as in drama, funny, awkward, disruptive, even silly, and he would know the history of the word silly – it has meant saintly and foolish, and its central sense is unworldly. This weird, cussed, enticing book is all of that, and all of a piece in a challenging way – and so the more power to Hibberd’s cranky pen.’

- Stephen Knight (The Herald, 1989)

COPY of COVER of ‘Memoirs of an Old Bastard’

Proscenium Arch Blues (character: Thea Limbo) specifically addresses theatre and existence through physical immobility. Long Time No See (character: Bea Paradise) explores the same through blindness and insanity. A Shadow of Her Former Self (character: Twiggy Styx) investigates similar themes through senescence.

A virtuosos role for an actress. This play is meant to precede MOTHBALLS, and the two have been labeled A CONJUGAL COUPLE.

The style is French Gothic and the structures Brechtian. Again there are lots of songs. Yvette’s life is full of grotesqueries and a chamber of comic horrors. She encounters such choice characters as August Morbide, Count Coolgardie, Ray le Sting, Henri Suave, and Zeek. At the end Yvette seems set for some happiness, but an elliptical threat soon intervenes.

Throughout the play we see the phases of the moon on back projections

N.B.  Jack Hibberd has adapted and/or translated other works; Aristophanes’s The Ecclesiazusae, Arrabel’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (see below).

The play narrates the revolutionary feats and achievements of one Captain Midnight VC (he won the VC in World War I), the bastard son of an indigenous woman and English peer. Politically charismatic, he eventually leads an uprising of blacks (aided by black brothers from Africa and the USA) which compels the government to eject all whites from Tasmania and give it back to the Aborigines, as `Trugininiland’.

‘Hibberd’s inventiveness shows scholars how we should go about more than one aspect of our business, so that any debt he might feel towards historians has been more than repaid.’

- Humphrey McQueen

‘Captain Midnight is a rorty, rumbustious comic tale….It language is extravagant. its large gallery of characters vivid, if unsubtle. It gallops along, stopping every 10 mins or so for a song, ending on a high note with Midnight taking over as President of the new ‘goanna-republic’ of Trugininiland, alias Tasmania.’

- Leonard Radic (The Age, July 1984)

COPY of COVER of ‘Captain Midnight VC.’

The interrogation scene in this play (which is a tribute to a similar scene in Pinter’s The Birthday Party) needs an update to make it contemporary, while maintaining its absurdity.

Liquid Amber was published by Penguin Books in 1984, along with Dimboola, written 1981-2.

Sin is highly disrespectful, satirical, wild, and descends into mayhem. Written in 1978, as a commission from the Victorian State Opera.

photo of Evelyn Krape, Jan Friedl and a Pig

photo courtesy of Victorian State Opera

Hibberd has interlarded his comico-tragic dramatization with several songs – about cities in general, the intention being to make the metropolis of St Petersburg have a universal dimension. The wretched central character is here called ‘Kak’; the other characters are all grotesques, who treat him abominably. He has, nevertheless, a sweetish revenge at the end, but is still without the overcoat for which he saved across a decade (in order to propel the sadsack up into a better class of society). A production requires a composer and some singers.

COPY of COVER of ‘The Overcoat, Sin’. Photo by Brendan Hennessy

Recueillement

Enough, Sorrow, be sensible, be calm.
You called for evening, look it is here:
a thick dark cloud enfolds suburb, farm,
delivering peace to some, to others fear.

While the harrowed multitude of the human race
are tortured on compulsive racks of sex
(then sublimate their anguish in lukewarm fetes),
give me your hand and let us wistfully trek

to distant shores. See the dead years lean down
from the sky’s parapets, each in an old gown,
see Regret leap smiling from the sea and mist,

as the moribund sun sleeps beneath his dome,
and look, a long black shroud trails from the East,
listen my sweet, listen, soft night creeps home.

COPY of LINOCUT of a MAN’s FACE

(at bottom of linocut: ‘Linocut by David Fitts’)

A powerful dynamic vivacious women, she bestrode the opera world for decades, rivalled only by Caruso (who appears). The characters who feature are Treacle O’Kane, Madame Marchesi, Buffalo Bill, Lady de Grey, George Bernard Shaw, The Duke of Orleans, Sir Thomas Beecham, Neville Cardus, Oscar Wilde, Frank Wedekind, and the scintillating Mayor of Brisbane.

The actress who plays Melba must be able to sing a few arias and parlour songs. There is a selection of recorded music that is essential to the work. The ABC TV production of A Toast to Melba was shown by the BBC in 1982, the first Australian TV drama put to air by them.

COPY of COVER of ‘Peggy Sue’

Being of Irish extraction, he objected to fighting a British war. He stowed away on a ship, but was banned from fighting in the USA. He died there from pneumonia at the age of 21 (1917).

The play has actual boxing, so the actors must train for this. As well there are Irish songs and dancing. The cast must all be able to sing and dance to the live music.

COPY of COVER of ‘Three Popular Plays’

The play lasts nearly two hours, and requires a virtuosos actor and an interpretative director. The actor is required to physically transform into younger versions of himself, and as well to transform into other characters. Stretch, among other things, dramatizes, place, time, the strange workings of memory, history, a care for the environment, remorse, and death.

This comico-tragic work has been performed in China (Sanghai, Beijing, 1987) in Mandarin, and was the first Australian play produced in that country. It has also been produced in London (twice), the USA, Germany and NZ.

“A Stretch of the Imagination is the first unmistakable Australian theatrical classic. I know it is a dangerous game predicting classics, when the only real test is the test of time; but it is just because I believe this play needs time for all its imaginative possibilities to be fully explored that I am willing to take a chance on it. I doubt there will ever be a definitive performance of Stretch. It is the first play in Australian drama against which an actor can be measured. – not just because of the extraordinary demands it makes as a virtuoso piece, but the subtleties and complexities of the text make possible any number of imaginative readings, and the play’s ‘meaning’ is the sum total of those potential recreations. It is this that marks a theatrical classic from a first-rate play of its time.”

- Margaret Williams (Currency Press, 1973)

“A Stretch of the Imagination (1972), a monodrama by an old man facing death, blends comedy and pathos, and is widely regarded as his finest work to date. Its protagonist is a quintessentially Australian character, a teller of tale tales who brings together positive and negative aspects of the national legend.”

- The Cambridge Guide to English Literature, 1996

“Why has Monk O’Neill taken so long to reach England? Jack Hibberd wrote this play about a surly, voluble Aussie awaiting death in the Outback in 1972; perhaps we’re finally ready for such a complicated colonial….he claims a classical education, reads at least a line of Plato. …Mark Little does him exceptional justice…waving his stubbled head like an angry vulture…batting off condescension for the entire nation. The only time we get to look down on Monk is in his coffin… after he has left all his worldly goods to the Aboriginal peoples.

- Nina Kaplan, Time Out, London, July 2010

‘Monk O’Neill comes home…’