Category Archives: Plays

There is only one character in this work: DONALD ‘DRIP-TRAY’ DUNNE. Hence it is a ‘monodrama’. He is a medicated lunatic, depressed and hypochondriacal. He sits in a wheelchair, sporting a grey blanket and some Scottish clobber. On each side … Continue reading →

adapted from a short story by W.B. Yeats 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 … Continue reading →

adapted from a story by John McGahan and influenced by his novel: THE DARK. PATRICK O’HAGAN teaches at a remote bucolic school. He was expelled by the Christian Brothers just before his graduation, for disinterest and depression. He is lonely, … Continue reading →

Subtitled ‘Time is of the Essence’ and ‘a celebration of the anachronistic’ 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 … Continue reading →

This play features  FATHER TIME  and his retainer (or  ‘obliger’) TOD . FATHER TIME is a dominant and despotic figure, prone to the cruel and sadistic. TOD is subservient and grimly miserable. They spend their time filling in time. They … Continue reading →

Three Sapphic Plays 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 … Continue reading →

In final draft form this play embraces a visit to the said prison by President George Bush, Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. They watch a play within a play about the history of torture, which play … Continue reading →

Here five of the Ten Commandments are dramatized: I am the Lord Thy God, Thou Shalt Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother, Thou Shalt not Steal, Thou Shalt not Kill, and Thou Shalt not Commit Adultery. As inversions of these … Continue reading →

A work that hones in on the Creation versus Darwin debate. It is set in a Pentecostal chapel outside Chattanooga, whose charismatic preacher Lazarus Everyman presides over a congregation of black, red and white ‘trash’. This ‘sect’ has elements of … Continue reading →

Taboo territory – a comedy about a woman with terminal cancer. It actually enshrines ‘gallows humour’ ….or as Samuel Beckett said: “You can only crack jokes in the last trench.” Her name is Doris ‘The Dancer’ Morris. She is much … Continue reading →

Stage adaptations of two Irish short stories: The New House by the highly underrated writer Elizabeth Bowen, and The Small Lady by Sean 0’Faolin. The former is a domestic comedy (suffused with some malignancy), set in a ‘new house’ belonging … Continue reading →

Theatrically covers a trial in which a young indigenous woman (Alice Springs) is convicted and sent to jail for trivial offences – stealinga can of infant formula, and a breast pump, from a pharmacy. Written in 2001.

Based on Tolstoy’s superb novella, it was commissioned by the International College of Oncopsychiatry (1999) and performed in Melbourne and Yokohama at international conferences. It explores the development of serious occult pain in a conceited upper class lawyer, and subsequent … Continue reading →

Another male monodrama, composed 1998, this work is literally what the title claims: a theatrical history of Western humankind from Homo Sap to Cyber-Man. It concentrates on the great civilizations and historical convulsions.

Two impoverished women, Mag and Nancy, survive in a remote, ramshackle house on the bleak plains north of Melbourne. Early, Mag is visited by two men who forcibly repossess all whitegoods etc., stripping the household. Nancy arrives. She and Mag … Continue reading →

Another 1997 play, this one embraces an intense rancorous biting baiting marriage, which harks back to Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.

This 1997 play enjoys a peculiar setting – a bath upstage, with a toilet on one side and a bidet on the other. Downstage there is a large map drawn on the floor…Australia if the production is set in Australia. … Continue reading →

Witten along 1997, this work is set in a family crypt not long after the death of the mother of her four children: Petunia, Yorick, Hardwick and Warwick. The play dramatizes the disintegration of a family that so frequently occurs … Continue reading →

or THE LAST DAYS OF EPIC J. REMORSE. 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 … Continue reading →

Composed in 1992-3, this is a counterpoint to The Prodigal Son. Here the father is the monster, and the mother a weak but articulate alcoholic. The daughter becomes a gruesome victim. These plays are meant to be coupled, as TRIOS, … Continue reading →

Written in the early 1990s, this three-hander centres on a family of MR, MRS and SON, quite anonymous, but the forces in this play are quite specific. The son has been booted out of home when very young, on the … Continue reading →

Sub-titled ‘curtain-raisers’ and written across 1985 and 1986, they are comprised of three monodramas for actresses. They theatrically illustrate, demonstrate, the premise ‘I perform therefore I am.‘ Proscenium Arch Blues (character: Thea Limbo) specifically addresses theatre and existence through physical … Continue reading →

Yet another monodrama, written later in the1980s, features the about-to-be married Desdemona Jones. She enters naked from a shower, and gradually dresses and makes herself up for the ceremony. It essentially a comedy and satire (particularly on ‘beautification’). At another … Continue reading →

Composed in 1984, it is a three-hander for teenage males: Mungo, Chuck and Beefy. Mungo is a nature-lover, conservationist, republican, and keen on literature. Chuck and Beefy are chainsaw-lovers, brash, aggressive, Americanized rednecks.. They mock Mungo remorselessly, and finally attack … Continue reading →

An adaptation from a short story by Guy de Maupassant written in 1984. This slender but poignant piece of writing has been expanded greatly, because Hiberd felt that its condensation concealed a number of layers below, and concentric circles of … Continue reading →

First written and performed in 1972. However, this version was loose, rudimentary, and under-researched. For the 1984 version I read Blainey, Reynolds, C.D. Rowley, Judith Wright, Lyndall Ryan, Bernard Smith and Humphrey McQueen. Once digested, I applied Brectian Epic techniques … Continue reading →

Written in 1983, in which two alumni of private (‘public’) schools meet after 20 years, BRONZE visiting WOOFER at home. The latter attempts to persuade BRONZE to return to politics, at which he was a wizard. It is a comedy … Continue reading →

Written in 1983, S.J. Malarky returns to Australia after some 20 years in the UK. The play dramatizes his drastic ambivalences as an Anglicized writer, expatriate Australian, and his impressions of Australia after such a long time. Needs revision.

Written in 1982, it features two tart widows enjoying afternoon tea not long after the death of their husbands. It is black comedy full of witty but vicious repartee. Their deceased spouses are not spared, and many are the victims … Continue reading →

A golden wedding celebration (that goes wrong) and an audience participation play like Dimboola. Written in 1981, the play centres on the matriarch Ruby Strap and her husband, the not so patriarchal Jock Strap. They are joined by six of … Continue reading →

Another monodrama, written, in 1980, features the recently widowed Jocasta Vaudeville-Smith. This play assumes two broad forms for the central character: public grief: formal sorrow and loss, suffering, weeping, yet numbness…then private grief: informal and chaotic, displaying anger, resentment, relief, … Continue reading →

Written in 1979, a meta-theatrical monodrama centred on a lunatic actor, was not a success.

Sub-titled ‘an immoral fable in five acts and entr’actes’, Sin is a piece of musical theatre which ironically, or perversely, inverts the Seven Deadly Sins into Seven Deadly Virtues., and features characters such as Sir Raphael Rasher de Bacon, Rhubarb, … Continue reading →

A stage adaptation of Gogol’s great novella, acknowledged by all Russian writers who followed to be a masterpiece. Written in 1977. Hibberd has interlarded his comico-tragic dramatization with several songs – about cities in general, the intention being to make … Continue reading →

Sub-titled, ironically, ‘The Power of Romance’. It tracks the journey of three young country women to the city, marriage, pregnancy, desertion by husbands, and descent into prostitution (owing to a recession), and jail. It is a mirror image of W4: … Continue reading →

Written in 1974, this play dramatizes the life and career of Les, an extraordinary middleweight boxer who won 40 of his 44 fights (20 by knockout), and defeated virtually all the crack American boxers who to Australia to challenge him. … Continue reading →

After working during 1970 with John Romeril and the actors at the APG to develop and stage Marvellous Melboure, Jack diverged and wrote the above monodrama about an outback philosopher, Monk O’Neill, who interlards his daily surviving chores with theatrical … Continue reading →

This is Jack Hibberd’s most popular play, written in 1968 (in London!), it still enjoys some 16 productions a year, mostly in the country, whose denizens it satirizes. Dimboola is an audience participation play in which the audience ‘become’ guests … Continue reading →

Jack’s next production was BRAIN-ROT, subtitled an Evening of Pathology and Violence, Love and Friendship, again at the University of Melbourne, in1968. It contained short plays such as Who? and One of Nature’s Gentlemen, dramatic and comic attacks on mateship, … Continue reading →

Written for the 10th anniversary of La Mama, a short monodrama, it was performed there in August 1967, and published in Meanjin 3/1967.

This is jack’s first play and was produced at the University of Melbourne in 1967 (directed by David Kendall), enjoying a huge success. It had productions around Australia in the following two years, all professional. W4 sparked a surge in … Continue reading →