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Hewett's dramatic heroines were famous in the 1970s for
their iconoclastic behaviour and the challenge they threw
out to middle-class Australia and to us. In their defiance
and critique of the much-cherished values of the time, the
beautiful Mrs Porter, Sally Banner, Tatty Hollow, Joan,
and the rest of her hybrid characters who combined the feminine
and the female in their personality structure, provoked
a rage of protest but also the unreported empathy of those
women and men who recognised the psychological and sociological
force of Hewett's plays. And yet the playwright's fictional
figures were the product of pure montage, frequently of
separate traits, created in the spirit of expressionism
and its strategies of discontinuity and alienation. Inasmuch
as it did exist, personal identification with the heroines
was just an epistemological approach to an examination of
being in the context of contemporary Australia. Other dramatis
personae thus frequently reflected the protagonist's
emotional response to her human environment; they were merely
functions of the central subjective standpoint implicit
in the heroine's relationship with her immediate surroundings.
This 'anti-objective' bent was of course deliberate, and
modelled after the widespread practice among avant-garde
dramatists in Europe and America before World War Two. When
conventional understandings of the self gave way to the
experience of subjectivity as an ongoing and fundamentally
ungraspable process, that lent itself to extreme interpretations
ranging from the denial of any sort of individuality ('death
of the subject') to the redefinition of human nature as
a dialectical state of human character, shaped by socio-economic
circumstances and the cultural climate of the era.
Although evocative of Hewett's expressionist period and
her experimentation with 'Ich-Drama' ('drama of the self'),
Nowhere forges stronger bonds with post-modern texts,
thus paying tribute to the revolutionary role of the avant-garde
in the redefinition of the institution of art in Western
societies, without losing ground in the present. The play
draws on Samuel Beckett's legacy in reinventing the theme
and the setting of Waiting for Godot, but builds
upon the initial inspiration a far richer aesthetic and
a very personal discourse with the post-World War Two era
in Australia; the 1960s in particular. Recognised in history
and theory alike as the key transitional period in the twentieth
century, that decade saw the rise of the new international
order marked by American neo-colonialism and the Green Revolution,
as well as by computerization and electronic information
that replaced traditional forms of communication. At the
same time, the global community could not escape grappling
with the 'internal contradictions and external resistance',
to quote Fredric
Jameson, inherent in every social structure.
Out of the given agenda, Hewett took big visions that subsequently
crumbled into nothingness, and delusions that cost lives.
Nowhere, however, is much more than a melodrama.
It is an Australian story.
The play takes place on a long-forsaken showground at the
edge of a country town in Western Australia, Hewett's recurring
location. The protagonists are two tramp-like figures from
society's margin who, it is clear, can be expected to have
far more to offer than 'boring' (Hewett's own word) middle-class
suburbia. At an advanced age, she still claims that she
'married two rough boys and joined the Communist Party to
join the rough boys and girls'. In Nowhere, though,
the author 'changes gender' and ascribes some of her life
experiences to a male hero. Josh, 'an eighty year old pensioner,
once a Communist', is portrayed as a former itinerant worker
who 'jumped rattlers all over the country in the depression'.
He dwells in a shack that reeks of urine and soiled possessions
hoarded over twenty years in which his life was kept at
a standstill. With Josh trying hard to pull on his battered
boots and the line 'Get on y' bastards, get on' - an unequivocal
reference to Godot - the historical framework of
the play is established with Hewett positioning herself
as a writer at the cross-roads of the avant-garde and post-modernism,
where three generations of Australians meet. For Nowhere
opens with another character's dream and a clash of sentiments
that bring forth the sense of failure and enduring pain.
Snow, 'a homeless forty eight-year-old Vietnam veteran'
is haunted by the memory of atrocities he blindfoldedly
committed in somebody else's homeland against people who
fought for their own vision of a harmonious society. With
just one word, 'democracy', on the swearing lips of Snow's
commander, the playwright conjures the full controversy
and ethical dilemmas behind foreign interference into the
internal affairs of a sovereign country. She deconstructs
and ridicules the hollow language of war propaganda and
exposes the strategies of fear and coercion. The dreaded
possibility of Japanese invasion is then juxtaposed with
their portrayal as 'our best customers' today. Sarcasm,
jokes and irony are all Josh's; Snow feeds the lines to
him and completely conforms with the expressionistic treatment
of a supporting character who is a function of the protagonist's
central subjective standpoint. The female hero, who completes
the triad, does not enter the play before the closing lines
of the first scene.
In Nowhere, the older man plays the role of an eye-opener
to his younger and politically naïve mate. This stereotyped
concept of character relationships taken over from satirical
comedy subverts the whole notion of the dignity of war,
without confusing an armed conflict driven by imperialistic
interests with an anti-fascist war. Thereby Hewett avoids
shutting out dialogue with other currently circulating discourses,
and allows for the possibility of alternative ideological
positions. The indictment on the sacrifice of human lives,
however, is immediate and enduring, since the social position
of both characters allows for no ambiguities as to the rewards
awaiting the returned soldiers. It is clear that, through
constant revolutionary agitation and subversion, a particular
form of epistemological and ideological critique emerges,
stemming from Hewett's allegiance to the avant-garde. It
produces a form of insight into alternative values and,
consequently, into what Richard Murphy, in his 1999 text,
Theorizing the Avant-Garde, calls 'the discursive
status of reality.' The desired result of this technique
is an informed opposition to any dogma or 'fixity' that
might emerge and take the central position of a new order.
As in many avant-garde texts, Snow's nightmares are close
to reality. They are dispersed, and bickering sentiments
between the two men appeased, only with the arrival of Vonnie,
a young woman and Aboriginal at that. Hewett ascribes a
conciliatory role to the woman in the men's world, and along
with it introduces the theme of reconciliation between white
and indigenous communities in general. The central signifier
is a broken down Holden placed centre-stage which, together
with the shack, a municipal rubbish bin and a pile of logs
symbolically lighting the showground setting throughout
the play, makes a fixed 'décor'. The dying
vernacular of the country folk also anchors the play in
an Australian cultural context. The closure of the opening
scene is brought about by extending the play's political
discourse to another frequent theme of Hewett, that of environment
or, rather, of nature. Some four decades ago, at the time
when Hewett decided to return to the 'country of the imagination',
Carl Jung warned in Memories, Dreams, Reflections
that to say: 'We have conquered nature is
a mere slogan. In reality we are confronted with anxious
questions, the answers to which seem nowhere in sight.'
The daunting one peculiar to Australians is associated with
Snow: almost fifty years on he is still portrayed as being
'frightened of the wide open spaces.'
Nowhere begins on an early winter's morning that
reflects Josh's age, but also points in the direction of
yet another literary reference, that of 'The Winter of Our
Discontent.' The playwright's discourse with the Western
literary heritage defines both her style of expression and
her aesthetic. Hewett's individual oeuvre can be
viewed as a unity; it goes on exploring the same sites of
meaning, with womanhood among her most important concerns.
Significantly, when Vonnie, 'a twenty-year-old former hooker
running from drugs and Bull, her brutal pimp in the city',
enters and is asked where she is going, she answers casually:
'Nowhere.' Therefore it matters not whether she relies on
her own resources and goes away, or stays under the protection
of men. In Vonnie's character, we recognise the rebellious
traits of Hewett's former heroines struggling against an
aggregate of social ills inside themselves and the society
at large. Aboriginality, femininity and drug dependence
are all condensed in the story of Vonnie's childhood and
her social and psychological conditioning..
Dreams and humour are the two stylistic elements that pervade
Nowhere. They appear as nightmares, symbolic visions,
and cherished or torturous memories that change shapes.
And they give expression to both social concerns and personal
yearnings. Josh, for instance, dreams of the river that
once was, symbolized by the Dry Torrent that the country
town on whose edge he is now living has become. Formerly
called The Torrent, it evokes all the harnessed rivers in
Australia that are drying out or becoming infested with
algae. Water, age-old symbol of a life source, becomes the
play's overarching paradigm: it links the controversial
regional issue with the global problem and, at the same
time, serves as an aesthetic tool that brings upon the reader
the sense of nostalgia – subverted all the time, however,
by humorous overtones. Thus Vonnie, in one of the longest
scenes in the play, acts out precious moments from both
Josh's and Snow's sentimental lives in what is a mixture
of documentarism, nostalgia and irony. While Vonnie - as
an uneducated young woman - would be unaware of the theorising
of therapeutic effects that an enactment and the consequent
venting of one's emotions can have on individuals, this
'play within a play', or meta-theatre, is an attempt 'to
bring it [all] out in the open' and release the two men
from grief buried inside them for years. Meta-theatre, ever
since The Man from Mukinupin, has been one of Hewett's
favourite techniques and psychological motivation of her
characters' actions is her trademark. She recurs to psychoanalysis
whenever she wants to 'put flesh on the bones of her characters'
without succumbing to the dominant discourse of 'holistic'
naturalistic representations, but alternating instead between
realism and abstraction. In using water as the central symbol
related to Josh, Hewett goes even further and reaches out
towards her characters' archetypal being. Like Jung and
Freud, Hewett sees the unconscious as the deposit of the
remnants of the past; and she draws on Adler in her interpretations
of will for power as much as on Marxism.
Consequently, Hewett's most potent signifier is her poetic
language. Around and by it she weaves her characteristic
texture of exuberant theatricality. Her favourite companion
along the avenue of literary creation is music; specifically.
evocative music that helps her awaken emotion and bridge
the strings of poetry and prose. In Hewett, theatre, music
and poetry merge and bring about a sense of nostalgia and
a desire to recreate the past. In talking about what the
French call la mode rétiro, that is retrospective
styling or a nostalgic mode in art, Fredric Jameson acknowledges
that pastiche and parody are the most significant features
or practices of postmodernism. He argues, however, that
in what he calls new postmodernism, parody
is excluded since 'modern art and modernism ... actually
anticipated social developments' along the same lines. Since
those developments involve social fragmentation and the
emergence of numerous 'private languages' or, rather, registers
associated with certain professions, the linguistic norm
becomes impossible and - by extension - so does ridicule.
And indeed, Hewett's sense of humour is never employed in
the service of mere parody. For the version of pastiche
she now exploits is a syncretic mimicry of her own former
dramaturgical styles as much as an author's discourse with
her cultural heritage. Thus, in Nowhere, 'all the
old favourites' are played during the meta-theatrical moments
in the plot, bringing back the recollection of The Golden
Oldies, Hewett's earlier work commissioned for the launching
season of the Playbox,
Melbourne. Intertextuality, including that
of modern art and social developments, is arguably why Hewett
also keeps situating her plots on the edge of a small fictional
town in Australia: it allows her to efface the contemporary
reference, and encourages the public to receive her plays
as Jameson puts it as narratives 'set in some indefinable
nostalgic past, an eternal [2000s], say, beyond history.'
They uphold mass-culture values and are about specific generational
moments of the past. This stylistic option also explains
why the language of Hewett's plays nurturing the Shakespearean
tradition, from The Man from Mukinupin to Nowhere,
is somewhat archaic and evocative. Like parody, pastiche
requires a dramatist to wear 'a stylistic mask' and reproduce
'speech in a dead language'. And yet Hewett's idiom is her
own invention: it produces an idiosyncratic and highly personal
language of dramaturgy that accommodates poetry and political
awareness as an expression of 'the inner truth of that newly
emergent social order of late capitalism' peculiar to Jameson's
new postmodernism.
The nostalgia mode serves Hewett one more purpose: to invoke
the spirit of melodrama at various points in Nowhere.
These excursions began far back in the 1970s during the
author's expressionist stint, and can be detected in most
of her plays. They were founded right from the start on
an amalgam of German and British notions of the genre since,
in German theatre, the term melodrama is commonly associated
with a 'musical-dramatic hybrid' ('musikalishe-dramatischen
Mischform') or with a sensational form of popular entertainment.
It was Eric Russell Bentley, Peter Brooks, and more recently
Richard Murphy,
who labelled the heightened emotional states in melodrama
as 'hysterical' and introduced the argument that melodrama's
'deeper significance lies in the fact that it resorts to
such “screaming” only in order to reach beyond
dominant representational systems, codes and conventions,
and beyond the epistemological and discursive restrictions
associated with them.' The first big melodramatic outburst
in Nowhere comes about when old Josh starts telling
young Vonnie about his past, and the memory of the only
woman he has ever loved brings back the image of his days
as a Communist as well. Josh's mind is the repository of
his identity and it remains, like Hewett's, solid and unshakable.
The author thereby initiates a form of counter-discourse
with her own past and the value system that was the focus
of her social and political discontent. By interspersing
the play with melodramatic utterances, she 'breaks through
everything that constitutes the 'reality principle', all
its censorships, accommodations,
tonings-down', She examines even
her own convictions. Lines such as: 'Class is a 'ard thing
to overcome ... No, that'd never work out', suggest a 'sobering-up'
and the fading of Hewett's former ideals only to be revived
several pages onwards in visionary statements like, 'Socialism
with a human face. That's what I've always believed in,
Edith.' What the playwright sets about to undermine henceforth
are assumptions encouraged by realism that 'grasping' reality
'conceptually means possessing and controlling it'. No wonder
most of Nowhere revolves around Communism and anti-war
proclamations, both inspired by strong political convictions.
Melodramatic outpourings serve Hewett, above all, as a source
of oppositional power that she wields upon the 'conventional
and repressive discourses of the post-Enlightenment order'
in order to force them to yield up their limitations and
to reveal the sites of their repressions. Thus, melodrama
returns to the primary impulse behind perhaps all theatricality:
it stages fundamental human conflicts and gives vent to
unleashed desires in an open transgression of social restraints
and psychological repressions. In Murphy's interpretation,
it is a spontaneous 'if rather desperate medium both for
communicating the anxiety associated with the breakdown
of moral and ideological systems in the 20th century, and
for expressing the desires (to which this revolution lends
support) for the creation of a new order.' But Hewett allows
for the melodrama as spectacle and entertainment as well.
The pleasure principle to her is the vehicle for social
and political persuasion.
In Nowhere, as in Hewett's earlier plays, Eros is
the dominant instinct, a 'kosmogonos, a creator and
father-mother of all higher consciousness' as Jung called
it in The Undiscovered self. It is canvassed as an
issue that reflects generational attitudes, this time ranging
from the widely acknowledged notion of sex as a panacea
to the romantic conceptions of love that lead people to
suppress their desires by either quelling them altogether
or sublimating them into dreams. Desire is again discussed
in the form of discourses surrounding both sex and gender.
Woman as Virgin versus woman as slut - the two antithetical
male perspectives of women - reappear at various points
in the play, suggesting that once they get embedded perceptions
are difficult to modify.
Something has changed though in modern Australia, Hewett
suggests, for Vonnie's behaviour is neither aggressive nor
defensive. She freely expresses her sexuality and is at
peace with herself. This certainly has to do with her portrayal
in the image of a 'half-caste' woman empowered by indigenous
wisdom and attitude to nature. The violence to which Vonnie
gets subjected by men is still considerable, though. With
a single phrase, 'Make love not war', Hewett conjures up
the entire era of the 1960s and with it brings to life pictures
of women still often sexual objects under the banner of
'sexual liberation.'A fulfilling sexual relationship is
seen not to preclude harassment or physical abuse of women
by their male partners. From the modern point of view, this
parallel examination seems to suggest that men find it more
difficult to adapt to the notion of partnership and its
quotidian connotations of equality. Violence towards and
victimisation of women are the two behavioural patterns
that Hewett subverts with a large gesture. One of the most
powerful scenes in Nowhere is the axe-murder of Bull,
a bikie and Vonnie's abusive pimp, conceived in the best
manner of expressionism. Hewett has recourse to that aesthetic
whenever she needs powerful visual imagery; it also helps
her to create the atmosphere of total theatre on stage.
But being a pastiche, Nowhere exploits other aesthetic
options that allow the author to explore. for example, desire
in old age. A not-old reader/viewer of a Hewett play can
find out what it might be like to be and feel old, and in
what ways this feeling weakens or empowers an individual.
Institutions like old people's homes, the pension system,
and social welfare pop up as discursive points along with
social work in general, the 'stolen kids' generation, public
and municipal property, or the ambivalent attitude to the
arts in Australia. Characters who epitomise public institutions
are reduced to character types or symbols and are therefore
given only a prefix to a name (Mrs Mac) or are called by
the name of their profession (the Sergeant), just as Bull
is a man with only a nickname.
This dramaturgical practice commonly found in expressionism
enables Hewett to efface the psychological dimension of
individuals and lay bare the representational device - both
formally and ideologically. The technique has an anti-illusionist
function similar to the Russian formalists' alienation method
subsequently adopted by Brecht. The three main characters,
on the other hand, are not only given personal names that
have a signifying dimension, but also have personal histories
and hence, the depth, of human beings rather than being
mere instruments of social control. Due to the duality of
dramaturgical devices and to memory flashbacks, as well
as the meta-theatrical devices and the intrusions of public
figures into protagonists' private lives, the sense of discontinuity
and representational instability characteristic of the avant-garde
lingers on, but the individual scenes are much longer than
during Hewett's infatuation with Kinostil in the
1970s. The playwright has moved closer to the modernist
aesthetic described by Murphy that 'updates realism's technical
virtuosity', while still seeking to deconstruct dominant
social discourses and, with them, the implicit epistemology,
reality-principle and social value system.
The events and emotions that make up Nowhere's protagonists
are built of a picturesque series of encounters, with Josh
as a central figure 'wandering amongst reflections of his
own persona on the path towards redemption' and rebirth.
The pivotal signifier in the play, its setting, can be largely
construed according to spatial considerations and the symbolic
meaning of the showground. Its location on the edge of the
country town suggests a symbolic reference to Australia
and its geographical position on the map of the world. It
is the promised country, Alice's Wonderland/Wormland; it
is also the 'nowhere' in which initial settlers ended up
- the 'place to disappear' to and live a peaceful life at
long last, says Hewett the poet. When Snow arrived to the
showground on the edge of Dry Torrent, Josh was its only
occupant. From that it can be inferred that he ended up
nowhere. Vonnie repeats several times in the play that she
is going nowhere, and two of her songs or, rather, two parts
of the same song delivered at the beginning and towards
the end of the play, first as a solo and then in a duet
with Snow, bear the title 'Going Nowhere.' Consequently,
when the couple decides to leave the showground, they again
choose Nowhere as their destination. But when finally Snow
turns the signpost pointing towards Nowhere in the opposite
direction, all expectations of a definite solution in the
play are dispersed. One feeling remains, though. When first
sung, 'Nowhere' eerily resonated of death; when continued
at the point of the couple's departure it bore the promise
of peace, of 'belong[ing] somewhere again'. So, the turning
of the signpost could signify that the land of peace stretches
all around us. This is also what Josh's determination to
stay put seems to suggest. For he both refuses social integration
and stands his ground to the very end. 'I'm not disappearin',
he says. The 'coming down' of rain that he alone can anticipate,
the rain which is 'goin' to be a real bobby-dazzler' is
Hewett's last and most important symbol, her discourse with
Christian heritage and its Holy Scripture - the Bible. For,
unlike Noah, Josh climbs on top of the roof of his shack,
closer to heaven and the universe, to await the Flood and
watch from above the purification and renewal of the land
that will bring physical and moral ablution as well. The
prophet in him rejoices at seeing once more the torrent
that is going 'to sweeten the waters and green the land
again.' The play folds with the soft sound of 'The Rite
of Spring' accompanied by church bells tolling faintly,
'as if under water.' Thus, what stays after the book is
shut is the promise of an overarching revolution of social
habit, with marginal people figuring as the heroes with
whom our hope should rest. Or is it, rather, a warning?
Refusal of a closure corresponds with the polysemous nature
of Hewett's writings in general and points once again
to what Richard Murphy calls, 'a historical sense of the
danger which lies in wait for those who do not practice
some form of epistemological skepticism with regard to what
are, in effect, discursive fictions.' Brecht's argument
brings us even closer to Hewett: 'And when the fallacies
are all worn out? The last one keeping us company/sitting
right across from us/is nothingness.' But it is in Carl
Gustav Jung's legacy the most significant link to this chain
of intertextuality is found: 'In an era which has concentrated
exclusively upon extension of living space and increase
of rational knowledge at all costs, it is a supreme challenge
to ask man to become conscious of his uniqueness and his
limitation. Uniqueness and limitation are synonymous. Without
them, no perception of the unlimited is possible - and,
consequently, no coming to consciousness either - merely
a delusory identity with it which takes the form of intoxication
with large numbers and an avidity for political power' (The
Undiscovered Self).
The most prominent discourse, and the one interspersed throughout
Nowhere, is the discourse of war. Flowing from the
stage in the Beckett Theatre at Melbourne's Playbox, in
the wake of September 11, its historic import faded before
the fresh onslaught of a universal and ominous signifier.
Jasna Novakovic grew up with fiction and the sound of music
at heart, and was adamant that she would make a career in
opera. Radio unexpectedly opened the possibility for accommodating
both but, when the country of her birth started crumbling
to pieces, the music stage followed suit leaving theatre
as the only resilient medium. Reviewing plays proved to
be a source of solace and newly discovered joy, and Jasna
was attracted to Dorothy Hewett and to her exuberant world
of emotion and social critique. A PhD thesis at Monash University,
when completed, will explain more.
Fredric Jameson. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings
on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London and New York: Verso,
1998.
Published
in Hecate 2.2, (1976).
Richard
Murphy. Theorizing The Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism,
and the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Peter
Brooks. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,
Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1976.
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