Patrick White's Theatre

Denise Varney offers an analysis of Patrick White’s plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years.

Winner of the AUHE Prize in Literary Scholarship 2022

“Varney combines a theoretically astute sense of the hybridity of the dramatic event, with a dense but lucidly rendered sociological history of White’s plays as they progress through different productions, revivals, and receptions … This is an essential insight, and one which could be usefully extended to White’s novels, and perhaps to Australian modernism broadly.” - Jonathan Dunk, Australian Book Review

One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting.

In Patrick White's Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White's eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White's complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.