AustLit

'Patrick White wrote plays throughout his career, and the ongoing success in Australia of productions of his dramatic work signals something of the longevity of his public profile. For theatre historians and reviewers, White's theatre writing provides, more-over, a point of genesis, signalling recurrent moments of vitality in his overall literary output, as well as in the national theatre more generally. The observation by David Marr in his programme notes to the 2007 Sydney Theatre Company production of The Season at Sarsparilla that "the stage was White's first love"' recalls a point made three decades earlier by H.G. Kippax in his introduction to White's first collection of plays. Kippax noted further that the production of White's early plays in 1933 by the Sydney Playhouse predated the publication of his early verse The Ploughman and Other Poems, by two years, and that his post-World War II literary productions were likewise prefaced by theatrical productions —Return to Abyssinia (1946) — in advance of literary publication — The Aunt's Story (1948). The invocation across these diverse contexts of figures of cultural and authorial genesis through theatrical performance, while of course somewhat qualified, in that none of these early plays survives, nonetheless animates a sense of the public occasion of Patrick White, a sense of the persistent importance of the public dimension of his work that subtends his larger significance in the development of the national theatre and, through this, of the national culture, in the second half of the last century. (Introduction)