Collected Plays, Volume 1

Front Cover
Currency Press, 1985 - Drama - 361 pages
In 1961, following a now-famous controversy in which Board of the Adelaide Festival rejected it, Patrick White's The ham funeral was brought to the stage by the Adelaide theatre Guild. this expressionist drama, highly European in consciousness, was the first of its kind to reach the Australian mainstage: it and the three plays which quickly followed blazed the way towards a new kind of theatrical imagination which soon began to draw with a new freedom all forms of poetry, music and the visual arts into the creation of a new kind of indigenous drama. A generation later a theatre rich in skills and resources has grown to maturity in which the plays of Patrick White have taken their place in the repertoire of the major companies.

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About the author (1985)

Patrick White was born on May 28, 1912 in Knightsbridge, London, to Australian parents. He studied modern languages at King's College, Cambridge. During World War II, he served in the Royal Air Force. His first novel, Happy Valley, was published in 1939. His other works include The Tree of Man, Voss, Riders in the Chariot, The Solid Mandala, The Twyborn Affair, and The Hanging Garden. He also wrote several plays including The Season at Sarsaparilla, Night on Bald Mountain, and Signal Driver. They never met with the success his fiction had and have not been produced outside Australia. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. He died on September 30, 1990.

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