Jack Hibberd - Career

Career

Jack has written close to 40 plays, some of them not full length. His first play, White With Wire Wheels, was staged in 1967 at the University of Melbourne, and is a proto-feminist revenge play, which satirizes male herd behaviour and the men’s obsession with cars and alcohol-virility over women.

Jack’s micro-play, Three Old Friends, opened the legendary La Mama theatre in Melbourne (29 July 1967). This work was one of a number of very short works in which Hibberd reconnoitred the styles of Beckett, Pinter and Brecht These, plus a couple of longer plays (Who and One of Nature’s Gentlemen) made up a season called Brain-Rot (1968)

There followed Hibberd’s most popular play: Dimboola, a wedding breakfast farce with audience participation. It was a huge commercial success in the early 1970s, and holds the Australian record for the longest continuous run of a play (two and a half years). It still enjoys some 20 productions a year.

His next play, a long monodrama, A Stretch of the Imagination, is regarded by most connoisseurs as his finest work, embodying a radical advance in the character of Australian theatre, embracing and remoulding as it does many of the strong strands in theatrical modernism. The actor who plays Monk O’Neill has to be a virtuoso. Stretch was the first Australian play to be done in China (in Mandarin) with a famous Chinese actor Wei Zong Wan as Monk. The production packed a large theatre for six weeks. This play has enjoyed productions in the USA, Germany and New Zealand. In 2010 it was performed in London by Mark Little, a winner of the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award.

Jack Hibberd has completed some stage adaptations of short stories: Gogol’s The Overcoat(with music), De Maupassant’s Odyssey of a Prostitute (an epic gothic monstrosity), and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych . The Gogol was the first Australian play to be done in Indonesia.

Hibberd’s most challenging plays are his monodramas, in which he specializes. Those for women include Female Rhapsodies (sub-titled ‘curtain-raisers’), Lavender Bags and Mothballs. The first entails a preparation for a wedding (a fantasy performance), the second explores the fine public face of grief and its ugly private underbelly. Apart from Stretch, there is a gargantuan male on monodrama, From Apes to Apps, subtitled ‘A History of the Western World in Ninety Minutes’, which indeed it is.

Among others might be mentioned Bedlam Ballads, two linked incarceration plays, one for females, the other for males. They resemble psychiatric research and torture oubliettes, and have overtones of USSR institutions and Guantanamo Bay. Domestic Animals embraces a ghastly dysfunctional marriage, and enjoys echoes of Strindberg’s Dance of Death. Legacy sees for siblings in a family crypt warring nastily over their recently deceased will. Blood Bath and The Crown Versus Alice Springs deal with poverty and indigenous injustice. Trios addresses two dysfunctional families. In The Prodigal Son the father is a monster, and in The Dutiful Daughter the father is a monster. An Evening with Elizabeth Bowen and Sean O’Faolin are again stage adaptations of stories. Slam Dunk entails conflict between two adolescent redneck chainsaw addicts and an adolescent conservationist and poetry lover.

Peggy Sue, a companion to White with Wire Wheels, dramatizes the mistreatment and exploitation of three romantic young women during a severe economic depression when they are compelled to work as prostitutes. Liquid Amber is a companion to Dimboola, and has audience participation at golden wedding celebration. A Toast to Melba and The Les Darcy Show embraces the lives of the famous diva Nellie Melba and the champion boxer Les Darcy. Repossession concentrates on the conflicts between two poor young women who live in a shack out in the bush and two domineering corporate captains who, stranded, turn up for the night.

Jack’s recent plays are Commandments, in which five of the ten Commandments are inverted, or perverted, so that the breaking of a Commandment becomes ethically justified. And Guantanamo Bay, which is set in that institution and is visited by President George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz because it is ‘Open Day at Guantanamo Bay’, and, to begin the celebrations, there is a performance of ‘The History of American Violence’...a play within a play. The guests watch some examples of the artistry of contemporary torture. Later they are joined by Tony Blair and John Howard, Australia’s ‘Man of Steel’. Fidel Castro appears as an interlude. A waiter called Malcolm X causes great distress among the American dignitaries.

Finally, Jack has a work underway called Time is of the Essence, and features Methuselah on his 1000th birthday when he is visited by Eve, the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, Salome, and Zenobia. They dance around him at the end to celebrate his majority. Hibberd has also completed a revision of Dimboola, updating the text and providing numerous lyrics for songs and choruses. A director and composer are in hand, and a production is anticipated early next year. He is now putting the final touches to Three Sapphic Plays.