Suburban nig.htmare

July 23, 1997
Issue 

The Season at Sarsaparilla
By Patrick White
Directed by Mary-Anne Gifford
New Theatre, Sydney

Review by Brendan Doyle

A few days in the life of Sarsaparilla, a fictional suburb of Sydney, in the summer of 1961. Three decidedly Anglo families, the Knotts, the Pogsons and the Boyles, go about their stultifying, mundane and largely meaningless daily business, utterly divided between the men who go out to work and the women who stay home, clean the house and have babies.

White's play allows us to look back in horror and see where we came from, how far we've come and how far we've still got to go. Was life in the suburbs really so awful under Menzies, before the "wogs" moved in, before it was OK to be a "poofter" or to talk about sex?

Yes, it was! Sarsaparilla proves it.

Patrick White wrote this play, as well as A Cheery Soul and Night on Bald Mountain, between 1962 and 1965. This was a period when Australia was still firmly in the deadening, conservative grip of the Menzies government and, as Manning Clark wrote, "it seemed as though the whole continent was to be brought under the influence of bourgeois civilisation", that "suburbia was to be the last fate" of the entire country.

Only White and Barry Humphries were satirising Australian suburbia on our stages at the time, and the critics and audiences found it disturbing.

Critics accused White's plays of being too clever and too abstract. What they meant was that he dared to attack the increasingly affluent lifestyle of the vast majority of suburban Australians.

But whereas Humphries was unrelentingly savage, White had a soft spot for some of these ordinary people trapped by history and colonial culture.

We find typical White themes in Sarsaparilla: sexual repression, the yearning for another, wilder and more natural dimension to life.

The "season" in the title is the mating season, and a central motif of the play is a bitch on heat who attracts all the local dogs. The dogs that bark all night seem to represent the voice of something denied, something elemental and troubling.

Sarsaparilla was theatrically inventive and even avant-garde at the time. There is no real central character and little structure. The action moves between the three households in an episodic, filmic sort of way, which leads to a lack of sustained energy and loss of pace.

The theatrical style is a mix of naturalism, lyricism and cartoon. I felt the cartoon elements worked best for an audience today. And White's precise ear for the vernacular has hilarious results.

In this world, a pivotal character is Roy, a young teacher who is dying to escape overseas. His ambition is to write a novel, but he never seems to start. You feel there is much of White in this character, who doesn't seem to go anywhere in dramatic terms.

If White had fully invested himself in Roy, he could have made him a gay character who finds — or fails to find — love among the men. But to risk that would have meant White's play got even less exposure than it did.

Lyn Collingwood is hilarious as Girlie Pogson, the utterly repressed suburban housewife who lives in the idyllic past of a country childhood.

Jacqueline Mikhail is delightful as pubescent Joyleen, obsessed by the bitch on heat, who loves crawling under the house to escape her mother, as is Gabrielle Rogers as Judy, the young woman on the brink of life who gives up the violin for she knows not what. Stephen Barker is a fine comic character as Ron, her suitor.

White's suburban nightmare is re-created in all its horror.

You need Green Left, and we need you!

Green Left is funded by contributions from readers and supporters. Help us reach our funding target.

Make a One-off Donation or choose from one of our Monthly Donation options.

Become a supporter to get the digital edition for $5 per month or the print edition for $10 per month. One-time payment options are available.

You can also call 1800 634 206 to make a donation or to become a supporter. Thank you.