John Charles Hibberd (12 April 1940 – 30 August 2024) was an Australian playwright best known for his plays Dimboola (1969) and A Stretch of the Imagination (1972). He was also a physician.
John Charles Hibberd was born in Warracknabeal, Victoria in 1940. He pursued his medical studies at the University of Melbourne and was associated with Newman College during his time there. He held the position of registrar at St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, in the Department of Social Medicine from 1966 to 1967. Following this, he practiced as a general practitioner until 1984, after which he specialized in clinical immunology.
He was married to actress Evelyn Krape, with whom he had two children, as well as two children from a previous marriage.[1]
In 1970, Hibberd played a pivotal role in establishing the Australian Performing Group (APG), where he remained an active member for a decade, including a two-year tenure as chairman. In 1983, he took the initiative to establish the Melbourne Writers Theatre, an organization that continues to operate today. His engagement with the arts industry extended to serving on the Theatre Board of the Australia Council on two occasions and more recently on its Literature Board.
Hibberd died on 30 August 2024, at the age of 84.[1]
Literary career
Hibberd wrote 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.
Hibberd's micro-play, Three Old Friends, opened the 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).
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. In 1976 it was performed by Max Gillies of the APG; he reprised his role in the 1990 TV movie version. It was the first Australian play to be staged in China (in Mandarin) with a famous Chinese actor, Wei Zongwan, as Monk. This play has enjoyed productions in the United States, Germany and New Zealand. In 2010 it was performed in London by Mark Little, a winner of the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award.
Hibberd completed some stage adaptations of short stories: Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" (with music), Guy de Maupassant's "Odyssey of a Girl[fr]", and Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Hibberd's most challenging plays were his monodramas, in which he specialized. Those for women included 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 WesternWorld in Ninety Minutes.
Peggy Sue, a companion to White with Wire Wheels, dramatises 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 a golden wedding celebration. A Toast to Melba and The Les Darcy Show embraces the lives of the famous diva Dame 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.
Hibberd's later plays were 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 ofAmerican 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.
Selected works
Plays
White with Wire Wheels (1967)
Memoirs of a Carlton Bohemian (1967)
Brainrot (1968) – "The Great Gap of Time", "No Time Like the Present", "One of Nature's Gentlemen"
The Last Days of Epic J. Remorse (aka Death Rattle) (1968, revised 1994)
Over the years Hibberd has also published short stories and essays on theatre.
Screenplays
Miss Finger
A nocturnal thriller set in Melbourne. Miss Finger, a forensic scientist turns detective after her two children die of overdoses. With the help of a suave Sydney detective, she weaves her way through Melbourne's unsavoury and ethnically diverse underground, finally finding and nailing the Big Drug Baron, a toad-featured Australian Vietnam Vet, who originally went AWOL into the Golden Triangle.
Captain Midnight VC
Midnight is a VC winner from World War Two, but is denied a soldier settlement post-war because of his sooty complexion. He becomes an Aboriginal radical and an agitator for Black Power. He enlists the aid of black Americans and Africans, who infiltrate Australia, bomb Parliament House killing all its members, and seducing paddocks of white women. A deal is finally attained: all white Tasmanians are exiled to the mainland, and those urban and landless indigenes take over Tasmania, which they name Trugininiland.
Uncle Sam
Uncle Sam, who has been wrongfully incarcerated in the Hollywood Hospital for the Psychiatrically Challenged, escapes with the help of Charlie Chan, and begins a presidential campaign, assisted by an unlikely and incredible electoral team, including, among others, Black Hawk, Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Mark Twain, Superman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Zapata, George Washington, Janis Joplin, Curt Cobain, Rabbi Harpo Marx, and Mr Ed. To cut a long narrative short, Uncle Sam's truly liberal and leftish platform, along with his witty savaging of his two opponents and avaricious corporations in a television debate, leads to a refreshing and volcanic victory.
Television
Singing the Seventies A six-part series embracing the culture of the Seventies. Each episode is situated in a different Melbourne suburb. Each episode devotes itself to a particular profession of occupation. For example, Carlton is theatre; the CBD, finance; South Melbourne, the media, etc. There are number of through-characters who bind the free-standing episodes together.
Awards
State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowships 2005[5]
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