The Chapel Perilous

Last updated

The Chapel Perilous
Written by Dorothy Hewett
Characters
  • Sally Banner
  • Michael
  • The Headmistress/The Mother
  • The Canon/The Father/Thomas
  • Sister Rosa/Judith/David/Saul
  • Chorus
Date premiered1971
GenreExpressionist
SettingSchool chapel

The Chapel Perilous, Dorothy Hewett's third full-length play, was written in 1970. The play is Expressionist in style, where the theatrical spectacle dominates the plot. It introduces Sally Banner, a picaresque heroine moving without success through a search for love and freedom, while oppressed by authority figures and disappointed by unsatisfactory lovers. She is, in brief succession, a defiant schoolgirl, a promiscuous wartime student, a Communist, a suburban de facto, and a well-known poet. It is recognised as Hewett's best play. [1]

Contents

Characters

The eleven principal characters are played by five actors. They are

There are also

Setting

Upstage the outline of a school chapel with a stained glass window. The tower is accessible.

Three rostrums and an altar on a platform. Large masks or statues of the Headmistress, the Canon and Sister Rosa are on each rostrum. They are large enough to hide an actor. These are the authority figures and judges. Sometimes they step from behind the masks and become other characters. [2]

Synopsis

Throughout the play, the dialogue is rapidly, almost inconsequentially exchanged between characters who each have a different world view, while the loudspeakers announce events or secret thoughts, and the Chorus sings and dances. The many songs of Sally and the Chorus, and Sally's introspective poems, play an integral role in the script. [2]

Prologue

A clap of thunder. Sally describes her approach to the Chapel Perilous through a blackened land of burning forests. The Headmistress unveils a stained glass window in the school chapel, endowed by the older Sally. The Canon and Sister Rosa emerge from behind their masks to extol Sally's fame, with asides as to their real attitudes to Sally, Satirical dialogue comes from the loudspeakers, while the schoolgirl Chorus sings “Poor Sally”, “Jerusalem” and “Come live with me and be my love”. Sister Rosa tries to make the young Sally bow before the altar.

Sister Rosa is transformed into the schoolgirl Judith. Sally lyrically says she loves Judith, who cannot reciprocate. The Headmistress warns Judith that Sally is gifted but precocious and evil. Judith rejects Sally. In despair, Sally climbs the tower to jump, but instead throws down her hat.

Sally sits with the Parents while the loudspeaker announces the outbreak of war. The Mother reads Sally's erotic verse aloud and calls her a dirty little whore. Sally meets a Catholic violin player who feels her breasts. The Parents take her to a magistrate and she is put on probation. She meets Michael on a bicycle. The Father hits Michael on the head with a piece of timber. Sally and Michael have sex without love. Judith calls Sally an "awful little whore".

Sally receives the Gold Medal for English while the Chorus sings “Bring me my bow” and chants, “With time” repeatedly.

Act I

The Chorus jitterbug in 1940s outfits. An interviewer talks to parents about Sally's poetry prizes. The Father says he doesn't understand poetry, and Sally is man-mad. Sally says the world tastes like blood in her mouth. She is taken to an unimpressed psychiatrist. The Mother says she smelled semen on Sally's pants. After a fight she leaves home.

David finds her asleep in the Men's Common Room and falls in love. He wants to love her intellect, and takes her home, Girl students say Sally is a nympho. David goes off to war, saying he can't take their intellectual romance with her lovers on the side. Sally says she'll marry David and wants to make love. He walks off awkwardly. Sally yells he's a rotten impotent shit.

Sally yells she's Sally Banner and nobody, and swallows Lysol. The Parents try to revive her. In hospital, Sally's national ABC prize win is announced. Her father dies, and the Mother cries, "You've killed our Daddy." The actors all repeat earlier lines of blame at Sally.

Thomas arrives in uniform carrying a bunch of dandelions. He instructs her in Communism, and marries her. Thomas becomes drunk because he can't consummate the marriage. The Authority figures pray.

Michael returns, surprised she would marry anyone but him. They drink and go to the beach, Michael writes ETERNITY in chalk. Sally tells Michael she's pregnant. He says she's on her own.

Thomas comes home from war, and Sally tells him she has aborted Michael's baby. He forgives her, says they have socialism to build. The Chorus sings “The Worker's Flag” and they all march off.

Act II

A fairground sideshow proceeds, Sally is behind a political rostrum, speaking for the Soviet Union, backed by Party leader Saul and interrupted by sideshow spruikers and interjectors. The Mother enters as a widow, and says Sally is a dirty Commo and won't get any money.

Thomas enters pushing a baby carriage, and says Saul is inspiring. David turns up drunk, wanting mothering. Incidental characters say Sally has "gone off", or ask would she "like a bit". Michael enters and says "Choose!" while Thomas and Saul stand in judgement.

Sally tells Thomas about the affair with Saul, leaving him “with nothing” but the baby. The Mother offers Michael cash to "take off". The baby dies of leukemia.

“Overtime rock” is sung by the Chorus. Michael is tired, but Sally wants to make love. The Chorus sings “Marry me Sally” and “Come live with me”, while Michael burns her papers and poems.

A court scene takes place, based on the Petrov trial. Sally is accused by witnesses in turn: the Mother, the Father, Thomas, Saul, Judith, and Michael. Judith accuses her of destroying her children for a great love – of herself, and to write.

The amplifier intermittently announces events showing the passage of time.

A bell tolls and they all line up. Sally bows or nods to the altar. She stands outlined on the tower, with the Authority figures below her in red light.

Music

The original music was composed by Frank Arndt, who had taught piano to the young David Helfgott. The highlight songs are the satirical “Poor Sally” theme, Hewett's rewrite of Andrew Marvel's “Come live with me and be my love”, the wistful "I passed my love”, the boisterous “Sally go round the moon” and the bawdy “Lets all dance the polka”. Several songs from folk musician Mike Leyden are included, as well as Les Flood's “Overtime Staggers Rock” (which also featured in Hewett's early novel Bobbin Up ).

First performance

For reasons of theatrical setting and direction, Hewett preferred this first production over all later ones.

The Chapel Perilous was written for the New Fortune Theatre, which Hewett's university office overlooked. It made full use of its pit stage and three-tier construction. The open stage allowed the characters and the Chorus to move fluidly around and across each other. The Authority Figure plaster masks were a full two stories tall, giving a giant brooding presence and a gravitas to proceedings, particularly the court judgement scene. On the third tier, Sally was able to rise above these monstrous statues in the finale. [4]

The director Aarne Neeme was an ex-dancer [5] and skilled in directing the movements of the two Chorus troupes. Neeme wrote an insightful introduction to the published version of the play, covering key dimensions that were often neglected in later performances. [4]

The original hero was named "Sally Thunder” and the performance was advertised as such. [6] Preparations were interrupted when a female journalist of that name complained the lurid character was not to her liking, and an alternate name “Sally Banner” was adopted. Immediately, a couple called Banner complained that their four-month-old baby girl had been given the nickname “Sally” and the play might blight her future life-chances, but they withdrew their complaint. [3]

Subsequent performances

The play has continued to be performed regularly for almost 50 years; often by schools or drama classes.

Variations

The 2007 La Mama production used a very small space and only six actors. [7] The 2015 VCA production used three Sallys and no masks. [8] The 2017 New Theatre production combined all Sally's lovers in one actor. [9]

Influences and style

The Chapel Perilous had its genesis in an old notebook which Hewett's son Joe Flood found in a garage: Hewett's diary at age sixteen. She was intrigued by the passionate outpourings of her teenage self and decided to turn them into a work of some kind. [10]

The play that resulted is Expressionist. [11] At the time of the first staging of The Chapel Perilous, this genre was over 60 years old in Germany but largely unknown in Australia. In Expressionism, the full performance rather than the flow of dialogue delivers the meaning. An overlooked failure of the societal system usually underpins the action. The protagonist is typically the “New Man”, unafraid to act on their moral beliefs. A later development is Brecht's Epic Theatre, where the music distances the audience from the action, and sympathy for the characters is discouraged. Hewett's play incorporates all these features. It is also influenced by Elizabethan theatre, [4] and owes a debt to Elliot's The Waste Land . [12]

Nobel laureate Patrick White observed, “For all its incidental but relevant crudity a very subtle and thoughtful play, with an introspective theme brilliantly externalised as theatre by the author and director. A work of art universal in its appeal as the crushing weight of authority in all its forms on the creative personality. A major statement of the woman artist's quest for freedom and self realisation in a community uncertain of its standards.” [13]

Observers have sought to define the three Authority figures (the three Masks with their attendant actor) in different ways. Neeme found the "Mother" class of characters as “the born great”, the "Rosa" class as the opportunists who “seek greatness, while the "Canon" class are the hapless or corrupt who “have greatness thrust upon them”. [4] Alternately, Whitehead saw a dichotomy of sterility versus authority in the placement of the Authority figures. [14]

Analysts of the play have considered it moves between many styles, to the point that they have found it to be “an audacious, fantastic awkward beast of a play”, which unprepared audiences may find confusing or hard to enjoy, and which professional theatre companies have found "unstageable". It incorporated “shouts and whispers, songs and chants, choruses and solos, echoes and amplification …and always an attention to rhythm.” [15] It is “an acoustic patchwork of heightened meaning” [16] which has been “assured of a prominent place in the history of recent Australian drama because it employs almost every technique that seemed new and experimental in the late sixties and early seventies, and ranges widely in its moods from the burlesque historical through the social satirical to the purely lyrical.” [12]

The play's virtuosity ensures its place as a major work of literature. Yet that is not why it is so famous.

Sally Banner

Where the play parted company with Epic Theatre was that many women in the audience identified or sympathised with Sally Banner. Sally is to a fair extent a caricature; humourless, immature and hopelessly demanding what others are not prepared to give. Yet this "incandescent heroine with the element of quest in her sexuality” arrived at exactly the right time. [17]

For many young women, Sally was the first modern liberated woman in literature [10] [18] at a time when women were distancing from the attitudes of their parents and seeking new role models. Sally, "wearing her hair as armour" in a female form of chivalric heroism, [19] and proclaiming “the blood and flesh are wiser than the intellect”, captured the Zeitgeist of 1971 and launched a new "mythology of the feminine" in this "founding text" of Australian feminist drama. [20]

Sally Banner paradoxically led to Hewett's fame, at least in Australia. A National Times headline in 1972 declared, "For women, a work that will make things suddenly and blindingly clear", celebrating a play that "will put up Hewett's name in lights along with Greer." [20]

Hewett's own attitude toward Sally could be dismissive: unsurprising given that the play spends much of its energy lampooning her. Hewett regarded her as a “humbling and irritating doppelganger” who would continue to follow her around forever. Ultimately however she was possessive of "her Sally", as an immature part of herself. [10]

Controversy

Sally has a tentative lesbian affair, undergoes an abortion, and leaves her husband and child to go off with another man. She has the temerity to ask several men to make love to her, though they cannot comply. At the time, all this was shocking to conservative audiences, and still might raise an eyebrow today. When the play was published in 1972, some education authorities sent a warning message to schools and parents concerning the text. Ten years later, however, The Chapel Perilous was on secondary school syllabuses. [21]

The end of the play, where in the published version Sally gives a nod as a gesture before her donated stained-glass window is lit, might simply indicate that to obtain recognition by those in power you must at least concede they exist. [2] However, feminists for whom the play was "not radical enough" (such as Anne Summers and Carole Ferrier) took this nod to authority as a clear signal that Sally had capitulated and was not a feminist figure. [22]

Adaptations

20 January 1976, Radio play, BBC, The New Australian Plays 5.

Publication

Dorothy Hewett (1972). The Chapel Perilous. Currency Press. Reprinted 1985, 2007, 2017.

Dorothy Hewett (1981), Collected Plays Volume 1. Currency Press.

Elizabeth Schafer (ed) (1997). Australian Women's Drama: Texts and Feminisms. Currency Press.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greta Scacchi</span> Italian-Australian actress (born 1960)

Greta Scacchi, OMRI is an Italian-Australian actress. She is best known for her roles in the films White Mischief (1987), Presumed Innocent (1990), The Player (1992), Emma (1996), and Looking for Alibrandi (2000).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judith Malina</span> German-born American actress (1926–2015)

Judith Malina was a German-born American actress, director and writer. With her husband, Julian Beck, Malina co-founded The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe that rose to prominence in New York City and Paris during the 1950s and 60s. The Living Theatre and its founders were the subject of the 1983 documentary Signals Through The Flames.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothy Hewett</span> Australian feminist poet, playwright and novelist

Dorothy Coade Hewett was an Australian playwright, poet and author, and a romantic feminist icon. In writing and in her life, Hewett was an experimenter. As her circumstances and beliefs changed, she progressed through different literary styles: modernism, socialist realism, expressionism and avant garde. She was a member of the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, which informed her work during that period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marilyn Miller</span> Broadway musical star (1898–1936)

Marilyn Miller was one of the most popular Broadway musical stars of the 1920s and early 1930s. She was an accomplished tap dancer, singer and actress, and the combination of these talents endeared her to audiences. On stage, she usually played rags-to-riches Cinderella characters who lived happily ever after. Her enormous popularity and famed image were in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy, frequent illness, and ultimately her sudden death due to complications of nasal surgery at age 37.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Currency Press</span> Specialist performing arts publisher in Australia

Currency Press is a leading performing arts publisher and its oldest independent publisher still active. Their list includes plays and screenplays, professional handbooks, biographies, cultural histories, critical studies and reference works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chapel perilous</span> Term from Arthurian legend used in literature and psychology

The term chapel perilous first appeared in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) as the setting for an adventure in which sorceress Hellawes unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Sir Lancelot. T. S. Eliot used it symbolically in The Waste Land (1922). Dorothy Hewett took The Chapel Perilous as the title for her autobiographical play, in which she uses "the framework of the Arthurian legend, Sir Lancelot, to create a theatrical quest of romantic and epic proportions."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neva Carr Glyn</span> Australian actress (1908–1975)

Neva Carr Glyn or Neva Carr Glynn was an Australian stage, film and radio actress born in Melbourne to Arthur Benjamin Carr Glyn, a humorous baritone and stage manager born in Ireland, and Marie Carr Glyn, née Marie Dunoon Senior, an actress with the stage name "Marie Avis". She had one half-sister Gwendoline Arnold O'Neill and two half-brothers Sacheverill Arnold Mola and Rupert Arnold Mola. She was named "Neva" after a great-aunt, who was a contralto of some quality. Both spellings of her surname appear in print roughly equally and apparently arbitrarily.

A Little Princess, The Musical is a musical with music by Andrew Lippa and book and lyrics by Brian Crawley, based on the 1905 children's novel of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

This Old Man Comes Rolling Home, Dorothy Hewett's first full-length play, was written in 1965. It captures the spirit and character of Redfern, an inner-city suburb of Sydney sometimes called "Australia's last slum". The play is ‘slice of life', following about six months in the life of the Dockertys, an extended family of seven children and partners, during the early 1950s. The family is subject to various stresses: most significantly because the mother is an alcoholic, largely lost in dreams of her youth.

The Man from Mukinupin is a musical play by Dorothy Hewett. It was commissioned in 1978 to mark Western Australia's sesquicentenary, and is her most popular and successful play. It is a romantic comedy in two acts covering the periods 1912 to 1914 and 1918 to 1920. The play involves the principles of celebration and reconciliation, providing a "rich theatrical experience with song, dance, humour, and powerful incident."

Bonbons and Roses for Dolly, Dorothy Hewett's fourth full-length play, was written in 1971, soon after The Chapel Perilous. It begins with the rise to riches of three generations of a family, and the opening of their new picture house, the Crystal Palace. Over the years the cinema descends into ruin. The daughter Dolly inherits the decaying theatre. She symbolically shoots her grandparents and parents, then herself, as her dreams crumble.

The Tatty Hollow Story, Dorothy Hewett's fifth full-length play, and last of a series of expressionist plays, was written in 1974 after Hewett's move from Perth to Sydney.

Golden Valley is a children's play by Dorothy Hewett for audiences aged 4-14, It is "a free-spirited and distinctly Australian fairytale ", telling the story of a 12-year-old orphan Marigold, who is adopted by a group of bush creatures. They take her to the magical land of Golden Valley, which is under threat from a nasty developer. Together Marigold and the creatures -- including a crane, a mopoke, a possum, a wombat, a feral cat and a shape-changing boy -- battle to save their patch of paradise.

What About the People! is a joint 1961 book of verse by Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) and Merv Lilley (1919-2014). It was the first book-length publication of poetry by either poet. What About the People! represented much of their significant output up to that time.The 1962 reprinting contained 43 poems by Lilley and 31 by Hewett, with one poem probably composed jointly.

Bobbin Up was the first novel by the author Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002). It is set in 1957 in a spinning mill in Alexandria, an industrial suburb of inner Sydney, and describes the lives of fifteen working-class women who work there for breadline wages. The novel is a series of loosely connected vignettes, where the life of each woman and her family is described within one or two chapters. The book concludes with a stay-in strike by the women for reinstatement after a mass layoff. Most of the group appear together in the final chapter.

A 1975 rock opera by Dorothy Hewett describing the rise of a peasant girl, her betrayal, execution and ultimate canonisation

The Rising of Pete Marsh is a play by Australian playwright Dorothy Hewett. Music was composed by Jim Cotter.

Catspaw is a 1974 rock musical by Australian playwright Dorothy Hewett, with music by Terence Clarke, Piers Partridge and Roy Ritchie. It was Hewett's fifth full-length play and her first rock musical. It was written for the Festival of Perth before Hewett departed permanently for Sydney in early 1974. It is an expressionist or 'epic' play with an episodic plot loosely based on a quest. It is the first of her plays that deals with the conservation of Australia, both as landscape and cultural heritage, where 'imagination' is a universal cultural force opposed to the destruction of commercial interests.

Christina's World is a 1983 Australian operetta, composed by Ross Edwards with libretto by playwright Dorothy Hewett. An old woman recalls her youthful memories of her family and her tragic love affair on a lonely Western Australian beach. Hewett describes the piece as "an allegory or fable about illusion or reality and the truth and lies of memory".

The Fields of Heaven shows the gradual destruction of a once-beautiful country property in the Great Southern district of Western Australia, Marvel Locke, due to overgrazing and rising salt. In Act 1 it is tree-covered with fields of wheat like "cloth of gold". In Act 2, only a few straggling trees remain. Evocative bush sounds give way to harsh crow calls.

References

  1. ↑ "The Chapel Perilous". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 17 May 2022.
  2. 1 2 3 Hewett, Dorothy (1972). The Chapel Perilous. Currency Press. p. 12. ISBN   0-868-19-005-5.
  3. 1 2 Moore, Nicole (2017). "The Chapel Perilous". Reading Australia. Retrieved 16 May 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Neeme, Aarne. "Director's preface". The Chapel Perilous. pp. xi–xiv.
  5. ↑ 'All the World's a Stage' - Director and Educator, Aarne Neeme , retrieved 18 May 2022
  6. ↑ "The Chapel Perilous: The Perilous Adventures of Sally Thunder". Museum of Performing Arts WA. 13 October 2013. Retrieved 17 May 2022.
  7. ↑ "The Chapel Perilous | La Mama". AustralianStage. Retrieved 14 October 2022.
  8. ↑ Moulds, Daniel P. (26 October 2015). "The Chapel Perilous". Daniel P Moulds. Retrieved 14 October 2022.
  9. ↑ "The Chapel Perilous | New Theatre". 28 March 2017. Retrieved 14 October 2022.
  10. 1 2 3 Hewett, Dorothy. "Why does Sally bow?". The Chapel Perilous. pp. 3–6.
  11. ↑ Bennett, Bruce (3 September 2002). "Obituary: Dorothy Hewett; anarchic Communist romantic of 20th-century Australian literature". The Independent (London). p. 14.
  12. 1 2 Novakovic, Jasna (2009). "The Chapel Perilous: the paradigm of fertility overshadowed by the Quest". Double Dialogues. 11.
  13. ↑ White, Patrick (2 November 1974). "The perils of art in Sydney Town". Sydney Morning Herald. p. 16.
  14. ↑ Whitehead, Jean (1971). "Ordeal by freedom: a carve-up of Sally or society?" (PDF). Westerly. 1: 41–4.
  15. ↑ Janaczewska, Noelle (2014). "The Chapel Perilous". Reading Australia. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
  16. ↑ Meyrick, Julian. "The great Australian plays: sex, poetry and The Chapel Perilous". The Conversation. Retrieved 29 September 2022.
  17. ↑ Lawson, Sylvia. "The female hero". The Chapel Perilous. pp. vii–ix.
  18. ↑ Nestle, Joan (2000). ""You're so Full On": A Portrait of Australian Playwright, Poet and Novelist Dorothy Hewett". The Women's Review of Books. 17 (8): 6–7. doi:10.2307/4023415. ISSN   0738-1433. JSTOR   4023415.
  19. ↑ Schafer, Elizabeth (1994). "Golden girls and bad girls: the plays of Dorothy Hewett". Critical Survey. 6 (1): 140–145. ISSN   0011-1570. JSTOR   41556571 – via Jstor.
  20. 1 2 Sheridan, Susan. "Dorothy Hewett's paths to The Chapel Perilous". Westerly. 54 (1): 170–188.
  21. ↑ Longworth, Ken (25 November 2009). "Ready to face up to a perilous undertaking". Newcastle Herald. p. 32. ProQuest   365221758 . Retrieved 18 May 2022.
  22. ↑ Sheridan (2009), p. 186.

Resources

The Chapel Perilous - A Reading Australia Information Trail.

Joanne Tompkins (1992). Setting the Stage. PhD Thesis, York University Ontario.

Jasna Novakovic (2006). “Dorothy Hewett: The Place of Myth and the Influence of the Avantgarde in her Plays”, PhD Thesis.

Susan Chaundy and Aubrey Mellor (2009). Dorothy Hewett and the Chapel Perilous.

Susan Sheridan (2009). Dorothy Hewett's paths to the Chapel Perilous. Westerly 54, pp. 170-88

Julian Meyrick (2017). The great Australian plays: sex, poetry and the Chapel Perilous. The Conversation. May 3  

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.