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Jack Hibberd | |
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| Born | John Charles Hibberd 12 April 1940 Warracknabeal, Victoria, Australia |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne |
| Occupation(s) | Playwright, physician |
| Website | Official website |
John Charles Hibberd (born 12 April 1940 in Warracknabeal, Victoria) is an Australian playwright and physician.
| This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(December 2017) |
Hibberd studied medicine at the University of Melbourne and resided in Newman College. He worked as a registrar in the Department of Social Medicine at St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, from 1966 to 1967. He worked as a general practitioner until 1984, after which he practiced as a clinical immunologist. He is married to actress Evelyn Krape, with whom he has two children. He also has two children from his first marriage.
Hibberd co-founded the Australian Performing Group (APG) in 1970. He was a member for ten years, and chairman for two. In 1983 he founded the Melbourne Writers Theatre, which is still active today. He served on the Theatre Board of The Australia Council twice, and recently on its Literature Board.
| This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(December 2017) |
Hibberd 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.
Hibberd'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 premiered in 1969 at La Mama Theatre under the direction of Graeme Blundell. [1] The play grew out of a reading in London of Anton Chekhov's 1889 play The Wedding and Bertolt Brecht's farce A Respectable Wedding . A 1979 Australian independent film based on the play was directed by John Duigan.
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, for which 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 has completed some stage adaptations of short stories: Gogol's "The Overcoat" (with music), Maupassant's "Odyssey of a Girl ", and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich . 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 WesternWorld in Ninety Minutes, which indeed it is.
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 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.
Hibberd'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 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.
Over the years Hibberd has also published short stories and essays on theatre.
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.
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.
Dimboola is a town in the Shire of Hindmarsh in the Wimmera region of western Victoria, Australia, 334 kilometres north-west of Melbourne.
Alvin Purple is a 1973 Australian sex comedy film starring Graeme Blundell in the title role; the screenplay was written by Alan Hopgood and directed by Tim Burstall, through his production company Hexagon Productions and Village Roadshow.
La Mama Theatre is a not-for-profit theatre in Carlton, Victoria. It has been nationally and internationally acknowledged as a crucible for cutting edge, contemporary theatre since 1967. La Mama produces work by theatre makers of all backgrounds and encouraging works that deconstruct and critique form, content and social issues.
Neil Melville is an Australian actor. He was born in Sydney, but spent most of his childhood in Apollo Bay, Victoria. In the early 1970s he was lead singer of Geelong rock band "The Iliad". Melville graduated from Adelaide's Flinders University with a Bachelor of Arts in Drama, and performed in a number of university productions, including, most notably, the world premiere of Jack Hibberd's The Les Darcy Show (1974).
Deidre Rubenstein is an Australian television and theatre actress, as well as a dramatist and playwright well known for her performance in Australian soap operas and main stage dramatic roles. She has won the Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award as Best Actress.
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Ron Elisha is an Israeli-born Australian playwright, writer and general practitioner.
George Dreyfus AM is an Australian contemporary classical, film and television composer.
Dimboola is a 1979 Australian independent film directed by John Duigan about a country wedding reception. It is based on the 1969 play of the same name by Jack Hibberd and was principally filmed on location in Dimboola, Victoria.
Barry Dickins is a prolific Australian playwright, author, artist, actor, educator and journalist, probably best known for his historical dramas and his reminisces about growing up and living in working class Melbourne. His most well-known work is the award-winning stage play Remember Ronald Ryan, a dramatization of the life and subsequent death of Ronald Ryan, the last man executed in Australia. He has also written dramas and comedies about other controversial figures such as poet Sylvia Plath, opera singer Joan Sutherland, criminal Squizzy Taylor, actor Frank Thring, playwright Oscar Wilde and artist Brett Whiteley.
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Dimboola is a play by the Australian author Jack Hibberd. It premiered in 1969 at La Mama Theatre under the direction of Graeme Blundell. The whole action of the play supposedly takes place at a real wedding at which the actors represent the families of the bride and groom and the audience are "invited guests". The play is described in the program notes as Rabelaisian and rumbustious.
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The Department is a 1974 play by David Williamson about political intrigue at a university department. It was based on Williamson's time as a lecturer at Swinburne Tech.
A Stretch of the Imagination is an Australian play by Jack Hibberd. It was one of the most significant new plays of the Australian drama revival of the early 1970s.
A Toast to Melba is a 1976 Australian play by Jack Hibberd. A biography of Dame Nellie Melba, Hibberd described it as:
Another 'Popular Play' like The Les Darcy Show. Using the Epic Theatre techniques of Bertolt Brecht, the play encompasses the life of diva Nellie Melba from childhood in Melbourne to her death in Egypt ... The actress who plays Melba must be able to sing a few arias and parlour songs. There is a selection of recorded music that is essential to the work.
John Timlin is a theatre producer, literary agent and was the administrator of the Australian Performing Group in Melbourne.
The Australian Performing Group (APG) was a Melbourne-based experimental theatre repertory ensemble formed in an official capacity in 1970 from the La Mama theatre group. Created to address a dissatisfaction with Australia's theatrical climate, the APG focused primarily on producing new works by then-emerging Australian writers such as Barry Oakley, Jack Hibberd, Kris Hemensley, Bill Garner, John Romeril, Steve J. Spears and David Williamson.
Roger Hodgman is an Australian stage and television director.
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