Parsing the documents in the archive gives us a sense that the rejection of Night on Bald Mountain took place slowly and with odd turns. The story quietly assumed its shape in late September 1962, with Harry Medlin's enthusiasm for Patrick White's playwriting style – ‘the play is excellent’, he wrote. As Chair of the University of Adelaide's Theatre Guild (1961– 66), and as a member of the Festival's Drama Advisory Committee, he had already mounted an impressive defence of Australian content in the Festival of Arts and was a significant agitator for modernist theatrical aesthetics more generally. As an advocate of The Ham Funeral a year earlier, such was his belief in the strength of White's modernist plays that he noted, ‘The quaint Australian custom of always looking elsewhere can safely be abandoned.’ On 26 April 1963, the Governors delivered their fateful words. Of course, the narrative and embodied history is not as neat as all that.

We build upon a familiar argument – that is, where feelings of disgust help to fuel strict censorship practices across the arts in Australia. Feelings of disgust for White, shown by the Governors, is made palpable in the historical record. However, we take this analysis one step further by looking at the ways in which disgust was instrumentalized as an act of sovereignty, how it was tidied up, rationalized and mobilized as what was now a tried and tested procedure. The case of Night on Bald Mountain reaffirmed the sovereignty of the Board of Governors. Seeing itself as a sovereign power, it thought it was under no pressure to be popular in the media or to be considered cultured by members of the Drama Committee. However, when the news hit the media, the Board's arrogance and sense of immunity was shown to be misplaced. Its power lay elsewhere – namely, in the authority to enact an executive decision, and to do so repeatedly. Through repetition, the Board created the conditions for its own institutionalization as a power among the various committees and organizations related to the Festival. It became the end point for a ‘final decision’ to be made on matters of culture.

Dramas of rejection and artistic opposition rarely play out as neat didactic narratives where the weak are overpowered by the strong, as in Carl Schmitt's friend– enemy distinction. The inevitably messy alliances, collusions, eruptions and flows of affect cannot be contained by applying easy binaries. When we consider the governing bodies involved in the Patrick White Affair, there were disagreements and tensions between members of the Board of Governors and tempers to be assuaged. While affect was projected onto Sir Lloyd Dumas in Harry Medlin's recollections decades after the fact, it is often scripted out of the adversarial negotiations documented in the Adelaide archives.

In arts’ governance, the stakes of life and death are not as they are in war. It is nonetheless critical to stress that the friend–enemy criterion is to some degree reproduced in the lesser scenarios of arts’ governance. Schmitt denounces the appearance of these lesser versions of politics, revisited in such quarrels as those that occurred between the Governors, Medlin and White. Here, the Board's function is not political in the grand sense of governing and protecting the sovereignty of an entire nation but it stands in as a lesser reproduction of governance. In Schmitt's view, an authentic political authority can only be enacted or shown via the sovereign's decision. The adversarial relationships displayed by members of boards and committees cannot be considered authentic politics in this theorization of what constitutes authority.

However, whether or not arts enmities are authentically political in the Schmittian sense has not really been a guiding question for this book. While there is some wisdom to be gained from Schmitt's denouncement of tactics parading as politics, the behaviour of the Adelaide Festival of Arts’ Board of Governors, along with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and other players, indeed resembles a degraded political plot, a drama populated with caricatured esquired men who scheme and create intrigue. They are Governors who behave like Shakespeare's Roman tribunes but with the gravitas of the Emperor. Unlike Schmitt, we are not seeking to theorize the constitution of an authentic political sphere, which is best achieved by the political sciences, rather we seek to understand how the arts becomes embroiled in cultural politics and in so doing becomes a virtual political sphere, re-performing the behaviour of the state.

In March 2012, the Adelaide Festival of Arts staged an exuberant steampunk version of Patrick White's comic play The Ham Funeral, originally written in London in 1947 and first performed in Adelaide in 1961. The 2012 production celebrated the centenary of the writer's birth and marked 50 years since the Board of Governors of the 1962 Adelaide Festival had refused to stage the play's world premiere. Amid claims of philistinism, paternalism and amateurism, the Board had determined that the play's unsavoury themes, modernist form and poor box-office outlook made it unsuitable for a festival production. In recognition of the troubled history between the Adelaide Festival and White, 2012 Artistic Director Paul Grabowsky announced that the new production, directed by Adam Cook, would pay ‘tribute to our Nobel Laureate’ and finally see ‘unfinished business finished’. The Festival production, presented by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, made amends with a dazzling interpretation that drew out the flamboyant theatricality, humour and pathos of the play (Figure 0.1).

In May 2014, Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre staged White's ambitious and challenging modernist drama, Night on Bald Mountain, written between 1963 and 1964. As was the case with The Ham Funeral two years earlier, the world premiere of Night on Bald Mountain was rejected by the Board of Governors for the 1964 Adelaide Festival and took place instead at the University of Adelaide's Union Hall theatre. At the Malthouse Theatre 50 years later, director Matthew Lutton's production earned high praise for its ‘truthful and scrupulously faithful version that gathers immense power as it unfolds’. The 2014 revival introduced contemporary audiences and critics to a little-known play whose complexity and startling symbolic imagery and language were brought to life by the creative team, who drew out the modernist aesthetic from the play's naturalist veneer. The combined effect of satire and symbolism was a masterful realization of the nascent brilliance of White's writing for theatre (Figure 0.2).

These two recent productions followed the stylish Sydney Theatre Company production of White's second play, The Season at Sarsaparilla (first performed in 1962) in 2007. Director Benedict Andrews made extensive use of live streaming video cameras and screens to reinterpret the text by means of contemporary intermedial theatre.

The venue recommended for the premiere of The Ham Funeral at the 1962 Festival was the University of Adelaide's Union Hall theatre. The Board of Governors had an agreement with the venue's management, the University Theatre Guild, to stage the Festival's productions of Australian-authored or small-scale new plays from overseas in this space. In the 1960s, Union Hall was what we would consider today to be an off-Broadway or fringe venue, attracting small but drama-literate audiences. The Drama Committee was confident that the proposal to stage the premiere would be accepted, if not welcomed, by the Governors. In the wake of the proposal's unexpected and hostile rejection, the Guild went ahead with the production three months prior to the Festival. The publicity around the rejection of the play ensured that the premiere was a gala social event, attended by Patrick White, local dignitaries, friends of White's and several interstate critics.

As the programme cover (Figure 2.1) indicates, the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust had come on board as an associate partner, and in doing so found itself co-producing a play it had originally refused to support. This triggered a sequence of events that saw the Trust under Hugh Hunt reject a proposal for a Sydney premiere, followed by the Adelaide Governors’ rejection of a Festival premiere. The Trust then partnered with the Guild to stage a University of Adelaide premiere, before being shamed into remounting the production in Sydney, leading Geoffrey Dutton to deadpan that Adelaide was ‘that home of second chances for plays of the first importance’.

The Guild premiere was a critical and box office success and an overall victory for progressives over the conservative establishment. Harold Tiderman, the Advertiser's theatre critic, proclaimed The Ham Funeral ‘a brilliant success’ and ‘a masterly achievement’ that drew a delighted response from ‘the capacity audience’. The News review focused on audience response, noting that ‘this seemingly substantial fantasy showed at its first performance last night that it could consistently hold an audience – an important point’. Roger Covell of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the play ‘generates emotion the most cosmopolitan of theatregoer would desire’.

The rejections of The Ham Funeral and Night on Bald Mountain by the Adelaide Festival's Board of Governors were not random events but were linked to structures of governance and a presumption of sovereignty. Although the Board was not a statutory or corporate body, the Adelaide Festival's Board of Governors and committees held regular meetings and kept formal and, at times, extensive minutes. Members of the Board and committees and Festival staff communicated to the outside world through written correspondence, press releases and Festival advertising and programs. This archive allows us to reconstruct key events in Australian cultural history and address the critical questions they raise about the confrontation of a colonial culture with the emergent dynamic of modernism in the post-war period.

The Archives

To sit in the quiet of the reading rooms at the National Library of Australia, the State Library of South Australia and Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide is to enter the archive. The documents we seek, scan, decipher and read cover only a short period from 1959 to 1964, and while we hone in on the details of dates, names and decision making with regards to the rejection of the two plays by Patrick White, we read for broader patterns, trends and styles of governance. We are aware of hierarchies of power and authority in the language of the last century and of boards and committees made up exclusively of white, wealthy, older, socially well connected men, of the kind who are, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous words, born to rule. The minutes of meetings, correspondence and newspaper columns – while allowing for the inevitable gaps in the recorded information – lead us to the view that the Board of Governors took a censorious stance not just towards White but also to Australian drama more broadly. At its second meeting on 5 May 1959, the newly formed Board reported that ‘arrangements are in hand to select a new Australian Play’, but noted that if one was not available, then ‘an overseas play by a modern author not previously performed in Australia’ would be acceptable. This arrangement played into the ‘cultural cringe’, which the critic A. A. Phillips described in the 1950s as ‘the assumption that the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article’.

As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the Governors rejected The Ham Funeral and Night on Bald Mountain; yet the plays were not passive objects. They had the power to create affects of disgust and anger in some, notably Glen McBride and Neil Hutchison, and joy and enthusiasm in others, such as Harry Medlin, Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris. Reaching beyond the field of politics, Carl Schmitt recognizes the power of theatre when he ascribes something akin to sovereignty to the lifeworld of plays. He writes:

Here he theorizes, in a manner akin to modern theatre studies, that the live theatre event exceeds the domains of both the Governors and the play text. This view adds a further layer to the Governors’ disdain. If they intuited that the play constituted a lifeworld, then they had good reason to consider it a challenge to their authority. In a further tract about the theatre as a selfcontained world of play, which is yet another dimension pertaining to the onstage action, Schmitt advances a thesis that a play is free from the tyranny of not only its literary origins but also the figure of the author himself. Schmitt's view anticipates debates in theatre studies many decades later that would pit fidelity to the play text against the director's autonomy, and it accounts for the rows between Patrick White and theatre director John Tasker, over the stage interpretation of the plays. This scenario reveals that White, the living playwright, had his own struggles not only with the Governors over the rejection of the plays but also with the will of the director over the staging. White made certain concessions to Tasker, such as agreeing to shift the time frame of The Ham Funeral from 1947 to 1919, but held fast to the originating situation of the play in other matters. This was especially so because many of the characters in White's plays were based on people he knew. To his mind, the author – not the producers or the directors – was sovereign.