The play heightened the way an urban group of actors, armed with a Hibberd script, could conquer a nation that was happy to recognise its affinity with a bunch of loudmouthed yobs. The urban Carlton connection was highlighted when Dimboola was made into a film by John Duigan.
Hibberd was a playwright who understood the folk and also understood the ways in which the theatre and its dramatic cousins (Duigan made films ranging from The Year My Voice Broke to Wide Sargasso Sea) could shift and reconfigure.
The first production of A Stretch of the Imagination was staged in 1972 and reminded a lot of people – but not Hibberd – of huge and looming influences.
The original production of Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola at La Mama in 1969 featured Bruce Spence and Lindy Davies.
“[At] the time of writing this play, I was never conscious of Beckett, his concerns and techniques. Indeed, I had not read the fellow for some years, finding his work a great silencer of creativity. It is impossible then for me to allow that A Stretch of the Imagination is either derivative or adaptive; it possibly explores a different mount in similar territory.”
It’s remarkable that a play as apparently offbeat as A Stretch could appear at the same time that David Williamson could be taking the world by storm with The Removalists and Don’s Party.
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Most people who saw the original production with Peter Cummins as the old bush savant and loner, that old Xaverian Monk O’Neill, see the performance as so formidable and so terrifically realised that it is without peer – so crisp, so dry, so heartbreaking.
It will always be remembered and it retains its status as the definitive performance of what has high claims to be the most original characterisation in the history of Australian drama. The control of the voice, the homage Cummins pays to Hibberd’s irony and wit is definitive and clearly perceptible on the ABC radio version.
None of which is to deny that others have shone in the role of Monk O’Neill and that Gillies’ mid-’80s performance was buoyant and brilliant. It represented such a theatrical inhabitation of Hibberd’s brilliance that for some theatregoers it will be a first choice because of the way it glowed in the memory – unlike some subsequent attempts.
Hibberd was always a master of the strange unsteady gangway between the experimental and the popular. A Toast to Melba was a homage to one of the great Australian legends who did this, and it allowed the second Mrs Hibberd, Evelyn Krape, to parade her high and mighty vocal talents in this area in a sumptuous show that managed to conjure up the spirits of the mighty theatrical dead from Buffalo Bill to Oscar Wilde while highlighting the career of the legendary soprano.
Jack Hibberd was born in The Mallee, north-western Victoria, but lived in Bendigo as a child and was schooled by the Marist brothers. He lived at Newman College at the University of Melbourne and practised medicine until a Literature Board grant freed him up to concentrate exclusively on his writing.
Actor John Flaus reads a book showing an early picture of Jack Hibberd.
In 1988 he published The Genius of Human Imperfection in which he uses traditional rhyme schemes to produce versions of Baudelaire, among others. The upshot is heavier than the original he honours, but poet Peter Porter was right to say “These poems give pleasure and there can never be too much skill at large in the world.” They are clearly the work of a major artist who is the spiritual cousin of Monk O’Neill. It’s hard to resist this summing up of Beckett: “Play it again Sam. / A bloke who never changed his tune: / a twelve-tone bagpipe among colossal ruins.”
Peter Craven is a literary critic.