Neither McGillick nor Akerholt makes any secret of their enthusiasm for the work of their respective subjects. McGillick states in his opening paragraph that he places Hibberd ‘at the very top of the Australian playwriting tree’; Akerholt considers that ‘Patrick White’s contribution to Australian indigenous theatre must be counted with the best that has emerged from its writers’. This is as it should be. A critic undertaking the daunting task of putting together a book must start from the premise that the work to be discussed warrants all the bother. But, while McGillick and Akerholt are enthusiastic, neither is partisan. Their discussion is well considered and substantiated; their arguments are based on reason and not on emotion.

Akerholt tackles White’s works play by play – and, although deadline exigencies have allowed no more than a postscript appendix on Shepherd on the Rocks, that it’s there at all must be counted a bonus. She is meticulous. White’s thematic, symbolic, stylistic, and narrative concerns are explored and analysed and there’s a good deal of cross reference from play to play – e.g. ‘she (Miss Docker, A Cheery Soul) lacks the insight of the Young Man, Roy Child and Nola Boyle, and the vitality and perception of Miss Quodling’. She also makes connections between White’s plays and his novels – ‘There is no doubt that Australian drama owes one of its most formidable characters, Miss Quodling, to prose predecessors such as Theodora Goodman, Miss Hare, Stan Parker, and Voss.’

Although Akerholt’s method is fairly traditional lit-crit, she doesn’t lose sight of the plays as material intended for performance. She focuses on the stage as well as on the page. Stage directions and design concepts within the texts are fundamental to her discussion. And she takes into account the impact on an audience of specific theatrical contributions that have been made by particular directors, designers, and actors, ‘The opening scene’s image of Mag (Big Toys) on a sumptuously covered bed playing with an enormous red balloon while gossiping on the phone, establishes the superficiality and sterility of the beau monde’:

That was a balloon. It burst … Oh, it was only a fun thing Ritchie brought home – because he thought it amusing – as it was. But now it’s horrid! Ugh! Like some ugly old wrinkled scrotum!

‘This implication of sexual sterility is reinforced when Mag’s toe searches for the burst piece of rubber when addressing Ritchie on the phone immediately afterwards. Brian Thomson’s set at the Parade Theatre, with its off-white elevated round bed as a focus, provided a perfect frame around Kate Fitzpatrick’s blonde beauty.’

My only reservation about Akerholt’s book is that, while her discussion of White’s work is thorough and scholarly, she provides only cursory information about the wider social and theatrical context in which his plays were written and performed. Nor does she convey much sense of his place, his significance, or his influence within the broad spectrum of Australia’s contemporary theatre.

In McGillick’s book, Hibberd, the playwright, is planted firmly within his social and theatrical context. The time, the place, the social and artistic environment that instigated Hibberd’s work are crucial to McGillick’s analysis of that work. The reader learns almost as much about innovative theatre in Melbourne from the late 1960s into the 1980s as about Hibberd. But McGillick keeps Hibberd well in the foreground. He discusses his plays with vigour and perception but his particular achievement is his assessment of Hibberd’s significance as a playwright of his time.

He gives Hibberd the first (and the last) word. The book begins with twenty-one pages of what McGillick aptly describes as ‘a witty autobiographical sketch’. It’s an ideal opening, measured and honest; an annotated, anecdotal chronology of prodigious achievement and startling landmarks – like David Kendall’s 1967 production at Melbourne University of Hibberd’s first play, White With Wire Wheels, the establishment of La Mama later in the same year and it’s opening with another Hibberd play, Three Old Friends, the Brain-Rot Season at Melbourne University, Dimboola, Stretch of the Imagination, Marvellous Melbourne (a collaboration with John Romeril), the later monodramas and his most recent (1984) large-cast play, Odyssey of a Prostitute. He places in context his association with the Pram Factory, with other writers, directors, actors, and composers, his private life and public career, his aspirations, achievements and ultimate disillusionment. Hibberd’s introduction provides the necessary historical detail which is an essential referent for McGillick’s discussion; and it allows him to get on with the task in hand, his ‘articulation of (his) own response to the work’.

And get on with it he does. His organization of his text into broad topic areas – ‘Context’, ‘Forms and Themes’, ‘Language’, ‘Practice’, and ‘Dark Comedy’ – allows for a great deal of cross reference of Hibberd’s work. And, even when McGillick focuses quite specifically on an element of a particular play – language, thematic concerns, style, content – the reader always has the sense of being engaged with Hibberd’s broader theatrical practice, vision, and output.

The book ends with a transcript of McGillick’s video interview with Hibberd – available from the publishers. It’s low-key and intimate and McGillick poses some important questions. The value of this final section, however, is not that it contains new or startling information but that it’s an appropriate rounding off and reiteration of all that has gone before. In his preface, McGillick hopes that his book will ‘communicate (his) conviction that Jack Hibberd’s theatre matters’. He succeeds.

Akerholt and McGillick quote liberally, but judiciously, from the works of their respective playwrights. McGillick, in fact, justifies this practice in his preface – the presumption that this series of books will be distributed extensively outside Australia. But even for the local reader, textual illustrations are valid and ‘welcome. In both books they serve to elaborate and clarify critical statement.

And the illustrations at the very end of both books provide essential visual documentation of the work discussed. In his chapter on ‘Context’ McGillick points out that a play text ‘consists of more than verbal language – it involves the whole mis en scène and the totality of events during the performance’. To discuss performance, then, without photographs seems absurd. And, although in both books there are some close-up shots (interesting enough as an indication of characterisation but not particularly enlightening), there are also a number of excellent wide-angle photographs that indicate staging.

Both McGillick and Akerholt in their different ways make significant contribution to Australian theatre criticism. But the worth of their work is not reflected in its presentation. It’s low budget – cheap paper, tiny and unattractive type face, unprepossessing binding. These are books that must never be judged by their covers.