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AUSTRALIAN DRAMA AND THEATRE (CORE STUDY)
Topic 1: Dramatic Traditions in Australia

The Chapel Perilous

by
Dorothy Hewett

Overview of the online tutorial

The first part of this online tutorial gives you a synopsis of the play. It introduces some of themes and techniques raised in the play, and gives you workshop activities to undertake to gain a deeper understanding of the dramatic meaning and traditions of The Chapel Perilous. The second part of the tutorial is a detailed analysis of the play which will help you to gain an understanding of why this is a uniquely Australian play, and how the play in performance creates meaning for an audience.

First part of the tutorial

Synopsis of the play

Sally Banner is the central character of the play The Chapel Perilous; she is the lone questing figure with high ideals who is disillusioned and brought down by the prejudices and small mindedness of others; she herself contravenes the existing moral values of her culture as she tries to locate her identity. In this play Sally undertakes a journey of self discovery in which she explores her sexuality on her own terms, becomes a writer, has an abortion and a baby, rejects marriage and commits herself to the politics of class struggle. Sally pursues her sexuality and ideologies with spirituality, continually discovering the power and frailty of her body and mind. The chapel title, suggested on stage by the altar and the stained glass window is a shifting theatrical symbol. It says to an audience that the chapel is a sanctuary for Sally from her hostile world, yet the sanctuary is also hostile and repressive. The chapel is the place where Sally is brought to trial as a person who challenges the status quo of women in Australian society.

Some themes raised in the play

The quest: Sally Banner is like a hero of a medieval quest where she struggles to attain her highest ideals against the adversity of 20th century Australian society and culture.
In her quest Sally wishes to:
- Become an actress, a communist, a writer, and a poet
- Search for gender identification
- Experience culture as well as personal knowledge
The fight against blind authority by a woman who wants to challenge the status quo in Australian society.
The perils in discovering the truth about yourself as a woman in Australian society.
The tension between private and public responsibility. For example, Sally cannot just live in the world of her imagination, she has to live in a 1930s to 1950s Australian society and culture.
The tension between idealism, mockery and self mockery in Australian society as demonstrated by the attitudes and values of such characters as Sally, Michael, Judith, the Canon, the Headmistress and Sister Rosa.
That private actions have public results as demonstrated by Sally’s choice of personal freedom which is theatrically juxtaposed by Michael’s rejection of her, her suicide attempt, and the emotional consequences of having an abortion.
That public commitments have private consequences as demonstrated by Sally becoming a political activist which in turn causes her to lose her husband, her lover and her child.
That there is a difference between being alone and understanding the concept of self acceptance, as Sally does at the end of the play, versus her being passionately naked in her desires at the beginning of the play.

Some techniques used in the play

There are distinct character types in the play:
- The authoritarian group such as the Headmistress and the Mother
- The Sister Rosa group who sneer at life but who are consumed with the search for personal and professional power
- The Canon group who are weak-willed and ineffectual
- The Chorus/crowd groups who, in the main, represent the conservative majority
- The gullible and the weak such as her Father and her husband Thomas
- The Lovers such as David and Saul who falsely represent an escape from the rigidity of Australian social mores; David because of his intellect and Saul because of his righteous leadership position in the Communist Party of Australia
- The ideologically driven Michael, who is also her lover, but appears like a saving angel to Sally because he represents disorder and extreme passion that contradicts and challenges the veneer of Australian civilisation. He is totally self-centred and cruel
- The questing woman Sally, who searches for meaning in her life
The characters of Sally and Michael are played by individual actors as they represent the individuals in Australian society, albeit flawed ones. The rest of the characters are doubled up by actors; this is an essential theatrical device to theatrically demonstrate how Australian society often thinks and acts in similar ways.
Vaudevillian techniques, such as the opening of Scene Two with its Sideshow Spruikers, Hula and Egyptian Dancers that are used to deliver a fast paced and entertaining production.
Song, dance and music which are integral to the Vaudeville technique and are used to make theatrical points about certain aspects of Sally’s life (see part two of the tutorial).
Irony, which is used to expose the hypocrisies of the authority figures and which is demonstrated in the opening of the play, as it is Sally herself who has donated this stained glass window to the chapel. It visually represents her ideals, and the oppression of her ideals.
Satire which is used to ridicule and attack the small mindedness of the authority figures in Australia of that time. Satire is present in the set design, as the outline of a school chapel with an image of a stained glass window mocks the authority figures’ religious and moral values.
Other techniques are used such as:
- black comedy
- farce
- flashbacks
- loudspeakers
- overlapping and juxtaposed effects
- realism to heightened realism
- spectacle,
all of which preach, shock, and persuade an audience to engage in the dramatic action and meaning of the play.
This play is also deeply influenced by Elizabethan/Brechtian/Expressionistic techniques, and this theatrical mixture is used to jolt the audience into a thought-provoking and emotive response.

Dorothy Hewett therefore employed an eclectic use of techniques to bring her message home to an audience.

Learning activities to help you understand the meaning of the play

You can explore these activities with your peers. If you have no one to study with try improvising them on your own and see how your imagination can create the other characters, in action, in these scenes.

Act One, pages 23 and 24. Improvise Sally’s first verbal interaction with the psychologist and her parents which is juxtaposed to the dancing and 1940’s music happening behind them:
- How did you express the dialogue through the tone, pitch and pace of your voice?
- How did your body react to the dialogue through its rhythms, gestures and stance?
- Why did the playwright want to have a dual focus in this scene (i.e. dialogue in the foreground and music and dancing in the background) and how would this affect an audience?
Reflect on all these choices and write them down.
Act Two, pages 66 and 67. Act out Sally’s monologue about annihilation and her song ‘I passed my love on the street today’; while doing this, stop at any time to improvise a monologue of the thoughts in Sally’s mind at that moment. Reflect on the choices made and write them down.
Imagine that you are a middle class Australian audience who has gone to see the play The Chapel Perilous this year, in our time. Your improvisation is set in a restaurant after you have seen the play. Your group is going to enact your reactions to the play, its performance styles, and the social and cultural context from which the play emerged. Reflect on the choices made in your improvisation and write them down.
Form a group of three or four, (or just play all the roles yourself). Spend five minutes recalling the main events of this play. Perform this summary to your peers and/or family in two minutes using:
- Some dialogue from the play
- Some songs or music from the play
- A symbol from the play
Reflect on the choices made and write them down

Characters and their dialogue

In this section of the tutorial you are going examine how characters’ dialogue make and enhance dramatic meaning in The Chapel Perilous. Dorothy Hewitt consciously assigned particular language traits to a character. These can be recognised, analysed and then experimented with to understand a character’s attitudes, responses and actions in the play. In part, it is through the dramatic incorporation of these facets of a character, that Dorothy Hewitt communicates the play’s themes to an audience.

The following features of a character’s language need to be noted:

Rhythm
Choice of words
Frequency and length of speech
Subject matter

For example:

Sally’s language is lyrical, poetic, rhythmical, flowing and she uses poetic, emotive and persuasive words. She speaks often, but often says many things in a few words; when she speaks at length it is about her thoughts, feelings ambitions and desires. Her subject matter is about sex, religion, politics, the often taboo topics in Australian society, as well as about her aspirations, beliefs and her poetry.

Sally’s heightened lyrical language, punctuated with uncontrollable passion can be found in the Prologue, pages 9 and10 ‘ ... that queer, affected voice of yours drives me mad, so that I could punch your mouth and kiss you till the blood comes.’ Her language also has religious undercurrents, for example, when she is affirming her belief in Communism the rhythm and incantations of prayer are evident as she recites in Act One, page 33, ‘I believe in Marxism-Leninism.......The dictatorship of the proletariat.... To serve the working people.......And promote the cause of peace........Save me, Thomas’.
Michael and Thomas’s dialogue has a rhythm that complements their dramatic function in the play. Thomas’s language is strewn with uncertainty whereas Michael’s language is brutal and aggressive. Find examples in the text that reflect these different styles and consider why the playwright has made these choices.
The Canon’s dialogue has a rhythmic beat to it that is either very lyrical and flowing to persuade the other characters of his righteousness, or it is jarring and harsh and his subject matter browbeats the other characters about their wickedness or exaggerates his own foul thoughts. For example, the opening speeches in the Prologue, pages 6 and 7 demonstrate the lyrical flowing rhythm of his religious jargon followed by the jarring short sentences of the Canon’s (Amplifier’s) own sexual desires.

Activities to help you explore the importance of dialogue in rehearsal and performance

Explore the Headmistress’s speech in the Prologue, page 5 where she says ‘Parents, teachers, girls: on this speech day ... etc.’ by finding her objectives, obstacles and tactics for each given moment in this speech. Act out this speech by exploring the tone, pacing and pitch of her voice, and how her body language would complement or contrast with her words, then, explore the Canon’s speech in the Prologue on page 6 in the same way ‘Parents, teachers, young ladies, dear brethren, children of Christ: on this speech day . . .etc’ . Reflect on the different rhythms, choice of words, subject matter and write down your experiences.
Step into the character of Sally in Act Two, pages 68 and 69 when she is pleading with Judith and experiment with her dialogue. As Sally, stop as many times as practicable during your dialogue to internally justify what you are saying and why. When you stop you can begin your internal justification by saying:
- I am doing this because . . .
- I am saying this because . . .
- I feel the emotion of ____________ because . . .
Reflect on the choices you made about the character’s delivery of the dialogue and write this down.

Part 2

Detailed analysis of the play

The Chapel Perilous is largely an autobiographical play and is considered one of Dorothy Hewitt’s most important. It dramatises a women’s odyssey to find freedom versus the personal cost of being a free spirit in a world that does not value a women’s personal and professional needs and desires. Dorothy Hewitt has used the framework of the Arthurian legend, Sir Lancelot, to create a theatrical quest of romantic and epic proportions. The audience is taken on Sally’s journey, as a young poet from a region in Western Australia, to a mature woman who understands that liberty often stands beside bigotry and repression in Australia’s early 20th century culture. This journey was, in its time, a metaphor for women of the 1970s who struggled to be heard in our society. It is important to remember that in the 1970s the feminist concept was that the personal is political and this concept runs deeply through the play as Sally’s political radicalism, and her search for freedom and love, reflect the politics of this era. Sally’s struggle can be seen as indicative of Australian feminism of the 1970s, but this struggle can still resonate in today’s Australian society.

Panoramic social realism is the theatrical structure of the play. The play’s journey is driven by constant dramatic tension and conflict as Sally’s life is enacted out as one being hindered by the time, place and situation she finds herself in. For example, Sally embarks on a lesbian affair, takes many male lovers, has an abortion, settles down, becomes a communist, abandons her husband and child, becomes a poet of great repute. All this was extraordinary female behaviour and extremely scandalous in the 1930s to the 1950s when the play was set. Equally in the 1970s when the play was staged, Australian audiences would have been shocked by the depiction of such a radical female character. Even in the middle and late 20th century social and cultural attitudes towards women in Australia were only very slowly changing.

The play combines overt theatricality with social realism to create a vast story that exploits the visual and verbal aspects of theatre. The combination of poetry, vaudeville, irony, flashbacks, black humour, songs and music evokes a cacophony of sound, movement and atmosphere on the stage which can engage an audience emotionally and intellectually even if they find the play shocking. In performance the characters come to life through an almost valedictory touch where the sensual persona of Sally Banner is contrasted to the sadistic and lecherous nuns, priests, and the weak, controlling and/or cruel lovers.

Sally’s main objective in the play is to take control of her life, and the tactics she uses to try and achieve her desires are generated more by spontaneous impulse than by conscious plan; she is self willed and rebellious as a girl; she is headstrong and provocative as a woman; she has a black underbelly of hubristic sexual desires and poetic passions. Sally’s objective is difficult for her to achieve as there are so many obstacles that stand in her way, not the least of which are her own egocentricities that lead her into social and moral decay, as well her ability to constantly challenge the social and moral mores of the time. Along this journey, to take control of her life, Sally brings pain and suffering to the people she loves and cares for, as well as those she is rebelling against; this can be very disturbing for an audience.

Dorothy Hewitt uses music and lyrics to complement and contrast the action or to make a particular dramatic point. The music and lyrics in The Chapel Perilous are therefore a very important dramatic device and have been well orchestrated within the play to have a Brechtian impact on the audience by creating dramatic patterns that introduce a new argument or unexpected event. For example, ‘Jerusalem’, Prologue, page 8, is a rousing religious song and it is used to introduce the innocence and passions of the young school girls who sing it; the song sets the scene that Sally will not ‘cease from mental fight’ and introduces to the audience the word ‘bow’ as a theatrical pun. ‘The Good Ship Venus’, Act One, page 34, is an erotic and bawdy song that is used during Sally’s wedding to Thomas to predict her future sexual predilections and to provide a contrast to the wedding scene, which would normally be romantic. ‘Bump us into Parliament’, Act 2, pages 45 and 46, is vaudevillian music and juxtaposes the seriousness of Sally’s venture into Communism and her fervent desire to become a peace monger.

There is a pivotal dramatic moment in the play when Sally overthrows Michael and discovers the emptiness behind the authority figures. Through this enlightenment she comes to the chapel perilous where she stands, with the recognition that she has been oppressed, has oppressed others, but that she has had the courage to act and to live her female life to the utmost, even while she was at the mercy of the approval and disapproval of Australian society.

Through all of these aforementioned techniques and performance styles the character of Sally can be said to be fighting against the repression of women in the twentieth and perhaps even the twenty-first century.

The final moments of the play are structured to heighten the audiences’ emotional responses and they can also be thought of as paradoxical. The school girls march through the auditorium singing ‘Bring Me My Bow of Burning Gold’ and pass on either side of Sally; the stage directions then read, Act Two, page 69, ‘Sally joins the end of the line, straightens her back and bows to the alter’. Sally only speaks once, as part of the chorus, after this physical action, saying in unison with everyone else ‘World without end. Amen’ and then a single schoolgirl begins to sing ‘Come live with me and be my love’.

Why should a single schoolgirl sing the last lines of the play?
Should the audience feel betrayed by Sally’s capitulation to society?
Should the audience see the bow as an acceptance of what she has achieved and a submission that society has not changed as quickly as her?

Some HSC Drama students and audience members ponder whether the final scene indicates that Sally has achieved a level of peace and is making an acknowledgment of the values she has rebelled against all her life while others ponder if she still believes in her freedom within the social restrictions of the day. What do you think and why?

However a student or audience member interprets the final moments of the play, the drama of Sally’s tragedy lies in her trying to answer the gender oppression of females in Australian society; and to many women who saw the play in the 1970s this would have had a resonance with them. From your drama workshops into The Chapel Perilous do you think these themes are still relevant today and would a 21st century audience find Sally threatening or liberating and why?

Bibliography

Brisbane, K. (1974). Perilous Production. Australia: The Australian.

Hewett, D. (1997). The Chapel Perilous. In P. Tait & E. Schafer (Eds.), Australian women's drama. Texts and feminisms (pp. 1-70). Australia: Currency Press Pty Ltd.

Hewett, D. (1977). The Chapel Perilous. Australia: Currency Press pp. x-xix.

Holloway, P. (1981). Contemporary Australian drama: perspectives since 1955. Australia: Currency Press.

Kemp. K. (1972). Dorothy Hewett writes the roles she would love to play: For women, a work that will make things suddenly and blindly

Rees, L. (1978). Australian drama in the 1970s: a historical and critical survey. Australia, Sydney: Angus & Robertson.