It introduces Sally Banner, a picaresque heroine moving without success through a search for love and freedom, while oppressed by authority figures and disappointed by unsatisfactory lovers.
She is, in brief succession, a defiant schoolgirl, a promiscuous wartime student, a Communist, a suburban de facto, and a well-known poet.
[2] Throughout the play, the dialogue is rapidly, almost inconsequentially exchanged between characters who each have a different world view, while the loudspeakers announce events or secret thoughts, and the Chorus sings and dances.
Sally describes her approach to the Chapel Perilous through a blackened land of burning forests.
The Headmistress unveils a stained glass window in the school chapel, endowed by the older Sally.
Sally receives the Gold Medal for English while the Chorus sings “Bring me my bow” and chants, “With time” repeatedly.
Sally is accused by witnesses in turn: the Mother, the Father, Thomas, Saul, Judith, and Michael.
The original music was composed by Frank Arndt, who had taught piano to the young David Helfgott.
The highlight songs are the satirical “Poor Sally” theme, Hewett's rewrite of Andrew Marvel's “Come live with me and be my love”, the wistful "I passed my love”, the boisterous “Sally go round the moon” and the bawdy “Lets all dance the polka”.
Several songs from folk musician Mike Leyden are included, as well as Les Flood's “Overtime Staggers Rock” (which also featured in Hewett's early novel Bobbin Up).
The Chapel Perilous was written for the New Fortune Theatre, which Hewett's university office overlooked.
The Authority Figure plaster masks were a full two stories tall, giving a giant brooding presence and a gravitas to proceedings, particularly the court judgement scene.
[4] The director Aarne Neeme was an ex-dancer[5] and skilled in directing the movements of the two Chorus troupes.
Neeme wrote an insightful introduction to the published version of the play, covering key dimensions that were often neglected in later performances.
Immediately, a couple called Banner complained that their four-month-old baby girl had been given the nickname “Sally” and the play might blight her future life-chances, but they withdrew their complaint.
[8] At the time of the first staging of The Chapel Perilous, this genre was over 60 years old in Germany but largely unknown in Australia.
A later development is Brecht's Epic Theatre, where the music distances the audience from the action, and sympathy for the characters is discouraged.
[9] Nobel laureate Patrick White observed, “For all its incidental but relevant crudity a very subtle and thoughtful play, with an introspective theme brilliantly externalised as theatre by the author and director.
A work of art universal in its appeal as the crushing weight of authority in all its forms on the creative personality.
A major statement of the woman artist's quest for freedom and self realisation in a community uncertain of its standards.”[10] Observers have sought to define the three Authority figures (the three Masks with their attendant actor) in different ways.
[11] Analysts of the play have considered it moves between many styles, to the point that they have found it to be “an audacious, fantastic awkward beast of a play”, which unprepared audiences may find confusing or hard to enjoy, and which professional theatre companies have found "unstageable".
It incorporated “shouts and whispers, songs and chants, choruses and solos, echoes and amplification …and always an attention to rhythm.”[12] It is “an acoustic patchwork of heightened meaning”[13] which has been “assured of a prominent place in the history of recent Australian drama because it employs almost every technique that seemed new and experimental in the late sixties and early seventies, and ranges widely in its moods from the burlesque historical through the social satirical to the purely lyrical.”[9] Where the play parted company with Epic Theatre was that many women in the audience identified or sympathised with Sally Banner.
Sally is to a fair extent a caricature; humourless, immature and hopelessly demanding what others are not prepared to give.
Sally, "wearing her hair as armour" in a female form of chivalric heroism,[16] and proclaiming “the blood and flesh are wiser than the intellect”, captured the Zeitgeist of 1971 and launched a new "mythology of the feminine" in this "founding text" of Australian feminist drama.
A National Times headline in 1972 declared, "For women, a work that will make things suddenly and blindingly clear", celebrating a play that "will put up Hewett's name in lights along with Greer.
"[17] Hewett's own attitude toward Sally could be dismissive: unsurprising given that the play spends much of its energy lampooning her.
[7] Sally has a tentative lesbian affair, undergoes an abortion, and leaves her husband and child to go off with another man.
When the play was published in 1972, some education authorities sent a warning message to schools and parents concerning the text.
[18] The end of the play, where in the published version Sally gives a nod as a gesture before her donated stained-glass window is lit, might simply indicate that to obtain recognition by those in power you must at least concede they exist.
“Dorothy Hewett: The Place of Myth and the Influence of the Avantgarde in her Plays”, PhD Thesis.