Thérèse Radic’s A Whip Round for Percy Grainger (1982) and the Archive on Stage

Abstract

Thérèse Radic’s play A Whip Round for Percy Grainger: A Serious Comedy in Two Acts was premiered in Melbourne in 1982, as part of the celebrations for the centenary of the birth of Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger (1882–1961). This article explores this play in the context of Grainger’s autobiographical projects—including his extensive autobiographical writings and the autobiographical museum he built at the University of Melbourne—as well as within the dynamics of Australian theatre in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This article argues that Radic’s presentation of Grainger, his life, and music, was mobilized at a particular moment of cultural introspection in late twentieth-century Australia to aid in the exploration and critique of contemporary national and cultural currents. Radic’s work is situated first within presentations of ‘documentary theatre’ and historical biography on stage, and then in contemporary Australian theatre’s response to the ‘new nationalist’ movement, while also considering how her representation of Grainger is informed by his own construction of an autobiographical narrative.