Dead White Males

Written by Australian playwright David Williamson, Dead White Males is a brilliant satire that attacks the modern reader. Dealing with many complex themes and binaries such as modern vs. archaic, man vs. woman, and teacher vs. student, this play is absolutely captivating from the first act where William Shakespeare gets shot! 

At university, Angela Judd studies a quite demanding course: Literary Theory 1A. Her teacher, Dr. Grant Swain, is a passionately radical theorist and fierce intellectual who attempts to drum it into his students that there is no ‘reality’, merely a state of being ‘constructed’ by ‘ideologies’ adhering to a patriarchy. At the start of the course, Angela is smitten with Swain and his ideas, but as she studies the three generations of her family for her final paper, she begins to realise that his way of thinking is not as ‘true’ as she first thought. Whilst she struggles with sparking a relationship and the friction of her acutely feminist mother and aunts as well as her misogynistic grandfather and mild-mannered father, Angela begins to realise that there is a truth in ‘human nature’ and not everything is concrete when it comes to literature. 

This play came into being after a literary conference where a male academic gave a paper on deconstruction and post-structuralism. When no one could understand what the academic was getting at, he merely answered, “just keep writing and we’ll tell you what you’ve done”. This caused much anger to ensue, the result of which is this biting satire that just shatters the world of theory and literature. There’s a bit of every theorist that comes centre stage and takes a bash at literature here, all culminating in this wondrous frenzy of concrete statements and theories that, when you think about, really could fall in upon themselves. We’ve got Foucault, Cixous, a bit of Barthes… feminism, multiculturalism, structuralism, deconstruction… all vying for their fifteen minutes of fame. The whole thing is wonderfully written with great intelligence and incredible biting wit! I adored it! 

Whilst this all sounds a little dense, it really isn’t. The whole thing is remarkably easy to power through and is balanced out with just as many poetic and literary elements as there are of competing theories. Shakespeare takes the brunt of criticism and examination and by having him as a character within the play that’s a reflection of the protagonist’s mind, it brings this great metaphoric as well as metafictive element to the piece; bringing with it much of the humour when we consider that he represents one side of the binary that still holds relevance to this day: modern vs. archaic. Why do Shakespeare’s works continue to make the canon? You might or might not find an answer in this play! 

Filled with frustration, drama, romance, theories, and plenty of comedy, Dead White Males is a brilliantly written play in two acts that just crackles with wit! I thought it was fantastic!