Ken Healey

When Prince Hamlet cried ‘The play’s the thing’, he was about to use a performance of The Mousetrap to demonstrate a point central to his purpose: he intended to ‘catch the conscience of the king’. Nearly 400 years later, British playwright David Hare endorsed and expanded Hamlet’s utilitarian approach, writing: ‘Indeed, if you want to understand the social history of Britain since the war, then your time will be better spent studying the plays of the period … than by looking at any comparable documentary source.’

Imagine, if you will, the blessed child of a parthenogenetic conception involving the Oracle of Delphi and Cassandra. The girl has Cassandra’s clarity, passion and a good deal of her accuracy, combined with the Oracle’s high degree of credibility but without its duplicity. What could that girl grow up to become but a theatre critic and commentator, even if she had been raised in the 1930s, in the world’s most isolated capital city? Please note, before returning to mundane reality, how diminished the myth of Cassandra would be without the Trojan War, and how little we would care for the writhing of the Pytho, the priestess at Delphi, if Oedipus had not consulted her. A public voice needs subject matter that is at once contemporary and timeless if its utterances are to transcend the ephemeral.

The eighteenth-century French Academician Buffon gave the world the aphorism ‘Le style est l’homme même’. It makes a fine epitaph for H.G. Kippax. Harry Kippax was a distinguished journalist and, for more than thirty years, until his retirement in 1989, a theatre critic of singular authority and style. In the late 1950s, while employed by the Sydney Morning Herald, he began to write thoughtful freelance reviews under the pseudonym Brek in the fortnightly periodical Nation; in 1966 the SMH’s editor J.D. Pringle press-ganged him into the theatre critic’s chair.