It is a truism that great novelists rarely make great playwrights; Henry James tried to conquer the boards to disastrous effect with Guy Domville (1895), and writers from Virginia Woolf to James Joyce have failed to translate their genius for interiority to the stage. Charles Dickens, whose mastery of scene and dialogue would seem to make him a natural fit for the theatre, never made a good fist of a proper play. Even when adapting their own novels, writers tend to fall apart: Anthony Burgess’s stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1987) is a mess, and a recently rediscovered theatrical version of Lewis Sinclair’s It Can’t Happen Here (1926) is reportedly terrible. Closer to home, we have one shining – if problematic – example of a great novelist who could also write very good plays, and it isn’t Tim Winton. It’s Patrick White, whose stage work is still very much performed and cherished, even if it can be fiendishly difficult to nail. (Andrew Fuhrmann of course devoted his 2013 ABR Fellowship to White’s plays)

Winton has had a rougher foray into the theatre. His first play, Rising Water (2011), was savaged when it played in Perth and later toured, and his most recent play, Shrine (2013), contains serious difficulties of its own. On one hand, Winton has come a long way from that first effort: he seems to have more fully embraced his own cadences, and there is a singularity of purpose that pays off emotionally. On the other hand, with his tenuous grip on structure and pace, he has a way to go.