Patrick White in Adelaide

Dear Editor,

In his article on the theatre of Patrick White (May 2012), David Marr implies quite strongly that White had nothing to do with the theatre between John Tasker’s production of Night on Bald Mountain for the Adelaide University Theatre Guild during the 1964 Adelaide Festival and Neil Armfield’s production of Signal Driver, commissioned by Artistic Director Jim Sharman for the 1982 Festival. Marr goes so far as to say that the 1964 production ‘might have been it for White and theatre’, were it not for Sharman’s return to Australia, which, he says, ‘brought theatre back into White’s life’ in the early 1980s.