It was during this time that Johnston, suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis in much the same way George Orwell did while struggling to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four at about the same time, wrote the semi-autobiographical classic-to-be My Brother Jack (1964), Clift’s not inconsiderable literary talent sacrificed on the altar of her husband’s. (There is at least one affecting scene here involving a typewriter: Clift, having decided to ‘midwife’ Johnston’s book into existence rather than work on her own, slips a cover over her typewriter and we never see her take it off again.) Their regular companions are Vic (Hugh Parker) and Ursula (Tiffany Lyndall-Knight) – thinly veiled versions of Sidney Nolan and his wife Cynthia Reid that act as something like foils to the ‘monstrous work ethic’ of Clift and Johnston – as well as Jean-Claude (Kevin Spink), a posturing but magnetic French existentialist who stalks the edges of Smith’s play like a sort of collective id.

Nathan O'Keefe as Martin in Hydra (photograph by Jeff Busby)

As narrated by Clift and Johnstons’ son Martin (Nathan O’Keefe), and glowingly designed in this production by Vilma Mattila (set and costumes) and Nigel Levings (lighting), Hydra nostalgically conjures the sun-kissed world of the postwar international community of artists – Leonard Cohen and his partner Marianne Ihlen among them – who were drawn to the Greek island like moths to a flame. ‘Their years in the Aegean,’ wrote Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell of the Hydra expatriates in their recent book Half the Perfect World: Writers, dreamers and drifters on Hydra, 1955–1964 may have been half perfect at best, but it was on Hydra that they connected to a place, a lifestyle and a community that allowed them to live and express themselves intensely, and as they wished. They refused to believe their dreams were an illusion, or that boldness, ambition, and a leap of faith might not allow them to reach beyond the constraints of their birthright’ (‘bloody well fly!’ as Johnston and Clift put it in one of the play’s many references to the Greek mythological figure Icarus who, ignoring the warning of his father, Daedalus, not to fly too low or high, perished in the heat of the sun).

In a way, they feel like trailblazers for the bright young expatriates that would follow in their wake, not to Greece but to Britain: Clive James, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, and Robert Hughes, artists who, like Clift and Johnston, were not merely pulled by the allure of the cultural and intellectual centres of Europe but also pushed into exile by what Thomas Keneally called Australia’s ‘willed torpor’. (Clift and Johnston, as Smith’s play makes clear, were also in flight from scandal: Clift, a decade younger than Johnston, became pregnant while Johnston was still married to another woman.) Smith does not spare us the details of bohemia’s deprivations – ‘no fridge and no toilet’, as Martin wryly notes – but these things are of course as much a part of the iconoclast’s dream as the clacking typewriters, flowing alcohol, and unconstrained sexuality with which Hydra vibrates.

Tiffany Lyndall-Knight, Hugh Parker, Bryan Probets, and Anna McGahan in Hydra (photograph by Jeff Busby)

And yet it does not quite vibrate enough. I wanted to see the world of Hydra through the lens of Clift’s sensuality, her feeling for life and freedom, not Johnston’s discomfiture with the full range of bohemia’s unconventionality – an uneasiness that Sam Strong seems to share, his direction feeling coy or overt where it should be erotically withholding. Johnston may be unlikeable – neither Smith’s writing nor Probets’s excellent performance shy away from his jealousy or cruelty – but it always feels like his story, a man’s story of repression and control (the device of Martin’s narration, like that of the Icarus myth, another father-son narrative, subtly reinforces this too). There is a deep sensuality to Smith’s text, founded I think in the body’s erotic relationship to the world, that colours much of Clift’s writing; in Smith’s play, even the act of writing itself is framed as ‘a physical need like food’. But Strong’s direction feels spooked by the full implication of this.

In eroticism’s absence, we are left with a play that feels more like a eulogy to, than a celebration of, the Clift and Johnstons’ social and familial circles, cool where it should be warm, safe where it ought to be freighted with danger. The dynasty may be a tragic one, but it’s an honouring that ends up feeling more bourgeois than bohemian, a refusal rather than embrace of the feeling that was their ideal.

Hydra is being presented by State Theatre Company South Australia at the Dunstan Playhouse until 19 May 2019. Performance attended: May 2.