Peter Kenna

Playwright

• Born: March 18, 1930
• Birthplace: Balmain, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: November 29, 1987
• Place of death: Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia

Biography

Several circumstances in Peter Kenna’s life have a strong bearing on his plays. The first derives from the conditions of his birth and early life. He was born on March 18, 1930, in Balmain, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, into an Irish Catholic family. As one of thirteen children, he was in a tight family under the control of a strong, benevolent mother. He attended the Christian Brothers’ School in Lewisham but became infatuated with the stage from the age of ten, and by fourteen he had dropped out of school to work as an actor and property maker for various theater groups around Sydney while earning a meager living at whatever jobs he could secure. These experiences no doubt contributed to the strong maternal figures and the role of the Catholic church in his plays. It also accounts for his sensitivity to the needs of actors, for whom he provided distinctive and detailed characters and speakable dialogue.

Kenna’s ill health also influenced his drama. His health problems, which required one of his sisters to donate a kidney to him, forced Kenna to quit acting and endure long periods when he could not write. He died at the relatively young age of fifty-seven. Kenna was a homosexual, and the awakening of sexuality is a theme that runs through his plays and accounts for his many confused adolescent characters.

Throughout the first half of the 1950’s, Kenna acted in radio dramas and soap operas. In 1954, the creation of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust made it possible for him to concentrate on the stage, first as an actor and later as a playwright. After writing several plays, The Slaughter of St. Teresa’s Day won a significant award and was produced by the Elizabethan Theatre in 1959. The production launched Kenna’s career as playwright, and the play was adapted for television and was produced in England in 1961.

The Slaughter of St. Teresa’s Day features a complex matriarch, Oola Maguire, who dominates the denizens of a crime-ridden area of Sydney. Oola is a passionate worshiper of St. Teresa, and the play takes place on St. Teresa’s Day. Oola’s daughter, Thelma, is home from her convent school and anxious to return as a novice. Oola tries to shield Thelma, but in the end Thelma is seduced by one of the men in the neighborhood.

The English production of the play brought Kenna to London, where he remained for a while to act and write. His second play, Talk to the Moon, was staged at the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1963. He returned to Australia in 1964, directed the premiere of his play, Muriel’s Virtues, for the Independent Theatre in Sydney, and returned to England in 1966 for treatment of his weakening kidney. From then until the early 1970’s, his health prevented him from being fully productive.

Despite that, what was to become his best-known play, A Hard God, opened in Sydney in 1973. Its success led to a grant that enabled him to complete two more plays, Furtive Love and An Eager Hope, to make up a trilogy, The Cassidy Family Album. The grant and his kidney transplant in 1974 enabled him to work again. The immediate result was the play Mates in 1975 and the completed trilogy in 1978. He wrote a screenplay in 1979, but after that his declining health and the side effects of the drugs he needed to take interfered with his work and he was unable to write any new plays during the last eight years of his life.

Kenna’s plays generally deal with family issues created by heavy-handed religion, strong mother figures, and confused adolescents. Their style is a modified realism characterized, as Kenna described it, by “yarns” (the telling of elaborate tales) and “arias” (lyrical impassioned speeches.) For example, Lily Heath in Talk to the Moon is a sixteen-year-old tomboy seduced by her sister’s boyfriend. When her mother, Florie, discovers that she is pregnant, Florie forces Lily into a marriage that destroys her future life. Henry Jackson, a character in Listen Closely, is eighteen and thrown into confusion by his mother’s prohibition against sex outside marriage and his father’s successful efforts to sexually initiate him with the help of a local barmaid.

Most critics and scholars regard A Hard God as Kenna’s best play. It has an interesting structure that develops a double story line, with both stories involving members of the Cassidy family. One story line is about the marriage of Dan and Aggie and the role the church plays in their lives, especially after Dan’s death. The other story line is about the sexual awakening of the couple’s son, Joe, who falls in love with his friend Jack, causing painful adjustments on the part of Dan and Aggie, which are again exacerbated by church strictures. Joe Cassidy is clearly a thinly disguised self-portrait of Kenna, and he reappears as a struggling playwright in Furtive Love and an ailing patient suffering kidney failure while trying to complete a play in An Eager Hope. The Adelaide Playhouse produced all three of these plays in 1978.

In 1979, Kenna completed his last major work, his screenplay The Umbrella Woman. It was to go directly into production, but the project was shelved. Retitled The Good Wife, it finally appeared on screen in February, 1987, a disappointing failure just nine months before Kenna’s death.