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    Hydra
    Hydra
    Hydra
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Hydra

    By Sue Smith

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Wild, passionate and ultimately tragic: the love story of Australia's famous literary couple, Charmian Clift and George Johnston, plays out on the idyllic Greek island of Hydra in the 1950s in this reimagining from award-winning playwright Sue Smith.Weaving in text from Clift and Johnston's own writing, and including an introduction and extra materials, Hydra brings these remarkable artists to life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNewSouth
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9781742244600
    Hydra
    Author

    Sue Smith

    God has really been good to me through the years. I have been so blessed. I got to sing on a television show with some of the “good ole boys and girls” in country music: Freddy Fender (Wasted Days and Wasted Nights); Jeannie C. Riley (Harper Valley PTA); and Hank Thompson (inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame), all wonderful country artists. I also had the joy of singing in many states, like Georgia, Texas, California, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi. I also sang in other parts of the world, like Amsterdam, Holland, Nigeria and other parts of Africa, as well as Switzerland. I got to sing for ministers such as Adrian Rogers of Belleview Baptist Church, Memphis, and Lester Sumerall and Steve Brock of the Trinity Broadcasting Network. In addition, I have had the blessing of singing with LuLu Roman of the popular old television show, Hee-Haw; Denus Shakarigan of the Full Gospel Business Men's Association, Johnny Cook who sang with Vestle Goodman, and Pattie Collins, a noted singer from Texas. I was a good friend and ministry partner of Bonnie Khan, founder of Agape International. Then health problems came my way. My own family and six grandchildren became my mission field. I am pro Israel and a Christian Zionist. My favorite colors are blue topaz and amber. I stand for freedom and liberty and am against any kind of abuse, especially child abuse. I have been given a thankful heart and a desire to see others being touched by God's goodness.

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      Book preview

      Hydra - Sue Smith

      Photo by Grant Sparkes-Carroll, courtesy of the Sydney Theatre Company

      Hydra

      SUE SMITH is a multi-award-winning screenwriter, play-wright and script editor. Her numerous works include Kryptonite, Machu Picchu , Brides of Christ and many more. Sue was the STC Patrick White Playwrights Fellow for 2018 and received the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian Writers’ Guild. In 2019 her new play Hydra was produced by Queensland Theatre and State Theatre Company South Australia.

      Hydra

      A PLAY BY

      SUE SMITH

      A NewSouth book

      Published by

      NewSouth Publishing

      University of New South Wales Press Ltd

      University of New South Wales

      Sydney NSW 2052

      AUSTRALIA

      newsouthpublishing.com

      © Sue Smith 2019

      First published 2019

      This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

      Any performance or public reading of Hydra is forbidden unless a licence has been received from the author or author’s agent. The purchase of this book in no way gives the purchaser the right to perform the play in public, whether by means of a stage production or reading. All applications for public performance should be addressed to Cameron’s Management, PO Box 848, Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia; tel: +61 2 9319 7199; email: info@cameronsmanagement.com.au

      ISBN:     9781742236544 (paperback)

      9781742244600 (ebook)

      9781742249094 (ePDF)

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

      Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

      Cover design Original playscript series design by Sandy Cull, www.sandycull.com

      Cover image Shutterstock/Katarina Palenikova

      Contents

      Introduction

      Hydra: Overview

      Author’s Note

      HYDRA

      Selected Works & Further Reading

      Introduction

      Sue Smith

      ‘I pat myself on the shoulder for having had the guts to leave my conservative upbringing and search for a more bohemian touch of life. I suppose that’s what life is all about, to find out who you are and what you can do with this gift of being alive’

      – Dinnie Pedersen, reflecting on Hydra in the 1950s and ’60s*

      ‘… to find out who you are and what you can do with this gift of being alive …’ This is a story about choice: the choices we make and the reality that any choice, courageous or meek, wild or suffocatingly safe, will have consequences.

      Charmian Clift and George Johnston’s dream of a life of creative freedom on a Greek island first caught my attention over twenty years ago. Their love story fired my imagination, as did the scale of their ambition, and the magnificence of the writing they created. The scale, too, of their tragedy. The two met when George was a lauded war correspondent and Charmian a young journalist and fledgling fiction writer. George left his wife and daughter for Charmian, and they began a family together. In 1955, when Charmian was pregnant with their third child, they moved the family to Greece, and then, in 1956, settled on the island of Hydra. I was held captive by the myth. But the very thing that makes a myth so powerful is that it speaks to the lives we ourselves are living. There is evidence that Charmian and George, to an extent, created and shaped their own myth. But don’t we all, in the way we frame our lives to our families, friends and the wider world? And, indeed, we create myths for ourselves. So many of us dream of striking out for individuality and freedom from convention; of escaping the drudgery of the workaday world; of rejecting the grubby commercialisation of modern life in the big cities. We dream of allowing ourselves to be exposed to beauty, and to risk. But for most of us, these are only dreams. Charmian and George actually did it. In the most socially conservative of times they threw every type of caution to the wind and leapt off the cliff in an attempt to fly. In Charmian’s own exquisite words, they sought ‘to build a good rich life from the raw materials of the man, the woman, the children and the talents we could muster up between us’.

      And for a brief shimmering moment, they succeeded …

      The Clift–Johnston family story is quintessentially Australian. It illuminates the need felt by so many Australians, certainly of their generation, but even now, to expatriate in order to discover their true identity. It also reveals the complexities of how two passionate creators negotiate living together, how one career will so often be subsumed by the other, how difficult it can be to strike any sort of healthy balance: a difficulty often lived now as it was then. And ultimately, it shines a light on how the following generation is affected by the choices of the first.

      It can be argued that here in Australia we tend not to celebrate our artists in the way other cultures do. We admire their work, but we don’t often look at the life that

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