The origin of the term ‘Chapel Perilous’ lies in Sir Thomas Malory’sLe Morte d'Arthur – a collection of Arthurian legends first published in 1485. In one of the tales, the knight Lancelot enters a chapel where he claims a sword that will arm him for his quest. Within the chapel, he faces ‘real and imagined dangers’ (Brisbane, Katherine. ‘Playwright's Perilous Journey.’The Australian (27 January 1971): 10)

For further reading on the origins of the ‘Chapel Perilous’ in Malory'sLe Morte d'Arthur, see Field, P.J.C. ‘Malory and "Perlesvaus." (Old French source for Chapel Perilous episode of "Mort Darthur").’Medium Aevum 62.2 (1993): 259+. The full text ofLe Morte d'Arthur is available on theProject Gutenburg website.

Margaret Williams, inDorothy Hewett: The Feminine as Subversion, frames her chapter on Hewett'sThe Chapel Perilous around the theme of 'The Lonely Quest'. Williams says: 'The Chapel Perilous is the first of the Hewett plays in which the central character is a lone questing figure of high ideals ... The identifying of a precocious schoolgirl’s ambitions with the legendary Sir Lancelot’s search for the Holy Grail may seem absurd ... but the quest theme ... is a recurrent pattern in women’s writing, transposed to a female character’s personal quest for identity and self-fulfilment’ (48).

For further reading on the 'quest' theme inThe Chapel Perilous seeReba Gostand's 'Quest or Question? Perilous Journey to the Chapel' (Bards, Bohemians, and Bookmen: Essays in Australian Literature (1976): 289-304) andJasna Novakovic's 'The Chapel Perilous: The Paradigm of Fertility Overshadowed by the Quest' inDouble Dialogues 11 (2010).

To investigate the ‘Grail’ theme as a ‘thematic and allegorical device’ in works of fiction and its operation as a ‘representative of an individual's journey towards spiritual growth and enlightenment’, see ‘The Grail Theme in Twentieth-Century Literature.’Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 142 (2003). For allusions to the ‘Chapel Perilous’ in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, see Thomas Dilworth's ‘Eliot'sThe Waste Land.’Explicator 61.1 (Fall 2002): 43-44.

The Chapel Perilous premiered at the New Fortune Theatre in Perth on 21 January 1971. The theatre, which had opened in 1964, had been incorporated into the design of the Arts building at the University of Western Australia – the institution at which Hewett was teaching at the time of the play's writing. The theatre's pit and tiered seating mimic the design of London's Fortune Theatre, a contemporary Shakespeare's Globe. (For further details of the production at the New Fortune Theatre, including stage layout, see Joanne Tompkins's '"I was a Rebel in Word and Deed": Dorothy Hewett'sThe Chapel Perilous and Contemporary Australian Feminist Writing'Australian & New Zealand Studies in Canada 10 (1993): 41-56.)

The play was produced in Melbourne the following year and then in Sydney in 1974. At about this time, Hewett andCurrency Press (which had publishedThe Chapel Perilous in 1972) were sued by Hewett’s former husband for malicious libel. ‘The matter was settled out of court, one condition being thatThe Chapel Perilous be prevented from performance, or sale in book form, in Western Australia during his lifetime. The ban lasted until his death in 2004.' (Brisbane, Katharine. 'Not Wrong Just Different: Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Australian Theatre (2005): 155)

Helen Musa, former arts editor of theCanberra Times, reviewing a 1987 public playreading ofThe Chapel Perilous, expressed the view that 'the play ... has long been a favourite with Australian literature departments because of its rich text and intriguing blend of Australian experience with European literary awareness, all expressed through "rough" theatre. The play has not, however, found the same favour with professional managements. An unwieldy three hours in length, with choral work, difficult music and a demanding soundtrack, it is rarely performed’. (‘Fruitful Collaboration Sheds Light and Entertainment.'The Canberra Times (12 September 1987): 10)

In a 1973 interview Dorothy Hewett told oral historian Hazel de Berg thatThe Chapel Perilous was the play that (at the time) was most important to her. Hewett acknowledged that the play had been described as 'outrageously autobiographical' and she did not demur from that view. InThe Chapel Perilous she wanted 'to come to terms with' what had happened to her in her own life; to demonstrate, in the character Sally Banner, what it was like to be a creative person - particularly a creative female - during that period of Australian life. (To listen to de Berg's full interview with Hewett, go to the National Library of Australia's sound recording by clickinghere.)

Hewett went on to create a further twenty-plus dramatic works for theatre and radio from 1973 to 2001.

Aarne Neeme, director of the first production ofThe Chapel Perilous, reflects that Dorothy Hewett was building her craft as playwright ‘three thousand miles from the developing pattern of Australian theatre on the eastern seaboard. She stands outside that pattern yet she also embraces it. The free-wheeling vaudeville vernacular of the Sydney writers and the sociological interests of the Melbourne school are both vividly present in her work. She is unique.’ (‘Director’s Note to the First Edition.’The Chapel Perilous (1977): xii)

In her 1984 criticism ‘Female Figures in the Plays of Dorothy Hewett and Patrick White’,May-Brit Akerholt writes: ‘Traditionally, the female character in Australian drama has conformed to certain patterns of behaviour and language ... White and Hewett reject the restrictions of the so-called naturalistic drama ... they create a theatrical spectacle which defies conventions and labels ... and in doing that, they dramatise the ways in which the individual is imprisoned in the pragmatism of “the Australian way of life”’ (Westerly 29.1 (March 1984):68, 69, 70). Akerholt goes on to argue that the plays of White and Hewett ‘dramatise the conflict between the individual’s demand for freedom, or creative expression, and the pressures of society. The characters, and particularly the females, are both victims and perpetrators of the action in which they are involved’ (71).

Sally Banner, Hewett's largely autobiographical protagonist inThe Chapel Perilous, is born into an era when ‘female emancipation’ – which had previously meant ‘chiefly careers and the vote’ – has broadened into ‘an age when emancipation has given place to liberation’ so that ‘the Sally Banners of the world can begin to tell us who they are’ (Lawson, Sylvia. 'Introduction to the First Edition.'The Chapel Perilous 1977: ix).

Hewett’s intention was not to create a ‘thesis’ play. ‘Why then’, she asked in 1977, hasThe Chapel Perilous ‘come to stand for so many people, as a force for liberation?’ Hewett suggests that, ‘for many young women’, Banner is ‘the first modern liberated feminist’ in Australian literature’. Sally Banner came to life, says Hewett, ‘at a period when liberation and freedom began to be on the agenda’. Banner ‘reflects her time’ ('Why Does Sally Bow.'The Chapel Perilous 1977: xix).

While 'not entirely drawn according to feminist guidelines', Sally Banner and others of Hewett's female characters are ‘pioneers in the world of Australian drama, bringing feminist possibilities to the stage well before the appearance of acknowledged feminist playwrights likeAlma De Groen, andSandra Shotlander’ (Tompkins, Joanne. ‘"I was a Rebel in Word and Deed": Dorothy Hewett'sThe Chapel Perilous and Contemporary Australian Feminist Writing.’Australian & New Zealand Studies in Canada 10 (December 1993): 42).

In 1972, more than 20 years after the publication of his seminal essay ‘The Cultural Cringe’,A. A. Phillips reviewed six new Australian plays for the Melbourne journalMeanjin (‘Assaying the New Drama.’Meanjin Quarterly 32.2 (June 1973): 189-195). One of the six was Dorothy Hewett’sThe Chapel Perilous. Phillips wrote that the quality of the plays was ‘perhaps not the most important consideration’. What mattered much more, he said, was that ‘they are here and that they are satisfying audiences’. The reason for his assertion was his belief that ‘the theatre's first importance is not as a potent vehicle of art, but as the place where a crosssection of the community has a common, and preferably a significant, experience’.

With few notable exceptions (such asRay Lawler’sSummer of the Seventeenth Doll), Australian theatre audiences had been presented ‘almost entirely’ with ‘imported material’ and the theatre had therefore ‘forfeited half its power to develop our social coherence’ (189).

May-Brit Akerholt, in ‘New Stage: Contemporary Theatre’ – her contribution toThe Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000), says that the ‘big question in Australian drama in the 1960s was not only what but who are we? The end of the decade spawned a critical yet celebratory theatre which sought to explore Australian identity and build a new confidence’. This new focus was ‘encouraged by several significant developments’, one of the most important of which was the New Wave movement which took shape in association with theAustralian Performing Group at Melbourne’sLa Mama andPram Factory theatres. ‘Born in the late 1960s out of opposition to a culturally conservative theatre, the New Wave provided an alternative drama which exploited the vernacular and experimented with forms and structures in an in-your-face exploration of Australian myths and rituals’ (210).

The other developments that aided this new focus included the formation of theAustralia Council, the establishment of theNational Institute of Dramatic Art, the foundation ofCurrency Press to publish Australian play texts exclusively, and the inauguration of theAustralian National Playwrights' Conference.

This alternative theatre environment, provided playwrights such asDavid Williamson,Alex Buzo,Jack Hibberd,John Romeril and Dorothy Hewett a springboard (and a physical venue) for their plays. It is salutary, however, to recall Hewett's caveat to this burgeoning of Australian work: ‘Except for its outstanding actresses, the Australian theatre has been pretty much a male preserve'. The new wave of drama which erupted out of Melbourne and Sydney in the late 1960s was dominated, says Hewett, 'by young male playwrights, who interpreted the world according to their experiences. The result tended to be a series of female stereotypes...’ (Hewett, Dorothy. 'Creating Heroines in Australian Plays.'Hecate 5.2 (1979): 73).

For more information on the 'New Wave' movement, see the following:Maryrose Casey’s ‘Australian Drama Since 1970’ inA Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 (2007);Margaret Williams's 'Mask and Cage: Stereotype in Recent Drama.'Meanjin Quarterly 31.3 (September 1972): 308-313; andAxel Kruse's review 'New Drama.'Southerly 33.2 (June 1973): 240-246).