Written into Nonbeing: Queer Self-Effacement in the Work of Kester Berwick

Abstract

Queer artistic identity has historically occupied a liminal or in-between space dictated by socially-imposed and self-imposed forms of censorship. Queer writing thus carries a sense of incompleteness or ‘non-being’ in which something must always remain ambiguous; gestured towards but never explicitly signified, then interpreted by a reader or spectator as a feeling. This is especially true of archival texts. In this paper, I suggest a queer approach to three short plays by Kester Berwick, who alongside his friend and collaborator Alan Harkness ran the experimental Ab-Intra Studio Theatre in Adelaide from 1931-1935. My own subjective interpretation of textual signs and silences is informed by the archival image of Berwick created within his personal papers at the State Library of South Australia; what José Esteban Muñoz would call an ephemeral reading “linked to alternate modes of textuality and narrativity like memory and performance: it is all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself” (1996, 10). Combining queer theory and queer archival practice, this paper offers an interpretation of Berwick’s plays Judgement Day (1933), Ladder Game (1934), and Archway Motif (1935) to argue for a repressed queer sensibility in Berwick’s writing for the stage.