In a traditionally constructed play, the adults would have occupied the centre of the action while the boys would have been relegated to a less important sub-plot. 

Certainly it would have been necessary for Joe to play more of a part in the action concerning his parents and uncles and this would have raised a number of problems. Aggie refers to other people living in the house, Joe’s brothers and sisters. If Joe was involved in the house action why not them also? 

The demands of strict realism would, in my opinion, have bogged the action down with trivial comings and goings and made it necessary for me to invent reasons why people had to leave the room so that other people could play a scene without them. 

By cutting what would have been a sub-plot adrift from the major action I have given it an almost equal importance, as well as freeing both plays from the restrictions I mention above. After all, the audience knows it is not watching real life. It is watching a selection of events based on reality, written down and presented by actors as an entertainment. 

There is a story concerning a man who one day walked into the studio of the painter Pablo Picasso and boldly announced he did not like the artist’s works because they were not realistic enough. Sometime later in his visit he showed Picasso a photograph of a woman. ‘This is my wife’, he said; and Picasso replied, ‘She’s a very small, flat, black and white person, isn’t she?’ 

A study of the first act will reveal that the three scenes involving the adults take place over a single evening while the three scenes involving the boys take place over a period of weeks: swiftly-moving time intersects normal time. This is another break with realism, yet I believe I have successfully twisted the rules to suit the needs of my particular purpose. 

Next, people are usually curious to know about the relationship between Jack and Joe. They want to know exactly what happens between them physically. 

What happens is exactly what Joe says happens: they sleep together in the same bed with their arms about each other. The trouble between them springs from their different sexual orientation. Jack is heterosexual, Joe homosexual. In the pre-pill Forties, when practically any form of intimacy between boys and girls was frowned on by their parents and elders, when it was almost necessary for a girl to marry a virgin, or, at least, have had sexual relations only with the man she was marrying, Jack carries an urgent need for sexual gratification about with him. 

He responds to what he sees as feminine elements in Joe’s nature: his extreme modesty, his quick condemnation of sexual crudeness, his sensitivity in understanding what Jack has been through with his family. Jack teases him as he would a girl, misbehaving to provoke a shocked response, finally developing a sexual attraction for Joe. But it is an attraction for a sexual substitute. As soon as he is allowed to develop a fulfilling relationship with a girl, all thoughts of Joe as a sex object will disappear. 

Joe is a naive homosexual. He falls deeply in love with Jack but, as yet, sex plays only a small part in his feelings for other men. It is an emotional security he craves. When he tells Jack he did not wish for a physical contact beyond lying beside him at Woy Woy he is speaking the truth and when this is branded a sin, he is outraged. It was, after all, Jack who hoped for sexual gratification and it is he who is warned by the priest in the confessional to stay away from Joe because he is a bad influence.

A Hard God  is based upon events involving my family and myself. These events have been altered and condensed, but, overall, I believe I have managed to retain the feeling of what it was like to be an Irish-Australian Catholic in the 1940s.