Peter Kenna completed A Hard God in 1973 and has referred to it as ‘the play I had been wanting to write for fifteen years’.¹ It was the first play of the trilogy The Cassidy Album (comprising A Hard God, Furtive Love and An Eager Hope) and the reputation and stature the play has achieved are unique; A Hard God has given every sign of having established itself as a landmark in our dramatic literature.
Two important factors undoubtedly applied when A Hard God was written. One was the illness from which the playwright had been suffering for years, and which had brought the reality of death very close. He has explained in a radio interview with Katharine Brisbane:

I think one of the conditions that is terribly important in my writing at the moment is the fact that I am on a kidney machine and have been for about eight years, and this lowers my metabolism in a way ... and so I am rather anaemic, and I tend not to have as much energy as other people, and I think that this sometimes casts you into a sort of dream-like state in which remembering is easier than experiencing new things.²

The form which suggested itself for this new turn in his work was also a matter of timing, and the result of his continuing interest in and responsiveness to the work of his contemporaries. 

I spent eight years in England, and then came back to see a whole lot of plays by the new Australian writers, and although my own idea of form had been developing in those years, certainly the new writing I saw and the productions I saw at the Nimrod Theatre ... encouraged me to expand my form. That is just the difference. It’s an experience of life, an experience in dramatic form, which fifteen years can bring. ³

A Hard God is a dramatic account of a brief period in the lives of the Cassidy family. The setting is the western suburbs of Sydney in 1946, and the play is structured in two strands. The major strand deals with the marriage relationship of Dan and Aggie Cassidy, and with Dan’s two brothers, Martin and Paddy, and their wives. The minor strand concerns the relationship between Joe Cassidy, Dan and Aggie’s son, and Jack Shannon, a boy of his own age whom he meets at the Catholic Youth Organisation. The basic and thematic relationships in the play, however, are those between the characters and their ‘hard’ God, and it is this theme which links the two strands. The two strands also work on different time scales. The author’s description of this unusual form is a simple one: 

I’ve simply cut the normal cord between plot and sub-plot. I could have brought Joe into the play earlier and had a scene between him and his mother, but why?⁴

Some of the play’s first critics, however, found this form disconcerting. H. G. Kippax referred disapprovingly to the drawn-out agonisings of the two adolescent boys, one (we know from the programme) a Cassidy, but otherwise in no way linked with the family until the very end. This lack of linkage is at present a serious weakness. It should be remedied quickly.⁵

The author ultimately did add a five-line scene between Joe and his father at the very beginning of the play as a concession to those not perceptive of the inherent relationship between the two skeins, and this appeared in the play when published. There were other criticisms of the play when it was first presented. 

The Sun critic found that

A Hard God never has more impact than a dampening and gloomy rain shower ... The play drags out over an interminably harrowing three hours.⁶

Neither was the critic of the Daily Telegraph captivated:

Apart from some interminable speeches that leave other characters standing flatfooted, the dialogue is naturalistic and well enough written, but nearly three hours of one family disaster after another gets rather tiresome.⁷

There were critics, however, who were disposed to adopt more positive attitudes to the structural inventiveness and the dramatic poetry of the play. Brian Hoad wrote in the Bulletin:

It is profoundly experimental play. Mr Kenna keeps the older and younger generations completely separated until the final moments of the play. It seems for a start like two plays running in parallel. But in the end it serves to mingle together past, present and future.⁸

A more sympathetic view of the compatibility of form and content was also taken by Katharine Brisbane who, perceiving the organic nature of the play’s structure, wrote that A Hard God:

combines all (Kenna’s) experience in dramatic realism with an advanced and complex investigation of form ... In form the play is an experiment with time; the time that in youth whistles by one minute and crawls the next, and in age ticks by, never changing its pace. The form is central to the play because it defines a way of slicing right through the appurtenances of real life to the life itself. The play is realism rather than naturalism. It gives us the inward not the outward sign.⁹