The final scene of the play, in which the parallel strands are formally drawn together, presents a mother and a son unaware of the deep sense of loss, isolation and incomprehension being suffered by the other. Both turn to some immediate form of numbing escape (for Aggie, the wireless; for Joe, the defeating return to the pictures), and for both the moral sustenance of their faith seems to prove inadequate. Joe refuses to accept the verdict of the Church on the love he has felt for Jack, and is alienated from his religion. Aggie comprehends that she is to lose the Dan who has been her religion, and her attempt to pray direct to God is tentative and faltering. She refuses to accept this latest cruel blow countenanced by her hard God, but maturity has taught her that this refusal can only be temporary, and that ultimately she will have to submit to the desolation of facing life, after Dan’s death, divorced from her sustaining spiritual source.

        AGGIE: I don’t believe it! I don’t believe any of it! How could I believe such a thing? Why, I         might just as well believe the ground was going to open up and swallow me.
        JOE: You might have to believe it.
        AGGIE: I won’t, I won’t. At least ... not yet. I suppose ... eventually ... but, not yet, dear             God. Not yet! (p. 72)

Their unawareness of each other’s misery underlines the terrible isolation which each character faces as the play ends. For neither has the Church nor the family relationship provided solace, or any certain hope. The play offers no solution to the universal dilemma with which it has been concerned, and the profundity of Aggie Cassidy’s sense of loss is poignantly communicated in the play’s closing moments. For one critic, this moving scene took on an even wider significance:

        In the end as the play fades into darkness Aggie is left there utterly alone at the dawn of             an unspeakable anguish of ultimate incomprehension and despair. As an allegory of our
        times that moment can claim to be one of the most deeply moving statements of                             contemporary art.22

No other playwright working in the Australian theatre today has echoed as faithfully as has Peter Kenna the aspirations, frustrations and life concerns of ordinary, working-class, urban Australians. He has worked out the themes of his plays in a dramatic language which is at once poetic and unfailingly reflective of the periods and people of whom he has written and assuredly, at the height of this notable achievement, stands A Hard God.


This is an abbreviated version of the article originally published in the journal Southerly, 2/1979, which is reproduced by kind permission of the author and the English Association, publisher of Southerly.

References
All page references are to A Hard God, Currency Press, Sydney, 1982 (revised ed.).

1.    Conversation with Katharine Brisbane, National Times, 14 June 1976.
2, 3.    ABC broadcast, 6 August 1975.
4.     Conversation with Kenna, 2 September 1975.
5.     H. G. Kippax, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 August 1973. See also his review of a later production p. 15 below.
6.     Robin Ingram, Sun, 20 September 1973.
7.     Norman Kessell, Daily Telegraph, 19 August 1973.
8.     Brian Hoad, Bulletin, 15 September 1973.
9.     Katharine Brisbane, Australian, 27 August 1973.
10.     Conversation with Kenna, 8 September 1976.
11.     ABC Radio interview, 14 June 1976.
12.     Resource material for A Hard God, edited by Don Reid, Currency Press, 1976.
13.     From Peter Kenna’s scrapbook.
14.     Conversation with Kenna, 2 September 1975.
15, 16. Conversation with Kenna, 8 September 1976.
17.     Katharine Brisbane, Australian, 27 August 1973.
18.     Conversation with Kenna, 8 September 1976.
19, 20. ABC broadcast, 6 June 1975.
21.     Kenna has explained, in his programme note for The Cassidy Album, that he intends ‘hard’ to mean ‘difficult to understand’.
22.     Brian Hoad, Bulletin, 15 September 1973.