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    Cass Butcher Bunting
    Cass Butcher Bunting
    Cass Butcher Bunting
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Cass Butcher Bunting

    By Bill Reed

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    About this ebook

    ‘Cass Butcher Bunting’ begins with an explosion and a cave in down a mine shaft. Three miners are trapped there; Cass, the local golden boy, Butcher, the mentally-heavy, stay-at-home product of a small mining community, and Bunting, the old-timer, the ‘humpy’.
    The setting of the action deep in the bowels of the earth places so-called civilised man back in a primordial situation, in a closed-off cave, his only mental and moral buffer lying in having to fall back on his ownself, his own primitiveness -- and where he can only play out his own tragedy as death becomes increasingly inevitable.
    Man’s fundamental inhumanity to man is a major theme explored in this play. The exchanges between Cass and Butcher and their varying reactions to each other can be seen as subtle revelations of aspects of this inhumanity in a situation as extreme as imaginable. Bunting’s ravings are reminders that in the modern world this selfsame inhumanity is most often expressed in cruelty.
    Unarguably it is in the face of this impending end that man, with nothing more to lose, can step out from behind his everyday mask and reveal his needs and his weaknesses, acknowledge and accept his failures. Between the simple social comment suggested by one reviewer as a ‘powerful exposé of a small community’ and the consideration of death (‘it’s simply about dying’) put forward by the playwright lie a number of layers of meaning which the individual member of the audience or reader will find for himself.
    (Mary Lord, convener, Alexander Playwriting
    Competition, Monash University)
    --------------

    Bill Reed is an award-winning novelist, playwright and short-story writer who lived within the Australian literary and publishing worlds. He now lives outside its gates, mainly in Sri Lanka

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBill Reed
    Release dateMay 9, 2015
    ISBN9780994322739
    Cass Butcher Bunting

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      Book preview

      Cass Butcher Bunting - Bill Reed

      R

      First published by Edward Arnold (Australia) Pty Ltd, ISBN 0726709999 Monash University New Plays no 1: general editor Mary Lord.

      This re-issue published by Reed Independent, Dandenong, Australia.

      Winner of the Alexander Theatre Playwriting Competition

      Smashwords edition.

      Copyright Bill Reed 1976

      Cover illustration: ‘almost there’, uploader Kalebp, Google Openclipart

      Available from Smashwords.com and all leading bookshops and outlets with online ordering facilities. Paperback similarly available to be ordered at most leading book retailers and stores.

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

      Creator: Reed, Bill, author.

      Title: Cass Butcher Bunting / Bill Reed.ISBN: 9780994322722 (paperback)

      Subjects: Australian drama --20th century.

      Dewey Number: A822.3

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

      Creator: Reed, Bill, author.

      Title: Cass Butcher Bunting / Bill Reed

      ISBN: 9780994322739 (ebook)

      Subjects: Australian drama --20th century.

      Dewey Number: A822.3

      To a brave cast and director, and to Mary Lord.

      Contents

      Introduction

      The Premiere

      The Play

      Works by Bill Reed

      About the author

      INTRODUCTION

      The resurgence of interest in Australia drama during the latter years of the last century produced a crop of young dramatists who enjoyed considerable success in their depictions of contemporary manners and mores, sometimes treated seriously, but most often seen from a mildly satirical viewpoint.

      Bill Reed’s ‘Cass Butcher Bunting’ is wholly serious but it is only contemporary in so far as it deals specifically with characters of the post-war – and now international-terror-driven -- generation. They and their dilemma could be transferred to any time and place without loss and the overriding theme of the play, the fear of being trapped in a situation of imminent destruction, is basic to all living creatures. The play is brutal and shocking and it is unremitting in the demands it makes of its audience. That it is far removed from the popular idea of ‘entertainment’ goes without saying. Its importance as a contribution to Australian dramatic writing is quite another matter.

      The play begins with an explosion and a cave in down a mine shaft. Three miners are trapped there; Cass, the local golden boy, sometime star football player and medical student, now an ordinary worker in the mine, drug dependent and complete cynic; Butcher, the average product of a small mining town, inarticulate, unimaginative, who thinks that the best life can offer is a new motor car; and Bunting, an old-time miner with the typical miners’ ‘hump’, lonely and taciturn with an obsession about the welfare of cats. The play explores the reactions of these three men to the disaster that has befallen them and the fate which awaits them.

      Both Bunting and Cass have been injured by the explosion while Butcher suffers nothing more serious than shock. Cass’s pain does not seem to result from the effects of the cave-in as much as from the apparent loss of his drugs for which he searches between severe bouts of withdrawal symptoms that become more painful as the play proceeds. Bunting’s injuries are critical and he dies during the course of the play. He never regains full consciousness but moves intermittently between a near-catatonic state of total incomprehension and delirium, during which he shouts barely decipherable ravings about cats being mutilated or destroyed in a variety of extremely sadistic ways. Bunting’s words bear no relationship to the continuing dialogue between Cass and Butcher; they function as disturbing, almost surrealistic interjections of the single theme of human brutality to cats, a specific example of man’s inhumanity to animals – but probably more so as a metaphor for the happenstance violence-in-disaster visited up the three men and, of course, upon their lost miner mates.

      Man’s fundamental inhumanity to man is a major theme explored in ‘Cass Butcher Bunting’. Bunting’s ravings are reminders that in the modern world this inhumanity is most often expressed in cruelty to animals. The exchanges between Cass and Butcher and their varying reactions to each other can be seen as subtle revelations of aspects of this theme which Bill Reed has explored in a situation as near to the extreme as can be imagined.

      The setting of the action deep in the bowels of the earth places so-called civilised man back in a primordial situation, in a closed-off cave, his only weapons rocks and stones, his battle against impending death, his companions two work-mates. Butcher, the ordinary man (average man? Everyman?) responds to the explosion with shock, rising panic and then optimistic practicality – he tries to make contact with the world outside by persistently tapping on a pipe which runs through the mine. Inarticulate and unintelligent as he (intelligently!) thinks he is, he looks to Cass for explanations and support. They grew up together, went to school together until Butcher, like his father before him, went to work in the mine and Cass, unlike his father, went on to scholastic and sporting triumphs. He then became Butcher’s personal hero and the proud boast of the township.

      Cass, on the other hand, having found himself to be undistinguished, if not an abject failure, despite all the promise he had before him… and having grown past the township’s narrow

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