Backstage with Robyn Archer

Robyn Archer is a singer, performer, writer, artistic director, and public advocate of the arts. She was appointed an ABR Laureate in 2018. She has been performing professionally for more than sixty years , throughout Australia and the world, and is known internationally for her expertise in the Weimar repertoire and her artistic direction of major arts festivals.

What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?

Possibly a 1950s Nutcracker Ballet at Theatre Royal, Hindley Street, Adelaide. Dad took me there as a surprise – first time in the theatre. But as a twenty-something, Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers at the Valhalla in Glebe, Sydney.

When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?

Nil realisation. It just happened – I never had a chance. Dad was a singer, stand-up comic, and MC. I unconsciously apprenticed myself to him from the age of about eight.

What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?

Vanessa Redgrave in Ibsen’s Ghosts at Wyndham’s in the West End, 1986. In period setting, no attempt was made to make it overtly ‘relevant’, yet her performance made it clear it was all about AIDS. When Vanessa came out to take her curtain call, she made the deepest bow in her crinoline, and we saw her tears fall onto the stage. Unforgettable.

Name three performers you would like to work with.

I’m going for a director first, Derek Jarman, because I was in conversation about Derek directing a film version of A Star is Torn. I hung out a bit with him, there was lots of interest and many delays. Ultimately, Derek became ill and it never happened. Secondly Danny, a profoundly deaf performer with Bloolips. He gave the most abandoned vocal and dance performance of a song called ‘Let’s Scream Our Tits Off’. He, too, died of complications from AIDS before I could work with him. Now? Pink: a wise person once said that life’s too short to work with arseholes. Pink seems to be savvy, craftful, and a decent human being.

Do you have a favourite song?

Crazy question for me – there are sooo many. For listening: Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix from Saint Saens’s Samson and Delilah. I love Marilyn Horne’s version, but recently found a poor YouTube video of Jessye Norman’s interpretation, an absolutely brilliant performance. For healing the soul: Sidney Bechet’s Si Tu Vois Ma Mère. For singing: anything by Brecht/ Eisler, but ‘The Song of the Stimulating Impact of Cash’ has superb performative challenges, and Eisler’s setting of Heine’s Verfehlte Liebe almost always brings me to tears.

And your favourite play or opera?

Again, too many to mention, but generically I admire those American plays that are set in a confined domestic environment yet seem effortlessly to give you the big picture of America every time: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Sam Shepard, for instance. Opera or music-theatre? Anything new that works successfully to ensure the form endures.

Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?

Poet Bertolt Brecht, novelist John le Carré, composer Henry Purcell.

How do you regard the audience?

Through somewhat myopic eyes – I can’t see any facial detail even in the first two rows. Philosophically? There’s something alchemical that happens to me when I am in front of an audience. I become a different creature, and so I’m grateful to that ever-changing body of humans that allows me to live so many different lives.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?

The Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre. Its main feature as a 600-seater is its intimacy: from the stage, you feel you can reach every single person. I made my second serious music theatre appearance on that stage in 1975 for The Threepenny Opera, have played on it many times since, and just shy of fifty years later I’ll be there again this month with Robyn Archer: An Australian Songbook.

What do you look for in arts critics?

I want them to have serious expertise. Everyone can have an opinion or a gut reaction to art in any genre, so I demand more from a critic. Without the art, there is no role for the critic, so I admire critics who have the humility to say ‘go and see this for yourself’ and the expertise and experience to be able to say why the work did or did not work for them. The last thing I need is a summary of the content – that doesn’t constitute useful critical analysis. Nor does self-opinionated TicTockery.

Do you read your own reviews?

Rarely. I always have the closest to me have a look and get them to tell me if there’s anything useful to be gleaned from them.

Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult –or wonderful – in Australia?

The biggest challenge is isolation – from the rest of the world and from one another. We miss the dense cross-fertilisation of ideas and practice that denser populations enjoy. But this means that we sometimes produce things that are fresh and unique, which is particularly true of, for instance, our First Nations visual artists, who are so close to unique Country.

What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?

Popular culture, by definition, is a matter of demand and supply. I don’t think governments should get involved in that essentially commercial transaction (applicable just as much to musical theatre, favourite old operas, and MOR plays as to pop music). Government subsidy is better directed, or at very least equally directed, to those things which, because of their aesthetic and intellectual complexity, their initially minority appeal, or their very ‘newness’, don’t immediately attract a large audience, but are essential for any society’s cultural depth and richness. Also, stop punishing the humanities at tertiary level; many great artists have emerged from unformed ambitions at the end of secondary school, and the humanities can expand horizons beyond just job-ready.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Director Wal Cherry and mentor John Willett drilled me to ensure my performance was not about ‘look at me’, but about my role as an effective conduit between author and audience. If the audience cried it should not be because I faked tears, but because I told the story so clearly it affected them deeply.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Don’t get sucked in by fashionistas. Develop a skilled and authentic practice.

What’s your next project or performance?

I’m currently preparing to take Robyn Archer: An Australian Songbook on tour to Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, Darwin, Sydney, and Hobart. One of the shows at the Adelaide Cabaret festival is actually on my seventy-fifth birthday (18 June): it’s a two-hour show. Crazy stuff. Don’t worry, my closest has the hook ready! g

Theatre

Amiddle-aged woman, Winnie, is buried to her waist in the middle of a mound, amidst a dry, monotonous expanse while the scorching sun beats down. It is one of Beckett’s indelible theatrical images. She finds solace in her handbag, where she uncovers a domestic detritus that affords her the rituals and distractions that help her endure: comb, toothbrush, mirror, hat, music box. She herself is a protrusion or an excrescence, caught between organic and inanimate matter, like the teeth and hair she seeks to prettify.

First performed in 1961, in New York City, Happy Days is Samuel Beckett’s last full-length play, and the first to feature a woman. It is a breakthrough work artistically, looking forward to the gabbling female characters that emerge in later ‘dramaticules’ like Not I (1972), while also departing from the residual realism of its predecessor, Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Beckett’s theatre often includes memorable visual images – the tree on the roadside, the parents in dustbins – but from this point it will tend towards a searing, singular visual intensity, as akin to video art as to stage drama.

Beckett worked on the play in 1961, in Folkestone, Kent, where he and his long-term partner, Suzanne DéchevauxDumesnil, had travelled from Paris to be secretly married for testamentary reasons, which may account for its marital theme, yet one suspects the setting is also inspired by the couple’s regular holidays in Tunisia and Morocco. The image of the woman buried to her waist in sand may have been influenced by the closing shot of Louis Buñuel’s short surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), though, as ever in Beckett, vaudeville entertainment and popular culture feel as present as the European avant-garde. If En Attendant Godot (1953) deploys the comic male double act to make a play about futility, habit, and decay, Happy Days uses another music hall pairing – the chattering woman and the taciturn, often put-upon husband. Willie sits behind the mound, seldom speaking, but reading job advertisements from his newspaper, like a bourgeois husband on a Sunday afternoon trip to the beach. Winnie chatters incessantly, insistently, and with a determined pathophobia – ‘This will have been a happy day!’

Time seems to be running out in this sun-baked, deathdrenched world. Winnie speaks nostalgically about the ‘old style’ and seeks to reassemble half-remembered quotations from the ‘classics’. We can spot flotsam from Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Yeats in her allusions. She is determined to render this a ‘happy day’, marshalling husband (who only occasionally converses), handbag, and memories in the struggle to get through it, to keep her mind away from the devastation of her condition. Death is both an encroaching inevitability, made manifest in the second act, when the mound now reaches her neck, and a possible release, manifest in the gun, ‘Brownie’, which she kisses as she takes it out of her handbag early in the action. Here is a play which, with a wink to the audience, breaks the old Chekhovian principle – the gun which appears in the first act is never fired in the second. There is surprisingly little actual death in Beckett’s world, and this play is no exception. ‘World without end’, her morning recitation of her prayer concludes, and her world, it seems, is endless.

Often Beckett’s plays are not well served by famous actors, who carry an individual aura or performative baggage that can distract. Beckett himself often got frustrated with ‘stars’ when they took an interest in his plays, refusing their demands for explanations of character motivation or the play’s deeper meanings. He preferred to work with favoured performers, who understood the exactitude and fastidiousness of his stagecraft and submitted themselves to his scrupulous choreography. ‘Too much colour!’, he would often say to his predominant female interpreter, Billy Whitelaw, whom he directed on several occasions, including in a 1979 production of Happy Days at the Royal Court in London.

So what of so large a personality as Judith Lucy, a figure well known in Australia for her candid and colourful stand-up comedy? It’s true that famous international comics have taken on Beckett in the past. Steve Martin and Robin Williams did an acclaimed Waiting for Godot in 1988. Beckett himself sought out the legendary Buster Keaton to make his Film (1965). But does Lucy have the subtlety and the technical mastery to deliver on this role, this ‘summit part’ for female performers, on a par with Hamlet, as Peggy Ashcroft claimed?

The answer resoundingly is yes. Lucy’s performance is compelling. Her supple, expressive, seductive, haggard face captures the grotesque comedy of Winnie’s situation, but she also moves adeptly through the other registers of fear, anger, vulnerability, and bewilderment. There is a histrionic element to Winnie, since she is of course acting to herself, performing her own happiness. Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider, director of the first production in 1961, that the play should have ‘a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the kind of tawdriness you get in 3rd rate musical or pantomime’. Lucy is well suited to acting the actor, producing a performance which bears witness to its own fragility. But the façade breaks down as the play moves to its climax, and Lucy’s performance holds true here too. Shorn of object and routines, Winnie is forced, desperately, to recall stories and memories, as we approach the quick of her utter vulnerability and tragic desperation.

The fine performance is supported by some judicious decisions of director and designer. Mercifully, there were no didactic attempts to make the play relevant to contemporary themes, such as the pandemic or global warming. Those resonances are too obvious to need emphasis, and nothing kills Beckett quicker than preachiness of any sort. Earlier productions have tended to focus on its themes of social class, with Winnie as something of a Hampstead hostess fallen on hard times. This production under-emphasises that aspect, which arguably resonates less in contemporary Australia than in 1960s London. Sequins, sparkles, and evening wear are more subdued or given a slicker contemporaneity, with a slight techno-dystopian feel. Willie, when he finally comes out from behind his mound, looks like a cartoon with his Cat-in-the-Hat topper and his handle-bar moustache, not a ladies man ‘dressed to kill’. Winnie speaks in easy Australian tones, putting on a mocking Ocker accent when imitating the passers-by who, like the audience, wonder who she is and what her situation means. ‘What’s she doing? he says – What’s the idea? he says – stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground –coarse fellow – What does it mean? he says – What’s it meant to mean? – and so on – lot more stuff like that – usual drivel.’ Coarse is the word when we spectators or critics demand what a Beckett play ‘means’ in any cut-and-dried sense. His plays are not philosophical messages but artistic expressions. This careful, subtle Australian production from the Melbourne Theatre Company (until 10 June) allows Happy Days to shimmer in the sun, with beguiling eeriness and emotional impact. g

Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He was Director of Beckett International Foundation from 2004–10 and author of The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2007).