Theatre Australia 2(5) September-October 1977

THE I itralia’s magazine of the performing arts

S ep t/O ct 1977 $1.95

Marvellous M elbourne Part 2 Interview: Nancye Hayes H ello world, this is Sondheim Regional Theatre plus reviews,ballet, opera, film &c.

[usical Theatre

NIMROD

Nimrod Theatre 500 Elizabeth Street Surry Hills Sydney 2010

Until Sunday 3 0 O ctober Nim rod U pstairs

until Sunday 9 O ctober Nim rod D ow nstairs

by Jim McNeil directed by Ken Horler designed by Larry Eastwood John Clayton, Barbara Dennis, Martin Harris, Malcolm Keith The private hell of a perceptive survivor from Long Bay, Parramatta and Grafton gaols.

by David Hare based on the book by William Hinton directed by Richard Wherrett Alan Becher, Tim Burns, Margaret Cameron, Niko Lathouris, John Ley, Suzanne Roylance, George Shevtsov, Bill Summers, Stephen Thomas ‘Revolution in a Chinese Village: Watch out, there’s reds in the bed’ — B J Petersen.

S eco n d S en sa tio n a l Year P laybox M elbourne

from Saturday 2 2 O ctober Nimrod D ow nstairs

GoidonChaler

The Elocution of Beniamin Franldin

by David Rudkin directed by Ken Horler A superb and overwhelmingly eloquent account of a childless marriage.

Cast to be announced.

by Steve J Spears directed by Richard Wherrett designed by Larry Eastwood Winner of Four National Professional Theatre Awards and Three National Critics’ Awards Gordon Chater in this Nimrod production moves to London’s West End next March.

Now presented by Parachute Productions. from W ednesday 2 N ovem ber N im rod U pstairs

from Saturday 3 D ecem b er Nim rod U pstairs

A Visiting Production from The Marionette Theatre of Australia

Brilliant puppeteer Richard Bradshaw takes a trans­ lation of ‘Alice’s Adventures’ into Pitjantjatjara as the basis for his shadow production. Alice fans will find the setting transposed to the centre of Australia with the frog faced man (the frog footman), the Kangaroo (the white rabbit), the Koala (the doormouse) and the Witch Spirit (Queen of Hearts).

by David Williamson directed by John Bell designed by Tom Bannerman Jeff Ashby, Drew Forsythe, Ron Graham, Ron Haddrick, Ivar Kants, Barry Lovett David Williamson lifts the lid off the backroom politics, the buying and selling, backstabbing and bulldozing that regulate the life of a suburban football club.

Theatre

Departments

Musical Theatre September/October 1977 Volume 2, Number 5 Spotlight

2 5 7 61

Comment Quotes and Queries Whispers, Rumours and Facts Guide: Theatre, Opera, Dance

Australia

8 Tony Sheldon looks at the uneven history of Australian musical theatre 46 Hello World — This is Sondheim Robert Page 3 The Passing o f The Independent — Toni Reed Alan Schneider — Barry Eaton Nancye Hayes — Barry Eaton

Regional Theatre 18 Hunter Valley Theatre Company Part one How and Why — Tony Trench Frayed Shoestring — Terence Clark Riverina Trucking Company Survey by Terry O’Connell Mobilising Wagga — Marguerite Wells Young Playwrights

14 Errol Bray discusses the first National Young Playwrights Weekend

David Marr 16 Sweeney Agonistes David Marr profiles the new Chaiman of the Theatre Board Playscript 29 Marvellous Melbourne — Part two Opera 52 Survey David Gyger Ballet 54 Dance Company (N S W) William Shoubridge International 48 Germany — Berlin Theatertreffen Hugh Rorrison 51 Amsterdam — Festival o f Fools Solrun Hoaas Theatre Reviews 22 Queensland Stampede Fall Out and Follow Me 23 South Australia Four Play Readings The Coronation o f Poppea 24 A.C.T. Marcel Marceau 25 New South Wales The Glitter Sisters The Ripper Show Don’t Piddle Against the Wind, Mate A Stretch o f the Imagination Three Sisters Boeing Boeing The Hostage 44 Big Toys 45 Confusions 40 Victoria Radioactive Horror Show Ashes 42 Western Australia H M S Pinafore As You Like It Martello Towers Records 57 Roger Covell Film 58 Elizabeth Riddell Books 60 Helen van der Poorten

rational G uide pòi

Theatre Opera Dance

Theatre Australia

Editor: Robert Page Executive Editor: Lucy Wagner Associate Editor: Bruce Knappett Assistant: Jayne Farrell

Theatre has always been most closely associated with the way of life of capital cities, and it certainly has its major loca­ tions within them in Australia. Though London, New York, Paris, etcetera are well known as theatre centres there are other im portant th eatre com panies operating in other areas throughout their respective countries, just as in Australia there are companies working outside capitals whose contribution and value must not be overlooked.

There are many amateur companies very active in the regions, and it is at times suggested that these fulfil the only func­ tion that theatre can outside capital cities; that the repertoire they provide caters fully for the unsophisticated taste of pro­ vincials and people go because they are involved with the group, whereas they would not be interested in going along to professional theatre per se. This is very misleading. Both of the ventures men­ tioned above, and the Riverina Trucking Company at Wagga (see inside) have prov­ ed that regional professional theatre is both needed and wanted. A m ateur societies have their own very important function, but a full-time theatre company maintains a standard of excellence that can only be realised by people who devote their entire working life to theatre.

Of course various touring productions come to the provincial towns with some regularity, but these are in no way a sub­ stitute for a permanent theatre company in a community. Just as city theatre caters to the particular taste of its community, so theatre in country areas speaks to those around it because it is a part of them.

Terry Clarke says in his article on the HVTC that Newcastle felt the company to be a Sydney concept foisted upon it, and it was not until the actors decided to remain in Newcastle although the company had gone into recess, determined to fight for a resident theatre company in Newcastle, that the town really took them to its heart.

There has been much feeling of gloom and doom about the results of these early experiments in regional theatre. The end of the Old Tote’s Armidale project after six months is certainly not due to any failure; it was scheduled to run for that length of time and appears to have been successful beyond all expectations. So much so that their Othello has had a brief revival in Sydney and the project will be started up again next year for a further period. There is to be a full report on past achievements and future plans in the next issue in the second part of our look at regional theatre.

2 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

With the Hunter Valley Theatre Com­ pany, in pro rata terms the venture has been a success, though relativism is an argument and not a filler of coffers. The fog of gloom and doom seems at last to be clearing and a low cost programme (see Terry Clarke Quotes and Queries) is in hand to get the company active again.

Armidale had much more money and a big brother back in Sydney to turn to.

Hunter Valley was on its own with a small grant and suffered many setbacks beyond its control. At Wagga the Australia Coun­ cil and NSW Government share the cost of the two professional salaries; their success is in actually making a profit at the box office.

All three companies have proven that what the regions respond to is not artistic condescension but exciting theatre. Armi­ dale had them turning up in droves for Melba and a gripping Othello', Hunter Valley and Riverina have both had an out­ standing response to Hamlet On Ice. They cannot get away with the remote and pretentious; there just aren't the coterie groups of trendies around to support such programming.

But of all, the Hunter Valley is perhaps the most important — which is why the profession has rallied around with benefits to support it. It alone is a fully profes­ sional company trying to work all the year round. And the eyes of the federal funding agencies and cultural departments are on it to see whether it can be made a go of before pitching in in their own areas. It must succeed or the cause of decentral­ isation of theatre will be set back twenty years.

At another end of the scale it’s good to see an all Australian company of actors coming together for what is shaping up towards a very stylish production of a collage of Sondheim material, Side by Side by Sondheim. And good that the Theatre Royal, which has had some difficulties finding suitable shows, is being used as the venue for such a highly acclaimed musical tribute. The basic material might not be homegrown, but virtually everything else is. Recognition of our own stars is happening at last.

Regional theatre is an issue that has come very much to the fore in the last few months, as two projects, that of the Old Tote-backed Armidale project, and the N ew castle H unter Valley T h eatre Company, have been seen to come to a close in one way or another.

Advisory Board: John Bell, Graeme Blundell, Ellen Braye, Katherine Brisbane, Vivian Chalwyn, Gordon Chater, John Clark, W.A. Enright, Lynda Gray, Jack Hibberd, Ken Horler, Garrie Hutchinson, Robert Jordan, Philip Mason, Stan Marks, Jake Newby, Phil Noyce, Ray­ mond Omodei, Philip Parsons, Diana Sharp, Ken Southgate, Raymond Stanley, Elizabeth Sweeting, John Timlin, Tony Trench, Guthrie Worby, Richard Wherrett

Publisher: John Curtain Art Director: Alex Stitt

Correspondents: Sydney, Sue Manger (02) 456 2068 Melbourne, Raymond Stanley (03) 419 1204 Brisbane, Don Batchelor (07) 269 3018 Perth, Joan Ambrose (092) 94 6639 Adelaide, Michael Morley (08) 275 2204 Theatre Australia gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Australia Council, the Literature Board of the Australia Council, the New South Wales Cultural Grants Board, the Arts Grants Advisory Committee of South Australia, the Queensland Cultural Activities Department, the Victorian Ministry of the Arts, the University of New South Wales Drama Foundation and the Assistance of the Univer­ sity of Newcastle.

Manuscripts: Manuscripts and editorial correspondence should be forwarded to the editorial office, 7 President Place, New Lambton Heights, New South Wales 2305, telephone (049) 52 5976.

Whilst every care is taken of manuscripts and visual material supplied for this magazine, the publishers and their agents accept no liability for loss or damage which may occur. Un­ solicited manuscripts and visual material will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope. Opinions express­ ed in signed articles are not necessarily those of the editors.

Subscriptions and advertising.

The subscription rate is $19.80 post free within Australia. Cheques should be made payable to Theatre Australia and posted to the publisher’s address.

For advertising information contact the publisher in Melbourne (03) 42 0583 or Sue Manger in Sydney (02) 456 2068.

Theatre Australia is published monthly by Playhouse Press Pty. Ltd., 114 Cremorne Street, Richmond, Victoria 3121. Distributed by subscription and through theatre foyers etc.

by Playhouse Press and to newsagents throughout Australia by Gordon and Gotch (A’asia) Ltd., MELBOURNE SYDNEY. Set

by Abb-Typesetting Pty. Ltd., and printed by Norman J. Field & Co. Pty. Ltd., 114 C rem orne S treet, Richm ond 3121. @ Playhouse Press Pty. Ltd. 1977. All rights reserved except where specified. The cover price is maximum recommended retail price only.

Registered for posting as a periodical — category C.

The passing of The Independent Toni Reed An era of Australian theatre history came to a grinding halt on Wednesday 6 July 1977, when the Independent Theatre was forced to close its doors for the last time.

This theatre which had almost become an institution in Sydney’s North Shore had been fading slowly for the past few years, and it was virtually a matter of time before the final crunch came.

The Independent Theatre, which was established in 1930 has a remarkable and commendable history. The theatrical situation in Australia in which this theatre was nurtured gave it its tough core and ability to survive in the face of almost any crisis. It was in an atmosphere of profitseeking commercial managements, talking pictures and the Great Depression that Doris Fitton founded what was to become one of the most distinguished theatres in Sydney, and for some time Sydney’s only permanent group.

The policy of the theatre from its ad­ vent, was to present the world’s best plays as well as developing Australian talent in the full theatrical sphere of acting, direc­ ting and writing.

From 1930 to 1939 the Independent operated in various city locations, in­ cluding the Conservatorium of Music. In June 1939, Mr Harald Bowden, General Manager of J.C. Williamson, was looking for a new tenant with a well-established reputation to occupy a theatre he had in N orth Sydney. L ater th at year the Independent took over the building despite the qualms among some members who were doubtful about its success in the theatrically unknown North Shore. These fears were soon quelled as it became ob­ vious that the Independent’s reputation had carried them comfortably into the new premises.

Saturday 3 September 1939, was chosen as the opening night. The theatre opened to a crowded house with French Without Tears. At midnight Britain declared war on Germany and the Second World War had begun. The very fact that this new venture on the North Shore was able to withstand the deprivations and hardships of war is proof enough of the grip it had in the Sydney community.

Doris Fitton’s policy of presenting at least one Australian play a year certainly brought results when in 1948 Rusty Bugles

by Sumner Locke-Elliot reached the stage.

Rusty Bugles had been turned down by professional and amateur managements until finally taken up by Doris Fitton where it broke all box office records at the Independent. It was then taken over by commercial management which toured it for three years in Australia and New Zealand.

This was just one example of the way the Independent took the precedent in many new and exciting productions which com­ mercial managements were not initially prepared to back.

Some other extrem ely successful productions include — Mourning Becomes Electra, Black Chiffon, The Visit, Our Town and A Touch o f Silk.

The Independent Theatre began a policy of regular Saturday afternoon children’s matinees in 1945. This has been con­ sistently successful in its introduction and developm ent of young enthusiastic audiences.

The School of Dramatic Art founded in 1933 was an integral part of the theatre which encouraged and trained local talent.

Some ex-students include Reg Livermore, Jill Perryman and Aileen Britton.

The theatre thrived during its heyday of thirty-odd years, but over the last ten years its popularity dropped considerably. Poss­ ible explanations include a maturing audience experimenting with new theatres and the Independent’s dire need of renova­ tion. Due to lack of finance only a core staff was maintained — director, theatre manager, stage manager, receptionist and cleaner. For five people to maintain such a theatre is a massive job.

Doris Fitton, the extraordinary lady, who founded and often carried this theatre devoted herself entirely and unselfishly to it. In 1956, ‘The First Lady of Australian Theatre’ was honoured with an OBE for her service to theatre.

The principal trouble which culminated in the final collapse of the theatre was its dependence on government grants which at best were irregular and uncertain. The Independent seemed to become the ‘Cinderella’ of Sydney theatres.

The In d ep en d en t T h e a tre ’s co n ­ tribution to Australian theatre is im­ measurable as not only did it bridge a gap during the decline of the professional theatre but it also gave the Australian audience good theatre which it would otherwise have gone without.

It was an unknown quantity when it first began but over the years many of its ideas and innovations became the practice of other theatres. It is very sad to see this

passing of an era. One can only hope that something will rise from its ashes.

Alan Schneider, visiting director Barry Eaton For the last few years the Peter Summerton Foundation has imported a theatrical talent to work with local actors and direc­ tors on a workshop basis. Names like Stella Adler, William Gaskill and Michael Blakemore have now been joined by Alan Schneider from the United States. During July Mr Schneider worked with up and coming directors and actors who volun­ teered to be “used” . The vehicle used was the works of Samuel Beckett.

A formidable task.

To say Alan Schneider is well known in the theatre is to underplay his importance.

He has directed over 100 productions in regional theatre, off and on Broadway. He has produced all of Samuel Beckett’s plays as well as most of Pinter and Brecht in the US. He directed Albee’s Who’s Afraid o f Virginia Woolf originally, for which he won the Tony Award; in the same year he won the Obie for Pinter’s The Dumbwaiter and The Collection — the only director to have won both awards in the same year.

At present he is the Director of the drama division of the Julliand School at the Lincoln Centre. His credentials are faultless.

I attended one of his workshops at the NIDA theatre in Sydney and spent three fascinating hours. The man is a pro.. His whole approach to directing and acting is really so simple and logical you wonder why you hadn’t thought of it before. That is part of Alan Schneider’s philosophy.

Often what is so obvious is the hardest to see.

He works with his directors and actors in a very close way; talking with them, often cajoling and dragging the response from them. Making them do the work and reap the benefits. But never in a smart, know-it-all way.

You must respect the man. He talks such obvious sense and does it in an enter­ taining manner. A former actor himself he uses theatricality to great advantage when instructing.

What does he hope to achieve with the three week workshop? I put this to him after the first week.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 3

“ I hope that at the end of three weeks I will leave them with something to think about for future reference. The applica­ tion of that something will take the rest of their lives, just as it takes the rest of mine.

I haven’t achieved ultimate truth which I’m transmitting to the next generation. I am struggling with something that I am sharing with other people and that struggle is constant.”

His main aim is to give them another perspective, another point of view about directing.

There is no such thing as an instant course in directing to Schneider. However he does have a few constants which have come to be known as Schneider’s laws. “ Basically theatre is not a place to reproduce life but to intensify it, or make it more interesting. To do this you add var­ iety in a subtle way. For instance in my productions if an actor gets up from a cer­ tain chair, moves to the Fire and then returns to his seat, I direct him to sit in a different chair.” That’s Schneider’s law on movement.

What about another law?

“Not to let anybody notice that you’re doing these things, I suppose.”

The Peter Summerton Foundation has been exposing young directors to experi­ enced overseas directors for seven years now. What effect has this had? “ It’s very hard to judge what observ­ able effect this has had,” says Jacqueline Kott. “ Just working with these people must have had a good effect eventually.”

This is Alan Schneider’s philosophy, an interchange of ideas. He travels a lot, always observing, but always ready to give of himself.

He is searching for an Australian play to produce in America, having done two in the past — Summer o f the Seventeenth Doll and Alex Buzo’s Tom. A fter his A u stra lia n s tin t A lan Schneider returns to the U.S. to direct Mother Courage for the Acting Company which is a national classical repertory company which tours all over the U.S.A. for forty weeks a year and also plays a month in New York.

Nancye Hayes: “ I keep getting rediscovered . . .”

Barry Eaton Nancye Hayes is a dedicated, talented and hard-working actress. That almost says it all, just like a publicity handout. Life in the theatre at best could be described as up and down, but for Nancye at times it is like being a ping pong ball. “ I keep getting discovered every few years,” she says. “ It all started with the chorus of M y Fair Lady working as a dancer. Then five years later Sweet Charity and the Hollywood type step to stardom and instant fame.”

4 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Did she expect great things after that? “ Well I knew that those kinds of parts weren’t going to come along every time.

Over in America they have people writing especially for individual talents in the musical theatre. Big parts in musicals don’t turn up every day though and even Gwen Verdon didn’t work in a big show for ten years after Charity."

Many people think that Nancye Hayes went into great periods of “resting” after Charity. In reality she worked for various theatre companies around Australia in a great variety of roles. “ I have also been in some long runs,” Nancye recalls. “Pippin, Irene and Same Time Next Year." Her last three major productions ran for twelve months each.

There have been a few slow patches in the past, but there again not a lot was happening at the time.”

Does she feel cheated at all at the way things turned out after Sweet Charity? “ People tend to think you shouldn’t do certain things because they’re not starring roles. I don’t believe in that. I just love working. I find it boring not to work.

Sometimes the smaller roles I’ve done, like in Promises Promises and Pippin have been very rewarding.”

She tries not to think about what might have been. “ If you get bitter then I think you become boring.”

In the slack times Nancye doesn’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring. She goes back to classes and also teaches dancing to children. “ I hit the doldrums sometimes,” she admits, “ but then I give myself a lecture and get myself out again!” At the moment with musicals not exactly plentiful, Nan­ cye is about to be discovered again.

She’s appearing in Sydney at the Nimrod Theatre in Alma de Groen’s new

play Going Home. She plays the part of Molly who is a rather large lady — “ I have to wear lots of padding, and I eat all night,” laughs Nancye. “ I have to diet all day, or I’ll end up like Molly at the end of the season! With my luck, they’ll say, can you be ready to do a dancing role in two weeks — a dancing elephant!”

Playing a straight character role in a theatre like Nimrod is important to Nan­ cye at this stage of her career. She believes actors should never stop learning right through their career. She automatically returns to the musical area to illustrate her point. “ I think it’s important for actors to learn to sing and dance, even if they never use it. The Americans particularly do all the classes all over the place and they are into every facet of theatre. Whereas here, I suppose because the musical sometimes hasn’t been considered a very prestigious thing by many actors, they go — Oh, Musicals!” .

So then she launches into a great disser­ tation about the musical overseas and her eyes light up at the mere thought of doing another one.

Is there another side of Nancye Hayes to be discovered? “ I would like to do a film,” says Nan­ cye, “ but apart from that nothing.”

Her mad sense of humour then takes over. “Well, I don’t play the violin, I don’t think I’d like to do Sweet Charity on ice, become an acrobat or join a circus.

Although if I had to do it for a show I’d say, — I can do that. Then I’d go out and learn it!”

That is Nancye Hayes’ attitude to theatre and to life. Always say you can do it, even if it does get you into strife sometimes.

ARMIDALE CARRY-OVER JAKE NEWBY: “ Now that I am working here for the HVTC many people are ask­ ing what has happened to the Armidale Project, so may I say once and for all that the project was only ever a pilot scheme to last for six months. However there has been a substantial amount of carry-over of activities. The ATYP is mounting a one week season of Othello, at the NIDA theatre in August and providing 14 weeks back-up work for schools in the New England region. The whole project has in my view been a huge success and I look forward to its renewal and growth in 1978.

We shall be producing a full report for the next issue of Theatre Australia."

VISITOR FOR GORKI BILL SHANAHAN, Administrator for the Old Tote: “ We are proud to announce the visit of Liviu Ciulei, arguably one of the world’s top five directors, to the Old Tote to direct The Lower Depths by Gorky at

HVTC FLAG FLIES

the Drama Theatre in November. “ He is an architect, set designer, stage and screen actor and director who emerged in the late 1950’s as one of the influential new wave of European directors, com­ bining a highly physicalised style with an intellectual and emotional ruthlessness.

His major work has been in his native Bucharest with Romania’s famed Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Theatre in a vast range of classicial and contemporary works from around the world, and central to the resurgence of innovative theatre in post­ war Eastern Europe. “ Foreign parts are familiar to Mr Ciulei having guest directed at a number of West German theatres, and work in North America with Leonce and Lena for the Arena Stage Washington in 1974 and for Vancouver Canada. One of his films Forest o f the Hanged (1965) gained him the Best Direction Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival. The Lower Depths runs for seven weeks from 16 November and will be designed by fellow Romanian Jelmuth Sturmer.”

TERENCE CLARKE, Artistic Director HVTC: “The interruption in the activities of the Hunter Valley Theatre Company has thankfully only been short. In the in­ terim the actors have stayed together un­ der separate auspices to present Hiss the Villain at a local theatre restaurant. Now we plan to mount a twenties review under HVTC which will open in Armidale for four days at the Bistro then come to New­ castle for a six and possibly eight week run.

Whilst this is going on we can prepare for a mainstage production to open in late Oc­ tober. Probably this will be presented at our first haunt the Arts/Drama Theatre at the University. With that on, lunchtime and community activities would be a real possibility during the day. Benefit perfor­ mances at various theatres, with more to come at other major theatres throughout A ustralia, have been of enormous significance in getting the company back on the road. Nimrod alone raised $1500 and a local amateur company (Newcastle

The National Institute of Dramatic Art

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Repertory) has raised over $900. The money is being put majorly into ongoing production work, with some towards pay­ ing continuing administration costs and finally to help clear the $16,000 debt.

Never The Twain, an entertainment based ■ on the works of Rudyard Kipling and Ber­ tolt Brecht, compiled by John Willett and directed by Wal Cherry.

“The company will stage works from Australia and overseas in its dedication not to ideologies but to their potential to excite both audiences and the company itself.”

FROM NATIONAL TO INTERNATIONAL

MR LAWSON AND MR RAMSAY ROBIN RAMSAY: “ Perusing a short work by Professor Manning Clark I notic­ ed this description of Henry Lawson: ‘An Australian Merlin — an innocent bush boy and a devil’. Looking at Lawson with this Manning Clark-ism in mind, it gave the man entirely new and colourful dimen­ sions. As I researched him more and more I realised the stunning possibilities of com­ bing Mr Lawson’s writing with Mr Ram­ say’s performing . . . and soon I had the basis of what seemed to be an extraor­ dinary show; being able to keep away from the painful ‘stock whip among the wattle’ syndrome. I researched his trip to London — his droll observations about the English folk, and found very funny pieces in the oddest ways . . . including one poem written by Lawson on a grocery bag to Lyn Curran’s granny.”

Robin Ramsay’s one man Henry Lawson show The Bastard From the Bush opens at the Russell Street Theatre, Melbourne on 29 September.

NEW C O M P A N Y ’S PA C K A G E SHOWS LORRAINE ARCHIBALD, Manager, the Australian Stage Company: “ The Australian Stage Company is a new ven­ ture created by a group of professionals who are taking an innovative approach to the production of exciting new theatre.

“The aim is to create packaged shows designed to meet the requirements of ex­ isting organisations and thus to provide flexibility without the enormous overheads normally involved. Each production will be built around name professionals, and generate its own audience. Yet it is not to be merely ad hoc but provide dramatic vehicles to test and heighten the skills of performers and provide a focal point for the stimulation of further creativity in the Australian theatre.

“The founding members are Robyn Archer, Lorraine Archibald, Wal Cherry, John Gaden, Silver H arris, George Whaley and a business consultant Fergus Simpson. The first season is to be presented by the Sydney Opera House Trust in the Recording Hall (August 22nd27th) and by the Canberra Civic Centre Trust (September 12th-15th). The show is 6 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

AARNE NEEM E, Director, National Theatre, Perth who has a Churchill Fellowship for six months: “ After I resign the artistic directorship of the National Theatre, Perth I will be going to Great Britain in January and I intend to visit as many theatres as I possibly can. The itinerary isn’t finalised, but I will certainly be visiting a good many experimental theatres, and talking to their directors. In addition I am particularly interested in the regional theatres, as I feel their problems are probably more similar to ours. I will be looking into how the companies are run — not only seeing plays, but covering the broad spectrum. And I plan to go to France and Germany and possibly Scan­ dinavia.”

SEEING THE LIGHT DAVID READ has been brought to Australia by the Old Tote assisted by the Australia Council. His major work has been as lighting designer for the R.S.C. including work with Peter Brook, David Jones and Terry Hands. Five World Theatre Seasons at the Aldwych have been his responsibility and occasional lighting design for the Moscow Art Theatre and Actors Studio of New York when in Lon­ don: “ All the lighting designers I have ever known and I include myself say that you cannot teach lighting design. We are probably right but even if it cannot be taught it has to be learned. My function for the next year, then, is to assist the variety of students who arrive at our little hut at Anzac Parade to learn how to design lighting for the theatre.

“There is of course a basic set of rules which can be learned like those which apply to cooking. The art of lighting has something to do with knowing how to bend and twist the rules and so produce a memorable meal rather than something just to eat.

“Cordon Bleu cooking courses rarely produce great chefs and lighting courses don’t produce great lighting designers but both can produce a person with the ability to succeed and the confidence to fail.”

APOLOGY In the July Theatre Australia, "Whispers, Rumours and Facts” , reference was made to the pre-publicity for Taranta! Taranta! in Melbourne. The comment was not intended as a criticism of any individual and if so interpreted is retracted with apologies.

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Forrest Redlich — who wrote the screen­ plays for High Rolling and the forth­ coming Body Count, has been optioned by Hexagon to write a sequel to High Rolling tentatively titled Tow Truckers and has another script likely to be filmed by Bert (Pure S) Deling — tells me it’s his ambi­ tion to write a play for the stage, believing it “to be the form where one can really be oneself.” How about one of the subsidised companies commissioning a play from Forrest? . . . Meanwhile, shan’t be sur­ prised if David Williamson writes a play for a commercial management.

Still on the subject of playwrights: understand from Steve J. Spears that his play King Richard, set in the future and

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workshopped at the recent Playwrights’ Conference, has been taken up by the Old Tote . . . The Nimrod's production of Christian Brothers by Ron Blair, per­ formed by Peter Carroll, is to be pre­ sented by Hoopla in Melbourne next year.

With it will be another Blair play, Perfect Strangers, both plays directed by John Bell. Could be John and wife Anna Volska may even act in the latter two-hander, which would mark only their second stage appearance in Melbourne.

returns John will be directing Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in Canberra.

Rumours that Melbourne’s Last Laugh Theatre Restaurant is brewing up a show that will feature some members of the Hills Family Show from the A.P.G. . . .

Seems as if Nureyev broke some box office records in Melbourne for Michael Edgley International and J C Williamson Produc­ tions . . . Derek Glynne, who was the old JCW company’s rep in London, has had such a large success with the Marcel Marceau tour in association with Michael Lorraine Bayley of the TV serial The Edgley, it’s almost certain he’ll be back — Sullivans may be back on stage again in tandem with Michael — presenting around Christmas time, either in Mel­ other attractions. Eve even heard whispers bourne or Sydney . . . And Andrew of Ronnie Barker perhaps coming out in a MacFarlane (John Sullivan) who comes play . . . Marian Street are following up out of the serial soon, also hopes once their successes in the small cast musical again to appear “ live” . . . See Ken area with Piaf to open their ’78 season; Shorter is in the London cast of the Round perhaps it will follow in the footsteps of House production of Tennessee Williams’ The Red Devil Battery Sign, which has Tarantara! which is just finishing its incredibly successful nationwide tour. transferred to the Phoenix.

They’ll have to find a very distinctive kind of actress to play the lead.

Caroline Gillmer and John O’May, tak­ ing an overseas trip during a break before In the “ Whatever Happened To?” their 20s And All That Jazz tour, had in­ Dept.: When Gary Files played the lead in troductions to producers in New York and London arranged by Kenn Brodziak . . . the MTC’s City Sugar, his name was on 20s co-star John Diedrich will be playing the lips of everyone who saw the play, Dawn Fraser’s husband in the film on the expressing raves for his performance. One swimmer’s life . . . John Tasker spending expected him to be snapped up and given 12 weeks in Papua-New Guinea as con­ some other nice fat roles. But since City sultant to the Papua-New Guinea Dance Sugar not a word about him. Where are and Theatre Company. Immediately he you Gary? What are you doing?

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DANCE & DANCERS, FILMS & FILMING, PLAYS & PLAYERS, DANCE MAGAZINE, AFTER DARK, CINEMA PAPERS, THEATRE AUSTRALIA, GAMBIT THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 7

Tony Sheldon

Musical Thealrein Australia The most popular, and subsequently the most financially successful form of theatre in Australia must be the musical comedy.

Since the beginning of the century this country has produced, or imported, world class presentations of the best (and sometimes best forgotten) musicals from Broadway and the West End. In fact, since 1900, over 300 musicals have been professionally produced in Australia. Do you know how many of those shows were written by Australians? About 40. And that’s the good news! The bad news is that out of those 40 shows, only 13 have been seen in more than one state. And when you find that one of our most popular and fre­ quently revived musicals is Hamlet On Ice — it boggles the mind. So why is it, when we have a perfectly respectable reputation for straight plays, that we can’t turn out a M y Fair Lady type smash hit? If I knew the answer to that question, I'd be writing the show instead of this article, but at least we can cheer ourselves up by looking at what we have accomplished.

1934 was the year that it all started.

After 30 years of imported musical theatre, a gentleman named F.W. Thring (Frank’s father) came into theatrical management, leasing the Princess Theatre in Melbourne and the New Tivoli in Sydney, and presenting the first All Australian musical, Collits Inn starring the one and only Gladys Moncrieff. With a book by T. Stuart Gurr, centred around an actual inn in NSW, and songs mostly by Varney Monk, the production also boasted Australia’s first revolving stage, which contributed much excitement to the show once the cast of 64 learned how to walk on it without falling over. Collits Inn played to packed houses chiefly because of Miss Moncrieff and the talented cast, which in­ cluded Robert Chisholm, George Wallace, Claude Flemming (who also directed) and Marshall Crosby. Flaving set the prece­ dent, F.W. Thring engaged Miss Mon­ crieff for his next project, another Australian musical, The Cedar Tree in 1935. Thring was to present only one more show, Mother o f Pearl starring Alice Delysia, before his death in 1936.

Meanwhile, J.C. Williamson’s, not to be outdone, secured the services of Madge Eliot and Cyril Ritchard and staged Blue Mountains M elody, with a score by Charles Zwar, who had also contributed songs to Collits Inn. Evidently none of these shows was a source of inspiration for any would-be writers, as we were not to see another home grown musical for twenty years.

So we went back to the parade of overseas hits, usually with imported stars . . . Harry Langdon and Robert Coote in Anything Goes (1936), Melton Moore and Katrin Rosselle in I Married An Angel (1937), Australians Don Nicol and Marie LaVarre in Let’s Face It! (1942), Cicely Courtneidge and Thorley Waiters in Under the Counter (1948), Oklahoma! with Robert Reeves and Carolyn Adair (1949), Brigadoon with Ken Cantril and Gwen Overton (1951) and many more.

One J.C.W. production of note — in 1947, Jenny Howard was announced as the star of the new American musical Annie Get Your Gun, but something must have come between the lady and her contract as the role went to a young American girl who had been living in Australia for eight years.

Apart from making Evie Hayes a star, Annie has seen frequent revivals her providing a vehicle for such proven talents as Nancye Hayes, Toni Lamond, Bunny Gibson, Gloria Dawn (twice) and, currently in Adelaide, English actress Dorothy Vernon.

Meanwhile, back at the billabong, dis­ gusted by our non-existent musical theatre scene, a chemist named Eddie Samuels wrote a show called The Highwayman.

With American performer Carl Randall willing to direct the property, Samuels made a tentative deal with JCW, but the Taits stalled for so long that Samuels and Randall booked the recently unemployed Annie Get Your Gun chorus and a cast in­ cluding the popular comedian Charles Norman, and mounted the musical at the King’s Theatre in Melbourne, opening in 1950. The show was unanimously praised by the critics, particularly the Act I Finale — a genuine Aboriginal corroborree — which naturally brought the house down.

EMI thought enough of the score to record an album some years later, leaving us a lasting monument to a very ambitious project. Reedy River was unique in that it had a plot written around the songs, rather than the other way around. After three un­ successful plot lines had been discarded, Dick Diamond constructed a story about a group of shearers on a station in the 1890's after the shearers’ strike. The songs are all traditional and can be replaced at the producer’s whim, with the exception of the title song based on Henry Lawson's words, and Helen Palmer’s “ Ballad of 1891” . The show premiered at Melbourne’s New Theatre in 1953, and was subsequently seen in all capital cities.

Lola Montez by Alan Burke, opened in a “try-out” production at the Union Theatre in Melbourne in 1958. Set in Ballarat in 1855, the story concerns the famous Spanish dancer who comes to town at the peak of its gold fever and captivates the men with her Spider Dance. The com­ bination of Broadway musical type staging and ocker dialogue was a trifle unsettling, but the score, by Peter Benjamin and Peter Stannard, included our first hit showtune, “Saturday Girl”, introduced by Neil Fitz­ patrick, and other songs ranging from pretty dreadful to very good indeed. When the Trust restaged the show at the Elizabethan Theatre in a full scale version, their chief mistake was casting English dancer Mary Preston as Lola, as she was too young for the role and a less than brilliant singer. Lola Montez closed at a loss of £31,581. A scheduled revival at the Independent Theatre in 1972 featuring Sheila Bradley, Bunny Gibson and Peter Carroll might well have given the show a new lease of life had the production even­ tuated.

Although Albert Arlen conceived The Sentimental Bloke in 1950 (George Johnston was to write the original script, but dropped out of the project because of prior commitments), the show was not to reach the stage until 1961, when it was presented for a week at Canberra’s Albert Hall. Sir Frank Tait and John McCallum caught the last performance and arranged THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 9

for a professional production to play a six week season at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre. The six weeks turned into five months, followed by a nine month tour which grossed over £250,000. The Bloke has continued its success over the years, most recently on ABC-TV in 1976, starr­ ing Graeme Blundell, Geraldine Turner and Nancye Hayes, and the Arlen/Lloyd Thompson/Nancy Brown collaboration is probably our most well known musical.

Two more shows have used Australian history as inspiration. The first, The Ballad o f Angel’s Alley (1962), by televi­ sion writer Jeff Underhill and Bruce George, deals with the “push” wars of the 1890’s. A great artistic success in its first production at the Union starring Kevin Colson, Mary Hardy, Reg Livermore and Marion Edward, Angel’s Alley broke no box office records, but frequent revivals in­ dicate the show’s continued popularity. A Rum Do, (originally titled Everybody S n iff Your Neighbour) was the inaugural production at the QTC in 1970, the central character being Governor Lachlan Mac­ quarie. The Rob Inglis-Robin Wood musical has not been seen outside of Queensland to date.

In recent years, the musical theatre in Australia has prospered quietly, due to the efforts of a small group of people who

Madge Elliot in Hold M y Hand (1932) seem undaunted by failure and encouraged by their successes: Don Battye and Peter Pinne have a list of credits as long as your arm, but only a small percentage of the public can claim to

know their work. The Melbourne based writing team enjoyed their first successes in the early Sixties with A Bunch o f Rat­ bags and It Happened in Tanjablanca, a spoof on Hollywood musicals of the AOs. Tanjablanca reappeared some years later in a revised version under the title Red, White and Boogie (featuring Pamela Gib­ bons as Viya Condias, a Brazilian movie star). Their next project, Caroline, con­ ceived by Leila Blake who also played the lead role of Caroline Chisholm, was produced at St. Martins Theatre in 1971 with the assistance of a $40,000 special projects grant from Sir Henry Bolte.

Sweet Fanny Adams, their last full scale musical to date, played a successful season at Melbourne’s Le Chat Noir Theatre Restaurant. Set in the 1930’s and dealing with the rivalry between two madams, Kit­ ty Lang and Fanny Adams, the frequent double entendres and eminently hummable songs provided perfect entertainment for the dining/drinking audience. Bur it seems the Pinne and Battye team are not content to cater to one type of audience; their songs have embraced many styles and periods, making them the most versatile and prolific musical comedy writers in the country.

W illiam O rr, in his capacity as producer/director, has made a notable

Left: Evie Hayes as Annie. Above: Edwin Ride and Rosemary Butler as The Bloke and Doreen.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 11

contribution by commissioning, and sometimes adapting, musicals based on es­ tablished properties. Eleanor Witcombe and John McKellar's Mistress Money, based on The Miser with bits and pieces from four other Moliere comedies, was commissioned as a vehicle for Gordon Chater and Sheila Bradley. The music, by Dot Mendoza, was modern and typically “musical comedy” . Twelve years later, When We Are Married, based on J.B. Priestley’s comedy, was created for the talents of Johnny Lockwood and Jill Perryman, and the songs by Tommy Tycho and Alan Kitson were once again in the modern idiom. I doubt that Bill Orr presented either of these shows with dreams of a ten year season. Both shows were created specifically for the intimate Phillip St. T h e a tre s, and besides, “vehicles” are not designed for immortali­ ty. They are designed for bums on seats.

H o w e v e r, a t le a s t M r O rr h as demonstrated that a show need not be peculiarly Australian to be an Australian musical.

The Nimrod Theatre, since its inception, has enjoyed great success with musical plays, particularly Ron Blair’s Flash Jim

12 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Vaux (1971) with music by Terry Clarke and Charles Colman (half the score based on traditional airs), and Hamlet On Ice by B od dy / B 1ai r / C o o n ey / B on d & O'Donoghue. The Hamlet show is little more than a string of silly Vaudeville gags and pretty tunes with banal lyrics, held together by a terrific idea, but it is produc­ ed frequently and most successfully throughout the country. Flash Jim, on the other hand, is quite serious stuff, with a host of wonderfully seedy characters to enliven the difficult plot, and some haun­ ting songs to boot.

O f course there have been other Australian musicals of note: Kenneth C ook’s Sto ckade, Reg Liverm ore’s Lasseter, the rest of the Arlen-ThompsonBrown collection — including Girl From the Snowy and Marriages Are Made In Heaven — John Howson’s Razzamatazz . . . a plethora of rock operas, such as the ill-fated Nuclear, Hero and Man o f Sorrows . . . like I said, there are 40 of them. And what of the unproduced shows waiting in the wings? Livermore’s Ned K e lly , D avid M itc h e ll’s m u sical biographies of Lily Langtry and Bea

Miles, Tim Gooding’s Rock-Ola? Maybe one of these will travel overseas and become another Chorus Line. When per­ formers such as John O’May, John D iedrich, C o lette M ann and Ron Challinor are forced to write their own shows simply because nobody else will, that could mean we will lose these people to the more creative climates of England and the U.S. And if the Australian musical theatre has produced anything of impor­ tance, our performers must head the list.

So why should they be out here reproduc­ ing Broadway musicals when they can be in New York doing the real thing? The least we can do is try to keep them here with more home grown material. Whether the Music Theatre Lorum earlier this year was just a bunch of people nodding sagely and secretly being thrilled just to be in the same room as Stephen Sondheim, or whether it was a valid and educational con­ ference that will produce tangible results remains to be seen. The musical theatre in Australia must not be dismissed as hopeless; we've come this far — it would be nice to think we've learned something from our mistakes.

DARLING DOWNS INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED EDUCATION TOOWOOMBA — QUEENSLAND The Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education is situated in Toowoomba, a city of 67,000 people set on the eastern edge of the Great Dividing Range at an elevation of 650 metres. It has good primary, secondary and tertiary education facilities, extensive shopping and commercial areas and is within a few hours driving time of Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and various mountain resorts.

S C H O O L OF ARTS D E P A R T M E N T OF P E R FO R M IN G ARTS The Department of Performing Arts at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education offers an exciting three year (full time) programme leading to the award of Diploma of Arts (Creative). Both the Performing and Visual Arts Departments of the Institute aim to give students a basic understanding of all the major art areas.

Students also devote a major part of their study to general electives from the School of Arts or other schools in the Institute. The Performing Arts course provides in-depth study in several areas of theatre skills and specialised functions in both the expressive and technical aspects. The department allows students to concentrate upon either the Theatre Arts or Music. The Theatre Arts course includes acting, theatre design, stage management, technical theatre, directing, and children’s theatre. The Department’s central facility is the 220 seat arts theatre.

STAFF 1978 (THEATRE) Applications are invited from experienced theatre professionals or teachers in the following performing arts areas:

SENIOR LECTURER/LECTURER — TECHNIQUES OF ACTING (Ref. No. 90/63) This appointment will be made to cover all classes in acting and movement from first to third year and applicants should have extensive experience in the professional or semi-professional theatre in addition to the appropriate teaching qualifications. The appointee will also be required to make a substantial contribution to the public performing activities of the department and will be encouraged to accept invitations to work in the Darling Downs region and other places as opportunities arise.

LECTURER — THEATRE DESIGN (Ref. No. 90/64) This appointment will be made to cover the teaching areas of stage and costume design, props making, model making and programme and poster layout for technical students from first to third year. The appointee will also be expected to contribute to the public performing activities of the Department and will be encouraged to accept work in the Darling Downs region and other places as opportunities arise. Some experience in television design would be an advantage.

INSTRUCTOR — STAGE MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES (Ref. No. 90/65) The appointee will assist in the training of all stage management and technical students within the Department and will finally be responsible for the technical staging of all departmental productions. The appointee will also accompany Departmental touring groups where necessary and will be responsible for supervising students in all areas concerned with stage management.

INSTRUCTOR — VOICE AND SPEECH IN THE THEATRE/RADIO (Ref. No. 90/66) The Department proposes to develop in the area of media and the subsequent use of performing arts students in the areas of radio and television and cinema. The appointee will primarily be responsible for instruction in voice in the theatre, however, some experience in radio or television would be an advantage.

Salaries: Senior Lecturer I Senior Lecturer II

$21,123-$22,505 pa $19,290-$20,665 pa

Lecturer I Lecturer II Lecturer III

$16,809-$18,884 pa $14,345-$16,420 pa $12,346-$ 14,162 pa

Instructor Div. I Instructor Div. II

$11,578-$12,669 pa $10,269-$11,312 pa

Applications, including the names of two professional referees, should be submitted by 28th October, 1977 to: The Personnel Officer, Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, Post Office Darling Heights, TOOWOOMBA, OLD. 4350 (2093)

Errol Bray The First National Young Playwrights’ Weekend

Too often the expression and creative ability of young people is patronised or ignored. Unlike young musicians, young writers have few outlets for encour­ agement or training. This is especially true in the field of dramatic writing where subsidised theatres, the film in­ dustry and television give no priority at all to development of young writing talent.

The Shopfront Theatre For Young People, in Carlton, Sydney, has recognised the need and taken a lead by holding the first National Young Playwrights’ Weekend.

One comment during the Weekend was, “This is more significant than the National Playwrights’ Conference, because these are the writers of ten years from now.

There are over 30 writers being encour­ aged here — for a fraction of the cost of the adult conference’’.

In fact, 35 young writers applied with scripts and all were accepted. The Shop­ front Theatre believes that creative activity should not be competitive or elitist. This attitude is fostered in all the work done at the Theatre — no auditions are held, plays grow from the experiences and abilities of those young people who come along. The work of the Theatre is consistently praised for its innovation and strength, just as the plays submitted for the Young Play­ wrights’ Weekend were found to be of very high standard, despite the rejection of any selection procedure. The young writers, aged between 10 and 20, came from all over Australia and stayed at the large house that is part of The Shopfront Theatre complex.

A large variety of sessions run by profes­ sional writers, actors and directors filled all the spaces of the Theatre. The sewing room housed a radio scripting workshop; the members of Woman Action Theatre talked about group creation and non-sexist writing in the design studio; a director and actors held a production workshop in the theatre; Peter Kenna chose to sit out in the sun with his group; Steve Spears yelled and screamed with his young group in the com­ mon room in front of the fire; the dining room was wired for sound to record the sessions held there; Jill Morris was making a video tape of a puppet play on the front lawn; the street theatre group performed a play about rubbish at the Carlton railway 14 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

dramatic leanings and also in sessions that broadened their writing experience. Most of the groups were small but occasional large, all-in sessions were held. Practical work was done also — the street theatre; the puppet play; Margaret Kelly took a group to see some filming after they had read the script; Max Gillies organised a rehearsed reading of a short play; Matthew O'Sullivan and Malcolm Keith led im­ provisations around some of the plays; the radio groups worked with Shan Bensen on prepared tapes with the Theatre’s sound equipment. Tape recorders and video equipment were available all through the Weekend.

Theatre performances also played an important part in the Weekend. On the first night The Shopfront Theatre gave an open rehearsal of The Madhouse — a play written by David Thwaites, one of the young writers attending. Everyone visited Nimrod Theatre to see Going Home by Alma de Groen and discussed the play with Richard Wherrett afterwards. Canberra Children's Theatre performed their groupcreated play Face To Faces. In a group led

by Errol Bray, 16 of the young writers built and performed a short play. On the last night some of the young writers per­ formed The Midgets by Helen Beggs, a 14 year old writer at the Weekend. A video tape of Margaret Kelly’s television play, Pig in a Poke, was played over and over by the TV aficionados. Other performances have already been mentioned — in fact, the idea of performance was a central station and tried to give away garbage to the football crowds; Jim McNeil spent half theme for the Weekend. The professionals stressed that dramatic writing had to be a night on the office typewriter reworking performable first and foremost and the a script with a 17 year old writer. young writers kept asking where they The Weekend was three and a half days could get their work performed or even of intensive learning for the young writers. workshopped. Unfortunately, the rep­ For many of them it was the first time their resentatives from the Old Tote Theatre, writing had been treated with respect and Nimrod Theatre, the Australian Film and admiration — and the boost to their selfTelevision School, the Literature Board confidence was enhanced by the fact that the praise was coming from some of Aus­ and the professional writers themselves could offer little hope for special attention tralia’s top professional theatre people.

The gathering was strongly structured with' being given to young writers’ work in the various subsidised theatres in Sydney. The each session being followed by a break where discussion could be continued infor­ best chance seemed to be with a few youth theatre groups in Melbourne and Sydney mally or other writers could be sought out. who could not offer professional actors for In this way even the meal times became the job. This session which was called important learning situations. Each young “Where to now?” ended the Weekend on a writer was placed in groups suited to their

JIM McNEIL: I’ve known a lot of sur­ prises, not all of them good, but on this National Young Playwrights’ Weekend I have been happily astounded to learn of the talent being encouraged in youngsters a t T h e S h o p f r o n t T h e a t r e fo r Young People.

Invited to attend as Resident Play­ wright, I was flattered but cynical upon learning that I was to read and discuss plays written by ten-year old children and teenagers. My pleasant surprise was on the way, my cynicism on the way out.

I read a play by a seventeen-year old girl — her first attempt — that was every bit as good as, if not superior to, some plays I’ve seen performed in major theatres. I read a play by a ten-year old boy that had the grown-ups rolling about in hysterics; only four pages of it, but in those pages showing such imaginative talent as to convince me I hadn't been wrong in attending.

One of the best and most surprising weekends I have ever known, that’s the only way to describe the last few days. And it is wonderful to know that I have been able to assist and advise some of Aus­ tralia's best coming playwrights.

For that is what these kids are. And I sincerely hope that the dedication of Errol Bray, Garry Fry and Gabrielle Dalton, and the children themselves, will not go un­ noticed or unassisted in the future.

Long live The Shopfront Theatre for Young People!

slightly depressing note for it became clear just how little was being done in Australia to help young drama writers.

One of the most gratifying aspects of the Weekend was that the professional writers without exception treated the young writers with respect and sensitivity and many felt that they themselves had experi­ enced an important event in their own development. Jim McNeil lived in with the young writers as resident professional and was a tower of encouragement and inspira­ tion. He was constantly reading scripts, editing, advising. Although each profes­ sional had been given a couple of scripts to read most insisted on reading every play they could get hold of. Plays circulated amongst the young writers too and this created a very special atmosphere of close­ ness and understanding for everyone had a precious piece of work under scrutiny. The other writers who attended as “tutors” were: Margaret Kelly, Peter Kenna, Steve Spears, Alex Buzo, Shan Bensen, Jill Morris, Berwyn Lewis, Richard Brad­ shaw, Harold Landa, John Summons, and members of Woman Action Theatre. The directors and actors were: Matthew O’Sullivan, Max Gillies, Julie Dawson, Malcolm Keith, James Elliott and Chris Haywood.

It was exciting to find close relation­ ships forming between the senior writers and their young counterparts. Jim McNeil claims he has found a girl who “ writes McNeil as well as McNeil” . Peter Kenna has asked the Theatre to pass on to him scripts by two young writers whose work he particularly liked. Matthew O’Sullivan has offered to do production notes on some scripts by a young Queenslander. Mar­ garet Kelly was there for the whole three days and is now seeking out production possibilities for a few scripts. The exuber­ ance of both Steve Spears and Jill Morris made them particularly popular with the younger kids and Alex Buzo must have been doing lots right — he could only take one session but it lasted a mammoth two and a half hours. In fact, at the risk of seeming sentimental, the gathering was generally agreed to be the warmest and friendliest group of its kind anyone there had experienced. The readiness of the pro­ fessionals to accept and respect the kids

MARGARET KELLY: When I was first asked to volunteer to talk about television writing at a Young Playwrights’ Weekend I did so with a feeling of nobility. I was giv­ ing up my time to talk to a bunch of kids.

Now at the end of the Weekend my feelings have changed drastically. I have learnt so much this weekend about my own writing! I have also learnt that there's a whole crop of young writers around who in a few years will probably be taking my job.

My only complaint about the weekend is that it didn’t last long enough. Next time make it longer. And install more toilets or serve less coffee. allowed an atmosphere of strong affection and co-operation to develop.

On the practical side — the Literature Board of the Australia Council gave The Shopfront Theatre a grant of $1,955 to run the Weekend. This was to cover profes­ sional fees, food, fares for young writers where needed, administration costs and etcs.. Many of the professionals were able to offer their services free. The only charge to the young writers was a contribution of $5 towards food. The air fares of the South Australians were paid by their Education Department.

Apart from the continuing contact some of the senior writers have arranged with the kids a number of other follow-up ideas came out of the Weekend. The Shopfront Theatre plans to produce two of the plays,

by Sydney writers so that they can be involved in the production process. The whole Sydney contingent has agreed to meet once a month for discussions, and some will be coming to the Theatre on a weekly basis. The Theatre has offered to act as a clearing house for future scripts and some of the professionals will help find outlets for the plays. The Theatre is also planning to publish a collection of the plays from the Weekend in magazine for­ mat and this will be promoted through youth theatres and schools. The Theatre's magazine, Roles, regularly publishes short plays by kids and is another outlet for writers. Video tapes and sound tapes of sessions held at the Weekend will soon be available for interested groups to pur­ chase at cost price. Naturally, we hope that the success of this Weekend will make

it an annual event and the Theatre intends to seek funds for a 1978 Weekend.

Perhaps the full impact of this gather­ ing will not be felt for some years, but its immediate value to the young writers themselves was unmistakable. All young people need encouragement and respect for their creative endeavours, and the National Young Playwrights’ Weekend certainly gave this. It was a great success and, hopefully, a great beginning.

ANTHONY FUNNELL, 12, Brisbane: I think this weekend was vital to my writing career, because we discussed our plays with professional writers. But I think it is a big shame that there are not more of these sort of groups.

JULIANNE WATTS, 17, Adelaide: The National Young Playwrights’ Weekend has succeeded in filling a gap previously ignored by the majority of adults. For once young writers are taken seriously and given honest criticism. To work with the people we have worked with is mindblowing. The stimulation and enthusiasm is astounding. No one turns from you when you present a script. All the professional writers have been eager to read and discuss any written work. This way all the young writers here can be shown faults in their writing and how to avoid traps in the future. It’s about time young Australian writers were given a chance. We have been recognised and it’ll be our names you’ll be reading on the credits in the future.

JOHN TURNBULL, 17, Sydney: The Young Playwrights’ Weekend made me aware of the difficulties confronting young Australian playwrights in getting their plays produced and even acknowledged by the theatres around Australia. Apart from the general encouragement, each young playwright was given the opportunity to work with professionals in their particular field of interest. Also we were given the chance to work with professionals in other media related to theatre.

My only real complaint was the lack of facilities, but the weekend showed the need for such groups as The Shopfront Theatre.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 15

David Marr

Stories about Sweeney put him at the cen­ tre of a running vaudeville: Sweeney’s days at the races, Sweeney’s parties, Sweeney the Coca Cola bottler of the North down­ ing his Dom Perignon, Sweeney the only man alive to tip the headwaiter at Che­ quers as he's thrown out, Sweeney the friend and co-gallant of Killen, Sweeney the poet pursuing the doom-licked Anne Sexton. A big dollar man (she wrote) a monopoly player, Who bought up Boardwalk with a ten or a five To see the pallid bell boy smile, or please

16 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Lord. Lord. How you leave off. How you eat up men Leave them walking on the gummy pavements, Sucking in the tamed-up, used-up air Fearing death and what death invents.

Sweeney from nine to five with a carnation In his button hole introducing the rider To the cabby; Sweeney who flies through the bookshop. . .

The maid who supplied non allergic He’s got a Fine head with flaxen grey Pillows. Unlike my father, hair drawn back from a big forehead, and His mouth a liturgy a face that bullies and charms in seductive Of praise. Like a gangster, his wallet a alternation. It’s somehow a Queensland limerick. face — a bit like Jack Egerton’s, with something of Bjelke Petersen in it: tough Sweeney who brought up himself, gone but fine-edged.

Was his amorous mother at nine, gone Was his soused up father at 17.

He arrived for the interview in a three But talkative Sweeney at 45 lives on. piece suit of fine houndstooth check, a

striped tie and blood-red carnation. He was determined to organise a bit of calm around himself but attempts to get away from the vaudeville Sweeney were doom­ ed. Within minutes of ordering drinks an old friend on the piss was across the bar, “Just to shake your hand Brian.” “ A swashbuckling m an,” said the stranger to me with effort at sincerity and emphasis. “The king of bloody Brisbane.”

Brian Sweeney and theatre administra­ tion came together with Twelfth Night Theatre in Brisbane. He was one of the consortium of businessmen Joan Whalley got together to back the new project in 1965. He joined its board, raised money, and sunk a lot of his own money into it — money principally from the Kirks Cordials fortune of the Sweeney family. “ I’m just a high class soft drink salesman,” he says. And his business lines include the Kirks brand, and Coca Cola whose franchise he has to bottle and sell between Rockhampton and Lismore. It isn’t the whole of the North, but it’s enough.

At the Melbourne Cup in 1974 Whitlam asked Sweeney if he’d care to join the Australia Council and Sweeney — who says he’s never been a member of a political party, and votes how it suits him — took his place on the Council in July 1975. In July this year Fraser appointed him Chairman of the Theatre Board to succeed John Mostyn.

Sweeney doesn’t carry any of Mostyn’s beliefs that theatre must necessarily aim for some sort of commercial viability. “ Losses,” he said rather grandly, “are sub­ sidies when you reverse them.” “ I’m committed to excellence, of course I am. I’m a hierarchical sort of person: I believe some people have more talent than others, and finding talent is like finding oil — finding a rare creature. “ But I’m committed to access. We must have amateurs and we must be sensitive to the needs of small companies. I suppose that is only resolved with more money. But we depend on the big professional com­ panies. To a man, actors want to get to the Old Tote, the Nimrod, the MTC.” Sweeney may not be very powerful. His appointment is for two years rather than the usual four; he doesn’t know a hell of a lot in detail about theatre in Australia; and he and Jean Battersby were once close but observers round the Australia Council's headquarters in North Sydney say that some coolness has set in between them lately.

That’s the reverse of the normal order of things: the first impression he gives is often of a pompous man coming on a bit strong.

It’s a reaction many reverse on closer ac­ quaintance; Sweeney inspires loyalty in some, but is not without enemies. “ I don’t know how many, I’ve got, but it must be plenty. If you haven’t got enemies you don’t deserve friends.”

Jim Killen is one friend, an ornament at many Sweeney p a rtie s at the old Queensland house on stumps they live in at Hamilton. There’s lots of Mr-Ministering going on among the guests when Killen

calls. Asked about other political friends there’s a sudden gruffness: “ I know a lot of politicians, they’re pretty interesting fellas too.”

Sweeney has a reputation for being able to get money out of private business to back the arts. In the present arts political atmosphere it’s the best claim a contender for this sort of office can make. He began with the Twelfth Night Theatre appeal ($500,000) and says he’s still at it, but won’t name sums or companies that he’s recently gouged money out of. “ I’ve been managing to get a few bucks from here and there. I’ve had some success and I’m work­ ing on a few.”

The only qualification for the job Sweeney claims for himself is to be “a con­ sumer” of theatre. Cyril Richard in Blythe Spirit was one of the great theatre ex­ periences for him. Others on his short list are the first production of Virginia Woolf in New York with Uta Hagen as Martha, Nancye Hayes (“ at her best”) playing Cabaret in Perth, Alan Edwards in Hadrian VII and a night of “incredible empathy” between an Irish audience and Irish cast when he took his family to the Abbey to see The Plough and the Stars. “ I’m not presuming to tell the board what to do,” said Sweeney going over his plans, “ But it would be a good thing for the Australian public if there was more touring — the MTC to Brisbane say, and the Tote to Adelaide and Perth. I’d like to see the companies come along to the Theatre Board with positive requests for funds for touring to capital cities.”

He doesn’t know if old rumours of theatre companies working through the Council to keep interstate rivals out of town, are true or not. If true, he says, they sadden him. There’s no need for it: they aren’t going to ruin each other’s audiences.

There’s no reason, he argues, that a good production in Melbourne shouldn’t be seen in Adelaide and Sydney. And if the Elizabethan Trust has been looking after these tours in the past, then that’s only a fo rm a l d if f ic u lty to h is p la n s . “ Negotiations between the Council and the Trust are proceeding.”

Sweeney casts himself as a nationalist and optimist. Australian playwriting he finds has a documentary dryness about it at the moment, but he admires Peter Kenna (“that’s a good play of his, Hard God") and David Williamson. “ Williamson is the one with the big chance — and obviously I ’m talking about him as a world playwright, obviously we can’t talk in the narrow sense. He’s got to succeed in the English speaking world, in the world.”

Sweeney is also a Christian, a race horse owner, a raconteur and (for private dis­ tribution only) poet. “ I didn’t make it as a creative person, and that’s destroying. I tried a lot many years ago; but I didn’t make it. There are more aspiring poets in this country than race horses.”

He’s the sort who reads three or four books at a time, “always reading Chardin” and when we spoke was also taking in Margaret Meade (“ again”), Philip Larkin and Longford’s Years o f the Sword. He

dislikes Shaw and is devoted to T.S. Eliot.

Eliot, he says, is the only genius the Americans have produced. He’s up there in Sweeney’s galaxy with Goethe and Mozart. And talking of Eliot reminds Sweeney of an anecdote about a namesake of his, a professor at Harvard, who was visiting London and asked Eliot what theatre he should see while he was there.

Should he see Look Back in Anger? “ My company published that,” replied Eliot sharply. “ But not with my agreement. If I were you I’d go and see a play by a little known Australian playwright called The Sum m er o f the Seventeenth D oll."

Sweeney wonders, in an aside to the aside, if he ever passed the endorsement on to Lawler.

Oddly, for this collector of people, he’s not met Lawler. It won't be long. He’s said never to forget a name or face, can tell people years later the place and date they first met. And it’s at the track he makes great discoveries: very “warm people” the racing crowd.

There’s a sudden alertness of purpose in his voice as he talks about the track. “The trouble is the people in the arts don’t get mixed up with the gamblers, and vice versa.

The track is battling for an audience.

We’re down from three percent to one per­ cent, and I’d say even the theatre is better than one percent. Mind you, we’re much more sure of our subsidy because people keep on betting. But they’re alike racing and theatre: gimmicks don’t work. People come to see the great event, to see great horses and great stars.”

In Sydney Tommy Smith is training a yearling for him, a horse that “ couldn’t be better bred” by Onsidium out of Le Filou He’s called it March to Glory.

It’s said that if Sweeney hears about someone who appeals to him he’ll set out to find them. He read Anne Sexton’s work and made it his business to find her. She became more than an addition to his enor­ mous acquaintance; became, he says, “ something different” before her suicide last year.

“She was a good pal of mine. She was so honest, the honesty of the woman and the tragedy. She was right to the bone, writing things before anyone was saying them.

And she had a great devotion to God. She said, ‘The flesh does not lie.’ But I say, ‘There are no answers in the flesh.’ ” Sweeney is a man who speaks his mind, not so much wearing his heart on his sleeve as his brains all over his waistcoat. He’s anxious not to be thought a fool, not to be found superficial, but this lofty freewheel­ ing kind of talk is going to expose the man to some bitchy ridicule around the Australia Council. He has enthusiasms, he reveals himself, he doesn’t fit the categories. That’s not what they like at the Council.

He has an old saying that its good to “let the head out for a fly” . A couple of years with the Theatre Board should give him every chance for that. But if things don’t go so well there’s another Sweeney saying for the Chairman to fall back on: “ I don’t give a fuck what people think of me.”

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 17

Australian Regional Theatre Part One

The Hunter Valley Theatre Company

How and Why Tony Trench The history of the formation of the Hunter Valley Theatre Company can be told fairly

18 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

simply — but a straight recounting of the lack of funds (show me a theatre company facts gives little indication of the problems which has enough money). encountered, any one of which could have In 1975 Anthony King, Senior Lecturer resulted in the project being still-born. in the Department of Adult Education at The idea was the brain-child of two staff Sydney University, was seconded to the members of the Arts Council of Australia project, and he was able to spend a great (NSW Division) — John Tasker, then the deal more time in Newcastle than we were.

Council’s Artistic Advisor; and myself, the Very soon he had successfully negotiated Administrator. The Executive Committee with the University for the use of their approved our plans to investigate the for­ Arts/Drama Theatre, and with the Area mation of a professional regional theatre Office of the Department of Education for company somewhere in NSW, and the rest a disused High School building as office, was up to us. We looked at two areas — rehearsal and workshop space, both rentOrange, in the Central West, where a Civic free. And with financial backing from the Theatre was being built; and Newcastle in Coal Board and other local interests, and the Hunter Valley, the State’s second the appointment of Terence Clarke as largest city. The deciding factor in favour Artistic Director, the company opened its of Newcastle was the involvement in the doors to the public in March 1976 with project, early in 1974, of Mr Bernard John Romeril's The Floating World.

Hartnell, then the Chairman of the Joint All fairly straightforward, so where were Coal Board. the problems?

During the ensuing two years we Firstly, the matter of finding a perma­ proceeded in a very stop/start fashion nent home for the company was not resolv­ towards our goal, making frequent trips ed by Tony King’s negotiations with the between Sydney and Newcastle, talking to university — it represented a stop-gap interested people, and generally trying to arrangement which led to problems forcing involve as many members of the com­ the company ultimately to quit the theatre munity as possible. The two major hurdles at the end of the first season. The univer­ which we had to overcome were the lack of sity required the use of the building for lec­ a suitable theatre in Newcastle, and the tures during the day, frequently resulting

in the company being unable to gain ad­ mittance for dress rehearsals and set-ups.

The decision to use the theatre was a com­ promise because we realised from the out­ set that the location of the campus on the outskirts of Newcastle would be a deterrent to people w ithout private transport. In addition, we considered that there would be a resistance among many people to going to a campus theatre.

However, in view of the delays that had oc­ curred up to that time, we considered that it would be better to accept the university’s offer, rather than let the whole project run out of steam.

During our search for a suitable venue one thing became very apparent — grimy, polluted, industrialised Newcastle has some beautiful old buildings. And with the converted stables at the old Nimrod in mind we had high hopes that at least one of these old buildings would be available, and suitable. But this was not the case.

One building which did come up for con­ sideration led to the only major difference of opinion between the Arts Council and Joint Coal Board interests on the steering committee. The Hunter Theatre had, for many years, been the only venue in New­ castle for touring commercial shows. A cold, 900-seater barn, it was never much loved by Novocastrians, and as soon as the Civic Theatre was equipped by the City Council for live presentations the Hunter fell into virtual disuse, apart from oc­ casional film screenings. It was offered for sale and the Coal Board representatives, their eyes lighting on a “ Proper Theatre” , were keen to buy. We vigorously opposed such a move, having visions of the com­ pany being saddled with a jerrybuilt barn in a run-down suburb. The result was that the Coal Board did not buy the building, but the episode produced a stalemate between the two components of the com­ mittee which led to the company missing out on a warehouse in the city centre which would have been ideal for conversion. It is ironic that the company leased the Hunter Theatre for its 1977 season, and en­ countered all the problems we had fore­ seen. Now, in mid-1977, the problem of a permanent performing space still exists.

Funding was another problem in the for­ mation period. Lulled into a sense of security by the Chairman’s reassurance that business interests in Newcastle would come good with funds once our other es­ tablishment problems were solved, we found in late 1975 that the economic climate had changed dramatically from early 1974. No longer were large commer­ cial interests prepared to make significant contributions to the HVTC. NBN Channel 3, the commercial radio stations and the local newspapers were prepared to give assistance in kind, and happily both State and Federal government agencies made special allocations to the company early in its existence. But the Newcastle City Council, which could reasonably have been expected to help in some way, gave neither financial assistance, nor help with a building, in spite of being the largest landholders in Newcastle.

The other organisation which could have been expected to give assistance — morally if not financially — was the project’s in­ stigator, the Arts Council of NSW. Although initial approval was given for John Tasker and I to carry out our in­ vestigations, there was a singular lack of enthusiasm from many members, while others were actively opposed to it. This was particularly depressing in view of the fact that the Arts Council had combined with the Sydney Opera House Trust to produce a report Decentalizing the Perfor­ ming Arts in N S W which advocated that the State could support six such theatre companies in areas outside Sydney. In ad­ dition it was envisaged that the Hunter Valley Theatre Company (so named because it was designed to serve the whole region, not Newcastle alone) would take over a part of the Arts Council’s role in that area. But the company has not toured outside Newcastle since its first produc­ tion, except to schools and clubs.

regional theatre it will have to be backed by substantial funding; for, ironically, theatre outside capital cities costs more.

There are no prerequisites for actors in the regions, no fat commercial fees, voice overs, TV and radio work — which in effect subsidise low awards, and enable actors, in turn, to subsidise companies in their first difficult years. The smaller regional populations mean fewer potential theatre-goers and hence less money from box-office sales, particularly in the initial years. Local councils, unlike their English and European counterparts, do not yet accept a responsibility for the performing arts (though Q Theatre has made some headway with their local councils, and we have a toe in the door); they must even­ tually accept this along with their responsi­ bility for libraries, art galleries, sports, parks, and so on, if only for the reason that of the $250,000 turnover (including federal and state grants), 95% or more remains in the region, generates jobs, and helps stimulate local business. Convincing the councils of this will be a slow process, however.

We are grateful for grants from the Australia Council (1977: $22,000) and the NSW Division of Cultural Activities ($20,000) which seem generous for a com­ pany in its second year. Unfortunately, our SHOESTRING NEWCASTLE is the budgeting for the year was very tight and telegraphic address of the Hunter Valley made no allowance for a flop; it also Theatre Company which is, at the time of assumed a rent-free performance-space in writing, in recess until 14 August. By the town which we still have not found. Last time this article appears its future should year we were 10 km out of town on the un­ be clearer, and I hope we shall be in iversity campus; without the university’s production again. generous support we could never have Our troubles spring from inadequate started. We were faced in January with the funding and lack of a suitable theatre or choice of leasing the Hunter Theatre, performance space; some would add a which seats almost 1000, or delaying a third cause, the wrong artistic policy; start until suitable premises were found. others a fourth, the wrong structure for a We decided to take a risk with the Hunter regional professional theatre company (Q in order to keep faith with our 1200 Theatre in the Western Suburbs of Sydney members (annual fee: $10) and to fulfil the is successfully running as a co-operative). terms of our grants.

It is impossible in 1977 to run a regional It was a wildly uneconomic move, bring­ professional theatre company on a shoestr­ ing greatly increased costs in all areas of ing. That is a fact that must be faced by production and front of house; and to our anyone trying to start one up, and by the dismay our first play, What The Butler major funding bodies whose policies in­ Saw, drew less than last year’s average clude — in the words of the Australia audience. Our second show, a double bill Council’s Theatre Board drama policy — of The Les Darcy Show and The Roy ‘the progressive development of regionally Murphy Show under the title Sporting based drama companies’. If this is to be Double, toured local clubs in Newcastle more than a well-intended gesture to and Maitland and starred local footballer,

Frayed Shoestring Terence Clarke, Artistic Director

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

19

entertainer, and singer John Cootes.

Despite an excellent production by guest director John Tasker, excellent reviews (‘as good a night in the theatre as you would find anywhere’ said Brian Hoad in The Bulletin), the best publicity we had had, and what seemed to me the happy conjunction of Newcastle's three main preoccupations — sport, TV, and the clubs — it did disastrous business, playing to fewer than 750 people over four weeks. We struck trouble with the threat of a legal injunction from a member of the Darcy family, and there is no doubt that that did us a lot of harm. Together our first two productions lost $22,000; by the time we came to Hamlet the writing was on the wall, for it could only have made a profit with an audience of 7000 or more. And so we had to lay off all the Company after Hamlet closed, leaving only me and my secretary.

Nine of the former employees decided to stay in Newcastle and present theatre restaurant; they had to go on the dole for four weeks while rehearsing, and it is good to report that the season of eleven per­ formances was virtually booked out before opening. Their action stems from their considerable faith in both the idea of regional theatre and the region itself, and has gone some way to conteracting a wide­ spread feeling that HVTC has been im­ posed on the region by a Sydney en­ trepreneur (the Arts Council, which regret­ tably went bankrupt soon after we started), Sydney money, a Sydney artistic director, and Sydney actors — although we have provided twenty-four roles for local actors in less than eighteen months.

Our present crisis is the second in less than a year. In the gloom that has shroud­ ed the company recently there has been much talk of failure. But the attendance figures for our first year suggest a marked success, if we compare our achievement with that of other companies. When the Old Tote opened in 1963 it was the first professional theatre company in NSW, presenting four plays to an average audience of just over 6000; the average audience for our six mainstage productions last year was 3200 — more than half that of the Tote’s in a city one tenth the size of Sydney. Their third production was Hamlet, which we have just presented: they played to about 6000, we to almost 5000. These figures do not show us to dis­ advantage yet bear in mind that at that stage the Tote did not have to find money for director, designer, stage-management, front-of-house, set construction, admin­ istration, office overheads, or rent — all of which were provided by staff and students of NIDA or by the UNSW. We have had to pay all of these and, by a determination of the board, at least award wages to full­ tim e em ployees (but no overtim e: ridiculously hard worked employees still subsidise us). The com parison with Nimrod’s first year is even more sur­ prising: They played seven shows to a total of about 17,5000; we six to over 19,000 (i.e. their average was about 2,500 to our 3,200). It is hard to use the word failure of 20 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

such attendances.

Of the ten mainstage plays we have presented, six have been Australian, including the world premiere of A Happy and Holy Occasion by local writer John O'Donoghue (to be published in Theatre Australia). One of the jobs of a regional company is to reflect the life of the region, and O’Donoghue’s play did this superbly.

It was our most successful straight play last year. We were to have presented in June the premiere of Donoghue’s most recent play, The Breakwater, but our recess has stymied that. We hope to premiere it before too long.

We do not only present mainstage productions but have a com m unity program which covers lunchtime theatre, schools work, workshops for local groups, for prisons, for the university, for the College of Advanced Education, and for young people; we are a regional drama resource centre: acting classes, pro­ fessional assistance to local groups, an in­ efficient play reading service, and so on. I have no doubt that this less publicised work is our most important contribution and raison d’etre. Last term Community Director Michael Caulfield devised, directed, composed music for, and per­ formed in Pantechnicon and Kodachrome Ketchup, two anthologies of poetry and music which played to more than 6,500 pupils and were extraordinarily well received wherever they went.

It is not easy to find actors who are prepared to go out of circulation for six or nine months, and perform unseen by most producers, directors, and casting agencies.

We have been lucky indeed to have people of the calibre of Robert Alexander, Tony Sheldon and Kerry Walker (who all spent 1976 in Newcastle) and, this year, Alan Becher and Pat Bishop. Pat came to us as guest artist for one show but stayed on, and will have been with us for over six months by the time she leaves. There is still abroad in Newcastle something of the cultural cringe that marked all Australia ten or twenty years ago — ‘if you were any good you wouldn’t be here’; the presence of such an excellent and well-known actor as Pat, and her commitment to the company (both Pat and Alan have stayed on for the threatre restaurant show) have helped to reduce that feeling.

As I write I do not know when we shall resume, or indeed if we shall. It has been suggested that we have grown too quickly; we had sixteen employees for most of this year: and with the double load of mainstage and community work sixteen never felt like too many — on the contrary, the very long hours most have had to work is very worrying. It seems likely that an ex­ perienced administrator will join us short­ ly; we should have had one from the outset, but administrators do not lie thick on the ground. Without a healthy injection of money both to clear our debts (about $16,000, plus more to pay out broken con­ tracts if we can) and to enable us to get another production underway, our future is uncertain. Nimrod’s benefit of Much Ado on 24 July, Newcastle Repertory’s of

The Good Doctor on 26 July, and others promised but not yet definite, are ex­ ceedingly generous: the practical support and boost to flagging morale are most warmly appreciated, coming as they do from groups who could well use the money themselves. Without more money, without a big brother to lean on, it is likely that we will stagger from crisis to crisis; without premises it is doubtful if we can do anything. The City Council has approved our use at low rental of part of the old city hall, but fire restrictions may stop that.

Somewhere there must be a rough space for rough theatre, a warehouse or factory near the centre of town somewhere awaiting conversion to a playing area for about 200 people. Although HVTC is not yet Newcastle, sufficient Novocastrians want us to stay to justify our existence: th ere has been alm o st daily c o r­ respondence in the excellent Newcastle Morning Herald; the media generally are on side with particular support from the local ABC and from Channel 3; four com­ mittees of members are working hard on fund-raising, premises, memberships, and articles; members have been delivering our mail to cut costs and helping out in the office; there is a reluctance to let the actors go or to see us die. I think we will just make it, but it won’t be easy.

The Riverina Trucking Company

Terry O’Connell, Artistic Director The Riverina Trucking Company opened in August 1976 with Ron Blair and Michael Boddy’s Hamlet on lee. The production was staged with a budget of $500 raised from within the company.

Owing to the success of this production it was decided to stage a season of Robert Patrick's Kennedy’s Children. Despite dire predictions patrons were turned away from full houses at each performance.

Im m ediately following K enn ed y’s Children the company presented Soozuu an outdoor entertainment for children which was presented free of charge throughout the summer. This production,

devised by the company and directed by Gordon Beattie was presented in Wagga’s parks and gardens and also toured south coast beach resorts.

Early in 1977 it was decided a perma­ nent home was needed for the Trucking Company, Riverina College of Advanced Education kindly leased to the company, at token rental, an abandoned arts students' workshop on their south campus.

This area was, in the early months of 1977, converted into the intimate theatre where the company now presents its seasons. The $2000 needed for the con­ version was raised by public appeal.

The theatre opened with the Australian premiere of Jim Wann and Bland Simp­ son’s musical D iam ond Studs. The production played to 101% capacity con­ cluding with an 11.30 pm Sunday per­ formance at which 150 patrons attended.

(The theatre seats 108).

Diamond Studs was followed by a season of David W illiam son’s The Removalists and late night performances of the company-devised The People Show.

For the remainder of 1977 the company will present seasons of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, companydevised local history musical Ructions in the Riverina and (by arrangement with Superstar Ventures Ltd., London) Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar. The company will also present group-devised late night entertainment and special activities. The company’s artistic director is Terry O’Connell (courtesy Aus­ tralia Council) and the company’s designer is Fred Lynn (courtesy N.S.W. Division Cultural Activities).

Firm moves are now being made to turn the company into a small professional regional theatre company, opening as such in early 1978. The company’s policy will be to bring the theatre experience to the widest number of Riverina citizens possi­ ble. It will continue to present seasons in its own theatre as well as touring the Riverina regularly and presenting special community activities. The company will concentrate on presenting original groupdevised work, colourful interpretations of classical plays and contemporary Aus­ tralian work. It is envisaged that apart from the professional artists employed the company will also encourage the involve­ ment and participation of local artists.

This will enable larger cast plays to be per­ formed and keep the community spirit and image of the Trucking Company alive.

Solid financial support is now being gained for the project and it is hoped that govern­ ment funding bodies will contribute to the relevantly small amount needed to sub­ sidise this exciting project.

The company already possesses its own theatre, a growing following, a firm policy and its own artistic director and designer.

We believe that our plans will work because of the solid base they now possess, to make the Riverina Trucking Company a unique and exciting professional, regional company.

Having mobilised Wagga, the R.iverina Trucking Company proceed to entertain it.

With a production every six weeks, they truck their audience seats from the local picture theatre, and then truck them back again. On the last night of their smash hit musical Diamond Studs they turned away 120 people from their one hundred seat theatre, and they have auditioned sixty for their next production Much Ado about Nothing. “Country people will stay away from Shakespeare in droves” they are be­ ing told; but then they were told that about Kennedy’s Children, Hamlet on Ice and the Removalists too. Instead of collapsing in a heap, as they might have been ex­ pected to do, the Riverina Trucking Com­ pany struggle joyfully on, trucking their lights from the school hall to their theatre and back again for each production, and filling their hired seats with eager ticket buyers.

Much Ado is going on with a budget of $1,000, the profits from The Removalists and The People Show Number One. After Much Ado comes Ructions in the Riverina (an historical musical, which they are devising themselves), and Mates. Then they will move from their off-the-beatentrack space in the Riverina C.A.E. to a mausoleum in the central city to round off the year with a money-making, (and, I have no doubt, theatrically successful), ex­ travaganza, Jesus Christ Superstar. Their director, Terry O'Connell, expects that by the end of the year, their profits will have

paid for lights and other essential equip­ ment that they have improvised till now.

A company which expects to make a profit at the box office is rare enough. This one, with two professional staff — Terry O'Connell, the director, and the designer, Fred Lynn — cannot cope with the com­ munity demands for its services. It has had one performance of its ‘unsaleable’ Shake­ speare productions bought out six weeks in advance by an association of cultural clubs. It has been asked to do three seasons in Leagues Clubs with the return guaran­ teed by the club managements. They are planning a tent theatre for the Wagga Agricultural Show. This is a truly popular theatre, and one with artistic integrity. I have seen no amateur self-indulgence in any Trucking Company production. Their Removalists was a sound and workman­ like production, and in my 1977 hierarchy of delightful evenings at the theatre, Dia­ mond Studs ranks above Travesties at the Nimrod, with The People Show Number One fighting for first place with the Nimrod's Much Ado. By the end of this year, the Company will have done eleven productions in eigh­ teen months. Seven of those will be Aus­ tralian plays; four devised by the company themselves. They embark on only plays that they really want to do, and that means a policy of writing one out of three them­ selves. While there may be some things that they decide not to try in Wagga just yet, they don’t intend to run after cheap successes. Terry O'Connell says flippantly that if they staged Doctor-in-Love-type English farces, they could fill the centralcity mausoleum all year round, (If that is true, why didn't JCW’s move to Wagga?).

He refuses to allow himself to believe that being based in a country town must limit their repertoire. Those wicked words in Coralie Landsdowne Says No might have meant that some Wagga-ites will never see a .Trucking Company production, but then, as he points out, look at the Waggaites who turn up to every every production, sometimes two nights running.

Plans for the future entail being given a Federal/State grant, which at the moment is ‘under consideration', (to use the correct public service term). A staff of eight — director, designer, administrator and five actors, all on the minimum of salary, of course, would make touring possible, and give room for the ferment of 1978 plans to explode — The Club, On Our Selection, Rock and Roll, Hamlet, Two Bob a Ticket (on Australian theatre — gold rush to vaudeville), Run For Your Lives (docu­ mentary on Australian athletes, and why people push themselves to their physical limits), and The Great Australian Radio Serial Show, with a family who develop with the development of the radio and the serials they follow.

The Trucking Company tries to make each of its productions a new little adven­ ture for Wagga. Each has been a new adventure for me, and, come to think of it, not such a small adventure either, when it makes a three-hundred mile drive worth­ while.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 21

Theatre/Queensland

By no means the best atmosphere in which to appreciate the Troupe STAMPEDE FALL-OUT AND FOLLOW ME DON BATCHELOR Stampede and Fall-out and Follow Me. Popular Theatre Troupe at La Boite Theatre, Brisbane, Qld. With: Roslyn Atkinson, Jo Caust, Richard Fotheringham, Jan Hands, Greg King, John Lane, Errol O’Neil, Nicola Scott.

La Boite Theatre has now established a very successful practice of play perfor­ mances at 5.30 pm on a Sunday followed by a stand-up meal of some kind. The fin-de-weekend informality is most con­ genial, and that blue period after 5.00 o’clock can be pleasantly wiled away with a play followed by a gentle chat over some cheap nosh before flopping into bed with a book around 10.00.

The Popular Theatre Troupe recently opened a brief three-night season at La Boite with such a Sunday performance, tacking on the optional extra of strolling afterwards to some vintage jazz at Caxton Street. The way the bulk of the audience lingered over the goulash indicated that both the performance and the afters were well-received.

The occasion was something of a hybrid, however, and by no means the best atmosphere in which to come to a real ap­ preciation of the work of the company. In part it became a sort of PR event — an op­ portunity for interested special groups to see the Troupe on display; and so there were liberal sprinklings of academics from various institutions, and little clusters of people from other theatre groups. This meant that the shows took place in a strange climate of professional detach­ ment mixed with selfconscious com­ placence. Small wonder that there was evi­ dent confusion of intention in the perform­ ances. Especially when the rest of the sizeable audience were GP who had paid their $3.50 for a night of theatre. (The price, by the way, seemed to me a bit ex­ cessive for a little over one hour’s total playing time. This added elements of the benefit performance to the evening.)

22 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

The first of the two shows on the programme was Stampede which uses the production metaphor of a B-grade western movie to look at the struggle between the unions and the establishment. Two outlaw sisters (the unions), champions of the under-dog, take on the corrupt but out­ wardly respectable sheriff (big business) and his willing deputies (Mai and the media). The deputies are portrayed by one actor, so that Mai and the media are delightfully presented as twin aspects of the same character. For a time the outlaws rob from the rich in favour of the down­ trodden, till one is sweet-talked into going legit, and co-operates with the law’n’order system in return for a share of the profits.

This leaves one sister at the end of the play riding forlornly off into the sunset to carry on the good fight alone.

Seen, as it were, under glass, in the hot­ house setting I have described, such an image loses much of the potency it carries in the quadrangle of a CAE or a union can­ teen, or in front of executives from a big multi-national, where it toys cheerily with group prejudices. So we missed the wonderful visceral response these shows get in- the context for which they were designed. By way of compensation we were able to cast a cooler critical eye on the style, and see how it reduces the swagger­ ing world of politics to the level of card­ board characters and comic book moti­ vations, revealing the laughable within the pompous.

In this regard, Premier Joh is graphic­ ally depicted as a patent medicine quack who peddles his famous “Cure All Bitters” containing the wonder ingredient State of Emergency. Attaching to this simple pic­ ture are all the reverberations of the smart operator conning the gullible masses with false promises about their welfare, while actually serving his own interests.

Allusive vignettes of this type are one of the better features of the style. They are an extension of the metaphoric fabric which is the essence of the approach. Like all metaphors their power and value lie in

suggestion, not in logic.

The over-all image of Stampede, which presents maverick unions as heroic loners, is not altogether persuasive in the end.

It is this which causes so many people to say that plays of this kind are merely preaching to the converted. While this is no doubt true to a degree, it does not allow that there are any other aspects to any dramatic picture apart from the story it tells — aspects of character and relation­ ships, for example. There is much truth in the idea that business leaders, govern­ ments and the media cast themselves as eternally vigilant defendants of the law, and certain unions see their role as fighting outside the law for the rights of the poor and the oppressed. Once such self-images are accepted many of the simplistic notions of the B-grade movie begin to have their echoes in real life. In recognising this we have a touchstone for much of the absurd behaviour which characterises public life, and a means of distancing ourselves from it. This is much more valuable than any superficial message the “ plays” may con­ tain.

This is even the case in Fall-out and Follow Me, the second of the shows we saw, where the anti-nuclear bias is so much easier for me to support. Just as I am un­ likely to be converted by the first “ play” , pro-uranium people are unlikely to change their minds if they see the second. This is in spite of the fact that Fall-out contains one of the most brilliant pieces of irony I have seen in the Popular Theatre Troupe’s work.

This is the sequence where Nicola Scott, in a sickeningly simpering portrayal of a bourgeois gardening expert, takes us through a few little do’s and don’t’s in cultivating the charming uranium plant (“not to be confused with the noxious atomic bomb weed”). Discussing matters of such enormity in the trivial terms of a domestic gardening problem, coupled with the antithesis between growing things and the destructive potential of uranium, makes this sketch a harrowing piece of sick humour.

While the content of the programme was thrown into interesting focus by the situa­ tion, the performances, geared for non­ theatre buildings, were not. There was a disorientation in the hush of a theatre which detracted from those special skills the company has developed, and called for areas of technique which they normally do not require and could not supply.

The effect was something like a good Leagues Club performer trying to give a chamber recital. Popular theatre is most vital when it is with the people.

Theatre/SA

An innovation by Mr George that is certainly worth repeating FOUR PLAY READINGS TONY BAKER Four play readings by the South Australian Theatre Company at Theatre 62, Adelaide.

Let’s Twist Again by Rob George, Swansong for Antlers by Geoff Daly, A ny Fool Can by Ken Methold and The Right Man by Ken Ross.

July 20-23, 1977._________________________

Colin George’s arrival as its new artistic director seems to have begun a period of considerable innovation for the South Australian Theatre Company, new faces, new approaches and, most recently, a new format.

Between the end of part one of his first season and the launching with Annie Get Your Gun of the second, has come this brief series of Australian play readings.

Mr George was quoted in the local press as saying the season was an attempt to foster a construcitve relationship between the company and Australian writers — particularly those living in South Aus­ tralia. Given the snide bitchery that mars theatre politics that is a laudable and sens­ ible aim in itself.

It also provided the small audiences who turned up — paying only $1 each — with stimulating entertainment and, hopefully, encouraged Mr George to repeat the experiment. He added to both the stim­ ulation and the experimental nature of the occasion by having the author present and, with him and the readers, conducting a dis­ cussion period with the audience after­ wards.

Now a critic’s confession: personal cir­ cumstance meant I was able to attend only two of the four evenings, co-incidentally the two produced by Mr George himself.

Brian Debnam directed L et’s Twist Again and David Young, Any Fool Can. Strictly speaking these remarks are then confined to those two plays.

First the blemishes. In addition to the discomfort of an Adelaide winter’s night (it actually snowed in the Hills on one of them) in a dilapidated theatre not only designed for warmer times but also under the flight path of the main airport, the cast had apparently had only a brief opportun­ ity to go through the script before the

readings. This made for a number of fluffs, particularly in The Right Man, detracting from the general high level of profes­ sionalism and breaking the mood.

More seriously, the format of a reading with limited moves tended, for me anyway, to highlight structural faults or basic implausibilities in the plays, and neither was free of them. But that criticism should be kept in the context of general success. The THE CORONATION OF POPPEA presentation, with the director sitting to one side providing the audience with brief MICHAEL MORLEY stage settings and directions, was good, the readings able and the plays worthwhile.

The Coronation o f Poppea by Monteverdi.

Mr Daly’s I found the more interesting. A Libretto, G.F. Busenello; Realised by Raymond puzzle play in the sense that it is capable of Leppard. State Opera of South Australia, The various interpretations, as the subsequent Playhouse, Adelaide, Opened 18 July 1977. discussion established, it centres on a D irector, Adrian Slack; Designer, John young man Damien Anderson and the Cervenka; conductor, Myer Fredman.

Fortuna, Patsy Hemingway; Virtu, Angela murder and sexual mutilation of a board­ Denning; Amor, Deborah Pfeiffer; Ottone, John ing schoolboy several years before. Releas­ Wood; First Soldier, Valetto, Kevin Miller; ed from a period in a mental hospital, he Second Soldier, Lucano, Thomas Edmonds; contacts an old friend now apparently mix­ Poppea, Eilene Hannan; N ero, Gregory Dempsey; Arnalta, Norma Knight; Ottavia, ed up with a neo-nazi movement. Is it all a Daphne Harris, Drusilla, Patsy Hemingway; fantasy in Damien’s mind? Are the friend Seneca, Keith Hempton; Pallade, Damigella, and a former schoolteacher, and, now ap­ Angela Denning; Liberto, Lictor David Brennan. parently landlord of the flat where most of the action takes place, really fascist On the face of it, the choice of Monte­ plotters? Are they guilty of the original verdi’s The Coronation o f Poppea would murder? Such territory has been explored not have seemed to hold much box-office before but, especially with a knowledgeable appeal for Adelaide audiences. They are guide, it repays a new visit. hardly the most reliable public for new or Mr Ross’s play is more conventionally adventurous works, and pessimists — or accessible. It is about the upset preselec­ even pragmatists — might well have con­ tion win for a vital by-election of a political tem plated a luke-warm response to candidate who personifies purity and musical and dramatic action which could idealism. Inevitably, as the campaign seem spare and restricted to the devotees progresses he is corrupted or tempted, ac­ of Puccini and Verdi. But the production cording to view, into compromise and into has triumphantly vindicated the choice of an act of betrayal. Familiar country again the work and it is to be hoped that centres but it can be effective theatre. Mr Ross other than Adelaide will get the oppor­ did, however, have some trouble with his tunity to appreciate the extraordinary characters in seemingly not being quite musical richness and superb characteri­ sure whether to develop them fully or sation of a work which, as conductor Myer whether to portray them as types, for Fredman points out, is far from being a instance the candidate is named Hope and “ museum fossil” . To my (admittedly pre­ other characters include Crawley and judiced) eye and ear, there is more human Wheeler. Another problem for anybody emotion and musical truth in the charac­ acquainted with politics as she is played is ters and score of Poppea than in all the unthat amid the ostensible realism are a cou­ heavenly lengths and m onum entally ple of fundamental improbabilities. Con­ deployed emotional assaults of Tristan and text again, though. We have Mr George’s Isolde. word for it that these evenings were Poppea more so than more familiar arranged to generate such responses. Cer­ works, may well seem to fit Bierce’s view tainly the authors, much as they must have of opera as “a play representing life from been hoping for full production, have another world, whose inhabitants have no reason to be grateful to him. And so have speech but song, no motions but gestures, the audiences. and no postures but attitudes” . But when song is as expressive, the attitudes as con­ Next time, and there should be a next vincing and the gestures as eloquent as time, one hopes for a little more prepar­ here, one can be grateful to State Opera ation and for the company to find more for reminding us of the immediacy of a comfortable surroundings; perhaps the ex­ work that three hundred years have done perimental Space at the Festival Centre. nothing to rob of its appeal and power.

It is a score full of delights, unexpected turns and fluidity

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 23

Theatre/ACT

There were laughs, but this time the oohs and ahs were not there MARCEL MARCEAU MARGUERITE WELLS

Marcel Marceau presented by Michael Edgley International and Derek Glynne. Canberra Theatre, Canberra, ACT. Opened 18 July 1977.

Marcel Marceau; presenter of cards, Pierre Verry; stage manager, Antoine Casanova.

True humility is the red rose in the black top hat of showmanship, and there is something rather sad about an artist who takes three curtain calls, (plus three at in­ terval), when his audience is only prepared to give two. The sight of the great per­ former bowing and smiling deprecatingly to a thunder of adulation which was really only appreciative applause, was a mime which plucked the heartstrings as much as any other on the programme. It happened for two reasons; because he attempted too much and because he attempted too little.

In eschewing the ‘style exercises’, like walking against the wind and the shrinking cage, which are a beginning audience’s introduction to the art, and in advertising an ‘all new programme', the Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau seemed to be acknowledging that it is quite easy to become blase about mime. Those who went away stunned, their spirits purged, at their first revelation of such a rarely seen genre, had now recovered from the shock, and were back, wanting more sophistica­ tion. The programme itself acknowledged it in protesting just a little too much the magnificence of mime and the inimitability of Marceau. But the mimes were still full of little displays of virtuosity meant to amaze the uninitiated; the sculptor, struggling under the weight of a statue, in an agonising thigh-pull; the weight-lifter, subsiding to the floor in the splits; the mask maker who changed his invisible masks with lightning speed, yet never end­ ed up with the wrong expression on his face. There were laughs — plenty of laughs, but the oohs and ahs were not there.

24 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Marceau is no longer quite the revela­ tion his programme was meant to be, and in a large theatre it is hard to see how he could be. The physical subtleties of this most subtle art are lost, if you haven't the eyesight of an eagle, and if you really should have seen your optometrist a couple of months ago, then all that remain for you are the thigh-pulls and the splits and the lightning changes. The shadows on the muscles of the hand that make a close-up of Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death so heart-stopping are gone. If you are there to be amazed by subtlety of technique you will not see it in a five hundred seat theatre, and if you are there for grand con­ ceptual theatre, deep insights into the human condition, you will not see that either.

In the final mime, “ Bip in the Modern and Future Life” it became only too obvious that Marceau’s strength is in elegance and subtlety of execution, not in the conceptual design of his work. It broke his own rule that “A mime, in order to be understood by all, must be simple and clear, without ambiguity” . Bip’s progress from a bemused struggle with modern mechanical marvels, through the glorious freedom of the future, only to return again to the ape, would have made three mimes, but it did not make one. He was a most beautiful ape, who carried the stab of utter conviction. Half a million dollars worth of King Kong was a mere toy monkey on a string beside Marceau, but the audience ended up as bemused as Bip had been; con­ vinced that there was a lot in it, that it was meant to be a profound statement about the future of man, and that it hadn’t worked.

M arceau's exquisite “ presenter of cards” , Pierre Verry, besilked and besatined and beplumed like a wizened Blue Boy, sums the whole thing up. His dress and his manner wander between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. No-one could wish them to do otherwise. But one could wish that Marceau had been content to do the same. His goggle-eyed innocent Bip, longing after corruption, and his old lady gabbling in the park make him an exquisite museum piece;his “ Bip in the Modern and Future Life” had the sentimental pseudo­ intellectuality of third rate modern dance.

Marceau’s art is an art of little things and grand conceptual theatre is just beyond its reach, which is why the thunder of adulation was really only appreciative applause. I left with the feeling that Marceau is* a museum piece and should leave thematic grandeur to others.

Theatre/NSW

The deft hand of director, Jon Finlayson is seen everywhere as the pace never slackens THE GLITTER SISTERS BARRY EATON The Glitter Sisters. Oscar’s Hollywood Palace, Sydney. Opened 12 July 1977. Director, Jon Finlayson; musical director, Garey Campbell.

With Rona Coleman, Maggie Stuart, Geraldine Morrow, Joy Miller, Lynn Lovett.

If you like your entertainment with the music of the forties done in a high camp style by five lovely and talented ladies then don't miss the Glitter Sisters.

Following a highly successful run in Melbourne the act has now hit Sydney.

Re-cast here it now stars some well known local ladies.

The show opens with a medley of old songs just to set the scene. Then we take off with a real mixture of brassy show­ girls, fun musical numbers, drunk cocktail mixers and clever impersonations. I loved the show-biz sequence with appearances by Dorothy Lamour, Ethel Merman, Deanna Durbin and a very funny off key Marlene lurching about the stage. Cruel — but true.

The inevitable appearance of Shirley Temple with (you guessed it!) “The Good Ship Lollipop” nearly brought the house down. The show is a very clever blending of teamwork and individual talent. The deft hand of director, Jon Finlayson is seen everywhere as the pace never slackens.

When the girls first come on stage in their glittery costumes and lovely Andrews Sisters wigs, I was convinced that they were sisters, so much did they look alike.

As the evening races by each sister indi­ vidually delights the audience at some stage with her personality and talent.

Most of the entertainment is musical and the show can’t be faulted here. Unfor­ tunately a couple of the comedy sketches are much too long and not very funny. Par­ ticularly the Roy Rogers send-up which seemed to go on forever.

I almost had to be carried out in the cocktail mixing demonstration. A very lady-like Rona Coleman becomes more and more smashed with each new cocktail

and the result is hilarious. The inevitable follow-on sketch was Spike Jones' “ Cocktails for Two” — very well done.

Being a child of the '40’s perhaps I was stirred subconsciously by the material.

Songs like “ Basin Street Blues” , “ Chi­ cago” , “ Eve got a guy in Kalamazoo”, “ Sentimental Journey” , “ Lili Marlene” , “As Time Goes By” . . . I could keep on going! A version of “ Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” that out-Andrews the sisters them­ selves, plus a lovely laconic version of the famous “ Rum and Coca Cola” . These are just some of the delights that the Glitter Sisters deliver, all done in such a high camp style I’m sure the ladies all have per­ manent tongue indentations in their cheeks.

Long may the Glitter Sisters glit.

Jane Street back in the big time with two undeniable successes THE RIPPER SHOW DON’T PIDDLE AGAINST THE WIND, MATE FRANK HARRIS The Ripper Show (and how they wrote it) by Frank Hatherley. N.I.D.A. production at Jane Street, Sydney. N.S.W. Opened 15 June 1977.

D irector, Stanley Walsh; Designer, Bill Pritchard; Musical Director, Roma Conway; Choreography, Robina Baird.

Father Sharpe, Ron Graham; Mother Sharpe, Maggie Fitzpatrick; Jane Sharpe, Noni Hazelhurst; Charlie Sharpe, John Paramor; Mr Barclay, Don Reid.

Don’t Piddle Against the Wind, Mate by Kenneth Ross. N.I.D.A. production at Jane Street, Sydney, N.S.W. Opened 20 July 1977.

Director, John Tasker; Designer, Bill Pritchard.

Frank Bourke, John Clayton; Bob Davies, Ron Graham; Norreen Davies, Noni Hazelhurst; Phillip Sutton, John Paramor; Thelma Davies, Maggie Fitzpatrick; Normie Pitcher, Michael Ferguson.

Show (and how they wrote it) and Ken Ross’s realistic and up-to-the-minute sociological thriller, Don’t Piddle Against the Wind, Mate.

But let’s return for the moment to the Jane Street story.

For its first season in 1966 the theatre presented six new plays — with Tony Morphett, Rod Milgate, James Searle and Thomas Keneally among the authors of these passing hits.

Jim Sharman entered the lists two years later with his Terror Australis which broke a few barriers but aroused only temporary interest.

Alexander Buzo’s Rooted was the 1969 winner. It’s now in Currency Press publications and still gets a stage show.

Jane Street really took off in 1970 with Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis’ King O'Malley, a mighty success which rumbled like an earthquake under the still rather static theatre ground.

In 1972 came David Williamson’s Don's Party, an immediate triumph which went on to be a stage and film success supreme.

After that, the doldrums for a few years, the only lasting stand-out being Dorothy Hewett’s Bon-bons and Roses fo r Dolly, which is still being played around the country.

There are highlights enough to more than justify the theatre’s 11 years of life.

Now the Hatherley and Ross plays put a bright light on it once again as one of the most adventurous new-work theatres in Australia.

Hatherley’s The Ripper Show, first of the season, already has American interests inquiring after it.

Ross’s play, about a union confronta­ tion with a rebellious member, is the more powerful — both timeless, and timely.

Think of the Broken Hill union war in the Latham case.

It’s a play with guts and reality enough to give it a high survival rate in its por­ trayal of a man who bucks union rules — and invokes the bitter enmity of his former mates — to defend his individual voice of conscience.

John Tasker’s direction, with a very strong cast, had a tremendous impact on Sydney’s Jane Street Theatre, offspring of opening night.

NIDA, is an annual lucky dip in new, Bob and Frank are wartime buddies and experimental plays. wharf union men. In the opening scene S om etim es good, even b rillia n t, they ramble on about war stories but are sometimes just scraping by and on a few skittering over hidden tensions. memorable occasions exciting enough to A weakness still is that this initial go on to bigger theatres. passage is over-extended before the real The 1977 season puts it back in the big point of action is revealed. time again with two undeniable successes Bob, ordered to pay a social levy (a — Frank Hatherley’s musical, The Ripper ‘booze levy’ as he calls it) demands a THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 25

voluntary vote rather than a compulsory order. He is defeated but refuses to pay.

After that comes the murderous ‘sent to Coventry’ action against the rebel. No man can defy such a union order and get away with it. “ Don’t piss against the wind, mate,” Frank warns (‘piddle’ is supposed to be more acceptable in the title) and groans: “ Why do I have to pick you as a mate when everyone else is normal?”

Mateship goes down the drain. Frank deserts his friend and stands by the union.

Bob’s wife Thelma, a seemingly quies­ cent and loving wife, breaks under the strain of death threats and filthy phone calls and leaves him.

His adored daughter stands up for Dad at first but is pulled away by her fiance, whose business interests are threatened by the cancer-like spread of the union menace.

Bob is left alone, trying with faltering courage to stick to that principal of individual salvation against the tyranny of "the machinery of anonymous power” , as Ross puts it.

Ron Graham (Bob) and Maggie Fitz­ patrick (Thelma) worked superbly as they moved from the quiet opening scenes to a shattering climax in which Bob threatens to kill them both with a grenade. The em otional power of this scene was overwhelming.

John Clayton was excellent as shifty Frank and Noni Hazelhurst vital and lively yet touching as the bewildered daughter.

Watch out for Noni Hazelhurst. She’s an entrancing young actress with assured potential.

She was a top scorer too in Hatherley’s The Ripper Show which opened the season — not only a clever actress but a fetching singer with instant appeal.

The Ripper Show is a musical within a play — still a bit lop-sided in balance on opening night but with enough sparkle and invention to make it irresistible. A ripper show indeed.

Sharpe's Shorter Shakespeare players are a tatty, run-down troupe out of favor with the public in presenting potted ver­ sions of the Bard, despite the hilarious Richard III, which opens the show.

To beef up the box office returns they turn to “sex and violence” and build a hit with a musical based on the then current news headline horror — Jack the Ripper and his sex murders.

It’s crazy, and sometimes macabre, but a very funny musical, with catchy music by Jerem y Barlow and, under Stanley Walsh's expert direction, engaging work from the merry murder singers and dancers — Ron Graham, Maggie Fitz­ patrick, John Paramor, Don Reid (power­ ful as the man who falls under the Ripper’s spell), and of course Noni again. Her com­ ic song, “ I Married a Monster” , was a show stopper.

When 1 saw Ripper the show still needed tightening but its potential is obvious. No wonder the Americans are interested._____ Frank Harris is theatre and music critic for the Daily Mirror.

26 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

A virtuoso performance by both writer and actor A STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION REXCRAM PHORN A Stretch o f the Imagination by Jack Hibberd.

Australian Performing Group at the Nimrod Downstairs, Sydney, NSW. Opened 2 July 1977. Director, Paul Hampton; set designer, John Koning; lighting designer, Laurel Frank; Tunes written by Martin Friedl.

Monk O’Neill, Max Gillies.

This is the hardest kind of review to write: the evening was perfectly acceptable. The play, production and performance were all equally accomplished and, to make it harder, Firmly intertwined in one actor, making analysis difficult. And finally, I'm not even able to compare Max Gillies’ Monk O’Neill with any of the other Monk O’Neills, since this is the first time I’ve seen the play performed.

I’ve always had the feeling that a oneman play is something of a contradiction in terms — as if drama can only happen between two or more persons. I don’t think the feeling can be logically defended, but the notion of spending the evening with only one actor always gives me a slightly sinking sensation. Jack Hibberd’s char­ acter has imaginary visitors from time to time, he acts out all sorts of roles and is about as vivid and extrovert in language as anyone could ever want him to be. But I still felt the lack of another voice, another face — not because Monk O’Neill (as played by Max Gillies) was in any way in­ sufficient by himself, but for purposes of comparative evaluation, for contrast.

Against that I must set the feeling that the Nimrod Downstairs space has never been used to better advantage: the scale of the performance, the size of the set in rela­ tion to the number of the audience and the placing of the audience in the space seemed just right. (Contrast it, for example, with Gordon Chater’s Benjamin Franklin in the same space where one longed to get a bit more perspective, see him in a larger con­ text.)

I watched the play then, for the first time, without having read it, and I would like to record the fact that I was con­ tinuously reminded of the plays of Samuel Beckett. I found myself comparing the play, in particular, with Krapp's Last Tape — the old man with his memories, his bananas, his drinking, his recollections of sexual/sensual experience, his timeless/ time-obsessed state of being. I began to seek Monk O’Neill as an Australian ver­ sion of a Beckett character and, somehow, by extension, as a symbol of Australian literary identity — Monk (or Hibberd), the hermit in the bush, playing with the names of Proust and Plato (or Beckett), frag­ ments from the distant cultural tradition.

And then all the wonderful comparative differences: the particular, topical, mythcreating, Barry-Humphries-like, generalaudience-directed extravagance of the Australian dialogue as opposed to the universal, tradition-assuming, ascetic reduction of Beckett’s.

I recount these somewhat sweeping generalisations as an indication of the way my mind was running in relation to Beckett during and immediately after the performance. The next day I bought a copy of the play and found, to my sur­ prise, that both the author, in his intro­ duction, and Margaret Williams, in her preface, were at some pains to reject any kinship. Jack Hibberd, addressing himself to potential directors, says: “ . . . it is im­ perative to exorcise from thought and sen­ sibility the feral figure of Samuel Beckett.

Indeed, A Stretch o f the Imagination can plausibly be viewed as an indirect riposte to that increasingly taciturn and impacted gent. For Monk O’Neill, though a selfwilled exile and part-time misanthrope wrestling obsessively with his own immi­ nent death, is ultimately on the side of growth and human perpetuity.” And a page earlier Margaret Williams is saying: “ . . . Stretch is as far removed as possible from the Beckett limbo world. It is an affirmation, even celebration, of life in the face of inevitable death . . Paul Hamp­ ton's production was evidently inefficient in ‘exorcising’ Beckett for me. But then I don’t really see the need for these dis­ claimers — would the play have to be dis­ qualified from its title as “the first un­ mistakable Australian theatrical classic” (accorded by the aforementioned preface) if it admitted too openly to a European springboard? And anyway, I’m not con­ vinced that a life-and-death-enhancing play is intrinsically better than one that hates and rejects the process, nor do I think it any more than a vague general­ isation to associate the totality of Beckett’s work with either alternative.

One of the things I wondered about was the degree of realism intended: could this complex of ideas, feelings, opinions add up to a real human being? (Not that I neces­ sarily think they should — I was only pondering the intention.) Here are a few of M onk’s attributes which particularly caught my fancy: he makes his will in favour of ‘the Aboriginal peoples of Aus­ tralia’ and ‘the populous Oriental nations of the north’; he regrets his destruction of the one tall tree in the area, daily watering with his own ‘nitrogenous wastes’ a ‘prom­ ising sapling’ which will one day replace it; he is the erstwhile dux of classics at Xavier who was, nevertheless more physical than metaphysical; he is a romantic dis­ illusioned by women; the footballer who directed the winning leather in the grand final of 1907; he recollects readings from Wittgenstein with improvisations by Gap Silenzio the noted bassoonist . . . dawns in the gutter . . . clutching Ulysses; and his own once supple dactyls caressed the ivories on many a Saturday night at the Saloon Bar of the Shamrock.

Of course, we see Monk through his own eyes, just as we see the curious day through which he is living: an over-the-century pre­ diction for the morning and the possible necessity of “immersion of the sizzling parts” in Dead Dog creek characterises the first half of the play, while the second takes place in what seems to be a sub-zero night­ time, mysteriously followed by a sunset.

The script clarifies this: a hot, sunlit mor­ ning is followed by a cold, overcast after­ noon. Monk’s constant returning to the alarm clock on Mort’s grave which begins the play and which stops at twelve, con­ tributes to a feeling that the whole play is outside clock time in much the same way that Monk is outside the society that he has rejected, but to which his thoughts con­ tinually return. In a way you can only understand Monk as a general rejection of the society we live in. And the reality of the

rejection seems to me to be Jack Hibberd’s: surely the extravagance of the wit, the scope of the words (“ . . . two skeletons foxtrot on a field of afterbirth”) can only be authorial and not intended as the naturalistically-observed utterance of an aged recluse.

On this score Jack Hibberd says that the actor's talents “should be employed to capture a complex character of unnaturalistic dimensions, to render coherent and dramatically organic a splintered day in a contracting life, to manifest and shape seriously all manner of personal and emotional realities.” Max Gillies seems to me to take the right approach when he makes Monk’s aged stiffness into a sort of acrobatic display; when he acts out roles — like both waiter and diner at his various fantastic meals — with vivid agility; when he takes equal advantage of the colloquial (“ . . . parked the Malvern Star up against a flying buttress and went for a swim up the Seine, introducing the Australian Crawl to the Frog.”) and the literary (“ Hark! Shhhh. Hear the present ocean past. (Pause.) Not the tick-tock of ratchets and cogs, but a continuous and silent aval­ anche.”); when, in short, he sharpens up each moment into its own reality, playing all the various aspects of the character and the writing for all they are worth and let­ ting coherence and the dramatic organism look after themselves.

It does add up to a virtuoso perform­ ance by both writer and actor. And there’s surely nothing wrong with that.

Thankfully Act Four asserts its own shattering power over the production THREE SISTERS NORMAN KESSELL Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ronald Hingley, Old Tote Theatre Company at the Opera House Drama Theatre, Sydney.

Opened 13 July 1977. Director, William Red­ mond; designer, James Ridewood; original music, Nigel Butterley; lighting, Jerry Luke.

Olga, Monica Maughan; Irina, Elizabeth Alex­ ander; Chebutykin, Ben Gabriel; Tuzenbakh, Martin Harris; Solyony, John Krummel; Masha, Jennifer Claire; Anfisa, Queenie Ashton; Ferapont, Des Rolfe; Vershinin, Ric Hutton; Andrey, Peter Whitford; Kulygin, Tim Eliott; N atasha, Jacki Weaver; Fedotik, Anthony Martin; Rode, Robert Hensley; Maid, Lynne Porteous.

The more one reflects on the Old Tote Theatre Company’s new production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the more in­ ferior it becomes to the version staged in 1966.

Reported to have aimed this time for a more realistic approach, director William Redmond’s production is for the most part as superficial as designer James Ridewood’s impressionistic settings, each with

indeterminate geographical boundaries and openings across or through which characters wander haphazardly. Even the birch trees are presented symbolically with a surround of long, slender, leaning poles.

Once again, it seems, a designer has been defeated by the inhospitable breadth of the Opera House Drama Theatre's stage.

The living room of the Prozorov’s country home, setting for Acts I and II, was apparently intended to permit the sort of on-going action John Clark used so effectively in his recent Old Tote produc­ tion of The Alchemist.

Some characters enter through the din­ ing room doors, apparently having come in via the front door, while others stroll on from a dark void at the side, none more ludicrously than Natasha, who skips on, primps before an imaginary mirror down­ stage, then turns and runs up into the backstage, fully revealed, dining room.

When Andrey brings her back down­ stage to propose, the audience has to imagine them out of sight of the rest of the family, busily talking and eating at the din­ ing room table.

I found all this not only distracting, but a negation of Chekhov’s carefully drawn portraits of these members of a strata of Russian middle class as utterly selfcontained and totally unaware and un­ caring of anything outside their own petty world. In the downstage living room where they chatter, squabble and philosophise, they are physically distanced by the width of the playing area, but there is an obvious effort to treat them as a group.

Kenneth Tynan in his book, Curtains, quotes Peter Ustinov as contending that teamwork and Chekhov are, in acting terms, incompatible. Ustinov describes the characters as soloists who sometimes in­ terrupt others talking, but never listen to what anyone is saying, which is what makes them both funny and appalling.

(One reviewer was tetchy about audience laughter, but surely Chekhov sought this also?)

Tynan says this was fair comment by Ustinov, adding that in Three Sisters it is a technique carried as far as it can go with­ out blowing the play centrifugally apart.

Be that as it may, there is a dreariness about the first two acts of this production that begins to be dissipated in a vastly better Act III when the characters are in­ dividualised and the essential selfness of thought and act emphasised. Here one feels at last some understanding of and sympathy for the sisters’ longing for a fuller life in far-off Moscow — even though we know from experience it is a wish never to be fulfilled.

Thankfully, Act IV — one of the best ever written and well-sustained in this translation by Dr Ronald Hingley from the definitive Moscow version — asserts its own shattering power over the produc­ tion.

True, even here one carp about details — the pedestrian parting between Irina and Tuzenbakh as the latter goes off to fight the duel in which he will die or the THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 27

slow march around the estate by the henpecked Andrey pushing a pram — but an audience that had been showing no more than half-hearted approval was at last aro u sed to genuine-so u n d in g enthusiasm.

Redmond’s casting in general was sound, none more so than in his choice of Jennifer Claire as Masha. This is a beauti­ fully controlled performance from start to finish, her growing love for Vershinin subtly suggested by look or smile, her grief at their parting utterly heart-rending.

Monica Maughan as Olga and Elizabeth Alexander as Irina are competent though inclined to be colorless, but that usually delightful actress Queenie Ashton’s Anfisa remained a North Shore hostess wearing a head scarf.

A virtuoso performance saves one play, fine ensem ble playing makes another BOEING BOEING THE HOSTAGE LUCY WAGNER Boeing Boeing by Marc Camoletti. Adapted by Beverley Cross and Doug Fisher. Presented by J.C.W illiamson Productions and Michael Edgley International Pty Ltd. Civic Theatre, Newcastle, NSW. Opened 16 July 1977. Direc­ tor, Doug Fisher; designer, Bill Dowd.

Bernard, Doug Fisher; Janet, Kate Sheil; Bertha, Shirley Cameron; Robert, Richard O’Sullivan; Jacqueline, Judith Woodroffe; Judith, Paula Bowman.

The Hostage by Brendan Behan. NIDA Arts/Drama Theatre, Newcastle University, Newcastle. NSW. Opened 19 July 1977. Direc­ tor, George Whaley; D ESIGN ER, Mark Wager; musical director, Roma Conway.

Pat, Stephen Bisley; Meg, Judy Davis; Kate, Sarah McKenzie; Monsewer, John Francis; Collette, Dawn Blay; Ropeen, Elaine Mangan; Rio Rita, Peter Kingston; Princess Grace, Monroe Reimers; Mr M ulleady, Robert Menzies; Miss Gilchrist, Linda Newton; Leslie Williams; Anthony Prehn; Teresa, Debra Lawrance; Russian Sailor, Wayne Jarratt; IRA Officer, Anne Byron; IRA Volunteer, Mel Gib­ son.

The Williamson/Edgley production of Boeing Boeing, which started its tour (Newcastle, Sydney and Brisbane) at New­ castle’s Civic Theatre, is quite unashamed­ ly a vehicle on which to parade imported star (of Man About the House) Richard O'Sullivan. As such it was perhaps a good choice, because only a comic actor of his ability could rescue this tired and rather unfunny farce from being an evening of boredom, and his became very obviously the performance of the night.

The play centres around the once daring idea of the man who manages to juggle his 28 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

three air-hostess fiancees and constantly keep two in the air and one in the hand with the help of an aeroplane timetable.

Unfortunately the weather and increasing speed of air travel cause his schedules to go awry, which is when Richard O’Sullivan, as the unsophisticated and amazed friend from Aix turns up to stay and joins in the fun. The play lifted with the applause that greeted his entrance and from then on the laughs came fairly steadily, and almost en­ tirely from O'Sullivan’s incredible ability to transform appalling lines into snatches of his own brand of bemused comedy, and create zany business, for himself and others which took on the impossible logic of true farce.

This tireless and virtuoso performance, though it covered some of the play’s flaws, also managed (though without intentional u p stag in g ) to unb alan ce the play somewhat, so that all the other characters tended to pale helplessly into stereotype.

Doug Fisher (also the director, and second Man About the House star) was amiable as the suave architect who turns to rely on his more bumbling friend as the doors of different bedrooms slam with increasing rapidity, but really not strong enough as the straight man to O'Sullivan’s fall guy.

At times O’Sullivan had to play his own straight man as well, to be able to get in the fall guy elements.

The three air hostesses were hard to dis­ criminate, until they all determined their own partners; true, they often had little to do but sit or stand around and look adoring, but when involved in repartee none of them proved experienced enough farceuses to enrich the impoverished roles.

Paula Bowman as the forcefully romantic German who eventually falls for Richard O’Sullivan made more of the part than the other two.

Novocastrian taste is reputed to be strange and Unpredictable, but possibly it is tougher and more discriminating than that of those used to more and a greater variety of theatre. In its role for this play, of out-of-town try out, playing Brighton to Sydney’s London, it has not augured well for the further run of Boeing Boeing. The show drew minimal audiences and had to finish its run several days early; and all this in spite of Richard O’Sullivan’s great following. Although Richard O’Sullivan has been playing Boeing Boeing — in Britain before Australia — for some time, the show had overall an under-rehearsed feel to it, which will perhaps have departed as the tour progresses. Though the star turns in a virtuoso performance, it would be preferable to see him in a better, perhaps more modern, comedy, that allows others a chance to shine too.

There were no virtuoso performances in The Hostage, the 1977 final year NIDA students’ production, which made its annual trip to Newcastle and Orange, but the fifteen actors gave an excellent demon­ stration of ensemble playing that for much of the production worked very well. The situation holding The Hostage together is that of a young soldier taken as a hostage against the execution the following mor­

ning of a Belfast youth for killing an Ulster policeman.

The IRA officers hold the soldier in a lodging house/brothel which houses a gallery of characters, or caricatures, rang­ ing through gaudy prostitutes and homosexuals to dodos from the Troubles.

The soldier himself, played with some endearing youthful freshness by Anthony Prehn, makes his first appearance at the end of Act I, which should leave plenty of time for the inmates of the house to es­ tablish the status quo of themselves and their relationships, before the catalyst is thrown in.

The two who stand out among the others are old Pat, caretaker of the house and veteran IRA man, and his long-standing consort Meg. Their loving fighting partnership, mellowed a littly by time, is crucial to the establishment of the lodging house; other inmates may come and go, but these two will always be there.

Somehow, through the great attention payed to the detail of each character, this aspect of the play was obscured in George Whaley’s production: Meg seemed to have no closer relationship with Pat than either of the other two old whores.

Stephen Bisley as Pat was very compe­ tent and effectively aged, if at times a little too ponderous to extract the full humour from the part.

Visually the production was a delight — with a terrific set designed by Mark Wager, that sensibly had two sets of three stairs to a connecting landing, rather than the usual single high staircase, and providing interesting and full spaces which George Whaley used to their limit, main­ taining constant movement that was only occasionally distracting. The songs were well done, and revealed some beautifual singing voices, especially in Sarah McKen­ zie and Judy Davis. The adaptions and im­ provisations around the text mentioned in the programme notes are interesting, if not totally effective. The second act seemed to drag in some places, and the reversion to the Gaelic ending of having the soldier shot in the cupboard was confusing, particular­ ly as it was not clear from watching the cafuffle that it was the sympathetic IRA man who shot him by mistake, and not, for instance, Meg. But The Hostage is a play that is never totally effective in perfor­ mance structurally and always suffers from the very late introduction of the young soldier and the fact that the second act is a waiting game — a long night that everyone wishes would end. The love affair between he and Teresa, though nicely played in this production, and well con­ trasted with the affairs of the whores, par­ ticularly that of the homosexuals Rio Rita and Princess Grace, is too naive and sporadic to warrant the emphasis then placed on it at the end. I wouldn’t single out any one of the 1977 NIDA graduates as a potential star of the Australian stage, but their abilities in ensemble playing seem to show far greater promise for future theatre going than the importation of a star whose sparkling efforst could only hold together a crumbling evening.

Playscript

HflRVE LLCHl5 RN E

MARVELLOUS MELBOURNE PART 2 LADIES’ SCENE Mrs Dampler sits sewing, or stands water­ ing a pot-plant or etc. Lily enters, ran­ corous, glares at Mrs D. M rs D: What’s wrong with you?

Lily: Nigel has left me.

Mrs D: That’s not my fault.

Lily: Yes it is.

Mrs D: How? Lily: It was you who reared me in a prissy and romantic fashion.

Mrs D: I reared you according to the best traditions.

Lily: Exactly. That's why I'm prissy and romantic, a dupe and a greenhorn. That’s why I fell brainlessly in love with Nigel.

That's why he left me.

M rs D: He was a fop.

Lily: I know that now.

Mrs D: You’ve learnt your lesson, then.

Lily: Thanks to you and this society’s chastity-belt rules for ladies.

Mrs D: Well, now you might be able to find yourself a real man.

Lily: Like Dad. Mrs D: Hold your tongue!

Lily {sings): Like Dad, my urbane witty father Who visits home but once a week, Who loves the theatre and its women, rather, Who visits home to wash and eat and sleep.

Lily: I thought you would’ve learned your lesson by now.

Mrs D: How do you know I haven't? I have, but all too late. You should complain about society-weighted rules, I have had to sustain the pretence of a happy marriage for twenty years.

Lily: Even to the extent of fashioning me in your mould?

30 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Mrs D: Better late than never.

Sings: When will we women emerge from our trance, Toss aside the girdles of love and romance, When will we ignore the drudge of ignorance And cease to kiss the cuffs of our husband’s pants?

Lily (gesturing): Look at Mrs Coop, mother of seven, shackled to the mangle and the oven while her husband boozes and copulates around the town.

Cut to Mrs Coop, nine months pregnant, labouring at the mangle.

Mrs Coop {sings): I sits ’ere turning the mangle Until me wrists go black While 'e donates a bangle To some tart in Toorak.

Freeze.

Mrs D: And Mrs Pork, wife of our Chief Secretary, look at her, childless and lone, shrivelled to a stoop, reduced to pottering around her garden, patting tenderly her tulips, feeding her hydrangeas, and mutter­ ing botanical inanities.

Cut to Mrs Pork in her garden.

Mrs Pork {sings): Some iron nails to make Peter pink, Some ammonia to make Julie blue, I read . . .

My husband’s breath is a perfumed stink, There’s a mound of manure in my bed . . .

Freeze.

Lily {to Mrs D): Sterile?

Mrs Pork: Unconsummated marriage.

M rs D {gesturing): Miss Helen Hobbes, a suffragette and social pariah, a figure of fun, who, for example, was mocked by socalled rationalists at a recent dinner.

Naturally she was the only woman there.

Three eminent logicians cast her into the gutter and returned just in time to toast Voltaire.

Miss Hobbes {sings): All men think I'm a bitch.

They’re frightened, of course, They think I'll cruel their pitch.

They like their freedom of course.

So do we. We have a heart and mind and flesh.

Why shouldn’t we be free, free to think, feel and lech?

Unfreeze. A ll move to the centre.

All {sing): Yes! Why shouldn’t we be free, At home and in the streets, In the theatre, university and government seat, Free from social and intellectual tyranny, Free from masculine muscle and meat!

Yes! Why shouldn't we be free!

We've worked our fingers to the bone, We've put our guts into this country, Our wombs and tits into the home, In droughts and depression we saved the families!

Yes! Why shouldn’t we be free, Throw the mufflers off our mouths, Equality is a joke in this Democracy Where bulls blind with bullshit the cow, We'll moo no longer and stand up to pee!

TEMPERANCESUFFRAGETTE SCENE The company enters with banners, sign, drums, etc., marches up and down th theatre singing.

SONG FOR A SOBER CHRIST We sing to Thee, O Sober Christ, Of Virtue and Temperance.

We fight Your fight from door to door, With Bible, kettledrum and lance.

Our armies will advance in strength ’Neath Your unalcoholic flag.

We will defeat the Evil Drink.

Repent all sinners and be glad.

We love this youthful, noble land, Here we will build Jerusalem.

Milk and honey will be our wine, Sobriety our strategem.

Come, all Australians, march with us, Eradicate licentiousness, Convert the prostitute and pimp To occupations of holiness.

Repent all sinners and be glad, The Day of Glory is at hand.

Enlist in our battalion’s ranks; We want a sober Christian land.

Repent all sinners and be glad, Turn drunkenness to a drought.

The Holy Bible is our book, Sobriety and work our shout!

Munro: From time immemorial, ladies and gentlemen, baleful beverages have sapped and drugged the will of man. Wine was the disease and downfall of Ancient Rome. Charlemagne, a champagne souse, died gibbering from its pernicious effects — delirium tremens. The Kings of France, those stunted profligates, were ceaseless swillers of mephitic fluids. Many a pickled and impotent royal corpse has been borne down the streets of sottish Paris. To this day the consumption of immoral alcohol is a Roman Catholic and Papist perversion.

Search a soak and you’ll find a rosary.

Witness the present Pope, paradoxically called Pius, whose purple robes are so coloured from the grape-juice that perpetually oozes from the pores of his swart skin. Is it little wonder, then, that his pronouncements on infallibility are the outpourings of an inebriate, a bloated bacchanal!

Cheers.

Munro: Bibacity is the pox of the Irish. It is a Catholic canker, a galloping consump­ tion of the brain, a black plague in their souls! We must unite to fight the creeds and cant of these satanic dipsomaniacs.

Eradicate the bottle! Abolish beer! Ban all vineyards and breweries! {Cheers.) Arrest all inebriates! Confine them to the asylums!

Cheers. A drunk leaps up and attacks M unro. He is dragged o ff and ejected.

Munro: Thank you. I must apologise for that unseemly incident. The pixilated bogtrotter has been adroitly cast into the gutter whence he came. Our final speaker this evening is the Chief Secretary of Vic­ toria, Sir W allace Pork, who has magnanimously agreed to grace the meeting with his presence.

Pork: I can assure you all that my trustworthy officers are at this very mo­ ment in time clapping the notorious Mr Corrigan in irons. I stand for law and order, I stand for decency and high, even lofty, moral standards in the community.

Cheers I thank you. It has been my policy, as Chief Secretary to come down, with unerr­ ing severity, against bibulous dipsomania and drunken insurrection. As you are well aware, these liquid activities waterfall ra p id ly in to ce ssp o o ls of m o ra l degeneracy, slothfulness, malingering, animal intercourse, inefficiency, unrest, even anarchy, in our civil law-abiding streets! Furthermore, it has been my own personal concern, even obsession, to stamp out all excesses of the flesh in this colony.

To this end, I have seized, censored and confiscated numerous lewd and impure texts, obscene volumes whose sole purpose is to pollute, deprave and corrupt our chaste minds. This very year I have flogged personally five slavering Gay Lotharios guilty of wanton defloration. Their backs were like raw meat!

Cheers.

I thank you. Furthermore, fifteen brothels have been closed down, the whores have been douched with carbolic and dispatched to the care of religious institutions where they toil honestly at the mangle and hoe.

Twenty Oscar Wildes have been thrown into prison and lashed to the edge of death.

If I had my way, they would all be castrated!

Cheers.

Ladies and gentlemen, I can proudly declare that adultery, whoredom, lubricity, fornication, buggery and venery are now in the decline!

Cheers Melbourne is now a decent and delicate city. Her streets are platonic and temperate. Her citizens sober and virtuous.

Our wives and daughters, abused and sub­ jugated in the past, can look forward to an epoch of continence and equality. God save the Queen!

Cheers. They all march out singing as before, leaving Sir Wallace Pork at a table.

Last two verses: “Song fo r a Sober Christ".

THE BROTHEL SCENE Corrigan enters as a waiter. He fusses round, sets up the scene perhaps. Still drunk.

Pork {after a while; impatient): Corrigan!

Corrigan: Sir . . . Pork . . . the stable is yours to hog . . .

Pork: To what?

Corrigan: To whit.

Pork: Get me a drink.

Corrigan {writing down): One hogshead.

Pork: And something to eat.

Corrigan: Sauerkraut?

Pork: Eh? Is he here?

Corrigan: Or perhaps a Baw-Baw trotter dressed in bacon rinds.

Pork: Food!

Corrigan: I can recommend the gravy, Squire.

Pork: I need meat, Corrigan.

Corrigan: A ham sandwich?

Pork: Bring me a roast of pork. Two legs.

A snout. An apple, roasted, with potatoes, pumpkin, parsnip, pomegranate and lashings of blackcurrant jelly. To be followed by dum pling, cream and toothpicks. Hurry! Don’t forget the port.

It must be Portuguese and black as ink.

Corrigan: I shall return, Sir Mutton. {To the audience.) With a gutful of his port.

He laughs and leaves.

SONG OF SIR PORK I am Sir Wallace Pork, In public I’m a prig, So Christian in my talk.

In private I’m a pig.

I fool the citizens With moralising words And righteous regimens, The poor gullible turds.

I’ve made a million pound And stuffed as many cracks.

I eat food by the mound And fart on passing blacks.

I have a wife and kids, She gives me the fluid shits.

I hate all Chinks and Yids, But love their coloured tits.

When I die I’ll die fat, Fat as Henry the Eighth.

They’ll boil me in a vat And sell the soap in crates.

I don’t believe in Hell, But in Heaven I do.

Up there I’ll do as well As any bloody Jew.

Corrigan enters bearing (mime) a huge carafe o f wine. Pork snatches it Jrom him.

Corrigan leaves. Pork drains the vessel in one long swig and hurls it over his head.

He belches and grunts in a porcine fashion.

C orrigan enters bearing the m ost prodigious plate piled high with succulent food (mime). Sir Pork drools and grunts as it is lowered. He attacks the food, eats with his hands, etc., in the most obscene and disgusting manner.

Corrigan watches enviously.

Pork {after a while; between mouthfuls): Is Lulu here?

Corrigan: No. Pork: Why not?

Corrigan: Don’t ask me. Ask Madame Suspendue. Here she is.

Madame Suspendue enters wearing a feather boa etc. and is caught in a garish light. Pork pigs on.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 31

Underhand deals in property are negotiated.

And fat percentages instigated.

For we work within the Law, The Chief of Police is our chief bull and bore.

We pay him for the right to practise; The Government forgets our taxes.

Up in Lonsdale St. etc.

SONG OF THE BROTHEL-KEEPER SUSPENDUE Though I'm old and a little fat, I still occasionally lie on my back.

When the work comes thick and fast, I give some gentleman a rasp.

It helps to pay the rent And the Government, Keeps the wolf and Salvos from the door, Helps pay for another inexperienced whore.

Chorus Up in Lonsdale Street at our clean hotel, We pride ourselves on select clientele, We pride ourselves on bristling hair and strong vaginas, Strong enough to squeeze the beer from the biggest niner!

Members of Parliament Our establishment frequently frequent.

Here they come to dip their wicks.

The young the old with their walking sticks, Release their passions for a price, Free from syphilis and lice, Free from their wives and daughters In perfumed and pillowed quarters.

Up in Lonsdale St. etc.

Solicitors, architects and doctors, Sick to death of doors and laws and sores, Come here for relaxation and enjoyment, And to do their bit for feminine unemploy­ ment.

Speculators and businessmen Know we're always open, Officers of our army come here in regiments To engage in gunnery and amatory tournaments.

Up in Lonsdale St. etc.

Inside these protected walls, Bills and acts are oft decided in scores, 32 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Pork (to Madame): Where's Lulu?

Madame: She’s coming, Sir Walrus.

Corrigan: I bet she is.

Pork:I can't stand unpunctuality.

Madame (seductively): I'm here.

Pause.

Pork: Come over here.

Madame: I'm very expensive.

Pork: Come over here, fat-arse!

Pork chases Madame Suspendue, catches her and forces her to the floor, kissing her etc. Corrigan licks the plate and drains the port. Fink enters.

Sir Pork attacks Fink, knocks him down, and proceeds to kick him. Thomas Bent enters.

Bent: What’s going on here!

Madame: Sir Wallace has just attacked Mr Fink here, Mr Bent.

Corrigan: Bent Tom. Bent (to Pork): Are you mad?

Pork: Never been more sane, Thomas.

Bent: Shouldn't you apologise?

Pork: No Yids in here.

Fink: I came along merely to seek some in­ formation from you. I knew you'd be here.

In return I have a most lucrative proposi­ tion to put to you.

Pork (interested): Lucrative?

Fink: Very.

Pork: Out with it.

Fink: I'd much rather talk privately.

They both glare at Bent.

Pork: Over here then. Bad luck, Tom. They walk to one side. Tom talks softly to Madame, but tries, strains, to overhear their conversation.

Pork: What information would you want?

Fink: I wish to know the site of the new bridge projected to cross the Yarra.

Pork: I know.

Fink: I know you know.

Pork: First of all, what’s your proposition?

Fink: It involves the purchase of all the land on either side of the Yarra. I will establish a special company to deal with the, er, investment. I need your co­ operation. Are you at all attracted?

Pork: Very.

Pork whispers in Fink's ear for a time.

Bent creeps closer to hear, on all fours.

Fink: Excellent . . . I’ll start work on it first thing in the morning. All agreed?

Fink extends a hand to shake. Pork refuses to take it.

Pork (walking off): Agreed.

Lulu enters.

Pork (growls): Lulu!

Lulu: Waldo!

She giggles. Pork chases her, catches her, and rides her to the floor. Fink leaves, avoiding Bent. Superintendent Tomb, the Chief o f Police, arrives in uniform. He is o f a dour, phlegmatic, even funereal, disposi­

tion.

Madame: Superintendent Tomb, what a pleasure!

Tomb: I trust it will be.

Madame: I have something quite novel in store for you this evening.

Tomb (unsmiling): What?

Corrigan: A cold corpse.

Madame: A chocolate creamie!

Tomb: About time.

Madame: She’s a sweet little fourteen.

Tomb: I’ll split her in two.

Madame: No you won’t.

Tomb: I have a dong like a howitzer.

Madame: Don’t I know that!

Tomb: She’s not fat?

Madame: Only in the correct country.

Rump, pod and bosom.

Tomb: A good pod, you say?

Madame: A strangler.

Tomb: Where is this boong?

Madame: Room fourteen. She awaits you.

Tomb: Good. A whisky, Corrigan, on the double.

Corrigan (writes): One double for the wobblie . . . (Staggering out) one wobblie on the double . . . not as good as one erect on the straight. . . or stiff on the tomb . . .

Bent (approaching Tomb): How are you this evening, Manifold?

Tomb: Not bad, Tom. Bent: You'll be pleased to know that the Brighton subdivision was most successful.

Tomb: How much?

Bent: A lot.

Tomb (emphatically): How much?

Bent: How much? Oh, er, ha ha, of course, for you, er, ten thousand.

Tomb: Chicken-feed.

Bent: Twenty.

Tomb: Thirty.

Bent: Thirty!

Tomb: Thirty. Or else.

Bent: All right. Thirty.

Corrigan (approaching): Here’s your whisky, wobblie — Tomb hits Corrigan viciously and sends him to the floor.

Tomb: Get me another one, without the lip.

Corrigan gets up and exits.

Bent: Well done, Manifold. He’s been begging for that.

Tomb: Can't trust the Irish.

Bent: They’re a bad lot.

Tomb: Punch ’em on sight.

Bent: Bit dull here tonight.

Tomb: Mmmm.

Corrigan (approaching): Here you are, sir.

Tomb (taking the drink): That’s better.

Corrigan: Thank you, sir.

Corrigan wanders off. James Munro enters.

Munro: Are you drinking alcoholic liquor, Mr Superintendent?

Tomb: I am.

Munro: Desist.

Tomb: If you say so, sir.

Munro: I do.

Tomb: Very well. Corrigan!

Corrigan comes up. Tomb tosses the whisky in his face and hands him the empty glass.

Tomb: Remove that.

Corrigan leaves with the glass.

Bent makes to leave but runs into Sir Phosphorus Sewer who is carried in on a litter. Some whores trickle in. Sewer is im­ mensely obese and carries a rijle.

Sewer: Hold it right there, Bent, or I'll rid­ dle you with shot.

Horrified pause. Pork is asleep on the floor. Sewer laughs loudly. He is drunk.

You're a rank coward, Bent.

Madame: Sir Phosphorus, you shouldn't frighten us so.

SeWer: A mere jest, madame.

Munro: You're intoxicated, Sewer.

Sewer: I am. Scotch to the scalp.

Munro: A disgrace.

Sewer: You’re a bore and a crank, Munro.

Go away.

Munro: You’ll regret this, Sewer. I’ll have you railroaded. Not only will dipsomania be the death of you. I will. Straight into the gutter. A fat and suppurating soak. A gobbet of rancid meat!

He storms off.

Sewer: A flagon of canary, Corrigan!

Madame restrains Munro, prevents him from leaving.

Madame: Don’t go, James. You have yet to see our little entertainment.

Munro: Entertainment?

Madame: A licentious dance.

Munro: Licentious.

Madame: Yes, Prudence is to reveal her palpables.

Munro: Pudenda?

Madame: The lot.

Munro: I’ll linger.

Madame: Gentlemen! We now present for your delight and appetite a brief but sweet divertissement by none other than the delectable Prudence!

Music. Prudence enters into coloured lights, dances, and strips to cheers from the guests.

Sewer (after a while; raising his rifle)'. I’ll get her, I’ll get that peacock in the pod.

He fires and kills Prudence. Shrieks and shouts. Pork starts, and wakes.

Tomb: Order! Order, please.

Madame: What are we going to do!

Tomb: A foolhardy act, Sir Phosphorus.

Sewer: Is she dead?

Madame {shrieks): Of course she is! What are we going to do?

Pork: Who’s dead? {Staggering around.)

Not my Lulu . . . Lulu . . .

Madame {to Pork): It’s Prudence, Sir Wallace, one of my best girls. Worth a fortune to me.

Lulu: Here I am, Waldo! Safe and sound.

Sewer: I shall reimburse you, Madame.

Handsomely.

Madame: I should hope so. {to Pork) What are we going to do with her, er, body? . . . she has relatives . . . what a mess, a horrible bloody mess!

Pork: Calm down, Madame. Superinten­ dent Tomb and myself will cope with this.

Sir Phosphorus will co-operate in the little matter of, er, fees. Won’t you, Sir Phosphorus?

Sewer: I will.

Pork: Excellent. Superintendent!

Tomb: Sir. A simple procedure. Have no fears, Madame, Sir Phosphorus. Easily

covered up. Everyone out and home. Sir Phosphorus, could we employ your litter to remove the corpse?

Sewer: If you must.

He gets up with great difficulty, assisted by Tomb, etc.

Munro: I was not here.

Bent: Me neither.

Sewer: Poltroons!

Tomb: Lift her on to the litter, gentlemen.

They put Prudence on to the litter and bear her out. Mumbles and chatter. They all leave, except Corrigan, who, having loved Prudence, breaks down and weeps.

David Syme, editor o f the Age and fiery democrat, walks up and down deep in thought. Ronny, newsboy, enters.

Ronny: Eh, Mr Syme, I’ve sold all me copies already.

Syme: How did you get in here?

Ronny: Up the drain-pipe, sir.

Syme: What’s your name?

Ronny: Ronald Gallagher.

Syme {annoyed): Irish?

Ronny: Too right.

Syme: You know I don’t tolerate Irish members of staff.

Ronny: Why not? I sell more rags than any bugger in Bourke Street.

Syme: There’s the door, Ron. I’m busy.

Ronny: The pay’s poor.

Syme {with a piece o f paper in his hand; reads): From 1886 to 1890 Melbourne was forced to endure the wilful extravagance and irresponsibility of the Gillies-Deakin Government. Their abuse of power and position was nothing less than profligate.

Enlisting in their ranks Melbourne's most piratical speculators, they proceeded wan­ tonly to squandor public funds and reduce the Colony’s economy to rubble.

The methods employed were fiscal collusion, legislative connivance and flagrant political chicanery. Few members of this Parliament were innocent of blemish. Even Deakin, that upright and lofty radical, held directorial positions in highly specious companies.

It came as the finest of ironies when in 1890 Gillies and Deakin were usurped by James Munro, Melbourne’s Croesus and Christ.

The news of M unro’s ignominious retreat to England, after fifteen months of inspired government, could be greeted with a cheer were it not for the pitiful state of the colony, where starvation, unemploy­ ment and disease are the order of the day.

Ronny {in the streets): Read all about it!

Munro absconds! Get your copy of the Age. Munro absconds!

A crowd gathers round Ronny. They buy copies and chat volubly.

Voice 1: Thanks, Ron. Voice 2 {reads): Mr Munro in his capacity as Premier of Victoria has appointed himself Agent-General in London. He has embarked for England in what might be termed unseemly haste.

Ronny: Munro absconds!

Voice 3: Let’s petition the Governor!

Voice 4: Attack Government House!

All: Yeh! The crowd moves across to where the

Governor stands.

Voice 1: We demand an explanation!

Voice 2: Munro must be brought back im­ mediately!

Voice 3: Clapped in irons!

All: Yes! Gov.: Ladies and gentlemen, the Premier of Victoria, the Honourable James Munro, weighed down by the incessant and onerous tasks of Government, has seen fit to take up a, er, lighter appointment. It is, I feel, a species of vacation for him. I wish him well.

Voice 1: Vacation!

Voice 2: We're all on vacation.

All {sing): We’re all on vacation, Busting our holiday pay On lavish celebration, Caviar, cider and mud mornay.

Ronny: Read all about it! Shiels now Premier! Blames it all on world-wide depression!

Crowd buy papers and read.

Syme: Shiels was a cretin. But crafty enough to protect the potentates from prosecution.

Shiels {on stage; shouts, desperate): Even if all our bankers, our statesmen, our merchants, and our private investors had been a combination of the wisdom of Solomon and Solon, we could not have es­ caped a time of severe depression, a world­ wide depression foisted upon us by the Moguls o f . . . {He walks o ff) All {at same time as Shiel’s speech; softly sing): We’re all on vacation . . . etc.

Ronny: Read all about it! Patterson takes over the reins of Government!

Syme: Patterson was both a bungler and a poltroon. With ineffable idiocy, he en­ forced a moratorium on the banks and precipitated a catastrophic panic.

Ronny: Banks collapse! City banks close their doors!

Crowd bangs on the doors o f a bank.

Voice 1: Open up!

Voice 2: We demand our money!

Voice 3: Bash down the doors!

All {chant): We want our savings, we want our savings etc.

Syme: There was no money.

Ronny: Not a razoo.

Syme: Melbourne’s fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Genuine discontent agitated her streets.

Man 1 {leads the crowd up to stage where Patterson stands): Excuse me, Mr Patter­ son, could you help me? I’ve been out of a job for over a year now. Gotta wife and seven kids who eat nothing but boiled cab­ bage stalks picked up in the streets.

Patterson: The Government is doing everything in its power to ease the situa­ tion.

Man 1: Listen, three of my kids have typhoid and are certain to die.

Patterson: I could weep. You should pay more attention to hygiene in the home.

Man 1:1 ain’t got a home.

Patterson: Do you expect the Government to provide one for you?

Man 1: Er, no, b u t. . .

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 33

man, yes, but not a woman. It is against my principles.

Syme: He got very drunk and sliced his throat.

Voice 1: Don’t hang Mrs Knorr!

Voice 2: Commute her sentence!

Voice 3: It's not her fault!

Voice 4: The Government created the con­ ditions!

All {chant): Show mercy, show mercy! etc.

Patterson {shrieks): The Government is doing everything in its power!

The crowd watches in horror the hanging o f Mrs Knorr.

Syme: In January 1894 Mrs Knorr was deftly hanged by an eager recruit to the noose.

Lady {awed): She twitched for some minutes then blood and excrement ran down her loose leg.

Patterson: Any woman who murders a child has forfeited her right to life. Any murderer is an ogre for whom hanging is too kind a death. The working classes and liberals are drenched in sentiment. The working classes have lost their spine. They slaver and drivel before Parliament in search of hand-outs. Their indolence and immorality is of great concern to the Government and elders of the Church.

Instead of fruitfully toiling to improve their lot, they idle and riot in the streets.

As Premier of this colony, I shall do everything in my power to see that law and order are rigorously maintained.

Syme {roars): The political depravity of this Premier has roused up revulsion and retching in the electorate!

Ronny: Patterson and Boomers ousted!

Turner new Premier!

Cheers from the crowd.

Syme: A belated victory for democracy.

Pork, Bent, Fink and Munro file past de­ jectedly. Patterson leaves the stage.

Syme: But it was too late. The damage had been done. The city was a cemetery, doom­ ed to dullness, conservatism and Pres­ byterian sobriety.

Dampier: It was too late, all right. Pork’s last vindictive act was to close down my theatre on the ground of obscenity. Tomb personally shot the bolts.

Lily: I became a prostitute, and specialised in policemen. I gave them all the pox.

Syme: Melbourne’s population plum­ meted to below that of Sydney. Mel­ bourne became a second city, a mere car­ buncle on the rump of Australia. Workers, The crowd have gathered round Ronny writers, wits, painters and the middle-class and have bought papers. left for Sydney, Tasmania and the West.

Voice 1 {reads): Baby-farm scandal.

The population just drifted away.

Voice 2 {reads): Mrs Knorr, a baby- “Goodbye Melbourne Town" song with farmer, murders several babies in her care dialogue, as before. They leave at end. and — Ronny: Read all about it! Turner tightens Voice 3: Pockets the money. up economy! Period of reconstruction!

Voice 4: She put them in a chaff-bag and Truant Officer enters. drowned them like kittens.

Truant Officer: Hey, son, why aren't you Pause. at school?

Judge {on stage): Mrs Gertrude Knorr, I Ronny: Have to earn me keep. hereby find you guilty of the wilful murder Truant Officer: That’s no excuse. You’re of seven infants and sentence you to death under arrest. Name please. by hanging.

Ronny: Ronny Gallagher.

Ronny: Hangman refuses to hang Mrs Judge {on stage): Ronald Gallagher, of no Knorr! fixed abode, I find you guilty of wanton Hangman: I could never hang a woman. A truancy from school and sentence you to a

Patterson: Well?

Man 1 {annoyed): All I want is a bloody job.

Patterson: My advice to you, good man, is to enrol with all possible speed at our Labour Office, where you will find a rich variety of lucrative positions at your dis­ posal, our staff are honest, eager, welldisposed, sympathetic. (He slams a door in their faces.)

Man 1: 1 did enrol. Nothing doing.

Man 2: I did too and got a job building the railway from Natimuk to Goroke. The pay was nine shillings a week. After paying for food and rent, I sent me wife home one shilling.

Syme: The factories were not the only ones to indulge in the malpractice of sweating.

The Government were quite skilled at it to.

Ronnv: Read all about it! Thousands near starvation in Melbourne. Ragged crowds walk the streets. Typhoid strikes. The un­ employed march in Carlton and Rich­ mond. Mounted police attack with batons.

Cut to Price addressing the troops: “Fire low and lay them out — lay the disturbers o f law and order out, so that the duty will not again have to be performed. " Syme: The winter of 1893 was the worst in Melbourne’s history. It was left to relief organisations, mainly religious, to dole out hot soup, crusts and thin tea to long queues of cold and gaunt citizens. {Crowd form soup queue.) Wives and young girls, all out of work, joined the ranks of the city’s prostitutes. Husbands and kids scoured the streets and alleys in search of edible refuse.

Babies were found dead in gutters, in sewers and Boating down the Yarra.

Melbourne was sick, sick to the very core. {All o f this can perhaps be enacted by the “crowd" in a composite effort.)

Ronny: Read all about it! Matricide in Melbourne!

Mrs Burton: What's that funny smell? {She sniffs.) What’s burning? {She walks across to Mrs Newman, who is stoking a fire.)

What are you burning there.

Mrs Newman: Nothing; it’s just some, ah, rubbish.

Mrs Burton {kicking the fire): Eh, what’s this? {Pause.) God, it's a — It was an in­ fant. Burnt to death by Mrs Newman, a deserted wife unable to feed her other three children.

Patterson {back on stage): The Govern­ ment is doing everything in its power!

34 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

week s confinement, only to be released after fifteen strokes of the birch have been administered to your bare back. Blood not be drawn. Take him away.

Ronny leaves, singing softly the “Goodbye Melbourne" song.

BOER WAR MONGRELS Bugsy and Breaker Moran in playing-area looking back. They’re on their way.

Bugsy: Benambra sure knows how to say goodbye.

Breaker: Sure does.

Bugsy: Almost makes a bloke want to cry.

Breaker: Come off it nipper.

Fie turns and they mime riding. They half­ sing to a galloping rhythm: Oh me name is Breaker Moran And I’m your man Coming in from one of the Outlying districts And this is me brother.

Bugsy: I ain't no other Breaker: Than Bugsy Moran And he’s your man And I'm your man And we're like that And we’re riding in From one of the outlying districts To lend the Queen A helping hand To make a stand For God and the Empire.

Bugsy: That’s our desire.

Breaker: And he’s your man And I'm your man.

That's Bugsy and I’m Breaker Moran And we’re like that And we’re riding in — Bugsy: Hey, let’s take a breather, Breaker.

Breaker: Nup. Bugsy: Aw c'mon. The horses won’t stand up to it.

Breaker: An hour. We’ll snatch an hour when we get to the Goulburn.

They ride on. A narrator enters.

Narrator: There was movement through the country for the word had passed around That the Brits were getting beaten by the Boers.

Now the Aussie lad’s a stickler for loyalty to the Crown, So they up in droves and rallied to the cause Bugsy and Breaker are at the Goulburn.

They dismount and rest. Drink etc.

There was among the hundreds a horseman named Moran, Who with his brother lay awhile by Goulburn’s stream.

They’d ridden hard since breakfast, to reach Melbourne was their plan, And in his sleep young Breaker had this dream . . .

Enter in a chauvinist dress (kangaroo and emu emblems?) Miss Australia. Very flash.

Miss Aust.: I’m Australia, Miss Australia.

God, shine your light on me, Increase my fame and spread my name From sea to shining sea.

Breaker? Breaker Moran?

Are you my one and only man?

Breaker {asleep): Until death do us part, now and forever more, Amen.

Miss Aust.: Breaker Moran, Breaker Moran, do you hear me, Breaker Moran?

Breaker: I hear you, Miss Australia.

Miss Aust.: You’ll serve me well, won’t you Breaker? You’ll never let me down?

Breaker: No Ma-am.

Miss Aust.: We’ll make a great couple you and I. You — brave Breaker Moran — will help make me — a humble unassum­ ing Melbourne girl — Queen of the Pacific.

Breaker: Yes. Good show. What about Bugsy, though?

Miss Aust.: Bugsy?

Breaker: My brother Bugsy.

Miss Aust.: He'll get by — don’t you worry about him. But you — it’s you I’m interested in. Think big, Breaker. Open up your heart. You are destined for greatness.

Together we shall march across the pages of history. All the eyes of the world will turn our way. Remember that, Breaker Moran; your country is coming of age and you are bringing me out into the society of nations.

Breaker: Allow me to be your unreluctant debutanter, Miss Australia.

Miss Aust.: Thank you, Breaker — I knew you were the man for me.

Splash. She trips out. Narrator comes back.

Narrator: And, with the tiniest splash, Miss Australia had vanished. The surface of the Goulburn smoothed itself over. A silence hung over the river and the bush were Breaker and Bugsy rested. But Breaker had been ravished by a dream of a glorious future.

Breaker sits up. his shoulder-bag and gives it to the camel.

Breaker: By Jingo — Shiraz {watching gleefully): Booshie Narrator: Ism . . . Jingoism will steer you booshie ma kamel, booshie booshie through — shalong.

Breaker: By bloody Jingo — He pats it on the head again. Hang-Hi Narrator: Ism . . . Relax, let Jingoism tell enters with basket. you what to do.

Hang-Hi: Oooh, velly nice camel, velly Breaker: By bloody Jingo, Nipper, if I nice. You ownee camel, Mister? (Shiraz haven’t had one hell of a dream. nods.) Velly good camel. How much you Bugsy: Uh? wantee? Me makee velly good plice, chop, Breaker: Ha. Know something? chop, makee velly nice sweet-and-sour Bugsy: I’m fagged still. pork, long soup, short soup, velly big. You Breaker: One day the world’s going to be sellee Hang-Hi? (Shiraz shakes his head.) looking at us I tell you — the Queen of the Oooh, Mister, velly big mistake, velly Pacific. We’re going to show them a thing good plice. You sellee me? {Shiraz shakes or two. Hey you! {The Narrator.) Which his head.) Me Hang-Hi, honourable way to Melbourne? {Narrator points them Chinese cook. How you callee, Mister? off.) And Melbourne — a city and a half. Shiraz: Ahmed Shiraz.

Parks. Gardens. Tall churches. A sight to Hang-Hi: Ahhh, Mister Shilaz, velly good inspire awe Nipper — reverence. Well to gleet you. {Hang-Hi bows. Ahmed nods c’mon hurry it up or we’ll never get there gravely.) Camel no good in Melbourne, . . . Yachts on the Yarra.

Mister Shilaz. Camel die. No glass, lettushee; cabbagee velly big plice. (Shiraz They go.

Narrator: Melbourne’s parks and gardens p ro d u c e s a p o m e g r a n a te .) A h h h , were picturesque enough at the time — but pomeglanatee. I give you velly good plice. not quite in the way Breaker imagined (He produces a pomegranate from his them. As he and Bugsy led their horses off basket.) One shilling dozen. towards Melbourne town, a character of a Shiraz: Sixpence dozen. very different hue led an animal of a very Hang-Hi: Ninepenny dozen — velly cheap, different kind into the Treasury Gardens.

Mister Shilaz.

Ahmed Shiraz enters leading his camel. Shiraz: Sevenpenny dozen.

(Mime.)

Hang-Hi: Eightpenny dozen — me velly Shiraz {sings): poor cook now.

Shanki yoni lingum.

Shiraz: Eightpenny. (He thinks.) I have.

This song I am singum, Hang-Hi: Ahhh, velly good, you velly Good fortune to me bringum, clever man.

Yoni yoni for my lingum.

Shiraz: Three dozen.

Pause.

Hang-Hi hands Shiraz the basket. Shiraz Shiraz {shouts at the camel): Shaka gives him the money in small change. They each count, then bow to each other and barash! freeze in that position. Meanwhile Omo The camel sits.

Shiraz {patting the camel on the head): Noire and Gummy Bower have entered, a Booshie manga carafta booshie booshie little drunk and clutching bottles o f wine. shalong. Jarki-yi quomquot ab ab ba SLIDE: Omo Noire, a handsome Kanaka. pomegranate?

Gummy Bower, an Aboriginal resident o f Pause. He pulls out a pomegranate from Fitzroy.

Gummy: Jeez, Omo, youse is a regular ripper with the stump-jump, a dinky-di outback bull, ploughed me like I ain’t never been ploughed. Arrr (Stretching.) the best thump-thump I’ve had since the Mooroopna Mauler stepped aboard for twenty-four hours. What a pump! Better than a yam sandwich.

Omo: You-lady belonga me-all now.

Gummy: Too right I does. As long as youse keeps that up.

Omo: Me-fella belonga you.

Gummy: Yer reckon I’m orright?

Omo: Yum, yum.

She laughs.

Gummy (stopping abruptly): Hey, there’s that Afghan and his camel, tried to shit all over us in the Treasury Gardens.

They go up to Shiraz and Hang-Hi who break out o f the freeze.

Gummy (to Ahmed): Whatcha name, mate?

Shiraz: Ahmed Shiraz.

Gummy: And your Chinkie mate?

Hang-Hi: Me no Chinkie, Missee Boong.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 35

Me Hang-Hi, honourable Australian citizen, Missee Blackfella.

Gummy: Orright, orright, Mr Hi; I’m Gummy Bower; me friends call me Euchre-Lips! (She cackles loudly with a gaping, gummy mouth. Pause. Puzzled silence.) Orright, youse can all stop laughin’. Youse have to be Australian to get that one. Anyway, this is me Kanaka cobber, Omo Noire. (Shiraz and Hang-Hi bow.) Wouldya fancy a swig of wine, Mr Shiraz?

Shiraz: Allah forbids it.

Gummy: Ar, come on, can’t yer forget about yer Missus?

Shiraz: I must accept your hospitality; Allah bids it.

Gummy: Good on yer.

Shiraz drinks from Gummy’s bottle.

Omo: You-fella, Hang-Hi, drinkem bottle belonga me?

Hang-Hi bows and drinks from Omo’s bottle. They all sit and drink.

Hang-Hi (after a while): Oooh, velly good, makee me velly dlunk, me likee velly much, velly stlong, me likee you velly much . . .

He tries to kiss Gummy.

Omo (intervening): You-fella go alonga this — lady belonga me-all.

Hang-Hi: Me velly solly, Mister. Velly dlunk . . .

Gummy: Do yer like Australia, Shiraz?

Shiraz: No. Gummy: Why not?

Shiraz: Bad country. Bad people. They hate me. Only want my camel.

Gummy: Australia's orright, mate. It’s the Australians that stink.

Shiraz: They kill all your people.

Gummy: They haven’t finished yet.

Omoi Big white Queensland boss killem alia four my brothers. Stretchum alonga neck. Me run away, or me deadum too.

Shiraz (to Gummy): You must kill too.

Gummy: Na, we ain't like that.

Shiraz: Very bad. You will all die.

Gummy: I know. (Pause.) Hey, get a geek at Hang-Hi. (He is staggering around drunk and giggling.) H e’s shikered already. A one-pot screamer. Come on, Shiraz, drink up. (Shiraz drinks.) That’s it.

(To Hang-Hi.) Come on, Almond-Eyes, how about a Celestial dance!

Hang-Hi dances in Chinese fashion to music.

Omo (after a while): Me-fella dancum too.

He leaps up and dances in Kanaka style.

Gummy (after a while): Come on, Shiraz, show us the Afghan mazurka!

Shiraz dances in an Afghan style. Gummy joins them and dances in appropriate style.

The music is a bizarre conglomerate o f styles. The dance and music reach a frenzy, with the four dancers then linking arms and moving into a very ironical recitation o f the below with dialectical musical accompaniment.

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, etc.

Breaker: Jesus!

Bugsy: Blimey!

Breaker: Stone the crows and eat your shit!

36 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Breaker: Where does a man volunteer for Bugsy: Blow me over!

Breaker: What are we shipping out for? the South African War? There's enough Boers and their Zulus here Narrator: Never heard of it. to have a bingle right now. Where’d youse Bugsy: None of these coves have been all spring from, eh? Snuck in through reading the Town and Country Journal, South Australia, did you? I tell you, Breaker.

Nipper, the sooner they federate the coun­ Breaker: I can see that for myself. try the better. Only way to keep these ref- Narrator: Now, wait on. Volunteer eh? fos out. Which of youse — if any — can Course it might cost you a bit. Now, I reckon for a couple of quid I might just be speak the Queen’s English as she is spoke? able to squeeze you on to the boat, like, All: We all do. like if we're lucky. I’ve got some contacts.

Breaker: One at a time!

Hang-Hi: Me honourable Australian Get me?

Breaker: Here’s five. Can you do it? citizen. Lookee here, me habee papers.

Gummy: Hey Omo (Undoes his fly.), he Narrator: Follow me. wants to see your credentials.

Exit. Blackout. The howl o f a dog. A halfBreaker: Listen, Cadbury Crutch, I don't lit pool o f light. Mysteriously, the Jour­ want a geek at his message-stick; all I want nalist: to know is: where do I volunteer?

Journo: What'd you think that was, eh?

Shiraz: Volunteer?

The blood-curdling howl of a dingo on the Bogong High Plains? Wrong again! The Bugsy: Yeah. Volunteer. Enlist. Sign up.

Shiraz: As in the English sentence: “A press. The press is the watch-dog of young man was out one day walking, as democracy. Sit, Remington! was his custom when, on turning the cor­ Journo sets up a stool. Remington is a dog ner, he came face to face with, standing on — straining at the leash — with a a soap-box, an earnest young officer of the typewriter strapped to its back. It acts now Crown urging the people present to as a desk. volunteer for service in the far-flung cor­ Journo: That’s a good boy. Only hope we ners of the Empire.” don't see any red herrings. You know what dogs are like with rabbits — this one’s Bugsy: Exactly.

Breaker: Yeah. Haven’t you heard there’s murder on the herrings. (Light has grown a war on? What’s the matter? Don’t you stronger. He types.) “October 1899 — the blokes read the Town and Country Jour­ Boer War begins. In the months that follow, the Boers invade Natal and the nal?

Shiraz: A war?

Cape Colony, stir up rebellion, annexe British territory, and besiege the garrison Omo: Me no fightee white-feller's war. towns of Mafeking, Kimberley. They Gummy: You said it, Omo. Now c’mon.

Shiraz: A war. That’s very bad news. My rebuff all British attempts to defeat them camel not like his time as a ship of the — in fact, they thrash Britain in the field, desert carrying guns for the British in the and embarrass her in the eyes of the world.

Sudan. Me not like my time as captain of a A mighty imperial power frustrated by a ship of the desert carrying guns for the handful of Boer farmers.

British in the Sudan. Will settle for the Enter M iss A ustralia, clutching a Nullarbor Plain any old day. Allah be with photograph o f Queen Victoria. you! (To camel.) Shim sham holy etc. Miss Aust.: Oh never never never fear (Exit.)

Queen Victoria, mother dear, Bugsy: Cowards! Foreign filth!

Breaker: You see that! You throw open I’ll send stout-hearted brave Moran your doors — you treat them like your And some few Diggers to lend a hand. brother — you treat them just like that — Oh help, help, somebody help! (She dashes and when the chips are down what to and fro.) happens?

Journo: In the alcoves of power some of Bugsy: They do the dirty on you. the more intelligent aides and oppor­ Breaker: Yeller, they are, clean through. tunists, who cling to their pet politicians No fight in the buggers. like flies around a cow’s arsehole, saw a A cheeky sort o f rogue (the Narrator) great chance of making political capital comes on with a tin — collecting for out of the war. They slithered into con­ charity. ference.

Narrator: Give now, here’s your chance, Miss Aust. (To aides.): Oh, do something, give generously and help us to erect a do something. Ladysmith has just been statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon. Here you besieged. (She goes.) I do so hope she’ll be are. To the memory of Adam Lindsay all right.

Gordon — Brighton's own — help us to A “buzz" comes from the aides — they search. erect a statue by public subscription.

Journo: Finding a member of parliament is Breaker: A great horseman.

Narrator: You said it. You wouldn't not such an easy task. It involves a thorough search of innumerable bars, believe half the things he did. brothels, race-tracks, theatres — even Bugsy: Here. He was a great horseman. parliament itself. One enterprising group, Narrator: Thank you, thank you . . .

Bugsy has put a coin in the top o f the tin — though, managed to locate their man and it falls through into the Narrator’s hand. arranged a recruiting rally on the steps of parliament.

Narrator pockets it, moving off.

Some aides hustle in the MP. One appeals Bugsy: Hey! to crowd.

Narrator: Eh?

Aide: Calling all able-bodied brave young men — John Bull needs you! Do you seek adventure, fun and frolic in another clime, all these and duty too? Then you are the man for us.

Narrator has led Bugsy and Breaker in.

The Aide adopts a recruiting-poster stance — the others ease the MP into position.

Narrator: Hear that? This is the place.

Course, you realising there’s a good many people-attempting to volunteer, don’t you — the um, successful applicant will have to um — (Breaker pays him again.) You get what I mean. Good. I must say your generosity pleases me no end.

Bugsy: When it comes to the war-effort, the people of Benambra know where their duty lies.

Breaker: Not only that! We’ll get it all back.

Narrator: What’s that? How? Breaker (they grab Narrator): You’ve come this far, you may as well stick it out.

Aide goes to Journo.

Aide: Psst! Get this: important news release. “ MP rushes to Britain’s aid. Lawand-order specialist Pork advocates swift measures to crush Boers — asks that an Australian contingent be sent immedi­ ately. Pork is a man of action. Where others sit down and ponder, he seizes the initiative.” We expect to be reading that in this evening’s paper.

Aide returns to MP. A crowd gathers.

Bugsy and Breaker force Narrator to re­ main.

Journo: Do they think the press, the watch­ dog of democracy, will be satisfied with their press statements? No. The press will assess the situation and make up its own mind. Eh Remington?

The dog yowls. MP addresses crowd.

MP (reading from sheet given him by an aide.): Britain is at war and we in the State of Victoria must prove man enough to do something about it! Agreed? We Vic­ torians must seize the initiative as men of action, not sit down and ponder. We must show those sluggish Sydneysiders the way!

Crowd: Too right, etc. No pussyfooting around.

MP: Does this State bear the Queen’s name for nothing?

Crowd: No. Melbourne should give the lead.

MP: Are we going to show her and the rest of the Empire how much we deserve that appelation?

Crowd: Of course we are!

MP: People think we're down-at-heel.

They think we haven’t recovered from the crash of ninety-two and ninety-three. Let’s show them differently. Let’s show them by sending the biggest, keenest and bestequipped fighting force to Britain’s aid that any of the colonies can manage!

Crowd: Yah! MP: The ties with Britain are the ties of blood.

Journo: Or will be anyway.

MP: She is fighting for her life.

Journo: How can that be? For her life — against a few hundred poorly trained Boer farmers!

MP: We are bound to Britain as child is to its parents. Britain is a father and we are his sons. Britain is a mother and we are her daughters. To fight for Britain is to fight for yourself, for your very own family!

Journo: Anyone with the slightest drop of convict blood in his veins oughtn’t to even spit for Britain.

MP: Who — who is it? I ask you — who is it protects us from the threat of an Asian invasion? Whose sea power holds the Nip­ ponese, the Chinese, the ravenous Burmese hordes in check? We wouldn’t last an hour were Britain to sever her links with us.

Breaker: He’s right, he’s bloody right.

Isn't is bad enough already? Aren’t there Wogs enough in the country already, lowering the standard of living and putting white men out of a job. I tell you — I’ve just come from the Treasury Gardens and there’s more Boongs there than gumtrees!

Crowd: Yeah!

MP: All the more reason to strengthen the bonds between Britain and ourselves, not weaken them by ignoring her call for help.

It has been a dark week for Britain — a darker time lies ahead. But think what perpetual night will fall across this land of ours if the Empire crashes around our ears.

Civilisation will be set back centuries. The land of liberty and light will be no more.

The ships await you — Narrator: I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go — MP: To refuse is the act of a traitor.

Crowd: Shut that traitor up, or else we will.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 37

They threaten the Narrator. He quietens down. Reggie has rushed forward.

Reggie: Don’t let it happen, don't let the Empire fall to dust and ashes and ruin. I speak to you as an Anglo-Australian — Journo: That's Pommy talk for “ I'm a Pom''.

Reggie: Britain is in mortal danger. Stand by her in her hour of need, I beg you. All colonial peoples should rush to her aid.

Journo: Are you going to?

Reggie: Me? We want to win, don’t we?

Journo: Wouldn’t you know it! First to urge us on, but last to go — the lily-livered British immigrant!

Nigel (taking the platform): Not so. If you knew Reggie, you'd understand that only with him here in Australia can the war in South Africa be won. But, as for us AngloSaxons being a race of talkers not doers, what nonsense! Who was it settled this country in the first place? People of AngloSaxon stock. Everyone here now — if you were to trace your line of descent, where would you end up? Back home in the Old Country? Britain! I’m not a man to be sen­ timental. I'm not a man to beggar myself before you. I say simply: the Mother Country is in trouble; she needs your help.

I say simply; were it A ustralia, not England that was in this tight spot, to a man the British population would rise in your support, man, boy and dog, lock, stock and barrel. Let us link arms across the oceans, join hands across the seas.

MP: Hear hear!

Crowd: Ya! Journo: A pretty speech from an im­ migrant just about wrapped it up.

MP: Who, then, is for us, who will volunteer to aid Britain?

Crowd: We will.

MP: Those not for us are against us — clearly.

Crowd: The bludgers.

MP: If you can't make up your mind, remember this: you'll get five bob a day for your trouble!

Crowd: Rah! MP: And, since the exchange rate is favourable, in Africa that’ll buy you ten bobs' worth of goods!

Journo:: W ar’s a good business eh? It always had its perks. But who's footing the bill for this one? We Australians talk about sacrifice, but what does it mean? Britain herself is paying our men that five bob a day. What are we contributing? Nothing.

Are we out of pocket? Course not. What do we lose? A few fools who should’ve known better. Ain’t that right?

MP: Ssssh. It may be right. But it’s lousy journalism.

Narrator: I don’t want to to, I don’t want to go.

MP: Is that a traitor I hear bawling for his life — a coward?

Narrator: Coward! Ha! What about you?

What are you doing?

MP: I’m staying here and — Narrator: You hear that? Safe and sound.

MP: But, as for the war effort, I'm . . .

(He's handed a sheet.) I’ve put my entire stable at Her Majesty’s disposal.

Crowd: Hoorah! Well done. You see.

38 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

MP (aside): This can’t be right. Who authorised this?

Aide: We haven’t actually done that — we’ve only said we have.

Another Aide: If pushed, we'll say we meant the stable buildings!

MP: Well done lads! (To crowd.) All right then, this way, hurry up, no slacking.

“You Get Five Bob A Day" song. The crowd signs up.

M P: Oh, if only I had my time over — if only I were thirty years younger and the gout hadn't ravaged my limbs, if only I weren't constrained by my doctors to ride nothing more dangerous than a litter, with a spell now and then on the high-backed commode. Oh, by God I’d give my right arm to be there with you — side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, flank-to-flank and end-to-end, we'd ride to meet our glorious destiny. As it is, I promise you this: all your wants — spiritual or material — shall be taken care of. With your bullets go our prayers!

More song. A last volunteer.

MP: Next of kin?

Soldier: My wife.

MP: How old?

Soldier: Twenty.

MP: Beautiful?

Soldier: You said. Pretty as a picture.

MP: Just so long as she's more than a pic­ ture — all right, off with you. Did you get the address?

Aide: Yep. MP: Then what are we waiting for!

They exit. Soldiers have marched off.

Journo (with a gesture o f disgust): And seeing all this, what did I — the hard-bitten journalist — the watch-dog of democracy — the truth-sayer — what did I publish? “ All good men should rejoice to see lawand-order specialist Pork leap to Britain’s aid. There can be no doubt that an Australian contingent should hasten to crush the Boers. Pork, the man of action, shows us the way. “Worse still, I pilloried Higgins when he attacked the wisdom and morality of the war in Parliament.

He leaves. Higgins appears in body o f the audience.

Higgins: I don't care what the press does to my reputation — this war is ig­ nominious, a travesty of justice. It must end.

MPs appear and mock Higgins.

MP 1: Take a hint, Higgins.

MP 2: You’ve backed a loser.

Higgins: I have a mandate. When before the electors of North Melbourne last February, I was asked whether or not I would support a proposal to send a second contingent to South Africa. I said no, and was returned by a majority larger than any other Member of this House.

MP 3: There were other issues.

Higgins: None so important.

MP 4: Why don't you go and fight for the Boers yourself?

Higgins: Because there is more to be done here, unfortunately, in this very House.

The Boer War is a corrupt war of attrition conducted in frustration and brutality against farms, women and children. Our only reason for supporting such a rape is

that it is Britain's, and we follow like sheep, or rather, rams.

MP 1: We might require Britain’s protec­ tion in the future.

Higgins: Is this the price we have to pay— if that were true anyway? Britain is cynical and freely bargains with our potential enemies. She might not come running to our aid as eagerly as we rush to hers.

Regardless of all this, the immorality and frankly oppressive nature of this war re­ quires that we oppose it. The Boers after all only seek freedom and the right to run their own country in their own way. I only regret that the atmosphere of this country is so hysterical, prejudiced and rabid that I will have long passed on before it will be conceded that I, possibly, was right.

They laugh and howl him down. Transfor­ mation: the MPs become part o f the Australian contingent in South Africa.

They chant a slogan.

Soldiers: Free Breaker, free Breaker. . .

A General enters to run the court martial.

Breaker is brought in by another British Officer. Cheers.

General: Her Majesty's Imperial Army versus Breaker Moran. Would the accused step forward?

Soldiers: Free Breaker, free Breaker . . .

General: Who is that uncouth rabble?

Officer: Members of the Australian con­ tingent, sir. Moran is a great hero among them. Single-handed, he silenced five Boer gun-emplacements at Spion Kop. General: I don't care what he's done or how popular he is with these yokels. (Steps forward: shouts.) Silence in the name of Her Majesty! (Pause.) I warn you. More noise of this nature will count heavily against the accused.

Bugsy: Shhh! We’re making it tougher for Breaker.

General (to Officer): The damned political climate has swung against us at home.

Horror and outrage over the women and children we, er, detained in refugee camps, and those killed with the burning of farms.

Those reponsible must be brought to trial.

Breaker Moran, do you plead guilty or not guilty to the charge of slaughtering Boer cattle in the Transvaal’s Blood River area?

Breaker: Guilty.

General: Did you or did you not set Fire to farms, with their women and children, on that same day, the twelfth of December.

Breaker: I did. But under orders.

General: Stick to the point!

Bugsy: Kitchener ordered it.

General: Would you leave the court! And take your associates.

Officer (with a revolver): Come on, lads, out you go.

Bugsy and soldiers reluctantly leave.

Officer (to General): He was really acting under orders, sir.

General: I know that.

Officer: You are condemning scapegoats, not real criminals.

General: Politics, politics, Captain. I’m a mere pawn. Breaker Moran. You are sentenced to death. Execution to be im­ mediate.

The Officer blindfolds Breaker. The General becomes the leader o f the firing

squad (formerly the soldiers), which now enters.

Bugsy (seeing Breaker): Oh no! The bastards have sentenced him.

General: All right men, attention! (They do so.) Present arms!

Bugsy: I can’t do it!

General: Have you anything to say, Moran? Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Braker: Australia will be proud of me.

General: Remember, lads, aim for the point mid-way between the eyeballs.

Bugsy: I won't shoot. I’m his brother.

General: I don’t care who you are, son.

You are now under the command of the British Army. Five shillings a day. It’s an order and your duty! (Pause.) Your brother was excellent at carrying out un­ pleasant orders. Imagine how he feels, his own brother a shirker.

Bugsy: I won’t.

General: You will. (He draws out a revolver and walks to behind Bugsy.) I have this revolver aimed at the back of your skull, Private, and if your rifle is not pointed at Moran’s forehead when you fire, I shall shoot you for insurrection.

(Pause.) Take aim! (Pause.) Fire!

They fire. Breaker falls. The General walks up to the body and fires a shot into his head.

General: Well done! Moran, after a round of rum, you will be in charge of grave detail. Quick march!

They march out.

HOME SWEET HOME SCENE Dad and Mum appear with table. Norman gets up and moves to it and them.

Dad (at end o f scene as before: music ceases): A lot of things have happened while you’ve been away, son. Did you hear the result of the second referendum? We’re going to have Federation soon. I voted for it. That young Deakin — you know, Mum, he used to live round the corner of Ger­ trude Street — well he’s already off to England. A Fitzroy lad in London talking to the Queen! What do you think of that, Norman?

Norman: Where’s the apple-pie, Mum? Dad: You should go into politics, son.

With a record like that — medals, war in­ juries, the gift of the gab, a good head on your shoulders . . . Melbourne’s going to need a lot of new politicians, Norman . . .

Miss Australia enters.

Miss Aust.: Mafeking has been relieved!

Dad: Did you hear that, Norman? Mafek­ ing has been relieved.

Miss Aust. (moving around): Mafeking has been relieved! God Save the Queen!

Dad: Our Melbourne boys did that. (To the audience.)

Miss Aust.: Mafeking has been relieved!

Hip, hip hooray!

People appear from all directions; a jubilant street scene takes place, with shouts, hand-shakes, kisses and tears . . .

Old ladies, workers, office-workers, larrikins, etc. Miss Australia disappears.

The crowd eventually breaks into “Rule Britannia”.

The Ghost o f Peter Lalor appears on stage.

Lalor (shouts): Ladies and gentlemen!

Silence please!

Pause.

Crowd (hushes whispers, etc.): It’s Peter Lalor etc. . . .

Lalor: Ladies and gentlemen, I have further good news from London. The House of Commons, that Cromwell barn, has just passed the Commonwealth Bill!

(Cheers from the crowd.) It only remains for the Queen, God bless her fat Teutonic heart, to sign the approval, and we will have Federation! (Cheers.) One day we might slash completely the wrists of England and become a republic. Federa­ tion, however, will do for the moment, and with that in mind, people of Melbourne, the salt of Australia, I give to you — Miss Australia!

Miss Australia appears on stage holding spread out in front o f her the Australian flagLalor: And the Australian flag! (Loud cheers.) Thank you. Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen. Allow me to explain the flag and its motifs. In the top left-hand corner, we have a Union Jack in miniature.

(Cheers.) Whose red stands for blood, blue for cruelty and white for hypocrisy!

(Cheers, as i f he is saying things laudatory o f the Empire.) To the right we have the six stars of the Southern Cross! (Cheers.)

Thank you. My own invention. They represent, as you might have guessed, the six states of Australia. These six states are (pointing to t he t op st ar) : MATERIALISM . . .

Ecstatic and mob-crazed cheers. (pointing to the next) PHILISTINISM Cheers. (next) INTOLERANCE . . . Our love of the unusual. . .

Cheers. (next) MILITARISM . . .

Cheers. (next) RACISM . . .

Cheers. (the lowest one) And last but not least, supporting all the others — PARANOIA! Tumultuous cheers. The crowd rushes the stage and bears Miss Australia aloft. They carry her down to the main acting area in a procession and circle round. Miss Australia sings “God Save the Queen”, one half o f the crowd sing “1 Love a Sun­ burnt Country”, the other renders “Walt­ zing Matilda”. Lalor, still on stage, recites Lawson’s poem “Eureka”. The orchestra does its best with the “Marvellous M elbourne” theme. They eventually march off; Lalor disappears; “Marvellous Melbourne” then continues for a while.

Mortimer Peacock appears on the plat­ form.

Peacock: Once again, ladies and gentlemen, it is Mortimor Peacock, your Master of Ceremonies. Some twelve years ago, I was with you in these very Exhibi­ tion Buildings, when we celebrated a land­

mark in Melbourne’s history. Today is just such another landmark in Melbourne’s history. Today is just such another land­ mark, even greater, if possible, than that of the Centennial Exhibition. Those twelve years, ladies and gentlemen, have been rich in history, much of it not at all flattering to Melbourne and its citizens. The tide of for­ tune has, however, once again turned in our favour. As you all know, the Common­ wealth of Australia was formally in­ augurated on the first of January in this year of great grace, 1901. It was then decided that Melbourne become the seat of Government of the Commonwealth of Australia.

This was an apt and necessary choice.

Melbourne has always been the centre of the Federation cause, and she is the only city in Australia with a Parliament House large enough to contain the huge Com­ monwealth Parliament. Her Exhibition Buildings were the only possible choice for this ceremony today and the vast crowd of 15,000 people!

Today, ladies and gentlemen, we are to witness the opening of the first Common­ wealth Parliament. For Melbourne, the capital of Australia, this is a moment of unparalleled achievement. The vision of our forefathers has been realised, our vi­ sion of the future is limitless. Melbourne, the centre of a Pacific power . . . Ladies and gentlemen, yes, I can see them, their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York are approaching . . . yes, here they are . . .

A fanfare o f trumpets. The Duke and Duchess o f Cornwall and York enter. They are followed by the Governor-General o f Australia, Lord Hopetoun, and Lady Hopetoun. They enter. Following them are Mr Edmund Barton, the Prime Minister o f Australia, and his wife; then Mr Deakin, the Attorney-General and his wife; then Mr George Turner, the Treasurer, and his wife; then Sir Wallace Pork, Minister for Customs and Excise, and Lady Pork.

They all go up to the stage.

Peacock: The Old Hundredth Psalm, ladies and gentlemen.

The psalm is sung.

Peacock: His R oyal H ighness, as representative of King Edward the Seventh, will now read the King’s message and proceed to administer the oaths to the representatives of Commonwealth Parlia­ ment. He will then declare the Parliament open. His Royal Highness!

Duke: His Majesty has been pleased to consent to this separation, moved by his sense of the loyalty and devotion which prompted the generous aid afforded by all colonies in the South African War, and the splendid bravery of the colonial troops. It is His Majesty’s earnest prayer that this Union, so happily achieved, may, under God’s blessing, prove an instrument for still further promoting the welfare and ad­ vancement of his subjects in Australia, and for the strengthening and consolidation of his empire. (Fanfare and cheers.) I now declare this Parliament to be open.

Fanfare and cheers. “ Marvellous Melbourne’’ song.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 39

Theatre/Victoria

A strangely pessimistic assortment of desperate material THE RADI O- ACTI VE SHOW

HORROR

GARRIE HUTCHINSON The Radio-Active Horror Show by John Romeril. Australian Performing Group, Pram Factory, Carlton, Victoria. Opened 7 July 1977.

Director, Carol Porter.

With Wilfred Last, Margot Nash, Kerry Dwyer, Ursula Harrison, Richard Murphett.

The wheel turns. Optimists and pessimists ments. This deathly metaphor is the image take turns in charge of the western world’s of the century. personality. Sometimes everything seems So they say. to be going well and the future stretches Science fiction writers have had a boundless in front of us; mankind totally stranglehold on writing about the end of capable of dealing with any small tech­ the world lately, science having given them nical problem that might crop up. The enough stimulus to get off on. The theatre nineteenth century for instance. The sun is a hard mode to use in this fashion, set on happy Victorians conquering dis­ always tending towards the here and now ease, frontiers and mysteries. Wars were rather than the hereafter. But where the small, relatively efficient and useful in here and now is the imminent political spreading bible and soap. Everything got threat of disaster then work can proceed. faster and more confident.

On the streets, and in the theatre. The Sometimes the end of the world is at pessimists gain happiness through ener­ hand. Plagues carry off the healthy. Life is getic espousal of their views. nasty, brutish and short. Murder and Thus the Radio-active Horror Show at rapine, sacking and looting, torture and the Pram Factory, devised by the cast and death. The Middle Ages. The twentieth John Romeril. century.

The Australian Performing Group is in Nowadays things have gone sour. At no a good position to do something in this time for 80 years has there not been a war direction — some would say that politically somewhere. The rich get richer, the poor oriented, group developed, community starve. Science, instead of benignly pro­ based theatre is what they should be doing viding more and more answers has instead all the time — because the group has been opened up more and more questions. The heavily involved with contem porary solutions we apparently have do not make politics since the beginning. Of the sixties, very many people happy. The cities, sup­ that is. Not only the issues but also in ex­ posedly the touchstone of civilisation, are perimenting on how personal democracy dying. The countryside is poisoned. And might work. (I’ve often thought that a for thirty years the shadow of total show might be developed around the annihilation has fallen upon us. meetings that take up so much of the Previously m illenarian fantasies, APG’s time. Perhaps the public should just whether of the end of the world or the com­ be invited to a nightly argument about life, ing of the New Jerusalem or a combina­ politics and art.) tion of both have generally been based in Romeril, too, through his commitment religion. Mankind would have very little to to the ‘theatre of the moment’ and his do with it, except to be sorted out on justifiable opposition to the idea of monu­ Judgement Day. mental or masterpiece theatre brings his Now, the millenium will arrive as a strange pessimistic desperation to bear. direct result of our own efforts. It doesn’t The Radio-active Horror Show is for­ matter which particular mode you choose: mally most akin to Romeril’s Golden starvation, energylessness, the bomb, a Holden, that angry black piece gutting bout of race war, or perhaps the return of multinationals, Liberals and Australia’s disease; these are self-inflicted punish­ own car. That, and this show, are collec­ 40 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

tions of sketches, turns and songs around their subject.

Which is Uranium and what to do with it; the bomb and what it will do to us; and a cast of characters and what they want to do. The show is not a linear exposition of a political line, but an off centre series of fantasies and facts around the subject.

Thus we have an Activist (Ursula Harrison) who speaks about the ‘terrorist within’ dying to get out and kill, start a civil war between her messianic comrades and the lazy and immoral, the sexists, racists, scientists. Hers is the ancient at­ titude that if they’re gonna get me, I'm gonna try and get them first. Chaos.

Of course we have a representative of Late American Capitalism, The Fixer (Wilfred Last). He’s fixed Indonesia, and has been ordered by someone to fix Aus­ tralia. He loves Uranium, War Games and as long as he’s having a good time doesn’t give a hoot for the natives.

There’s a Scientist (Richard Murphett) driven crazy by the implications of what he’s done . . . but what can he do about it now? He’ll surely go down with the same ship we’re on.

An Optimist (Margot Nash) in a few episodes from The Nuclear Days of our Nuclear Lives regards most things as so Doris Lessing, sees salvation in new books and infidelity.

And a Pessimist (Kerry Dwyer) teaching her child the facts of life, like the half life of plutonium and how her children’s chil­ dren’s children won’t see the end of i t . . .

For the already converted the evening is highly entertaining and eccentric, with suf­ ficient points of view, and even humour, to sustain now that it runs two hours or so and not four. For the unenlightened I would guess the whole thing would be mys­ terious and even offensive, and the three or four sketches that don’t work dead boring.

For myself I found the Terrorist business morally repugnant and one item with the Scientist in a psychoanalytic heaven just about unintelligible. The Nuclear Days of our Nuclear Lives sequences, with a nuclear cop, the optimist and her lover are eccentric to a degree.

What they are really about I don’t really know.

However the poem about scientific responsibility — The Mad Scientist Is Mad With Us — is genuinely moving, and Kerry Dwyer’s sections in a Nuclear Laun­ dromat and teaching her child are terrif­ ically manic and effective.

All in all The Radio-active Horror Show is a strangely pessimistic assortment of desperate material which works at less than the capacity of the actors and writer.

A production that stays on the knife edge

and Anne are considered unsuitable; the thought of playing “ Mummy and Daddy” must be banished forever. Just as previous­ ly they had been forced by failure to reshape their lives around teaching and domesticity from their careers as actress and writer, so now the phoenix of other forms of creativity must rise from these ASHES ashes.

Colin goes over to Ireland for the ROBERT PAGE funeral of his uncle shredded in a bomb outrage. His monologue, too long and too Ashes by David Rudkin. Melbourne Theatre Company at St Martin’s Theatre. Director, late in the play, interweaves this theme of regeneration in their lives — of the fer­ Mick Rodger; designer, Steven Nolan.

Colin, Bruce Myles; Anne, Lynette Curran; tilising quality of ashes. the D octor/Sem in o lo g ist/G u ru /G y n aec­ The only answer, for the Ulster situ­ ological surgeon/am bulance d riv e r/a re a Adoptions Officer, Jon Finlayson; Jennifer/- ation deprives him of his own heritage; R eceptionist/V alerie/nurse/assistant adop­ isolated from the past by the move to tions officer, Jan Friedl.

England he is isolated from the future by barrenness.

The optimism is tentative. Anne in her In a world fearful of over-population and final speech describes her apocalyptic concerned for the quality of life many dream where the child of ice tells her “take couples choose not to procreate; but take o ff your dead” . The word from the agency away the possibility of choice in the comes. The prolonged non-appearance of matter, the situation at the centre of David their child is at an end, they must start to Rudkin’s Ashes, and humans will go to look for “whatever is". desperate lengths. Ironically methods of contraception, foams, rubbers, medic­ Sterility the central metaphor soaks aments, abortions, vasectomy and the pill everything with meaning — from the have never been so many nor so sophis­ breakfast eggs to IRA blood and death ticated, yet the incapacity to conceive is a with the bible, Malthus and Eysenck on problem like cancer and the common cold the way. It’s strain-all power is sometimes for which no satisfactory remedy has been over-used but rarely. found.

Steven Nolan’s set has similar ubiquity: But unlike the cold, which goes away, or a flexible background to the traumas, cancer, which kills or is cured, not con­ brilliantly combine sterile hospital and ceiving is chronic — it just goes on, not modern bedroom. The cosy intimacy of the happening. Like Tom Stoppard’s vision of bed of home becomes the cold slab of inti­ death in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are mate examination; an ambulance too, and Dead where one goes on and on not mak­ a platform for the adoption officer’s chilly ing a reappearance. Anne and Colin, the sermon. couple in Rudkin’s play, have reached the The language ranging from pithy stage where the heavy continuation of the epigram to lyrical flight requires a pro­ non-event begins them on the harrowing duction that stays on the knife edge trail from specialist to specialist. Their between sentimentality and the cold and desperation increases with the conflicting, expensive and undignified advice they receive — circus dog copulating positions (mechanically demonstrated by a nurse with surgical model), cold bathing of testicles (farcically mimed), sodium bi­ carb. douches, sperm and ovulation tests — but although finally deemed able nothing continues to happen for them with monotonous monthly regulation.

Then it does. Rousing strains of Mahler “ Veni, veni, Creator Spiritus” . A child is conceived and for a brief time life looses its uncertainty, suspicion and jealousy — the yo-yo ascription of guilt to one then the other is over. They can feel their heritage fluttering in the womb beneath their fingers, but this brief hesitation in their childless yearnings comes to a slow pain­ ful end as Anne at three months starts to haemorrhage and finally miscarries, not one child but — with bitter irony — twins.

And they remove her womb.

The chance of producing their own child now utterly gone they begin on the adop­ tion trail. Lights up. Audience switches role from observer/sympathiser to hopeful adoptors as the agency officials all but callously dismiss this as a possibility. Colin

clinical.

Mick Rodger and his cast of four held this precision with utmost delicacy. Lyn Curran and Bruce Myles portrayed two in­ dividuals whose affection and closeness only momentarily frays with the hideous tension that pervades their lives. Though more of their speech is directed to the audience than to each other the sense of the strength of their relationship is never lost. Even individually, when Anne chats to the adoption officer, with a frankness that is only damning of their cause, on their liberal attitude to Colin’s bi­ sexuality, how she doesn’t always like him, and doesn’t always fancy him.

Such honesty shows the strength of their relationship to us but its “ flaws” to the of­ ficer; the episode is a master work of tragic irony.

Myles’ shambolic Colin, quiet, sensitive and with a wry touch that didn’t over­ reach for laughs at the start kept the in­ creasingly black mood deftly in check. The perfect foil for the more animated — yet brass tacks acceptance — of Lyn Curran's Anne.

Jan Friedl and Jon Finlayson played their range of character, or rather cari­ cature, parts — doctors, nurses, am­ bulance man, over-fertile neighbour — with a fine versatility. Rudkin could per­ haps have restrained himself from the alltoo-easy send-up of the medical pro­ fession and social services.

Tragedy is concerned with the operation of fate, with lack of choice, and in the end demands finality. That the couple can’t have their own children is tragic; that they can’t adopt is a social problem: “what happens to us in the world bears no resem­ blance to morality” . The final grasp at op­ timism gives a poignant dignity that raises man from the animal mechanics he is the subject of in so much of the play. While there’s life there’s hope.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 41

Theatre/W A

Shakespeare and G & S in successful ‘pro-am’ productions HMS PINAFORE AS YOU LIKE IT MARGOT LUKE H.M.S. Pinafore by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Gilbert and Sullivan Society of W.A. Opened 28 July, 1977. Director, John Milson; design, Graham Maclean.

The Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., Robert van Mackelenberg; Captain Corcoran, Barry Preece; Tom Tucker, Roland McCallum; Ralph Rackstraw, Bruce Mackintosh; Dick Deadeye, Desmond Lukey; Bill Bobstay, John Milson; Bob Becket, Robert Miller; Josephine, Terry Johnson; Hebe, June Holmes; Little Buttercup, Anne Watson.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare.

Directed and designed by Raymond Omodei, produced by Bill Mason. Opened 28 July, 1977.

Orlando, Alan Fletcher; Adam, Michael van Shoor; Oliver, James Bean; Charles, Neil God­ frey; Rosalind, Wanda Davidson; Celia, Siobhan Sadka; Touchstone, Keith Robinson; Le Beau, Guy Bevilaqua; Duke F rederick, Chris Worthham; Duke Senior, Bill Dunstone, A Lord, David Zampatti; Corin, Cefn Ridout; Silyius, Gerald Hitchcock; Lord Amiens, Ber­ nard Carney; Jaques, Karl Zwicky; Audrey, Allanah Lucas, Sir Oliver Martext, David Zam­ patti; Phebe, June Richardson; William, Maurice Bucknell; A Masquer, Malcolm Hughes; Jaques de Boys, Paul Hetherington.

Every now and then, the am ateurversus/professional argument erupts. Last year the emphasis was on bread-and-butter issues in an overcrowded profession: was a first-rate actor who happened to combine two jobs successfully less of a professional because he did not depend on his earnings from the stage? Did his presence invalidate the professional status of his colleagues?

This year the ratio is reversed. Does the intrusion of one or two professionals on the province of amateurs invalidate their status? Nobody, so far, has raised any objections. In fact, of course the part played by the specialist non-professional organisations is overdue for appreciation.

They can, and do, mount productions that are lavish in manpower and audacious in experiment in a way the severely budgeted professional theatre cannot afford, thus ex­ tending the range and appeal of pres­ entation available to the theatregoer.

During August, Perth saw two notable examples of this kind: the staging by the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of H.M .S. Pinafore, and Shakespeare’s A s You Like 42 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

It by the University Dramatic Society.

Both of them were directed by distinguish­ ed professionals — both of them in­ troduced some professional element among the actors.

The opportunity for innovation when dealing with Gilbert and Sullivan is, of course, restricted. Tradition is sacrosanct, but even within the accepted framework John Milson finds ample scope for per­ sonal touches. His specialty in dealing with a chorus is to create individual characters among them and to introduce amusing bits of business that liven up the scene without diverting too much of the audience’s atten­ tion from the principals. Thus, not only are the sailors carefully differentiated, but the numerous sisters, cousins and aunts vary in temperament according to costumes of more delicate and more aggressive shades of pink and are graduated in age, with one doting relation rolling on in a wheelchair.

O ne’s feelings about Robert van Mackelenberg, the straight actor brought in from the outside, are ambivalent.' His extravagantly doddering Admiral Sir Joseph Porter (Ruler of the Queen’s Navee), is certainly an original but he is a caricature in an alien mode — eighteenth century rather than G. and S. In a different way Desmond Lukey’s grotesque Dick Deadeye is memorably venomous and con­ torted, but rather twisted twentieth century in flavour. Both of them seem to break the rule of lighthearted incongruity indicated by the music, which insists that no matter

what kinds of realities are hinted at in the libretto, everybody is playing games and the smoothly accomplished skipping and dancing proves that it’s all really very jolly.

So, despite the appeal of novelty, the strength and enjoyment is still in the traditional virtues of G and S: the dedicated chorus knowing its job, the sparkle and absurdity of noble sentiments affectionately parodied, the bright-aspaint design by Graham Maclean giving a precise visual equivalent of the spirit of the piece. Vocally, Barry Preece as Captain Corcoran is the most precisely right for the occasion, and Terry Johnson, who has a most attractive voice and personality makes a charming heroine.

As a curtain-raiser, added by sleight-ofhand, there is a little-known Offenbach one-actor, R.S.V.P., or Monsieur Choufleuri’s Musicale, intended no doubt to force audiences out of any lazy habits.

The revival of interest in the Savoy Operas shows a groundswell of public need — a tradition of uncomplicated enthusiasm, which clearly needs to be kept fresh by innovative touches to keep it from fossilising.

Ray Omodei, in his capacity as Director in Residence at the University of W.A. has a much freer hand. Innovative productions of Shakespeare are the rule rather than the exception, and he has found ingeniously multilateral way of making As You Like It relevant to his student actors and predom inantly young audience. By employing a pattern of contemporary sub­ cultures he achieves a com prom ise between the tw entieth century and timelessness that is on the whole successful and allows flexibility in accommodating the considerable range of ability in the group. The production grew out of a season of workshop training in which the actors were encouraged to “let themselves go in a fairly disciplined way” . This has clearly paid off: there is very little of the lifeless memorised recital tone, and a great deal of lively, freewheeling display of talent.

Orlando, the hero, played by Alan Fletcher, is unquestionably the represen­ tative of today’s generation — energetic, sensitive, and dressed in damaged denim.

(He has recently played a number of parts with the Hole in the Wall Company and is emerging as an actor to watch.) The usur­ ping duke and his followers are blackly fascist, using to rtu re and offering cigarettes with sinister overtones, whilst the banished duke’s merry band are carousing in the forest, dressed in ethnic gear, playing guitar and sitar and con­ suming quantities of fruit. Bill Dunstone,

as their ducal leader wears a permanent smile of bliss, which leads one to assume they are meant to be stoned as well.

The girls start off in hideous school clothes c.1930 but once they are in the liberating forest, Rosalind (Wanda David­ son) dons guerilla fighters’ jungle greens and Celia (Siobhan Sadka) becomes char­ mingly feminine in flower-child’s caftan.

In this respect the less successful, because no recognisable context has been found for them are the rustics — Silvius and Phebe, almost unisex, and Audrey neither trollop nor social climber, though both are hinted at. Touchstone, wisely left anonymously clownlike, is played by Keith Robinson with a sure sense of timing and deadpan wit, whereas David Zampatti’s vicar is turned into a wild television caricature of an Irish priest with a bicycle. Curiously, the only consciously early seventeenth cen­ tury touch, the androgynous Masquer, representing Hymen, seems to jar in all this company.

The single most arresting study is Karl Zwicky’s Jaques, whose tattered clothes are held together with tatters, who sports half a pair of sunglasses and cherishes a defunct umbrella. This eccentric derelict dominates the stage whether he gives way to his bitterly witty melancholy or stumbles about in slapstick manner. One is never entirely sure whether to condemn him for so blatantly stealing the show or whether to be lost in admiration.

Where ensemble playing is seriously attempted it works impressively well, notably in the scenes involving Rosalind, Celia, Orlando and Touchstone. Here the actors achieve more than the sheer ex­ uberance of the verbal battle, but also manage to deal with all the nuances of the sexual games resulting from Rosalind’s masculine disguise.

The austere set of hessian and string is a mixed blessing. At their best the strings, dappled with green light, suggest sunlight through forest leaves, at worst, especially when raised or lowered, the hessian backdrop crashes like a gigantic loom at work.

The instrumental accompaniment of guitar and sitar works well, though for some reason the songs struck me as less successful, neither Shakespeare nor con­ temporary.

A fine balance between the frenetic comedy and the undertones of seriousness MARTELLO TOWERS CLIFF GILLAM Martello Towers by Alexander Buzo. National Theatre Company, Hole in the Wall Theatre, Perth, Western Australia. Opened 27 July 1977.

Director, Aarne Neeme; Designer, Sue Russell; Stage Manager, Christine Randall.

Francesca Jones, Pippa Williamson; Edward Martello, Steve Jodrell; Lonnie Randall, Peter Rowley; Jennifer Martello, Leith Taylor; Vivien Martello, Ailsa Piper; “ Ice” Berg, Andrew King; Marian Bruce, Margarie Fletcher; Anthony M artello, Alan Cassell; Special Guests, Mike Morris, Geoff Gibbs.

Aarne Neeme’s National Theatre Com­ pany at the Playhouse has been having, critically speaking, a lean time of it for 1977. The failure of the first production of the year, Moliere’s The Miser during the Perth Festival (a failure partly the conse­ quence of the non-appearance of imported English lead John Le Mesurier) set the pattern for a string of productions which, even if commercially successful, (due to canny publicity work) have been received in a decidedly luke-warm fashion by the critical establishment.

The recent move by the company to the Hole in the Wall theatre for a four week season of Alex Buzo’s Martello Towers seems to have broken the spell. The production should satisfy the critics, and should certainly also do good business at the box office. It is difficult to know just why this particular production, unlike re­ cent National Theatre efforts, should have achieved the coherence and lively vigour it has since the play itself is, as a play, no better than others which have formed part of the National Theatre programme this year.

Certainly it is a well-made play, from the point of view of economy of means and Buzo’s sure instinct for the well-placed comic line, but the somewhat pretentious claims that have been made for it on the basis that it represents a “ significant” dram atic treatm ent of the “ ethnic minorities problem” do not seem to me in any way justified. What the play does demonstrate is the way in which a writer whose plays have been taken up for com­ mercial production is able to develop a confident assurance and a positive sense of theatrical effect. He learns to pace his effects, and how to prepare an audience to receive those effects.

One fine example among many others in Martello Towers of this kind of assurance in the writing is the way in which Buzo prepares us, through dialogue between Anthony Martello and his son Edward, for the line which provides the keynote for the confrontation between Anthony and Edward’s estranged wife’s mother, Marian Bruce. “ Hello Marian” , says Anthony “ I see you’ve shaved off your moustache” . As delivered by Alan Cassell, this line brought down the house, and Buzo has obviously calculated very precisely that it should have this effect.

The play is full of such felicities of comic writing, potent one-liners issuing out of cunningly preparatory dialogue. The form of the play facilitates the production of such one-liners since it exploits many of the conventions of farce. G athered together at Martello Towers (Edward’s holiday cottage at Pittwater) through the device of a confusion about whose turn it is to spend the weekend are Edward and his

estranged spouse Jennifer, their respective “lovers” , Edward’s sister Vivien, accom­ panied by Edward’s old friend and rival “ Ice” Berg, and finally Edward’s ItaloAustralian father and Jennifer’s mother.

Edward’s difficulties in coping with his father’s expectations, his separated wife, and his sister Vivien, whom he attempts to “protect” from the consequences of her liaison with the friend of his wilder youth, “ Ice” , are all worked through in an atmosphere of frenetic exits and entrances (in the first act) reminiscent of Feydeau.

Aarne Neeme demonstrated, with his fine 1976 production of Coralie Lansdowne Says No, that he has an affinity for the work of Alex Buzo. The current production confirms this affinity. The show is nicely paced, and Neeme has struck a fine balance between the frenetic comedy and the undertones of seriousness, which are largely present in Edward Martello’s sallies of mordant wit.

Buzo, we are told, conceived of this character as one whose ironic laughter is a consequence of pain, and Steve Jodrell convincingly justified this conception with his finely controlled performance. Jodrell, who was in his younger days a gifted but erratic performer, has matured well and has learned to judge to a nicety the relation between the mood of an audience and the timing of his performance. In a cast dis­ tinguished by eveness and strength of per­ formance he stood out. As the companion with whom Edward Martello expects to spend a quiet weekend, Francesca Jones, Pippa Williamson exploited her con­ siderable experience to advantage, eliciting a good many laughs from her presentation of Francesca’s naivety and pathetic desire to please, but also the audience’s sympathy for her sense of inadequacy. As Edward’s wife Jennifer, Leith Taylor managed the difficult transition from estranged shrewishness to the tentative recommit­ ment to her relationship with Edward with great skill and delicacy.

The tendencies of the play in the direc­ tion of farce are perhaps most evident in the character of Lonnie Randall, “ radical rock radio D.J.” He is conceived in a spirit of exag g eratio n which app ro ach es caricature. Peter Rowley played Randall both broadly and with great energy, mak­ ing a comic success of a role which could easily have become merely an embarrass­ ment to the play. But despite Jodrell’s con­ trol and Rowley’s energy, perhaps the most interesting performance of the even­ ing came from newcomer Ailsa Piper, who handled the difficult role of Vivien (who is, according to Buzo “the keystone of the play’s arch”) with an assurance belying her relative inexperience. Of the other players Alan Cassell, in the cameo role of Anthony Martello, was most notable despite the tendency for his accent to slide around between the extremes of Mock-Sicilian and public school Australia. Design, by Sue Russell, was refreshingly crisp; unfussy and efficient.

Well-produced and well-sited, Martello Towers is an unqualified success as a wellwritten entertainment.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEFTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 43

Theatre/N S W

Big Sydney Toys BIG TOYS

DOROTHY HEWETT Big Toys by Patrick White. Old Tote Theatre Company, Parade Theatre, Kensington, NSW. Opened 27 July 1977. Director, Jim Sharman; assistan t, Mark Gould; designer, Brian Thomson; fashion stylist, Victoria Alexander; lighting, Jerry Luke; stage management, Joe Walters, Penny Roberts.

Ritchie Bosanquet Q.C., Arthur Dignam; Mag, Kate Fitzpatrick; Terry Legge, Max Cullen.

Patrick White’s first new play for fourteen years! What to expect? The rumours had been flying, but it had all been played p re tty close to the chest . . . not impressionistic, no, disturbing, ye-es, realism really, not like the other plays . . . definitely no.

So to the Parade with an incredible sense of occasion for Big Toys. “We’ll be interested to see what you make of it.

You’ve always been such a rabid White fan.”

The conversations in the foyer later seemed to become the conversations on stage. What do they think about, the Old Tote patrons, seeing themselves writ strange and sad, on that stunning set? Do slivers of ice go into their groins?

Arias from The Marriage o f Figaro, melodic, piercing and exactly right: Kate Fitzpatrick lounging on a huge centrepiece circular bed, dressed in a white satin robe, balancing a giant red balloon on the tip of one impossibly elegaat ankle-strap red shoe, cooing into a red telephone, “ I’m concerned about people darling.”

We are in the world of expensive toys and this high flyer, the untouchable Mrs Bosanquet, is the most elegant toy of them all.

In the glasshouse bedroom above the great, glittering arc of the harbour, and the black void of the wind of retribution, a bitter trio play out Patrick White’s chilly, domestic allegory.

Richie Bosanquet, QC, Mag his wife and Terry Legge, the union leader, are all caught in this Point Piper rathole, and only Terry leaves it still partially alive.

The theme might be, we are all fatally corruptible but some are more corruptible than others. The toys are fur coats and emeralds and whisky and Ferraris and pay-offs and harbour views, and real Left: Max Cullen and Arthur Dignam.

44 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

working class lovers, and rich bi-sexual husbands, anti-uranium meetings, a brief card in the Labor Party, and Mag who thumbed a ride from Tibbaburra to Point Piper. “ Big toys make everything right. Keep the children quiet.” It is all very Sydney.

Mag is the centre-piece of the play . . . she is the Big Toy, the kept lady, the dabbler in love and seriousness; she is the view of the Harbour and even Sydney itself, rich, stylish . . . “ style is everything” . . . achingly beautiful, a whore in emeralds who wishes she was something else, and brings her past with her into the play . . .

Dadda the hawker who eventually tried to rape her on the floor of the van, so she hitched from Tibbaburra, and made it into the bourgeoisie . . . she wore clothes so well, she was so cool . . . “ Oh, yes Dostoevsky, I never seem to have time for reading.” The past rules all their lives: Ritchie, the poor, little, rich boy, who always wanted a big footballer mate, and now wants Terry. Terry the lapsedCatholic turned Communist union boss with the impossibly idealised figure of his dead wife Mary behind him, and Mag on the bed before him.

“You’re corrupt and rotten Mag.” Mag gives him a circle of gold plaited with elephant’s hair to wear round his neck, she makes him carry her parcels back home, she tells him she has “ some infinitesimal core of good not quite smothered by all this drag.” She tells him about “the one you search for and never find” , she tells him he will always remain “above suspicion for her” .

Using him for her husband’s latest court case she endures the pain of his ominous figure hunched over the harbour, sick with self loathing . . . “ I was the mellow witness Richie wanted, above suspicion” . As she sits in a pool of chill white light on the bed behind him she is the symbol of this rich mistress of a city, her toys spread around her. She cannot stand the black wind off that harbour when the glitter is gone.

“The black westerly preys and destroys me.”

When it is all over, and Terry has given back the keys of the Ferrarj, his pay-off for selling out on the uranium question and trade union principles, the betrayal has still taken place. He is no working class hero, he is “inclined to leave his charisma on the platform” . The criticisms of Max Cullen’s playing of Terry Legge are shallow and uninformed. Terry is a weak man, and as corruptible as most of us. He has old fashioned views on most things, as most of the Australian Catholic working class of his age group have. Cullen gets the essential weakness and sadness of the character across, the man who can only relate to a wife dead of cancer, who wants the beautiful Mag, but can’t get at her humanity, can only blame her for his downfall. Arthur Dignam, underplaying beautifully the silky corrupt Richie Bosanquet, is the perfect foil for Cullen’s uneasy ex-Catholic, with all his old moral­

ity half intact, and his new morality as shaky as his old.

Does Terry leave a loser? It’s a question you can’t really ask in this Sydney moral­ ity tale. They all lose and win, some more drastically than others. And when the game is over the penthouse remains as it always has, Mag has her Ferrari, the harbour is still mirrored outside.

Richie, the toy master, “ nothing’s hurtful if you analyse it” , has not even taken the last round. As Mag lets in the blackness she fears, for a moment we all hear the wind off the harbour. “ She’s a sensitive creature under the carapace.”

The ensemble playing of A rthur Dignam, Kate Fitzpatrick and Max Cullen is a joy and a terror to watch, Jim Sharman’s cool brilliant touch is over everything, the set design is the triumphant symbol of the play . . . “today what is important is style” . For once everybody from director to designers to actors know perfectly well what they are doing.

Australia’s greatest resident moral tale­ teller, in the bookshops and onstage, has done it again. Look you Sydneysiders and repent, listen you Australians and shiver.

That’s your black wind blowing over Sydney harbour.

If this is entertainment let’s have some more of it please CONFUSIONS PETER KENNA Confusions by Alan Ayckbourn. Marian Street Theatre, Sydney. Opened 13 July 1977. Direc­ tor, Ted Craig; Designer, Brian Nickless.

With Louise Pajo, Kerry Walker, Barry Lovett, Phillip Hinton and Trevor Kent.

I arrived at the Marian Street Theatre in time to read my programme before the performance began and was rather startled to find dotted through it, what sounded curiously like a justification for the type of fare they have been presenting over the past few years.

For their tenth birthday (I read) “A musical was chosen as a statement of policy. We aim to entertain” . There was a Clive Barnes quote: “ There is a place in every large city for a boulevarde theatre — to entertain people.” And actually hanging

over poor Alan Ayckbourn’s photograph were the words: “ He has no messages, no profound vision, gives no advice” . What can they mean by all this? Surely not that only people with absolutely nothing to say are entertaining? If, indeed, this is their belief then I must hasten to warn them (I’m sorry Alan) that there is a snake in their woodheap! Mr Ayckbourn does have a message and it is exactly the same as the one expressed by Anton Chekhov: a loving concern with the frailties of human nature.

The difference between them is a matter of weight, that’s all.

The five short plays which make up Confusions are simply delightful. They are true farces in that they are comedies in an arranged landscape and somebody’s frenzy is at the centre of each one. In Mother Figure it is a woman so harrassed by her children that she treats a couple of wouldbe-helpful neighbours as though they too were recalcitrant under tens. In Drinking Companion it is a man driven by the anguish of loneliness to accost a totally un­ interested girl into sharing a binge with him. In Between Mouthfuls the frenzy is spread over four diners in a restaurant who are accusing each other of lack of concern while the relentless service of a meal arrives and departs. Gosforth’s Fete shows us a group of charity workers getting ready for a fete while their expectations of each other are hilariously and sadly deflated all around them. The evening ends with the low key A Talk in the Park which because of its total simplicity is possibly the most moving piece of all. Five people sit on park benches each eager to communicate with the other but they are finally trapped into silence by suspicion.

The pieces are played by a strong com­ pany of actors: Louise Pajo, Phillip Hin­ ton, Barry Lovett, Trevor Kent and Kerry Walker. However I feel that the director, Ted Craig, doesn’t quite measure up to the material. He turns Gosforth’s Fete into a vaudeville sketch, and in Between Mouth­ fuls the complex rhythms of interrupted speech and mime carried on by the diners in counterpoint to the blase insouciance of their waiter are indicated rather than realised.

He’s uncertain with the actors too.

Kerry Walker plays her zonked-out Mum as simply weary; she should be absolutely punch drunk. Phillip Hinton plays his desperate man in Drinking Companion for comedy; he should be playing for reality and allowing the situation itself to carry the comedy. This sort of directional drive is needed throughout to ring up full value and it’s too often missing.

The settings by Brian Nickless are suitable. It’s a pity they have to be so cramped. Farce needs space in order to clearly define movement. I shared the evening with a large theatre party of peo­ ple who obviously enjoyed every minute of it. I had a good time myself.

If this is what the Marian Street Theatre means by entertainment then, by all means, let’s have some more of it please.

No justification necessary.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 45

The show S id e B y S id e By S o n d h e im tributes him as the best lyricist, most adventurous composer and most considerable musical dramatist in the American theatre today.

ROBERT PAGE

Hello World~ this is Sondheim.

Few full scale musicals can now be mounted because of the enormous expense of putting large casts on stage with orchestras to back them. In recent years the mini-musical has come into its own, Cole, Tarantara and The Twenties and All That Jazz.

Take a bundle of songs, preferably well known, a small combo, and a handful of talented performers and with a musical anthology conjure up a period feeling or pay tribute to a name, Gilbert and Sullivan, a Cole Porter, or a Noel Coward.

A recipe for success. Stephen Sondheim, alive, kicking, and at forty six with a lot of road still ahead of him, is being given this treatment.

The show Side By Side By Sondheim tributes him to the status of George Gersh­ win, Irving Berlin and Richard Rogers, as the best lyricist, m ost adventurous composer and most considerable musical dramatist in the American theatre today.

“Though Sondheim’s recent works have not met with unequivocal success, and though few of his songs have deeply etched themselves on the popular consciousness, it is the drama in his lyrics, the hard edge and lack of sentimentality in his comment on modern life, and the power, if too rich for the pop parade, of his music which makes this a formula for remarkable success.”

Sondheim goes beyond the pazzazz and schmaltz which has become the cliche of Broadway. Each song in this collage is a microsmic playlet of the desperation undertowing urban existence; much on Jonson’s adage of “marriage has many pains but celibacy (which I take to mean bachelordom) has few pleasures” , on the break up of relationships, social quids and quiddities, neighbours, children, com­ munity — even the faded Hollywood myth dissolving as inexorably as the American dream. As one critic put it “the most dramatic songs are sung through gritted teeth” . The world is that of the U.S.

metropolis but all roads lead to New York in the seventies.

In fact the idea was conceived in England — perhaps it took outsiders to recognise the work of an outsider — and then was taken with the original cast to Broadway where the critics fell over th e m s e lv e s in th e s c ra m b le fo r superlatives, admitting in passing that America had been beaten at its own game.

Since then a local company has been formed in New York with others in Dublin and Toronto all playing to full houses and tremendous press response.

How right then, in this age of media to cast John Laws in the part of the narrator — the role created by another media man Ned Sherrin who also directed the original production. As anchor man for the two female and one male musical talents he links the songs together with comments on their origins, notes on Sondheim and off the cuff remarks which will be as topical as talkback radio.

It’s not really an acting part but one that requires the cool, sometimes acid, abilities of the instant ad-libbers. His sardonic dealings with his radio audience and the instant astringency of his diagnosis of their problems augur well for the hard edge the show needs.

In interview though, the craggy Laws; despite a film role up his sleeve and countless TV appearances, seemed apprehensive of treading the boards. With no memory of any stage acting and certainly none professionally he consoled himself with the thought that “it will be alright so long as it’s dark.” Of course he is doing it by invitation not audition and seems to have been fascinated by the enticing fear of confronting an audience face to face. With little to do except exercise that magnificent voice in a show that is acclaimed the world over one can’t help feeling that the test has been passed before it’s even been taken. But then Laws

is not a man to bet on anything but certainties.

The most attractive thing for him besides the built-in entertainment value is the use of all Australian talent. Those actually performing the songs (Laws has several gold records to his credit but won’t be singing in this) are Jill Perryman, the well-loved star of musical comedy here and no stranger to Sondheim having played in A Little Night Music. Geraldine Morrow again with a strong musical show back­ ground, and Bartholomew John, Aus­ tralian by adoption, TV actor and another performer from Night Music.

Even the production team boasts indigenous talent, including Ray Cook currently doing A Chorus Line in London and the musical director of the original British production of Side by Side, and Helen Montague born here but co­ producing from H.M. Tennant’s (London) coffers with Australian Bill Cronshaw.

With the show depending on many topical allusions, having the locals in it, despite the impertinence of the British in America, has a significance beyond that of recognition of the talent here.

The set has to be minim al as a background for songs culled from musicals as diverse as West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies and many others, but there will be nothing minimal about the costumes or the New York Times Square type party to mark the Sydney opening at the Theatre Royal, (27 September after four nights in Canberra beginning 21 September). The producers are taking a whole floor of the MLC building for what they expect to be the event of the season.

And after the four week run what then for John Laws? Is this a new direction?

Even before reading it, the stage seems to have enchanted him. “ I would like to do straight acting parts . . . but only by invitation.”

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 47

International The B e rlin T h e a te r tr e ffe n which takes place in West Berlin in May each year is an annual round-up of the ten most striking productions of the preceding season in the German-speaking theatre. In practice the German Democratic Republic ignores the event, so the choice is restricted to the Federal Republic (where there are 2000 new productions annually), Austria and Switzerland. The Austrians, with their conservative temperament and preference for solid actors’ theatre rarely get into the final selection, for this is a directors’ festival, and the jury of critics looks for in­ genious and inventive productions. The Austrian for ‘ingenious and inventive’ is ‘outrageous’, which partly explains why all the productions on show this year came from the Federal Republic. Basel and Zurich occasionally represent Switzerland, but neither had anything to show on this OCCaSlOn.

Shakespeare’s Memory

Germany This year’s B erlin T h e a te rtre ffe n

Hugh Rorrison The chosen productions were: Carlo Goldoni's Servant o f Two Masters (dir.

Niels-Peter Rudolph) and Goethe's Faust l and II (dir. Claus Peymann) from the W u erttem b erg isch en S ta a ts th e a te r, Stuttgart; Shakespeare’s Memory (dir.

Peter Stein) a company project from the Schaubuehne am Halleschen Ufer, Berlin; Atlantis (dir. Agosto Fernandes) a group project, and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (dir.

P e t e r Z a d e k ) fro m B ochum ; Shakespeare’s Othello (dir. P. Zadek) and Karl Valentin’s Zwangsvorstellungen (Hallucinations), (dir. Ulrich Heising) from the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Ham­ burg; Hedda Gabler (dir. N.P. Rudolph) from the Schillertheater, Berlin; Euripides’ M edea (dir. Hans Neuenfels) from Frankfurt Schauspiel; Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm (dir. Dieter Dorn) from the Munich Kammerspiele. A parade of es­ tab lish ed nam es, since N euenfels, Peymann, Rudolph, Stein and Zadek have among them had twenty-four productions in the Theatertreffen in the last five years.

Nonetheless an interesting and varied crop.

The two Ibsen productions merit a closer look. The whole tradition of middleclass drama from Lessing to Hauptmann has come under close scrutiny in Germany in the last decade, not least Ibsen, whom the Germans have made as much their own as Shakespeare. This has all happened un­ der the general heading, “evaluation of our bourgeois heritage” , as committed theatre traced the roots of modern industrial socie­ ty. One of the subtlest reappraisals of a nineteenth century script was Peter Stein's arena production of Peer Gynt at the Schaubuehne am Halleschen Ufer in 1971.

In considering the visual framework for the play and the period attitudes embedded in the characters the production team noted: It will not be enough to know the nineteenth century on the basis of the facts that you need for a Marxist analysis. Examination of the whole broad surface of the nineteenth century, the wealth of contradictions that it produced, will be more stimulating for our ideas: things we would call Kitsch today; the interlocking of traditions that in practice can be traced back to the baroque period with the rapid advance of science and technology; the interlocking of socalled urban and rural cultures; the admixture of phantasy in Central European notions about the colonies.

The popular impact of capitalism, im­ perialism, improved communications, the opening up of Africa and America were ex­ amined and used as the background for the quixotic figure of Peer Gynt, who was played by six different actors at different stages of his development. He was seen as 48 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

a “petit bourgeois Faust engaged on a quest for identity . . . aping the behaviour of a successful capitalist, and inevitably failing in the attempt” . In the adapted final act Peer had to face the fact that he, and the class whose aspirations he em­ bodied, were doomed to be swept away.

His redemption by Solveig’s love became ironic.

Since then Ibsen has been probed from various angles. Hans Neuenfels directed a surrealist Doll’s House in Frankfurt in 1972 in a set inspired by Magritte, using enigmatic props in the way that painter juxtaposes incongruous objects inscrutably in space. Helmer, transposed from provin­ cial affluence to metropolitan, grand

Schillertheater Hedda Gabler bourgeois opulence, comes in and poises his bowler hat delicately on the top of the Christmas tree — that kind of thing. A Doll's House was revived several times as an spin-off of W om en’s Lib. Last December Germany’s outstanding conser­ vative director, Rudolf Noelte, successful­ ly directed it in Berlin at the Renaissance theatre as period reproduction, close to the original. This is the context of the two Hedda Gablers.

Rudolph’s Schillertheater production is highly stylised. Roger von Moellendorffs set is a vast, airy, two-level room, lined with peeling matchboarding, like a seedy Edwardian cricket pavilion. In a net slung below the skylight windows, autumn leaves and two dead pigeons. A live pigeon roosts and flutters until it is found dead as the ac­ tion intensifies in the fourth act. A vista left looks out over sand to the sea, at the back, doors open on to an elegant black and white art nouveau dining room, a glimpse of the world that gives Hedda her style. Gisela Stein’s Hedda is a wilful, erratic, immature creature, picking her way moodily around the provisional fur­ nishings in a strange, short, upswept coif­ fure and an elegant, black brocade cocktail dress. Her appearance of sophistication and fragility contrasts with the lum­ pishness of the other characters, whom Rudolph has tried to see through her eyes.

Berta, the maid who has been seconded to Hedda from the aunts who have mothered Tesman, becomes a padded, waddling monster with a huge buckled belt. Tesman, Brack and Lovborg are three thick-set, tweedy rednecks, shaven back and sides, brutal bourgeois who could have stepped off the pages of George Grosz’ drawings.

The grotesque, caricatural visual style is consistently worked out in the action, in

that the drives and tensions below the sur­ face of Ibsen’s realistic action, Ibsen’s mechanics, are exposed to view. A few ex­ amples: the room has been banked with flowers sent by friends to welcome them back from their honeymoon. In a fit of pi­ que H edda throw s these (to her) hypocritical offerings out the window.

Tesman offers no comment. The beginning of act three finds Hedda crouched in front of an electric fire on top of a cupboard.

Tesman, returning from Brack’s stagparty thinks the stage is empty, is startled when she speaks, then calmly clambers up beside her for the rest of the scene. When Brack leaves in act three after having gleefully asserted that Lovborg is destroyed and the Brack-Heda-Tesman triangle is safe again, Hedda slowly and peevishly tips the chair he has been sitting on off the stage. As Tesman and Mrs Elvsted become engrossed in the possibility of reconstructing Lovborg’s manuscript, Hedda, clad only in a transparent negligee, which nobody has noticed, so little are they aware of her real presence, struts across the floor with a cigar wedged like a moustache between lip and nose in a futile effort to attract attention to herself.

Tesman absent-mindedly removes it with the casual indulgence he would give to a child. Patterns of behaviour are obvious and explicit, from Hedda’s first entrance, sullenly chewing gum, to her final scene, when Tesman and Mrs Elvsted are crouch­ ed over Lovborg’s notes. Brack puts his feet up, and addresses himself to port and cigars. A shot offstage, blood splashed on the glass door, and Hedda slowly falls through with a neat hole in her forehead.

There is a fascination in watching this ritual evolve; none of the involvement that a straight reading of Hedda Gabler can produce, of course, but a kind of transfixed wonderment that the script can be resolved so appropriately into these grotesque im­ ages, and an admiration of the German ac­ tors’ ability to strike a consistent level of style. Expressionism is still alive and living incognito in the Federal Republic.

Zadek in Bochum approached Hedda Gabler from another angle, allowing the a c to rs to be them selves, to th a t characteristion is determined, within limits, by the casting. Freedom for the ac­ tor to find possibilities within himself, without the imposition of a prescribed role, is characteristic of Zadek’s current technique. In his Othello, which I sketched in my last article (TA March/April 1977),

Schillertheater Hedda Gabler

M edea he also allowed the actors to establish a basic position for their parts and then fill in the spaces between one another, so to speak. In the case of Hedda the dominant note was muted, understated realism, a relatively English style for the German stage. Rosel Zech played Hedda as a cool, poised lady of the house in Dior’s New Look of the fifties with a discreet single string of pearls. We are back at the begin­ ning of the Wirtschaftswunder, when bourgeois self-respect was just beginning to depend on conspicuous consumption.

This Hedda has only her father’s pistols to play with, she observes at the end of act one, because Tesman can afford neither the chauffeur, nor the horse that she feels her status requires. Status is perhaps the clue to the production. If the Berlin Hedda was vital, a predator among predators, the Bochum version is a more anaemic figure, bored by the idleness of middle-class affluence. She slips on a red wig to flirt with Lovborg whom Ulrich Wildgruber, hair flying, played as a kind of breathless Dylan Thomas. Her husband Tesman was a limp figure, out of his depth with her, a second-rate Oxford don, one might im­ agine, in baggy pullover and bicycle clips.

Judge Brack a dapper Brylcremed bachelor on the look-out for a bit on the side. The set brought out the disparity between the reality of Hedda’s situation and her aspirations; standard fifties fur­ niture, a radiogram playing Edmundo Ros’ Latin-American rhythms and a velvet sofa with scatter cushions, but set in a cavernous, semicircular, red room with two massive marble pillars reaching up to the flies, looking like an unrenovated cor­ ner of the National Gallery. An insertion in the dialogue established that it had been built for a former State President. Zadek’s interpretation of the text worked well over long stretches, carried by Rosel Zech’s poised Hedda, with her neuroses just below the surface, but it failed to make her suicide plausible. Divorce and a husband with a big Mercedes would have seemed the more obvious way out.

It was a good year for plays dominated by women. Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 49

(1763), a character comedy on the theme of honour set in Frederick the Great’s Berlin, was acclaimed by the Berlin public, largely because of Cornelia Froboes's spirited performance in the title role. This play may never have been done in English, though it is a classic in Germany. On this showing it might go down well in transla­ tion in the kind of production William Gaskill gave Farquhar’s Recruiting Of­ ficer in 1967 at the Old Vic.

based on the cast’s experiences and memories which shaped itself into a birth to death plot — vaguely. This kind of thing has been about on the British fringe for some time, but is now seen as a liberating, freewheeling addition to the subsidised set­ up in Germany. The Schaubuehne's Shakespeare’s Memory, which I touched on in my last article, is an attempt to B o c h u m Hedda Gabler reconstruct the furniture of Shakespeare's Euripides’ Medea too had a strong m ind in a kind of sem inar-cum female lead. This was a group production, performance. Lectures on the cosmologies masterminded by Hans Neuenfels, which of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe attempted to interpret Medea, played by with huge wall-maps of their respective Elisabeth Trisenaar, as a victim of sexism, astral systems. Readings from Burton's and introduced contemporary references Anatomy o f Melancholy in a reconstruc­ where possible. Jason becomes a vain tion of Leonardo’s Round Theatre of 1532. chauvinist, visually symbolised by a pair of Demonstration of rhetorical gestures ac­ trendy white Oxford bags, above which he cording to John Bulwer's manual of 1644. wears a corset. Medea’s children have And of course various scenes, sketches, regressed as a result of parental neglect, bits of juggling, acrobatics. This elaborate and are infantile fifteen year olds. All of exercise in theatre history was presented Medea's dealings with men are coloured on the fairground principle with various by their sexist attitudes, so that the impo­ events going on simultaneously for you to tent King of Athens, for example, is only dip into at will, the whole thing opulently prepared to offer her asylum when she produced in a way that only the most manages to raise a feeble erection for him. lavishly subsidised theatre could afford.

The general drift of the production, un­ The event was a warm-up for a forthcom­ derlining the social subjugation of women, ing production of Twelfth Night which will which, Neuenfels insists, is plain for all to re-utilise some of the costumes, and of read in the original text, was clear enough, course the set. Karl Ernst Herrmann had but the incidental illustration had run riot. built a wooden scaffolding, which carried Even the classical messenger who only has the lighting grid and enabled painted cloths to report the death of Kreon and Kreusa to be dropped round the audience, as well came on wearing a massive phallus and as affording platform s for elevated went through all manner of erotic contor­ apearances. If Twelfth Night brings Peter tions as he spoke his lines. Over the top, as Stein the acclaim all his other major a production, but it has apparently at­ productions have, all will have been tracted a big audience and stimulated late justified.

T he H a m b u rg p ro d u c tio n of night discussions on women's rights in Hallucinations, based on sketches by Karl Frankfurt.

Of the two group projects on show, Valentin (1882-1948) is of more parochial Bochum’s Atlantis was an improvisation interest. Valentin was a Munich dialect comedian who was constantly entangled in his own vocabulary, and with the mundane objects around him. One of his sketches shows a proud father taking his newly con­ firmed son out for a meal. Spaghetti!!!

Brecht was a fan, and Michael Coveney has aptly compared him to Will Rodgers, though Valentin was always a double act with Liesl Karlstadt. It is interesting in that straight actors are now taking up this comic material, and experimenting with it in dialects other than Bavarian.

Stuttgart again had two productions in Berlin, confirming its status as one of the liveliest cities on the German scene. Niels Peter Rudolph directed Goldoni’s Servant Faust 50 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

o f Two Masters, which for the last thirty years has been seen in terms of Giorgio Strehler's nimble, balletic Piccolo Teatro production with Marcello Moretti as Truf­ faldino at Milan in 1947. Rudolph transposed this Commedia dell’arte romp into the heavier world of German comedy, where it worked well. There is evidence here that Zadek’s experiments with im­ provised sets using objects found in the props store is working its way through the system. Ilona Freyer's set was a bare stage with a motley array of old chairs on one side, a couple of dustbins on the other and a creased backcloth. Her costumes too were a ragbag, ranging from the crumpled drainpipe suit and muddy shoes for Truf­ faldino to eighteenth century coat and wig for Pantalone. The characters were turned into German types, Silvio, the suitor, becoming an inhibited Corps student with his sabre dangling between his legs and tripping him in his efforts to be polite. The evening was carried by Peter Sattmann’s shabby deadpan clown of a Truffaldino.

Faust And finally Faust I and II over two evenings. The director, Claus Peymann, and the designer, Achim Freyer, took equal credit for this production, which ex­ ploits the potential of Goethe’s rambling masterpiece for visual spectacle. Freyer’s stage environments and fantastic costumes are worth a visit in themselves, and beggar description. Take the Prologue in Heaven, which is often cut; Peymann/Freyer put a Santa Claus God high in a box above the stage, flanked by angels in pith helmets (recruited from the Indian Army?) and long gowns with stiff gold armlets, which serve as machine guns with which they playfully mow down mankind as God delivers his homily. Much of the text is ironised in this way, indeed the production brings out a strain of comedy that nobody had noticed in Faust before. This creates problems with the Gretchen tragedy, roughly the second half of Faust /, which is played without visual support against sim­ ple reversed flats. Martin Luettge as Faust and Therese Affolter as Gretchen don’t quite pull it off after the preceding spec­ tacle. The Stuttgart style of production is open to criticism for its cavalier handling of the text, but Peymann/Freyer have con­ centrated with Faust, and with Das Kaethchen von Heilbronn last year, on rambling uneven texts, and the gains have been considerable.

Solrun Hoaas Festival of Fools in Amsterdam 2-20 June 1977 “The reason there are so many groups from England,” says a member of the London-based troupe Abrakadabra, “ is that there are so many fools there.”

The Festival of Fools in Amsterdam does not only boast the best in the English vaudeville tradition, but also a wide assort­ ment of mime, mask plays, puppetry, slapstick and improvised comedy routines, from as far away as Argentina and Los Angeles.

It is rightly called a celebration, and the mood is very much one of laughter, finding a common ground, and of openness to every possible form of theatre communica­ tion.

This is the third year of the festival, which was initiated by American mime ar­ tist Jango Edwards of Friends Roadshow, who answers the question Why a Festival of Fools?

“Simply for the reason that the fool is one of the most meaningful characters in theatre history . . . The fool is the in­ dividual who has the ability to com­ municate to the public information about their past, their present, and also shed light on a future. The fool is a commentator . . . a mirror of his surroundings.”

June this year has seen over 50 groups presenting around 200 performances in the course of three weeks in three theatres as well as the Vondelpark open air theatre and the many tourist-filled old market places of Amsterdam.

In contrast to the cynicism often felt in Europe's established and highly subsidised theatre world, there was a refreshing op­ timism and wish to entertain at the festival — almost a lingering sixties feeling of new possibilities, not yet exhausted.

The Melkweg, a renovated ramshackle building just a stone’s throw across a canal from a police station, is a youth centre with two theatre rooms, restaurant and tea-room; it is government-subsidised by more than $200,000 a year. It was packed every night and by midnight the hash smoke lay so heavy over the Theaterzaal that all one needed was to inhale.

(Holland’s drug laws have been liberalised recently to distinguish between hard and soft drugs and between selling and possess­ ing up to 30 grams for personal use.) Only a ten-minute walk along the canals, and one could choose instead the Shaffy, which seems to cater to a more conventional theatre public as well, and where there was more bar service instead. At either place with a membership card costing a mere two dollars, one could buy a ticket for the entire evening, for another two, and move from room to room to see 3-4 of the many offerings, including Frans Zwartjes’ ex­ perimental films. Most shows went on at different times at the various venues and

thus could reach a wide audience. And shows went on until one or two in the mor­ ning.

The town too is alive during the Festival of Fools when the groups perform for un­ assuming citizens who would perhaps find the Melkweg scene too unfamiliar to brave. The Dam, Niewmarkt, Spui and even the Amsterdam Historical Museum provided safe vantage points for the assaults of everything from the Women’s Liberation group Spiderwoman from New York with their tough and deliberately un­ prettified “Women in Violence” show to the juggling clowns of the Great Salt Lake Mime Troupe or the new sex punk rock routine of the Amsterdam-based Friends Roadshow.

With its clear emphasis on relevance to the present, on communication not based entirely on words and on diversity of form, the Festival of Fools may well become one of the most exciting international alter­ native theatre forums around. Working as it is on a shoestring budget, which means a limitation in programming, there is a danger it may become too much of an inbred thing as it cannot afford to pay travel expenses for groups from far away, only fees and hotel expenses. Yet, as several performers told me, many groups are now planning their June itinerary around the festival in order to be there because they find it such a valuable experience in terms of inspiration and exchange of ideas.

Recruitment so far has been mainly from England (Annie S tainer, Footsbarn Theatre, Action Space, Nola Rae, Theatre Slapstique, etc.), Holland (Pigeon Drop, Bamsisters, the environmental-theatre group Dogtroop, etc.) and neighboring countries like France with a resulting similarity in styles at times: the vaudeville slapstick or the French-style mime.

Among the more interesting shows I saw were two from Argentina: Le Grand Reveur, with their marvellous Chaplininspired mime show of the same name, and the zany, mind-bending antics of Carlos Traffic with his one-man show. Another high point was the Los Angeles Mask Theatre which explores the potential of masks in ritualising contemporary L.A. society with its pathetic human debris.

The festival could do with more influx from different parts of the world and the Australia Council could do worse than to provide a travel grant for a group that would like to attend and perform next year. This year there was even an intensive Fools School with crash courses in everything from fire-eating to juggling and bicycle acrobatics. A few more fools might do Australian theatre a lot of good.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 51

David Gyger

Opera

AO Sydney season’s first month immeasurably better in the event than one might have predicted The first month of this year’s major Sydney season of the Australian Opera turned out immeasurably better in the event than one might have predicted it would.

Lucrezia Borgia, which I reviewed last month, turned out to be not only an ex­ cellent vehicle for Joan Sutherland but a fine ensemble effort for the company; and the other early season new production, Auber’s Fra Diavolo, was a good deal more satisfying in the event than I had feared it might be on first acquaintance with its flimsy story line and its largely pedestrian score. Nor were any of the three revivals of the period without interest — The Barber o f Seville and The Tales o f Hoffmann for the personnel changes we were treated to this time round, Carmen for the spectacular improvement in Huguette Tourangeau’s performance of the title role as much as for the welcome return of Donald Smith to the roster of the AO after almost a year of estrangement.

It took some performances for Fra Diavolo to hit top form; but right from the start it was well worth seeing and hearing

52 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

for John Copley’s imaginatively humorous production, the aggressively artificial sets of Henry Bardon and costumes of Michael Stennett, the vocal star turn of Isobel Buchanan and the impeccably correct and precise conducting stint of Richard Bonynge.

Robert Gard’s Diavolo was an acting triumph from the word go, but it was not until several performances into the season that he was fully at ease vocally. Much the same could be said of Heather Begg's Lady Allcash; and even Dennis Olsen was not always absolutely in character as Lord Allcash on opening night. But the music of Fra Diavolo proves on rehearing decidedly not to be entirely in the category of eminently forgettable fairy floss: no one would claim it ranks consistently with the greats, but it bears a good few rehearings when it is performed with the consistent sense of style a Bonynge can instill into an ensemble. It is fragile music which either bubbles and exhilarates with a champagne effervescence or falls flat on its face.

Likewise, the dramatic side of pieces like Fra Diavolo: done with the frothy tongue-

in-cheek lightness of touch that Copley manages consistently in this Diavolo, the piece seems to have a good deal more merit than any dispassionate analysis of its ingredients could reveal.

It is the little things, both musical and dramatic, that make this Diavolo such a joy — the tiny wisps of orchestral sound that are handled with such precision; the subtleties of vocal inflection, spoken or sung; the comic detail of the patently phony sets, costumes and props; the little bits of stage business that not only amuse first time round but keep you discovering things you missed if you go back and see the piece again.

Copley himself says he worked par­ ticularly hard on the details of this produc­ tion, and it certainly shows: his Fra Diavolo is as successful as — dare I make the comparison? — his Ariadne on Naxos in 1975 was not. For Copley’s invention here illuminates the slim plot, embellishes the often trite music; whereas much of his invention in Ariadne seemed oddly selfindulgent — even at odds, at times, with the sense and genre of the piece.

With Fra Diavolo there are no such reservations: Copley knows what he is about just about every inch of the way and gets on with the job of entertaining and am using his audience in a highly sophisticated manner. He vouchsafes us a walth of detail that is literally more than the eye can take in fully on one exposure: hence the unmitigated joy to be derived from going back to see his Diavolo more than once.

Take, for instance, the marvellously apt and inventive stage business in Buchanan’s monumental aria at the start of Act II; or Diavolo’s aria at the start of Act III. Copley is hard at work throughout both these arias, just as he is in the memorable trio in Act I, where Diavolo is making mock-surreptitious love to Lady Allcash under Lord Allcash’s very nose; but even a Copley could not have achieved what he did unless he had been blessed with as vocally and dramatically talented a team as Gard, Begg and Olsen.

Olsen is not so obviously successful here as he has been in some of his G and S ef­ forts with the AO; but it is nice to see him venture outside the particularly con­ stricted, stylised corner of the repertory represented by the little man who sings the patter songs. In Diavolo he reaches — some would say overstretches — his limited vocal resources; but proved himself, increasingly as the production was run in fully, a real dramatic asset in an im­ portant part which lacks the vocal display of Buchanan’s, the flair and swagger of Gard’s, or the comic potential of Begg’s (arising jointly out of her flirtations with the devil-in-disguise that is Diavolo and the humor implicit in the inevitable plight of the over-dressed English lady on safari in darkest Italy).

An even more difficult role to bring off is that of the handsome young sergeant L orenzo, a tw o-d im en sio n al ten o r blockhead in the best tradition of comic opera romantic heroes; Anson Austin sang the part well and turned in a workmanlike acting performance with the odd trace of comic flair.

In lesser roles, Neil Warren-Smith was a superbly phony Italian thug; Graeme Ewer an adequate co-thug without sparkling with anything like the same brilliance. And Donald Shanks made about as much of the innkeeper, Zerlina’s father, as there is to be made of him.

In late June, Marilyn Richardson became the third soprano to tackle the quadruple heroines in the AO’s Tales o f Hoffmann (following in the illustrious footsteps of Joan Sutherland in 1974 and Joan Carden in 1975). The rest of the ma­ jor parts were played by the same singers who created the roles with Sutherland: Raymond Myers as the villains, Henri Wilden as Hoffmann, Graeme Ewer as the grotesquely comic servants.

Predictably, the old hands were even more assured this time round; equally predictably, Richardson was most spec­ tacularly effective as Antonia, the Act III heroine whose vocal style suits her ideally.

Her Olympia was surprisingly successful in

coping with the coloratura demands of the role, less credible (surprisingly) when it came to getting across the feeling that she is a mechanical doll who can give the illu­ sion of life only so long as she is wound up like a clock every few hundred bars.

Giulietta, the Venetian courtesan of Act II, demands more subterranean vocal depths than Richardson can plumb; but she is physically more than voluptuous enough so no red-blooded male in the audience would have worried much about that. Overall, it was a performance more than able to hold its own against the two Joans who went before.

This year’s Carmen was infinitely better than last year’s original airing of Tom Lingwood’s production, the major cause being Huguette Tourangeau’s spectacular improvement in the title role rather than the presence of a new Don Jose (Donald Smith) or the improved conducting of Russell Channell. Channell’s reading of the score, particularly in the matter of tempos, is a good deal more traditional — and satisfying — than Richard Bonynge’s.

Sometimes he goes too fast, as in the over­ ture; but he rightfully takes the smugglers’ quintet like the wind and now he allows the score adequate time to breathe at most other points, whereas last summer he did not.

Despite his admitted shortcomings on the acting front it would take a very drama-oriented opera-goer to object to the presence of Smith in an opera cast. His tenor is at least on the brink of greatness; an almost consistently thrilling sound that has been one of the AO’s greatest assets over the years. And it has certainly been kept in good form during its year in mothballs. It is a cause for unqualified re­ joicing that he and the AO have buried the hatchet at least far enough so he will be m aking guest appearances with the national company this year and next, even if not rejoining its full-time ranks.

But it must be said that this Don Jose was a considerable comedown from Ron Stevens’ original. If any corporal serving under me had been as insolent as he was to Lieutenant Zuniga in this Act I, I would have had him court-martialled forthwith; and at no stage did he convince me he was really involved enough with his Carmen to be capable first of desertion, then of murder, to avoid losing her. He was not nearly diffident enough toward her at the start, nor was he obsessed enough with her at the end: the biggest trouble with his realisation of the role was that his Don Jose was static, whereas the dramatic crux of the opera is that Don Jose is transform­ ed and eventually destroyed by his infatua­ tion with Carmen. It is Carmen who dies rather than change her lifestyle.

It was sad that Smith made his rap­ prochement with the AO in terms of a per­ formance which was so dramatically wrong, for he has proved in the past that he is capable of a good deal better. And Tourangeau was thus deprived of a suitable foil for her own Carmen Mark Two, which is immeasurably better than her Carmen Mark One. Last year, indeed,

she gave the impression she was almost fighting against the role, trying perhaps to play down the ferocity of the character, deprive Carmen of her fangs and make her nicer and more feminine-submissive than she ought by rights to be.

Tourangeau’s 1977 Carmen is vastly different: she is a vocal joy to match Don Smith and a dramatic joy to match Ron Stevens. I look forward to experiencing the pleasure of the dramatic fireworks that ought to result from a confluxion of Stevens and the new Tourangeau in this fascinating opera.

The welcome rejuvenation of the Sydney Conservatorium in the opera field con­ tinued late in June with a production of Smetana’s Bartered Bride on the reduced (by installation of a new pipe organ) stage of the Con’s main hall. In view of the severe physical constraints, Michael O’Kane’s sets for the piece were adequate; providing, as they did, a two-level perfor­ ming area which was at least acceptable, if not perhaps ideal, both for the village square which is the venue for Acts I and III, and the tavern which is the setting for Act II. Similarly, Franco Cavarra’s direction made quite a good stab at keeping things moving even within the inevitably cramped stage areas available; though Eric Clapham’s conducting tended at times to be a good deal more funereal than was ap­ propriate to the score or necessary because of the student nature of the orchestral forces involved.

Neither set of central lovers (these two roles alone were double cast in this produc­ tion) was ideal, but all four singers had a good deal of merit. As Marenka, Amanda Thane had a vocal edge on Jennifer Lindfield, while Lindfield had the edge in the dramatic department. As Jenik, her lover, John Main was a good deal more vocally pleasing than Geoffrey Harris, but Harris had a slight edge dramatically and con­ tinued to show flashes of vocal beauty that bode well for his future. In the major sup­ porting roles, Geoffrey Crook was a superbly overdrawn marriage broker (in both casts), and Jonathan Hughes made a very good job indeed of the difficult stuttering village idiot, Vasek.

And there were some marvellous moments of ensemble good fun when the circus came to town, with its conman/manager (played by Gary Horne) and its delicious dancing Esmeralda (played by Claire Ford). Some inventive stage business here, particularly involving the grotesque strong man and his impish offsider, was great fun for the kids; and the folk dancing of the Contemporary Dance Association’s choreographic course was quite good given the constrictions of the set.

Finally, this was quite a good Bartered Bride, marred primarily by failure to play down sufficiently the glaring dramatic in­ adequacies of the opera itself; but perhaps, to be fair, that is impossible. And there is sufficient musical merit in this piece to warrant the occasional airing despite its dramatic problems.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 53

Ballet

William Shoubridge

Dance Company (NSW) in the viewer.

The trouble is that one leaves the theatre admiring the concept more than appre­ ciating the actual execution, and here I’m talking in strictly choreographic terms. I'm not pedantically alone in this view either. The Dance Company itself had puerile or else not asked in sufficiently suc- the inspired idea of circulating ques­ cint a manner to make one think of an tionnaires amongst its audiences at the answer. It is a rag bag, but an adventurous, conclusion of the programme and many of refreshing, alarming rag bag. them state that people were excited, but It presents the events of the Paris Com­ confused with Two Numbers. mune, showing the involvement of the But it did inspire heated argument and mobs at the barricades; and it shows the conversation and surely any work that has facile place of “art” and “ culture” and “political” aspirations must count itself a “Theatrical Reality” in a way that is true partial success if it does so, if it sends peo­ to target, apt and quite vicious. ple darkly questioning out onto the streets.

It reminded me in moments of Gunter But, in choreographic terms, some Grass’ play, The Plebians Rehearse The aspects of the piece worked against the Uprising. over-all impact.

It highlights the comparisons between a It was difficult to adjust one’s sights to theatrical version of events or situations the abrupt change between the initial ex­ and the situations and events in the real, cerpts from Coppelia, all very hammy and dangerous and palpable outside world. vaudevillian in strict classical style, to the Two Numbers tells us that “theatre” no shuffling, huddled som etim es static matter how much it may try to remedy the groupings that followed. situation, must “defuse” the real world.

As the piece progressed the discrepancy In one scene we get the pantomime evened out and one could follow the two (that's the only way of describing it) of strands and the way they interacted.

Franz rescuing his little doll Swanhilda But it needs pruning. Two Numbers is from the clutches of the manipulative Dr too diffuse and self-indulgent at the Coppelius and follow this with the dogged moment. Incidents and attitudes are not determination of the grey people of the pin-pointed or defined closely enough. It Paris streets to build their barricades and seemed to me too that the dancers were draw themselves together for mutual enthusiastic about the idea but were just as protection. confused as the audience about the Later on there is a hilarious pas de deux “ motivation” or the meaning behind the for Gary Hill as Bismark and Graeme ballet’s scenes and events.

Murphy as Mr Thiers (the French Head of For those who like to have the informa­ State), each of them waving olive branches tion clearly presented to them (i.e. theatre at each other and each politely refusing the lovers or film buffs) before they make up overtures for detente from the other; while their mind, modern dance is an eternal in the background the other dancers are aggravation. desperately dashing off and on stage, fling­ In trying to describe or sum up in words ing down sand bags and running for their Graeme Murphy's Tip, I am presented lives. It is both slap-stick and savage. with one of the most “ aggravating” works And then, at the end of the work, the last I have ever seen. few surviving members of the Paris com­ The only note in the programme for Tip munity get up and dance to the mazurka is a mass of the dictionary definitions of from Coppelia. The music missing beats the word itself. “A small pointed extremity and whole bars here and there, as if it had of anything, a gentle hit, a suggestion, to holes shot in the sheet music. It is the last give a gratuity to, an item of information” ; hard slap in a very angry piece of theatre. all these and more are available for the After all, when the Commune had been choreographer and the audience to juggle shattered and the air was free for Coppelia with. to go on at the Opera again, it was terribly One definition of the word serves well as understaffed because so many of the a starting point. A tip being a dumping dancers, technicians and others had either ground, as in a rubbish tip. been shot or deported for entering into the When the curtain rises, one is con­ real world and taking their stand. fronted with an obscure setting, a tall I hope from this rather bald description metal structure covered and bound in can­ that one has an idea of the number of vas at one side, paper streamers at the fascinating allusions and aspects that this other and at the back, a water trough. The truly innovative and eclectic work inspires scene is inhabited by eerie personages

and T w o N u m b e r s are a couple of the most innovative and disturbing works yet seen in this country Tip

Can the dance have a political mind?

Can it align itself with an ideology to present the ideals and criticisms of agit­ prop in a convincing and effective manner?

Most people would shake their heads vehemently and point to Fokine's Pet­ rushka as probably the only great ballet that has even the smallest political senti­ ment behind it.

In any case, they would go on, it has become political only by hindsight. The milling crowds in the ballet, that crystal­ lised the theatrical concepts of Piscator and Meyerhold, became for later gener­ ations, a symbol of the class struggle in Csarist Russia that exploded a few year.* after the 1911 premiere of the ballet.

Fokine himself apparently had no political motive in mind during the work’s creation, and in any case, Sergei Diaghilev, a man who loved the old Russia would not conceivably have allowed such a radical colour to creep into any of his presen­ tations.

What Petrushka had going for it was its humanitarian idealism. The right of the small person to live his own life, away from the constraints and control. Any criticism of the (the) Edwardian society was purely coincidental.

True political theatre, agitprop theatre, deals in specifics. Certain injustices at cer­ tain times in defined social boundaries. Its basic aim is to point up these injustices and hopefully to get them changed. On that count, true political theatre is a very rare bird in western society. It has changed practically nothing. It has pointed up problems, presented them with force but, precisely speaking, a provocative speaker on a soap box has done more politically than any amount of staged “theatre” . All of these questions came to mind recently while watching the Dance Company (NSW) in their presentation of Ian Spink's ballet, Two Numbers.

Spink has taken the coincidence of the world premiere of one of the greatest, most artificial and strangely sinister ballets of the classical repertoire, Coppelia, and the rise (and fall?) of the Paris Commune and welded a ballet/theatre piece that is rich, rewarding and i.n some ways acutely irritating in the way it states points and asks questions.

Some of the points it raises are cogent, while a few of the questions it asks are 54 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

draped in rags. The images of the under­ world, the sewer or the council dump flit through one’s mind. The ballet’s going to be about the unwanted, the mutant and the mysterious you think. Well in some ways it is.

The tall structure is uncovered, it looks like something out of a geometrical theorem. The structure is inhabited by two scantily clothed men.

As the porcelain plinks and plonks (sorry, I’m no music critic) of the live orchestra give way to a rather“ Le Sacre du Printemps” sounding electronic score, the two men battle for supremacy (have the Monkeys in a Cage gone underground?)

The mutants stamp on and off some­ what like those creatures in a B-grade horror movie. Suddenly a woman steps out of the trough at the back of the stage, soaking wet. The two men dance for her and with her, vying for her attention then indulge in gymnastics on the metal cage.

Meanwhile the mutants dash about in a strange approximation of a ghostly waltz.

One of the men gets into the trough and then dances around, soaking wet.

Towards the end the two main pro­ tagonists get together and the mutants tear down the paper streamers and frenetically wrap the threesome up in them, as if parcelling rubbish. The end.

There. Try make of that what you can!

I tried, three times I tried!

Like the best of modern dance, it is totally subliminal, impressions change with each viewing.

The whole work is concerned with different aspects of meaning, layers of in­ terpretation. As one enigmatic note says in the programme, “ rapid and continual environmental changes — the result . . . bewilderment, insecurity” .

That is the clue perhaps to why it im­ presses one, it mirrors, in its own inimicable language, the quality of personal ex­ perience in this quickly changing society.

All those definitions are treated, and treated aptly by Murphy’s choreography.

The dancers themselves progress through the work with an innate understanding of the work’s argument, however personal and divergent their collective inter­ pretations of it are.

All I can say now is that 1 hope the com­ pany perform it again, if possible in other states and I hope a lot of people get to see it.

Tip and Two Numbers are a couple of the most innovative and disturbing works yet seen in this country and Tip in par­ ticular would not disgrace the repertoire of the Nederlans Dans Theatre or one of the more radical American dance companies.

Both works plunge an Australian audience headfirst into the maelstrom of contemporary dance. Both works are making up for lost time and the fact that Australia has never seen the explorers of the term “modern dance” or any of their works, with the exception of small servings of Tetley and Merce Cunningham .

Perhaps that is a blessing in disguise, because that leaves the way clear for Australian choreographers to have their say in the way they want to speak, without having to peel off the preconceptions and categorisations that even now encumber the modern dance in Europe and America.

As for the other works in the Dance Company’s recent programme, both of them are interesting to watch, both are more or less well put together, but neither of them leave me with anything approach­ ing a positive reaction.

Christine Koltai’s Constant Reach is, as far as I am concerned, a pretty basic slice of balletic bend-stretch done to the back­ ing of a rather “Tubular Bellsish” piece of music by Michael Carlos.

Her stated concern in the work is the striving and struggle that we all put into communicating. Struggle that nearly always ends in a deadlock; so the process has to be begun all over again.

The only moment where all this comes into any recognisable focus is an extended duet half way through the work full of high lifts that sink into stylized clinches and broken solos. Here the ideas of Koltai come alive, but as for the rest of it, it is one of those ballets that starts, and starts and starts but never really gets anywhere.

The same goes for Graeme Watson’s Medieval Malics an industrious piece of stylised rape; its note in the programme stuffed full of allusions to M arcel Duchamp and the surrealists, allusions that are never clarified in the work itself.

I much preferred Watsons’ Random Harvest last year. There was movement invested with feeling and m eaning, wheras Medieval Malics is too theor­ etical, too physically inert.

It suffers from the same trouble as Spink’s Two Numbers, a marvellous con­ cept, full of promising material, but material too contentious to be brought under control by its choreographer.

If both Watson and Spink could get out of the habit of idealising, objectifying and theorizing over dance, and produce a piece of pure gut feeling, I feel sure that they, with the inventiveness they obviously have, can produce a work that is patterned, con­ trolled and logical in its own way. At the moment they are thinking more in terms of tying up steps that in creating a feeling, a statement or an overall design.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 55

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Records

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An n M cDo n a l d COLLEGE OF DANCING (Est. 1926) Ballet (R.A.D.) Examinations in all grades, pre-preliminary to solo seal.

Full-time day classes also Classes and Private Tuition Ballroom, Latin American, Old Time, Social, Theatrical, Modern, Jazz and Classical.

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Boxes, Boxes and more Boxes B e eth o ve n q u a rte ts a n d B ach ca n ta ta s Judging by the supply it receives, the record market has an insatiable appetite for boxed sets of records: the complete str­ ing chamber music of Brahms, all the late Haydn masses, the entire works of Webern (in one box), complete sets of 18th century sonatas, concertos and symphonies, mam­ moth editions of one composer’s works such as the huge DGG compendium of Beethoven. Far from being intimidated by this bulky kind of presentation we seem to relish it. It is as if we did not want so much to listen to music as to take a course in it.

And why not? In the absence, for many people, of a philosophical and religious summa it is possible that we may believe that a box of all the Bartók quartets or the complete Decca sequence of the Haydn symphonies represents the only credible path to wisdom we are likely to find. There are obviously boxes and boxes: some may be no more than the m anufacturer’s method of gathering together a scattering of old recordings in order to give them fresh circulation. The best kind of record box is the one in which a single group of performers give a consistent view, in records not too far separated -in date, of some music that we are likely to want to live with.

My leading choice among omnibus box­ es in recent months has been the Philips issue of the complete string quartets by Beethoven played by the Q uartetto Italiano (674 7 272: ten discs). The quality of reproduction on these discs is delec­ table. Though the recordings were issued separately over a period of several years (the opus 18 quartets being the most re­ cent) the standard and style of recording has remained remarkably consistent and of very high average quality. No doubt this has been further adjusted during re­ pressings made for the boxed edition.

Some listeners may have a few residual prejudices against hearing an Italian quartet in Austro-German music. But the Quartetto Italiano belongs to that il­ lustrious group of Italian musicians (including Toscanini and Giulini) who are able to interpret northern and southern European music without our being able to typecast them as coming from one region or another. If the Quartetto Italiano reflects its origins at all it is in a certain northern Italian poise, allied with warmth but without the slightest trace fof excess in tone or phrasing. Its players pass all the tests. They do not try to make the opus 18 quartets sound later or more complex than they are; they have the scale and opulence of style for opus 59 no. 1 and the lean, ferocious abruptness of manner for opus 95, the stamina for the Great Fugue and

the intellectual and architectural control necessary for opus 131. These are inviting records with a cultivated sound and perfor­ mances of immaculate sensitivity and precision. The only real rival for the Quartetto Italiano set at the moment is the Beethoven series recorded by the Hungarian Quartet, but that is con­ siderably older and the difference in recorded sound is apparent even in re­ pressings.

Among the boxes which appear as part of a periodical sequence my undoubted favourites are those containing instalments in Telefunken’s wonderful series of the complete cantatas of J.S. Bach. Each box in the series contains two discs (usually enough for four cantatas) and adds to the discs a wealth of documentation, the texts and instrumental lists for each work and the complete scores of all the works in the box. These scores are now being reproduc­ ed from the New Bach Edition and provide as a bonus the opportunity of catching up with the remarkable advances made in Bach scholarship in the last fifteen years or so. The artistic directors of the perfor­ mances are Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt. Pioneers in the use of historically authentic instruments and playing styles, they divide the cantatas up between them and present them in versions as close as we can hope to come at the pre­ sent time to the sounds that Bach himself would have imagined when scoring them.

The all-male choral forces (boys and men) also conform to the practice of the churches of Bach's time. For similar reasons, almost all the soloists are male.

Although the boy soloists constitute the most variable item in the standards of per­ formance, they are generally very good in­ deed. The point I want to stress is that the attempts at historical fidelity are not mere­ ly museum exercises; they add (or restore) something to the impact made by the music. The playing and singing is very sk ilfu l.

All the boxes in the Bach cantata series are recommendable. May I particularly draw your attention to the latest box in the series to be generally available here, Volume 17 (6.35335; two discs), which contains the cantatas numbered 65 to 68 in the old Schmieder catalogue. If you have not previously heard the records in this series, this box will offer you a fair sample of the achievements represented by this project, p ro b ab ly the m ost am b itio u s and voluminous in the history of recording.

The mood of the music ranges from engraved austerity to irresistible joy; solo singers, choruses and instrumentalists work with consummate skill.

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THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 57

Elizabeth Riddell

Films

The Singer and the Dancer Love Letters from Teralba Road

Elizabeth Crosby and Ruth Cracknell in The Singer and the Dancer,

One could suppose it not beyond the capacity of exhibitors to devise a first half that would include one of these The Australian Film Commission has ap­ parently decided to put some muscle behind some of the smaller feature films into which it has injected money, with the object of getting them before the public.

To this end they have arranged release dates at the Union Theatre at the Univer­ sity of Sydney and screenings for a press that is sometimes reluctant to turn out for anything less than The Cassandra Crossing (I may say here that The Cassandra Cross­ ing is about as less as a film can be).

It is important for non-feature films to get a showing, but one of the difficulties is the peculiar running time of, say, two that the AFC is rightly pushing — Gill Armstrong’s The Singer and the Dancer and Love Letters from Teralba Road made by Stephen Wallace. The first runs for 60 minutes and the second for 53.

These are awkward lengths to fit into the rigid Australian pattern, although one could suppose it not beyond the capacity of exhibitors to devise a first half that would include one of these, another short subject and the indispensable cigarette ads.

I suppose the exhibitors simply will not 58 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

pay for them when they can get travel publicity films for nothing or those govern­ ment project films which seem to be about the steel industry or Victorian hydro­ electric schemes. It opens up the question of the way commercial cinema pro­ grammes are structured — why there is no such thing as a truly continuous pro­ gramme, for instance.

I don’t think the AFC’s idea of showing The Singer and the Dancer and Love Letters from Teralba Road together at the Union Theatre was necessarily a good one, but I expect they know their own business best. I would have preferred to see each one go in separately as a short subject prelude to a feature film. The Singer and the Dancer has had a season already in Melbourne but Love Letters was first presented at the Union. Gill Armstrong got her plot from a short story by Alan Marshall. She rearranged the characters somewhat but kept to the basic theme, and to the tone of the story, which is about frustrations remembered by the old and frustrations being experienced by the young.

The opening is remarkable for its con­ templative beauty and peace, a peace shattered by a glimpse of a face, cleft by the fall of the curtain, staring out of a win­ dow at the landscape, its expression one of controlled fury. That moment over, there is a change to the mundane, even to the grotesquely mundane. Old Mrs Bilson is propelled from the farmhouse, down the steps by a woman who is presumably her daughter, and into the doctor’s car. “ Now mother, don’t give the physios any trouble and don't get wandering about” , Mrs Bilson is admonished.

A few miles down the road Mrs Bilson throws her hat off into the back seat, pulls up her skirt, props her large feet on the dashboard and smokes a cigarette the doc­ tor gives her. He stops the car near a gate into a paddock and she lurches out and makes off up the hills in great strides. The doctor is in the joke, which is that Mrs Bilson pretends to be senile because it is her only way of defending herself against the other bossy, nagging, thick-skinned woman.

Up the hill, down the other side to the river bank tramps Mrs Bilson; she changes into her sandals, takes out another fag, lies on her back with her skirt pulled up to let the sun warm her legs, and listens to the races on her tranny. At this place one day she meets a city girl called Charlie who has moved with her miserable whining lover into a rundown cottage, and is trying to

make a life for herself while he works at the chicken factory and betrays her with a local belle. The old woman and the young one talk about men and love. The old woman is full of violence which emerges in articulated spurts. The young one is full of fear that she won’t be able to leave her lover. She should worry — he will leave her for the first girl who will give him a lift in her car, north or south.

The players are Ruth Cracknell as old Mrs Bilson, Elizabeth Crosby as Charlie, Gerry Dugan as the doctor, Jude Kuring as the “daughter” who is really another wom an’s daughter fathered by Mrs Bilson’s dead husband, and Charlie’s lover is played by Russell Kiefel. I have always believed in Ruth Cracknell’s intelligent, unorthodox talent and in Gill Armstrong she has found a director who perfectly understands her. Hers is an amazing per­ formance — so sure, so sensitive, so strong, in many ways so funny. She epito­ mises all the stubborn, resolute, freakish old women who retain to the end a kind of youthful coltish looks and a braggadacio that is indestructible. They are the terror of old people’s homes, and good luck to them.

The film is exactly the right length.

There should be no more of it, and no less.

Which brings up back to the where we came in. Love Letters from Teralba Road will make you squirm. The people in it are a few notches down from M ichael Thornhill’s characters in The F.J. Holden.

Socially, that is. But in fact Len and Barbara of Love Letters might well be Kevin and Anne of The FJ Holden a few years on. Len works in a spare parts warehouse in Newcastle, frequents the pub and the club and one night comes home smarting from some self-inflicted wound and beats up Barbara on the excuse that she has been seen at the club making up to Des. Des gets no futher mention as Len lays about him. The next day Chris leaves, returning to Sydney and the ramshackle home of her father — the mother has left, and no wonder — and her sub-teen sister Maureen. Barbara goes out a bit with other men, Len goes out a bit with other girls. There is one startling scene, in­ troduced irrelevantly, in which he comes to blows with a discarded lady in the club.

This may be interpolated to show that Len is a killer, in intention if not in fact, but if so it is not followed up. There is also the implication that Len has a low boiling point at work, as he slouches around the shelves of the warehouse with a sheet of orders, scowling at his comrades.

If this were just a story of a marriage splitting down the middle it would be un­ important. Two things make it different.

One is that Len starts writing letters to Barbara, in phrases totally unlike any he would use in the normal course of com­ munication, and expressing sentiments, she tells a girl friend in the pub, that are totally unlike him. Stephen Wallace, the director/writer, says he found the bundle of love letters on which he based his film in an old, run-down house. Perhaps had he

looked further he would have found the model for Len’s stilted letters in a magazine. When Len takes the Newcastle Flyer to Sydney to spend the weekend with Barbara at her boozy father’s house almost nothing goes right.

It has to be said that Len and Barbara are far from a jolly pair. Neither of them smiles. In Len’s case it may be that his rot­ ting teeth, of which he complains con­ tinually, preclude easy smiling. And when Barbara is a bit drunk she dances and sings to herself, but not joyfully.

The weekend is not a success. They fail to make it into bed. An audience may be inclined to hope that Barbara will have the sense not to take Len back, and to leave

her father and her unruly sister for some place where she can take advantage of her good looks, learn to speak grammatically and perhaps open a savings bank account.

I don’t mean to be flippant. At the time, I took the film very seriously, and admired its direction, camera work, musical score and even, at times, the writing. Away from it, I am not so sure. And it has one flaw that has nothing to do with any of the fac­ tors mentioned above. It happens that Bryan Brown, who plays Len and Kris McQuade who plays Barbara, are just too much alike — sharp profiles, dark hair, lowering expressions. Physical contrast is missing, and it takes something from the film.

DARLING DOWNS INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED EDUCATION TOOWOOMBA — QUEENSLAND

DEPARTMENT OF PERFORMING ARTS DIPLOMA OF ARTS (CREATIVE) The Department of Performing Arts at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education offers an exciting three year (full time) programme leading to the award of Diploma of Arts (Creative). Both the Performing and Visual Arts Departments of the Institute aim to give students a basic understanding of all the major art areas. Students will also devote a major part of their study to general electives from the School of Arts or other schools in the Institute.

PERFORMING ARTS The Performing Arts course provides in-depth study in several areas of theatre skills and specialised functions in both the expressive and technical aspects. The Department allows students to concentrate upon either the Theatre Arts or Music. The Theatre Arts course includes acting, theatre design, stage management, directing and children’s theatre. The music students concentrate upon acquiring musical knowledge and developing musical abilities, skills and techniques. Cinema and television studies are also offered as subjects within the Department.

ENROLMENT 1978 All intending performing arts students are required to attend an interview during which their aptitude for the course is evaluated.

Further information about the course and the interview procedures can be obtained from: The Department of Performing Arts, School of Arts, Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, Toowoomba, QLD. 4350 (2090)

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 59

Helen van der Poorten

Books

Some Approaches to drama in schools

Errol Bray, Are We Heroes? Experiences in Educational Drama, University of N.S.W. Press, Sydney 1976.

David Self, A Practical Guide to Drama in the Secondary School, Ward Lock Edu­ cational, London 1975.

Teacher, Teacher and Other Plays, A p ­ palachian Autumn and Other Plays, and Requiem fo r a Heavyweight and Other Plays, Scope Play Series, Scholastic Book Services.

Last time I wrote about educational drama books I was pleading for a few less prescriptive and a few more experiencedbased books on the subject. With Errol Bray’s Are We Heroes? my prayers are more or less answered. Published last year, this book recounts with unerring frankness the experiences of a teacher discovering the possibilities of educational drama in innercity high schools of Sydney. Mr Bray may be erring on the side of modesty when he describes himself as having launched into this as a novice, for he contrasts his ex­ periences favourably with those of drama graduates who prefer to deal with ‘nice’ rather than rough kids.

Historically in New South Wales there is some interest in this book, too, as it pays tribute to the kind of work Dr Oliver Fiala's educational drama courses at the University of NSW have been doing. It stands to reason that the emergence of specialist graduates such as Mr Bray from the University and CAE drama courses must have a state-wide impact in the schools.

The book itself is more a diary than a textbook, and has to be read through pro­ ject by project, stage by stage. Much of it is indeed written in the straight diary form, with the details of each day and the names 60 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

of participants freely mentioned. This open quality is one of the very attractive features of the book, as it allows the writer to explore very frankly his own failures in both discipline and ideas. Sometimes this is done in the body of the text and some­ times in ironical postscripts. Scenarios for individual projects, such as “ Double Cubed" in 24 scenes, are printed, then the diary takes up the development of this out­ line.

There is an intriguing account, too, of Mr Bray’s experiences as a drama demon­ stration teacher — especially a daunting encounter with 120 girls at Petersham Girls’ High School. But he turns these large-scale events into valuable learning situations for himself at least, and ends up rejecting Peter Slade's idea of "declimax” in a drama class for his own ‘“ big finish” .

Secondary teachers will doubtless be in­ terested in Mr Bray’s study of Othello at Cleveland Street High, but they would be ill-advised to turn to it without reading of the kinds of experience which made possi­ ble his improvisational approach to these students in this play. This is a book to be read right through, not least for the open and optimistic ending in which the writer rejects conventional notions of success and failure for educational drama in favour of group standards about the value of any exercise.

Another pleasantly open book is David Selfs A Practical Guide to Drama in the Secondary School, one of the best prac­ tical manuals on creative drama that I have ever read. It begins with a few cautionary tales for the unwary or overenthusiastic Drama teacher, then goes into eleven succinct chapters, heavily sub­ divided, which are crammed with ideas and approaches to “creative” rather than “theatrical” drama. On this level it pro­ vides a source of refuge, solace and advice for the harassed classroom drama teacher, often reviled or misunderstood by his colleagues.

Mr Selfs book, moreover, gives scope for the student of educational drama, providing as it does countless scholarly, public service, and literary references on the subject. It challenges some of Brian Way's theories on relating drama exercises to the experience of local students, and makes constant and intelligent use of quotations from other experts. I especially like the one in relaxation from PembertonBilling and Clegg to the effect that “just because we have had a drama lesson it doesn’t mean we can be seals all the way to the science lab.” Self goes on to examine the conflict between relaxation and con­ centration in the drama lesson.

While the writer goes through the various stages of working with secondary (and by implication some even younger) students, his most fascinating chapter is then called “Shaping a lesson” . The tricky question of approaching tactile exercises is explored, as are possible approaches to dis­ cipline and the extent to which a teacher ought participate in the actual exercises.

On this latter point Mr Self is surprisingly undogmatic, although his favourite kind of drama teacher is clearly a flexible and reasonably resilient person, who may take a back seat when appropriate.

While the bulk of this book is taken up with handy exercises and approaches to private creative drama, the writer readily admits that senior secondary students tire of being seals, sunflowers and the like.

They run into danger of distancing themselves from their roles and involve­ ment because of newly found sophistica­ tion and self-consciousness. It is at this point, argues Self, that the teacher can validly introduce “ theatrical” drama, which aims to communicate to an audience and looks toward an end result. Even so, one should be wary of submitting to the conventionally scripted play, so commedia dell' arte and documentary theatre tech­ niques are suggested in a chapter called “ Playmaking” . Finally, there are some sensible words about the actual perfor­ mances which are traditionally expected of drama teachers’ students. Liaising with other departments, getting something out of the whole exercise — all such matters are approached tentatively. This is a superb, detailed, and totally useful book.

By contrast the American educational drama books we continue to receive, seem directed largely to performance. In Re­ quiem for a Heavyweight and Other Plays, the assumption is that students will want to do plays which deal with serious adolescent problems. The White Cane, a Marcus Welby play, approaches such problems with self-righteous intensity, and while students may be interested to see scripted versions of television experiences they have had — especially in the sensitive TV play Teacher, Teacher by Ellison Carroll — it is hard to see what use drama teachers could make of these plays in drama (as opposed to, say, social studies) classes. Much of the dialogue is in general American, and the problems perhaps too localised. But more to the point, the roles are written for the kind of understated adult TV, rendition which would be beyond the scope of the average secondary student. I do not mean to restrict this kind of writing, but it is hard to see where it fits into the drama classes envisaged by its editors.

THEATRE OPERA DANCE

NEW SOUTH WALES

ACTORS COMPANY (660 2503) The Tails o f Koalaroo, by Tony Wright and Meg Alwyn, directed by Tony Wright.

Children’s production, to 10 Sept.

City Sugar, by Stephen Poliakoff, directed

by Michael Rolfe; and Ghosts, by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Matthew O’Sullivan.

Playing in repertory from 7 Sept.

ARTS COUNCIL OF NEW SOUTH WALES (31 6611) The Dale W oodw ard R o d P uppet Workshop, primary schools tour, Sydney metropolitan area, from 19 Sept.

New England Ensemble, chamber music trio comprising Andrew Lorenz, Robert Harris, Janis Laurs; primary schools and adult concerts, central western New South Wales. 26-30 Sept.

Ray Price Quintet, primary and secondary schools and adult concerts, Hunter and New England districts, 19-25 Sept.; Hunter and north coast districts, 9-14 Oct. Modern Mime Theatre, primary schools tour, Hunter, New England and north coast districts, from 19 Sept.

Big H: An Opera fo r B-flat Bikies, devised and perform ed by Howard Spicer, presented by arrangement with the State Opera of South Australia. Secondary schools and adult concerts, metropolitan, south coast, Riverina and central western N.S.W., from 12 Sept.

The Bull ’n Bush Show, from Frank Strain’s Theatre Restaurant, William Street, Sydney, directed by George Carden, with Red Moore, Leighton Watts, Donna Lee, John Barnes, Julie Godfrey; touring south coast, Riverina and western districts of N.S.W. from 12 Sept.

AUSTRALIAN OPERA (26 2976) Sydney Opera House (2 0588) Opera Theatre; Macbeth (Verdi) in Italian: 1 Sept., 3 Sept, (mat), 7 Sept., 10 Sept, (mat), 12, 16 Sept. Conductor, Carlo Felice Cillario; producer, John Copley; designer, Stefan Lazzaridis; resident producer, 'Michael Beauchamp. With Elizabeth Connell, John Shaw, Lamberto Furlan, Anson Austin, Donald Shanks or Clifford Grant.

Fra Diavolo (Auber) in English: 2, 5, 10 Sept, (eve), 14, 20, 24 Sept, (eve), 1 Oct.

(eve). C onductor, Peter Robinson; producer, John Copley; designers, Michael Stennett (costumes) and Henry Bardon (sets); resident producer, Elke Neidhardt.

With Robert Gard, Dennis Olsen, Heather Begg or Jennifer Bermingham, Henri Wilden, Grant Dickson, Isobel Buchanan, Graeme Ewer, Neil Warren-Smith.

The Flying Dutchman (W agner) in German: 3 Sept, (eve), 6, 8, 9, 13, 15, 17 Sept, (eve), 19, 21,22, 23, 24 Sept, (mat), 3 Oct., 8 Oct. (mat). Conductor, Carlo Felice Cillario or George Posell; producer, Peter Petersen; designer, Soren Frandsen; resident producer, Elke Neidhardt. With Robert Allman or Raymond Myers, Lone Koppel-Winther or Nance Grant, Rosina Raisbeck or Lesley Stender, Ronald Dowd or Reginald Byers, Robin Donald or Anson Austin, Neil Warren-Smith or Donald Shanks.

The Gondoliers (Gilbert and Sullivan) in English: 28, 29, 30 Sept., 1 Oct. (mat), 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Oct. (eve), 10 Oct. Designer, Tom Lingwood. With Jennifer Bermingham, Rhonda Bruce, Beryl Furlan, Rosemary G unn, C y n thia Jo h n sto n , R osina Raisbeck, Lesley Stender, Graeme Ewer, R obert G ard or Paul Ferris, John G e r m a i n , Alan Light, Ro na ld Maconaghie, Dennis Olsen.

AUSTRALIAN THEATRE, Newtown (51 3841) Who’s Afraid o f Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, directed and designed by John Gully, with Tony Girdler, Murray Watson, Leslie Van Dorn and Helene Grover. 10-24 September.

Oedipus Rex conducted by Robert Pikler, with Ronald Dowd. Angelique conducted

by Richard Gill. 14, 19, 22 October.

ENSEMBLE (929 8877) Boy Meets Girl, by Bella and Samuel Spewack, directed by Hayes Gordon, designed by Doug Anderson. With John M cTernan, W illiam C harlton, Len Kasserman, Linda Blumer. Continuing.

GENESIAN (827 3023) The Unexpected Guest, by A gatha Christie, directed and designed by Ray Ainsworth. With Gaynor Mitchell, Patrick Ward, Nat Nixon. To 24 Sept.

An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde, directed and designed by Denis Allan.

From 1 Oct. HER MAJESTY’S (212 3411) A Chorus Line, original production conceived, choreographed and directed by Michael Bennett; co-choreographer, Bob Avian; book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante; music by Marvin Hamlisch; lyrics by Edward Kleban; choreography and direction recreated for Australia by Baayork Lee and Jeff Hamlin. Cast of 30. Continuing.

KI LLARA 680 COFFEE THEATRE (498 7552) Hallo London, devised by John Howitt, with John Howitt, Peter Parkinson, Cherrie Popp. Continuing.

MARIAN STREET (498 3166) Away Match, by Martin Worth and Peter Yeldham, directed by Alastair Duncan, designed by Brian Nicklass. With Barry Lovett, Sue Walker, Lynn Rainbow, Vincent Ball. To 8 Oct.

A U S T R A L I A N T H E A T R E FOR YOUNG PEOPLE (699 9322) Doolan, by Richard Tulloch, with Jeni M A R I O N E T T E T H E A T R E OF Caffin and Ray Anderson. Touring AUSTRALIA (357 1638) primary schools, Wollongong, south coast, Roos, written and directed by Richard Riverina and central western districts of Bradshaw; and Hands, devised by the NSW. From 19 Sept. company and directed by Richard Workshops at N.I.D.A. (Saturdays, 10 Bradshaw. Outer suburban Sydney schools a.m. to 1 p.m., to end of year. holiday season, Parramatta area to 2 Sept; Sutherland Civic Centre, 6-10 Sept; B O N D I P A V I L I O N T H E A T R E touring schools, north coast, New South (30 7211) Wales, 12-30 Sept.

Popcicle, a history of the world devised and presented as an exercise by 40 students M U S I C HALL THEATRE of the school of fine arts, Alexander RESTAURANT (909 8222) Ma c k i e Col l e ge , and t he d r a m a Lust for Power: or Perils at Parramatta, department, University of New South written and directed by Michael Boddy, Wales. 20 Sept, to 4 Oct. with Alton Harvey, John Allen, Anne Semler. Continuing.

C O N S E R V A T O R I U M OF MUS I C NEW THEATRE (519 3403) (27 4206 or 27 9271) Oedipus Rex (Stravinksy) and Angélique Captain o f Kopenick, by Carl Zuchmeyr, (Ibert) in English. Director, Anthony directed by Jock Levy, designed by Roderick Shaw. From 10 Sept.

Besch; designer, William Passmore.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 61

MUSIC LOFT THEATRE RESTAURANT (977 6585) The Gloria Dawn Show, produced by William Orr, with Bryan Davies, W.P. Brennan, David Gilchrist. Continuing.

Cross, directed by Doug Fisher, designed

by Bill Dowd, starring Richard O'Sullivan; with Doug Fisher, Shirley Cameron, Kate Sheil, Judith Woodroffe. To 24 Sept.

Side by Side by Sondheim. From 27 Sept.

NIMROD (69 5003) Upstairs: Jack, by Jim McNeil, directed

by Ken H orler, designed by Larry Eastwood. From 17 Sept.

Downstairs: Fanshen, by David Hare, directed by Richard Wherrett. Continuing.

WHI TE HORSE HOTEL, Newtown (51 1302) A Jubilee Number, by Rick Mayer, Foveaux Kirby, Peter Stevens and Malcolm Frawley; directed by Ian Tasker, designed by Peter Fisher and Susan Frawley. To 24 Sept.

OLD TOTE (663 6122) Drama Theatre, Opera House: The Time Is Not Yet Ripe, by Louis Esson, directed

by Peter Collingwood, designed by Anne Fraser. With Ric Hutton, Helen Morse, Neil Fitzpatrick, Joan Bruce, Peter Collingwood, Robin Bowering, Margaret Ford, A1 Thomas. From 7 Sept.

M others and F athers, by Joseph QUEENSLAND Musaphia, directed by Bill Redmond, designed by Mike Bridges. From 21 Sept.

York Theatre, Seymour Centre: The ARTS THEATRE (36 2344) Norman Conquests ( Table Manners, Chase Me Comrade, by Ray Cooney.

Living Together and Round and Round Director, Catherine Sparks. To 8 Oct. the Garden), by Alan Ayckbourn, directed

by Robert Quentin, designed by Larry CAMERATA (36 6561) Eastw ood. With Alan Tobin, Tony Tis Pity She’s a Whore, by John Ford.

Llewellyn-Jones, Peter Adams, Veronica Director, Carl Whitehouse. From 23 Sept.

Lang, Jennifer Hagan, Judi Farr. Trilogy HER MAJESTY'S (221 2777) continuing in repertory.

Queensland Ballet — see below OSCARS HOLLYWOOD PALACE Boeing, Boeing, by Marc Camolette, THEATRE RESTAURANT, Sans Souci adapted from the French by Beverley (529 4455) Cross; directed by Doug Fisher. Opens 28 The Glitter Sisters, devised and written by Sept.

Gary Down and Jon Finlayson, directed LA BOITE (36 1932 or 36 2296) and staged by Jon Finlayson. With Joy Jack the Ripper, by Ron Pember and M iller, G eraldene Morrow, Maggie Dennis de Marne in association with Larry Stuart, Rona Coleman, Lyn Lovett. Parnes and Jon Nicholls. Director, Jo Continuing.

Denver. 16-30 Sept.

Q THEATRE, Penrith (047 21 5735) The Entertainer, by John O sborne, directed by Richard Brooks, designed by Arthur Dicks, with Ron Hackett. At Railway Institute, Penrith, 14-25 Sept; Civic Centre, Bankstown, 28 Sept, to 2 Oct; Marsden Rehabilitation Centre, Parramatta. 5-9 Oct. SEYMOUR CENTRE (692 0555) The M otor Show, by Steve Gooch, directed by Robert Love. Downstairs, 1-3 Sept. (Presented by the City Road Youth Theatre; high school pupils, aged 13 to 20).

Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Edwar d Bond, d ire c te d by Brent McGr egor , designed by Ma t t he w Lorrimer, presented by Sydney University Dramatic Society. Downstairs, 7-24 Sept.

SPEAKEASY THEATRE RES­ TAURANT, Kensington (663 7442) The Big Bang Show, conceived by Hugh Rule and Bryan Brown, directed by Hugh Rule, designed by Cliff Simcox. With Peter Corbett, Ross Sharp, John Ewart, Tina Bursill, Victoria Nicolls, Douglas Kingsman. Continuing.

T H E A T R E R O Y A L (231 6577 or 231 6111) Boeing, Boeing, by Marc Camoletti, adapted from the French by Beverley 62 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Antigone, by Jean Anouilh.

Stagers production. 18-28 Sept.

Middle

Q U E E N S L A N D ARTS C O U N C I L (221 5900) Why Not Stay for Breakfast, by Gene Stone and Ray Cooney. State tour commences 21 Sept.

Prunes, War-Cry, Inside Out, QTC secondary schools tour. South East Queensland.

Alexander Moreno, Spanish Dancer.

Special remote areas project. 29 Aug.-16 Sept.

Ray Price Quintet. South East Queensland tour. From 26 Sept.

Strings ‘n ’ Things. David and Sally Poulton marionettes. Tour continuing in the far north.

A lex Hood. Australian folk. Tour continuing in South West Queensland.

QUEENSLAND BALLET COMPANY (229 3355) at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

Coppelia, choreography recreated by Leslie White and Cyril Johns. Production and additional choreography by Harry Haythorne. Scenery, Kenneth Rayner; costumes, Pamela Conder. To 10 Sept.

Ballet fo r Pleasure including Idyll — choreographer, Charles Lisner; Games Out o f Court — choreographer, Peter

Darryll; The Visitor — choreographer, G a r t h Wel ch; La Ve n t a n a — choreographer, August Bournoville. 14-17 Sept.

QUEENSLAND THEATRE COMPANY (221 3861) The Brass Hat, by Thomas Muschamp.

Director, Robin Lovejoy. With Ron Haddrick and Marcella Burgoyne. 24 Aug.-10 Sept. Recess, Sept./Oct. Otherwise Engaged, by Simon Gray. ____________________ Opens 25 Oct. QUEENSLAND OPERA COMPANY (221 7749) at S.G.I.O. Theatre.

The Marriage o f Figaro, by Mozart.

Produced by Anthony Besch. Conductor, Graeme Young; designer, Allan Lees.

With Denis White, Arthur Johnson, Sally Robertson, Max Orwin, Barry Clarke, Gloria Eiser and John Ryall. 23, 28, 30 Sept., 4, 6, 8 Oct. II Trovatore, by Verdi. Producer, John Thompson. Conductor, Georg Tinter.

Designer, Peter Cooke. With Yusef Kayrouz, Phillis Ball, Margaret Russell, Paul Neal, Robert Harrington and Barry Clarke. 29 Sept., 1,2, 5, 7 Oct. TWELFTH NIGHT (52 5889) The Spider’s Web, by Agatha Christie.

Director, Babette Stephens. 2-17 Sept.

Season at Sarsaparilla, by Patrick White.

Director, Joan Whalley. 21 Sept.-15 Oct.

A.C.T.

CANBERRA PLAYHOUSE (49 6488) Australian Stage Company: Never the Twain, an entertainment based on the works of Rudyard Kipling and Bertolt Brecht, compiled by John Willett and directed by Wal Cherry. With Robyn Archer, Howard Spicer, Lyndon Terra­ cini, George Whaley and Michael Morley 12-15 Sept.

A Stretch o f the Imagination, by Jack Hibberd, APG production. Directed by Paul Hampton; designed by John Konig, with Max Gillies. 19 September-1 October.

CANBERRA THEATRE (49 8211) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, To 3 September.

Tarantara! Tarantara! G ilbert and Sullivan musical review by Ian Taylor.

Director, Ted Craig; designer, David Brinson. With Jon Ewing and John Faassen. 6-10 September.

Side By Side by Sondheim . 19-24 September.

HIBISCUS THEATRE RESTAURANT (51 3131) Cruise o f a Lifetime by Ron Fraser and

John M cK ellar, directed by Jam es Hutchins with Robert Corowra, Doug Williams and Mary Vincent (continuing).

Company 2: Master Peter’s Puppet Show, Primary Schools, North West region of Tasmania. 12 Sept.-25 Nov.

THEATRE THREE (47 4222) Canberra Repertory Society: The Return o f Ida Mulloy by Mike Giles, directed by Rodney W ilson. To 3 September.

Twelfth Night opens 6 October.

THEATRE ROYAL (34 6266) The Twenties and A ll That Jazz, a musical recollection wtih John Diedrich, Caroline Gillmer and John O’May. To 3 Sept.

Doctor In Love, by Richard Gordon with Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davis. 8-17 Sept.

The Club, by David Williamson. MTC production; directed by Rodney Fisher; designed by Shaun Gurton. From 28 Sept.

The Bastard From The Bush (And Other Heroes), by Henry Lawson. Performed by Robin Ramsay. From 29 Sept.

St. Martin’s: Ashes, by David Rudkin, directed by Mick Rodger; designed by Steve Nolan; with Lynette Curran, Jon Finlayson, Jan Friedl and Bruce Myles. To 24 Sept.

PILGRIM PUPPET THEATRE (818 6650) David the Giant Killer, by June Epstein.

PRINCESS THEATRE Wonder Woman, by and with Reg Livermore; directed by Peter Batey.

Presented by Eric Dare. Continuing.

SOUTH AUSTRALIA ST. KILDA PALAIS (94 0651) Les Patineurs, Monkeys in a Cage and Billy The Kid. 14-20 Sept. Peter and the Wolf. 26-30 Sept.

LITTLE THEATRE Godot and Other M ysteries. Revue adaptation of Beckett pieces directed by Steve Brown. 21 Sept.-l Oct. O PERA T H E A T R E (form erly Her Majesty’s) (51 2292) Doctor In Love, by Richard Gordon, with Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davis. 27 Sept.-15 Oct. RED SHED Troupe: Behold the Gay Marsupial written and directed by David Allen. 8-25 Sept., Thurs. to Sats.

VICTORIA

ALEXANDER THEATRE (543 2828) Richard Bradshaw and His Shadow Puppets. 10, 24 Sept.

AUSTRALIAN PERFORMING GROUP (347 7153) Pram Factory: Return season of Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch o f the Imagination.

To 11 Sept.

A Programme of Dance, by the Lead Balloon Dance Company. From 15 Sept.

SHERIDAN THEATRE (267 3751) Ad e l a i d e T h e a t r e Gr o u p : The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, directed

by Malcolm Blaylock. Weds, and Sats. to 24 Sept.

COMEDY THEATRE (663 3211) SOUTH AUSTRALIAN THEATRE Funny Peculiar, by Mike Stott; directed by Jeffrey Cambell, designed by Patrick COMPANY (51 5151) Annie Get Your Gun, music and lyrics by Robertson. With George Layton and Irving Berlin. Directed by Colin George; Bruce Spence. designed by Rodney Ford; movement by THE HOOPLA THEATRE Michael Fuller; with Dorothy Vernon and FOUNDATION Kevin Miles. To 24 Sept.

Playbox Theatre (63 4888) The Elocution o f Benjamin Franklin, by STATE OPERA (352 3738 or 352 3366) Steve J. Spears; directed by Richard Festival Theatre (51 2291) H M S Pinafore, Gilbert and Sullivan. Wherrett, designed by Larry Eastwood.

Conductor, Myer Fredman; director, Wi t h Go r d o n Ch a t e r . P a r a c h u t e Adrian Slack; designer, Jim Coogan; with Productions. Continuing.

Edward Woodward, Patsy Hemingway, Thomas Edmonds, John Wood, David LA MAMA (347 6085) Tenth Anniversary Festival.

Brennan, Norma Knight, Keith Hempton.

UNION HALL Adelaide University Guild Double Dealer, by William Congreve, by Graham Nerlich. 14 Sept-1 Oct.

TASMANIA

TASMANIAN PUPPET THEATRE (23 7996) Company 1: Cat and Dog, for infants playing North West coast region of Tasmania.

VICTORIA STATE OPERA (41 5061) Paper & Flowers & Things; or, The Three Lives o f Penelope Paper, by Peter Narroway. Continuing on schools tour, Melbourne metropolitan area.

LAST LAUGH THEATRE RESTAURANT (419 6226) Waiter, There’s a Circus in M y Soup, directed by Gary Patterson. To 3 Sept.

Last Laugh’s First Birthday Party with all star cast. 6-10 Sept. Return of Waiter, There’s a Circus in M y Soup. 13 Sept.

MELBOURNE THEATRE COMPANY (645 1100) Athenaeum: The Merchant o f Venice, by William Shakespeare, directed by John Sumner. To 3 Sept. Pygmalion, directed

by Ray Lawler. Designed by Hugh Colman. From 15 Sept.

Russell Street: The Club, by David Williamson, directed by Rodney Fisher; designed by Shaun Gurton. To 24 Sept.

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

CIVIC THEATRE RESTAURANT (72 1595) The Five Past Nine Show, (change of programme). With Max Kay, Alice Dale, Peter Dean, Bobby Hanna, Marie-Anne Koomen and the Shirley Halliday Show Girls. Continuing.

HOLE IN THE WALL (81 2403) Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O'Neill. Director, Raymond Omodei.

With Neville Teede and M argaret Anketell. 24 Aug.-24 Sept.

PLAYHOUSE (25 3344) Downstairs: Double Edge, by Peter Whelan and Leslie Darbon. Director, Andrew Ross; designer, Anna French.

With Carole Skinner, Dennis Miller and Leslie Wright. To 20 Sept.

O f Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck.

Director, Aarne Neeme. 22 Sept.-15 Oct. REGAL, Subiaco (81 1557) The Twenties and All That Jazz, a musical recollection with John Diedrich, Caroline Gillmer and John O'May. Opens 5 Sept.

W.A. BALLET COMPANY (35 6188) Octagon Theatre: Set Point & Love Match, by Leigh Warren. The Prisoners, an abstract ballet by Peter Darrell. New York by Garth Welch. 21-24 Sept; 28 Sept.-l Oct. W.A. THEATRE COMPANY In recess during building.

THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977 63

I

SYDNEY O P ER A H O U S E N E U SERVICE

Western Australian Institute of Technology

School of The Arts and Design The Institute is a major tertiary institution providing courses characterised by a multi and interdisciplinary approach to higher education. Academics wishing to work in a stimulating environment are invited to apply for the position listed below.

Department of English

Theatre Arts — Lecturer/Senior Lecturer Teach and develop courses in Theatre Arts. Share in the artistic direction of production and performance work in WAIT theatres. Practical drama experi­ ence essential. (Ref. No. 050).

Conditions include: Salary range: Senior Lecturer $19,676 — $22,955, Lecturer $14,632 — $19,262.

Diners' CluD

Qualifications: Senior Lecturer — A good higher degree and considerable experience including tertiary teaching are preferred. Lecturer — Postgraduate qualifications with experience, including teaching are preferred.

Leave: Annual, long service and study leave. Transfer Expenses: Fares for family plus assistance for removal expenses are payable to appointees. Tenure: Appoint­ ment may be either Tenured, or Non-Tenured for a period up to three years.

tickets

These cards “ " “ „ " f o l e r ^ h e counter at

the Opera°Hdése^Box Oftice.

^

C c°H ftB G E " 0 t t ' e» hone d o » k l,’ !>s ° P weeks in advance. ^

Applications: Detailed applications including a cirriculum vitae and the names and addresses of three referees should be submitted not later than November 4th 1977 to the ADDointments Officer. Western Australian Institute of Technology, Hayman Road, South Bentley, 6102, West­ ern Australia. A brochure containing further information may be obtained from the above address.

^

Ed' '“’T e t ^ ê ' p l e a ï a"d “ “

Sd!«Siif«à*r m

T heatre A u stralia.

When applying please quote position and reference number.

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• Prop locating, hire or Audio manufacture. Set dressing.

or 3583m ah. 5691376

Overseas subscription rates AS25.00 All other countries AS70.00 Bank drafts in Australian currency should be By air forwarded to Playhouse Press Pty. Ltd.; 114 New Zealand, New Guinea AS45.00 Cremorne St., Richmond, Victoria 3121, U.K., U.S.A., Germany, Greece, Italy AS50.00 Australia.

Surface mail

64 THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1977

Information services: M & L Casting Pty. Ltd