ART & CULTURE: Trinity up in lights

Trinitarians have been taking to the stage since the late 19th century. From classics to comedies, these student productions have reliably showcased exceptional talent and have, for better or worse, often attracted media attention. We look at the trajectory of Trinity’s performing arts scene.

BY DR BENJAMIN THOMAS

‘Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light for the keen apprehension of dramatic necessities possessed by the students of Trinity College, Melbourne,’ praised the Herald in 1881, citing Polonius’ utterances to Hamlet. What made Mostellaria (The Haunted House), a comedy by the Roman playwright Ticus Maccius Plautus (254–187 BC), even more notable to its Melbourne audience was that it was the inaugural play presented by students of Trinity, and the first performance of its kind in Australia – a classical play performed in its original language, Latin.

Mostellaria was performed in Trinity College’s original timber Dining Hall, which was decorated for the event by John Hennings, a scenic artist at Bourke Street’s Theatre Royal, with flags, wreaths and sprigs of evergreens – the whole serving as a backdrop to the set of an Athenian street. The main driveway was lined with Chinese lanterns, which formed a graceful arc around the eastern edge of the Bulpadock.

The Latin Play at Trinity College by David Syme and Co, 1881

IMAGE CREDITS: ILLUSTRATED AUSTRALIA NEWS, TRINITY COLLEGE ARCHIVES

The classics

Trinity favoured classical plays for much of the 1880s, as young College thespians presented more works by Plautus: Rudens in 1884, followed by Aulularia in 1887. Performed in April at the Masonic Hall on Collins Street, Aulularia was produced as a fundraising event in support of the Trinity College Hostel, the women’s residential hall that had opened the previous year in a two-storey terrace house on Sydney Road. ‘The lady students apparently are not yet strong enough in classics to assist their brethren of Trinity in the production of a Latin or Greek play,’ Melbourne’s weekly rag Table Talk suggested, ‘though we hope at some not very distant date to see the “Aulularia” revived or some other comedy of Plautus given.’

In the lead role of Alcestis herself was Florence Towl from Ballarat who had come into the hostel two years earlier (she was the first woman to be awarded the College’s residential music scholarship while studying voice at the University’s conservatorium under the tutelage of feted Viennese soprano Elsie Wiedermann-Pinschof). Following her impressive university performances, Towl forged a musical career and gained international recognition as ‘Madame Ballara’, a homage to her home town of Ballarat.

Alcestis of Euripides performed by students of Trinity College in 1898 at the Melbourne Town Hall

As it turned out, the women would not make their on-stage debut with a Plautus comedy, but rather, the tragedian Euripides. In 1898, Trinity moved from the Romantic to the Hellenic, putting on a grand performance of Alcestis (which was performed again in 1998 to mark its centenary) at the Melbourne Town Hall in the original Greek. A decade earlier that would itself have been newsworthy, but, according to The Weekly Times, ‘undoubtedly the most interesting feature of the coming play is that for the first time the students of Trinity will have the assistance of the “sweet girl graduates” of Trinity Hostel.’

Finding a new direction

When war erupted, collegiate life – in all forms – was reduced to a shadow of itself. Returning servicemen recommencing earlier studies and new, fresh students had to re-establish lights pre-war student culture and the College traditions that had been left languishing for almost a decade. In the early 1890s, a Dramatic Society was formed at Trinity and, together with the College’s Glee Club, they produced HV Esmond’s three-act comedy, One Summer’s Day, in the Jubilee year of 1922.

The following year, another new element was introduced, with the Dramatic Society’s production of Robert Marshall’s comedy, His Excellency the Governor, with proceeds going towards the ‘aid of the wives and children of the unemployed’.

War would then pause activities once again and production resumed in 1949 with American playwright William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, first performed on Broadway a decade earlier. Held at the Union Theatre in May, attendance was good for all three nights of the production, with The Age newspaper most impressed with the cast of almost 30 players.

And Then There Were None, performed at Melbourne University’s Guild Theatre in 2012

Highs and lows

The following years saw a revival of established English and Irish playwrights on the stage: George Bernard Shaw’s story of protagonist Blanco Posnet, Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1954 and The Winter’s Tale in 1956, and 17th-century John Vanbrugh’s comedy The Provok’d Wife in 1957. But it was the ambitious production of James Flecker’s Middle Eastern-themed Hassan, staged in 1955, that loomed large as one of the most memorable productions of the decade.

Let the music play

Not all productions met their mark, however. This seemed to be particularly so throughout the social revolutionary years of the 1960s and early 1970s. In a critical review of the 1969 production of The Cherry Orchard, by Russian lights playwright Anton Chekhov, a withering George Myers (TC 1965) deemed the joint Trinity-Janet Clarke Hall production ‘a failure’ and declared that comments heard from audience members at the play’s conclusion ‘revealed that far from catching up with the kitchen sink the general Trinity College milieu doesn’t even copy with the 19th century values which it claims to be familiar with.’

And the criticism came not only from within the Trinity student community, but beyond. Journalist and collegian Michael Cathcart, who was in the cast of Ormond’s So Many of Them Aren’t in 1975, was condemnatory of the College environment of the 1970s because:

‘The colleges are such sites of privilege, often what would happen is that someone who would enjoy being in their school play at Melbourne Grammar or at Scotch or at PLC would come in and want to do more theatre.

‘So they would become the efficient, private, privileged secretary of the drama committee in their college and they’d want to go on doing The Boyfriend or some sort of activity for ruling-class boys and girls to put on funny clothes and to sing and dance. That was always a problem and Trinity was always doing that. They did it shamelessly, tirelessly and enthusiastically over decades.’

Despite Cathcart’s stance, by the mid-1970s there was a discernible shift. Student theatre, particularly around the University, had been ‘growing and developing over the past two years in a way that could not have been foreseen at the beginning of the 1970s’.

By 1980, a new genre was being pursued in addition to the traditional plays – the musical. ‘Musicals are more of a pain in the neck than usual as far as risks are concerned but this play had a number of things in its favour,’ read a passage in the Fleur de Lys about the 1980 production of Joan Littlewood’s 1963 critique on war, Oh! What a Lovely War. Much to the students’ relief, it was praised as ‘a success, at the box office, to act in, to watch’. Musical theatre was here to stay. A string of classics followed: Grease (1986), Chicago (1987), West Side Story (1990), Sweeney Todd (1995), Little Shop of Horrors (1998 and 2007), The Producers (2008, and again in 2018).

Trinity students performing the musical Urinetown in 2019

One hundred and forty-one years after Trinity’s inaugural dramatic performance, audiences were this year left astounded by the talent on display in student Jem Herbert’s (TC 2020) production based on Paul Gallico’s 1966 novel, The Man Who Was Magic. Two years in the making, Mageia: A Musical Fable was a marvel that encapsulated the fullness of dramatic creativity at Trinity. As lockdowns eased and audiences could once again return to campus, Jem reflectively points to the sage observation of the late, great American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim: ‘Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator is in before you can complete the collaboration.’