Three coffees later and I found myself pottering around a second-hand bookshop today. On a table out on the street, I rummaged through the pile of old romantic novels and tired history books and discovered at the bottom a large anthology entitled Entertainment Arts in Australia.
Published in 1968 and written by Roger Covell, Sir Robert Helpmann, Harold Kippax, Mungo MacCallum & Michael Thornhill, it provides a fascinating insight into the arts industry of the country, profiling theatre, dance, opera, film and ballet. It includes an array of photographs from theatres around the country and gives short expositions written by the characters of the time.
There are interviews with critics, teachers, directors, actors and producers. Above anything else, it portrays a time of exciting changes and an atmosphere of healthy debate amongst all the stakeholders, all with a deep concern for the future of their industry.
The introduction to the anthology says:
It is hoped that Entertainment Arts in Australia will be the first of many, since the arts need continual reassessment just as a person or country needs to objectively analyse aims, motives and purpose. In a country on the verge of its own discovery, the identities of the arts and the nation merge, and interaction between them is of the essence of progress to both.
An Overview
Let me first provide you with an edited version of H.G Kippax's short essay State of the Play;
Australia as a whole today has more theatre, and in greater variety than at any time in its history. Consider its spectrum. At one end there are the annual seasons of opera and ballet presented in each major city by permanent national companies. At the other end there is a booming entertainment industry in pubs, clubs, discotheques and restaurants...
Formal theatre of all kinds lies between these two extremes of taste. It is characterised by two major developments reflecting both the increased and more diversified population and the rise of affluence. One is the increasingly sophisticated organisation of private enterprise. The other, in majority of the large cities, is the increasing replacement of the amateur 'little theatre' by the subsidised professional company.
Formal theatre begins with musical comedy, still the best money-earner for the commercial entrepreneur. Here J.C Williamson Ltd remains the leader. One important change in its position is that it is no longer the perennial target for criticism from all those who seek an indigenous theatre. This is due to no change of heart by The Firm which, one must note, has felt no compulsion to commission a local musical comedy since its deserved and, it might be thought, encouraging success with The Sentimental Bloke early in the decade...
The Firm's conservatism has been more apparent in its unadventurous choices of farces and light comedies to supplement its musical comedies. The complaint here is not against cakes and ale but that too many of The Firm's comedies follow well-worn formulae...
...No less urgent voices will argue the claims of non-affiliated theatres, meanly subsidised, if at all, from local and State sources against the favoured few, the Melbourne Theatre Company, the Old Tote, the National Theatre in Perth, and the South Australian Theatre Company. Readers who have not already made up thei minds about this central dilemma of artistic subsidisation from a central source should begin considering the arguments for an against 'raise' or 'spread, for unless the Government or its committee decides that drama must continue to try to exist in a shoestring, they are likely soon to hear much debate on the subject.
The third practical disability of the indigenous theatre is, of course, the disconcerting absence of a convincing body of Australian drama. Some funds are needed here to commission works (for there seems no other way of interesting professional writers in a notoriously ill-paying craft) and to provide experimental workshop theatres in Melbourne and Sydney so that theatres like the Old Tote need never again imperil their main function, which is to serve the drama generally, by imposing untried plays on their trusting audiences.
But no amount of public expenditure can order a thriving school of playwrights into existence. I suspect a divorce between most hopeful playwrights and their audiences, that is to say our society, especially our middle-class society itself. Is it the lack of overt conflict, exploding into violence, that persuades playwrights to avoid the comedy of strains and stresses in our very mobile middle-class? Is it a sense of the triviality of many of our political issues that persuades a Thomas Keneally ( the most successful of the Old Tote playwrights) to dramatise a passionately felt protest against war in terms of a laboured myth that can accommodate only rather abstract figures of fear, tyranny and despair?
Is it an oppressing sense of sheer dullness in the local society that persuades Rodney Milgate to try a second time (this time disastrously) to lend significance to comic-strip caricatures from the Barry Humphries' country by thrusting them into Greek mythology? And why, does the failure of those pre-war playwrights who tried to dramatise our vivid outback mythology in terms of Ibsen's three act realism seem to convince the modern writer, who has Brecht's Epic Drama as a technical model, that the subject is theatrically intransigent?
At least one playwright is not so convinced: for me the most interesting and impressive Australian play since Patrick White is (Bill Reed's) Burke's Company. Both on the page and, I understand, in production by the Melbourne Theatre Company, it assimilated the Brechtian technical lessons without any obvious sense of embarrassment and offered a lesson to its contemporaries - that a thriving drama in any country will be primarily concerned with human beings in action, not with the illustration of ides better left to poets, philosophers or leader writers if they cannot be related to life and to the human experience of the audience.
More tomorrow, when I will give you an extract about the leading directors of 1968.
Image: PM John Gorton, Wikipedia
All extracts above are from:
Entertainment Arts in Australia
Copyright Paul Hamlyn Pty Ktd 1968
