A Letter from the Past (Part 3)

I received an interesting comment to yesterdays post referring to the collective cultural amnesia that we suffer in this great brown land of ours.

So to jog all of your memories, let's flip back to 1968 again and see what was happening at the Old Tote in Sydney and at the Melbourne Theatre Company. The parallel's are extremely interesting.

Profile of a Theatre
The Old Tote Theatre Sydney

Opening with a production of The Cherry Orchard in 1963, the Old Tote Theatre has presented over twenty plays. It takes its name from the old totalisator building of Randwick Racecourse which still houses the dressing rooms and costumes for the theatre inside the grounds of the University of New South Wales. This gives some indication of the makeshift nature of the theatre, which is soon to be rebuilt on the same site...

The Theatre is subsidised in facilities and services by the University of NSW, and is given a limited underwriting against loss by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Its unique feature is that it is part of a University-centred drama complex with a full-time training school attached, and an academic department in tow. NIDA gives the Tote a range of producers to choose from, and a continual flux of new faces with talent and-some training.

The Tote follows an adventurous policy, sometimes adventurous enough to reach the verge of disaster. It has held two Australian Play Seasons. Biggest successes have been modern plays such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Representative and it is hard to see why plays with similar potential such as America Hurrah and Saved have been left to the amateur theatre.

The Tote in general has a livelier policy than its big brother MTC, but has the annoying
habit of pulling its horns in when it meets with obstacles - mainly those of the box office. It has run the gamut from being a fashionable 'in theatre' to being accused of catering for a minority elite audience. It has still managed to maintain a consistent standard over some years, and can be regarded as the gathering point for much of Australia's production talent.


Melbourne Theatre Company

The present Melbourne Theatre Company grew from a repertory company formed in 1953 at Melbourne University. For many years it was known as the Union Theatre Repertory Company, taking its name from the Union Theatre in which it played.

Its newly decorated premises, the Russell Street Theatre, and its new name indicate the status which the theatre has achieved in fifteen years. It has also built an audience following unequalled by that of any other serious theatre in the country. By following a policy of tempering experimental and avant-garde 'risk' plays with 'safe' commercial theatre, it has kept its financial head above water better than most.

Partly this reflects the administration of John Sumner. The Melbourne Theatre Company now receives subsidies from three directions - Melbourne University, the Trust and the Melbourne City Council. This gives is a degree of independence which most theatres do not have...

The needs a of theatre and the demands of audiences are changing fast. Australia has not so far had a theatrical upheaval equivalent to the 1956 explosion in England, and our theatre is still struggling to find a proper relation to its audience and society...

But the theatrical context which has satisfied audiences in the past shows signs of losing favour, and MTC's careful policy may eventually place it out on a limb with a carefully cultivated but dwindling audience. The solution lies in knowing how to enliven the current theatrical tradition and when to abandon it. MTC has placed itself in the strongest position in the country to rejuvenate the serious theatre if it can steer the narrow path between box office security and meaningful experiment. There is a kind of deceptive safeness in theatre which is fatal.

Tomorrow: The Critics and their views


All extracts above are from:
Entertainment Arts in Australia
Copyright Paul Hamlyn Pty Ktd 1968

A Letter from the Past (Part 2)

Yesterday, I provided some extracts from the large anthology I found entitled Entertainment Arts in Australia.

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.

This letter from 1968 continues.

The Directors of 1968

One of the most important changes in the formal theatre this century has been the rise in importance of the director. From the old actor-manager system at the turn of the century with the emphasis on one man, the ensemble approach of a group of actors under the direction of an individual has gained ascendancy...

The role of the playwright has merged into this shifting structure. The relation of Chekhov to the Moscow Arts Theatre, or Brecht to the Berliner Ensemble, was more than just that of the ordinary writer to the theatre...

The impact of the new group approach first came to Australia with the work of Hayes Gordon at the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney. It was quickly matched by the work of Wal Cherry at the Emerald Hill in Melbourne, and both theatres made great advances in the training of actors and the group presentation of plays. The work of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre in London has shown that this form of theatrical experiment is highly dependent on subsidy, and the early efforts of Gordon and Cherry soon floundered.

The equivalents of these theatres now exist in the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Old Tote Theatre in Sydney. At MTC, the work of George Ogilvie in his studio workshop classes has won the enthusiasm and support of his actors, but has so far not reached fruition on the stage of the Russell Street Theatre.

At the Tote, students at NIDA are starting to develop an ensemble approach under the guidance of tutors. Eventually the work of these two theatres can be expected to bring us the excitement of this new style for which the important plays of the modern theatre are being written.

The obvious gap in both of them is the existence of a playwrights' workshop where the third member of the modern theatre trio may be absorbed into a suitably Australian theatre. The mere commissioning of plays is not sufficient - the exciting theatre of the next decade will grow from a living relationship between actors, directors and playwrights, not out of single elements working in isolation.


Robin Lovejoy - Co-Artistic Director, The Old Tote
Quintessentially, I discover only one important direction in the theatre. It boils down to only one common factor, and that is that I am using all these things to ask you "Do you know I'm here?" And if you say "Yes", then I have succeeded. The theatre has stopped being a place to go to in order to stand off and feel grateful that you are allowed to touch a little. It has become a place in which you can worship freely. It was a temple and it is now something else - it is now just a circle of stones. It has become more primitive, and therefore more attainable, a more available place in which the audience is in a peculiar way more important while being less important. It is more important because the audience participates more... and less important because it is no longer a big sort of communal monster to be worshipped or feared. The more theatre breaks away into small individual personality theatres, the less important the commercial audience is, and the more important the "I am here, where are you?" attitude becomes.


John Clark - Director, Old Tote Theatre
There is a lack of professional dramatists in Australia. I think one harks back to the sort of influence that someone like Eugene O'Neil had on the American Theatre. We all of course thought this was going to happen here when Summer of the Seventeenth Doll hit the deck some years back but it faded away...
I hope that the theatre of the future will lose some of its stuffiness. I would hope one the basis of seeing shows like Brook's Marat Sade that the theatre is moving right away from naturalism, and I think this really wise because naturalism chucked out of the theatre so much that really makes a performance hum.


George Ogilvie - Melbourne Theatre Company
My biggest aim is to have a company of actors who are expert enough - with myself who I hope at that time will be expert enough - to be able to take a script of, say, Troilus & Cressida, and enjoy interpreting this play without having qualms about the technical talent interpreting it. But I also believe in transitory theatre. I think that the idea of a state decentralised theatre is marvellous because it would allow me to do, say, one or two years of something there and then shift over. Get a new image. I'd like to be attached to a theatre where, having done a Three Sisters, you could then go mad in experimental theatre - just go crazy. One need this sort of catalyst constantly.


Doris Fitton - Director, Independent Theatre
The future changes in theatre will depend very much on the plays. Since they are written in a stylised vein - I think the modern approach is stylised - this will alter the interpretation of character. if the trend towards the unreal play develops, then unreal performances will be demanded. I think the well-made play will come back in turn. I think in many cases people prefer it. Older people, anyway. I think the young always want experiment. I myself prefer the well-made play.


Hayes Gordon - Director, Ensemble Theatre
We have to be a bit jealous or suspicious of sources of support, lest we end in the position of whose bread we eat, his song we sing. It is absolutely imperative that we have a free voice. The original concept of the theatre was a theatre predicated on public need rather than professional need. I think that in general, theatre is going in the direction of popular theatre. It is going to reflect communal needs more and more, rather than the esoteric needs of a community which can be supplied by, for example, operas and ballets. These can titillate a section of the audience, but they don't answer the immediate needs of the community.


Irene Mitchell - Director, St Martins Theatre Company
My aim is to develop more and more the young side of the theatre. To know what the young people are thinking is vitally important to the theatre.
I think audiences are fed up with everything in a condensed form. Everything is condensed on television for us so that we do not have to do any thinking...
I don't like the stage that theatre is in at the moment - I don't think it is an exciting stage. I am not pessimistic about it, but I just feel that it needs some great big injection, and it must come from the writers. There are not enough poets in the theatre, I think.


George Fairfax - St Martin's Theatre Company
Theatre has to be theatrical to succeed. We must establish for people that they are coming to the theatre for a theatrical experience. I believe that there are enough people with enthusiasm for the theatre to make sure it will succeed. It is necessary for people in authority to change their attitudes - press, governments etc. It is up to us to produce a better product and make a better impression. We have been accused of having a captive, middle-aged audience. The whole business of selling is important in all aspects of life - supermarkets and bonus films - and we must sell theatre that way too.

Tomorrow - a profile on the Old Tote & the Melbourne Theatre Company.... how much have they changed?


Image: Bertolt Brecht from theoldvaultradio.org
All extracts above are from:
Entertainment Arts in Australia
Copyright Paul Hamlyn Pty Ktd 1968

A Letter from the Past (Part 1)

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