Panel members: Graeme Blundell, Bill Garner, Betty Burstall
Informal presentations and panel discussion and open discussion
Chair: James McCaughey

 

James McCaughey

In this session we are going to look at some of the diverse theatre activity that was happening during the time of White With Wire Wheels. They were extraordinarily generative years. It seems to me like there were a thousand characters at the time, but there were three characteristics that might contextualise our conversation. One is that what was happening here was happening simultaneously in New York, Paris and other places. There was the usual ten years time lag but I arrived back in Australia at a time when extraordinary things were happening in New York. The second characteristic is reflected in the people who organised this conference and its location. This was the very generative relation between what was happening in the university and the emergence of a new culture in Carlton. And the third characteristic was the extraordinary polymorphic nature of what was taking place at the time in theatre in the 1960s, which you have just heard, focusing very particularly on Jack as writer and on White With Wire Wheels. But it wasn’t just that. There were all sorts of things being explored in theatre and there was an extraordinary explosion in theatre language which in turn developed the performers. All those things bring the context together and, I hope, frame this session.

I should start by saying that Liz Jones who was due to be here today can’t be here because of a bereavement, her father has just died, and I’m sure that we all would want to send her our best wishes. But even without Liz, if I may say, so we have something of a dream team. We have Graeme Blundell who didn’t quite graduate from the university but does have a connection with it; but what he didn’t finish was his BA Honours not just a BA, so I think that’s an important point. He didn’t finish it because he started acting for the Union House Repertory Company and from there played a crucial role in the development of Melbourne University student theatre and then in La Mama and through La Mama and beyond with the Pram Factory. He’s done an extraordinary number of things since then which is all recorded now in his autobiographical book.

Then there’s Bill Garner who actually did finish his degree and was a crucial figure in the founding of the APG company through La Mama. He played an amazing role both artistically and organisationally in the development of the Australian Performing Group and the Pram Factory. Finally we turn to Betty Burstall. I certainly don’t know anyone else who has made decisions from such a completely unselfish base, decisions that were taken for others that cost her extraordinarily but which had such an effect on tradition, individuals and generations. We are honoured with her presence here.

Now Graeme’s going to speak first and then Bill; Betty tells me she is not going to speak unless she feels moved. She tells me that history tends to be rewritten so I’m hoping that Graeme will get up her nose enough so that she does speak.

Graeme Blundell

I’m going to start with some notes I wrote and I’m glad I did because after David Kendall’s performance [this morning] as the deranged drama teacher from Strindberg, I keep waiting for someone to yell, ‘Thank God You’re Here!’ I’m going to just talk briefly about the very early days preceding what we spoke about this morning – the days preceding even Jack Hibberd. In my first year of university in 1963 I fell into theatre. I was a working class kid from the outer suburbs and I turned out to be good at theatre even though I had never thought of it as a way of life or even something to do for enjoyment or as recreation. I’d only seen four plays in my life at that time and I think Jack said he had only seen one. In my final year at high school in matriculation I moved from Coburg High to Merrilands High out in Thomastown where they didn’t actually do matriculation so I went to Coburg High and met an actor who was in the Tin Alley Players, and he suggested that I should become an usher of the Union Theatre. That was my introduction to the theatre. I was terrified of the actresses and you had to get your torch and your tickets from a little box at the front and Zoe Caldwell and those people would sweep in and say ‘ah ya fuckin’ cunt, you fuckin’ cunt!’

During orientation week in 1963 I joined the Marlowe Society and was influenced by a certain woman called Hilary McPhee who promised endless parties if I joined up. The first play I was in was Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi which some of you will know was first performed in Paris in 1896 and was a grotesque vaudevillian-like tale of horror. Ubu Roiexplains the fundamental awfulness of the mundane and created a new category of drama called absurdism, which we can possibly talk about later in terms of its influence. Of course this suggested a theatre where no holds were barred, a theatre where everything was possible, a theatre that acknowledged nothing more than a couple of barrels on stage, a platform and a few drunk actors, and not reality itself. Of course I found pretty quickly that university theatre was its own playhouse of the absurd depending not only on the audience but also on the cooperation and enthusiasm of its own community. The simplest productions required carpenters, seamstresses, painters, electricians, producers and, of course, actors. It’s hard to believe nowadays, but the theatre building was the centre of the university and equipped you for a profession. Students had no rigid nine to five schedule like amateur actors elsewhere and they could find the time to develop exciting ensemble theatre. In the student community in the early 1960s there was an extraordinary minority interest carried on by a dedicated coterie, most of the ex-students. We constructed and painted our own sets and made our own costumes and slipping through the cold nights we glued posters to the walls of factories and lamp posts along most of Melbourne’s main thoroughfares. I did two plays and a revue in that first year and I had no idea what a revue was. They said here’s a character based on Barry Humphries’ Sandy Stone and I said who’s Sandy Stone? I didn’t know. So I played several characters and I was always amazed at my own bizarre confidence when I actually found the follow spot on my face. It was obvious that in the absence of formal training, because no one really knew what formal training was, young actors could only learn from directors or pick up advice from admirable sources, usually older actors because this was a time when learning acting was literally in the hands of older actors.

Most young Melburnians at that time, who were interested in the theatre as a profession, were still going away like David Kendall did, leaving Australia in a cloud of slow dust, seeking visions of somewhere else and wanting to be part of the narrative of over there. They were meeting aspiring actors with new voices in London and Bristol. When I suggested to people that I would like to be an actor they said oh, you’ll go off to England, I suppose. It was obvious that the only way you could learn was from local directors and picking up advice from anyone you could pick up advice from. I used to sit in the university library when I was meant to be studying, devouring magazines and periodicals about the shortcuts and techniques of performance and the conventions of acting that you could see in the gifted older actors around the university like David and Bruce Knappett. Some of these actors were better in their pauses than their lines. I’ve never heard so many pauses. Others, like Carrillo Gantner, shot words off like rounds from a machine gun towards the audiences like trenches in the stalls. He was amazingly loud, Carrillo.

My friend, the architect and designer, Peter Corrigan, even then believed that theatre design was a constructed landscape in which actors experienced life. Peter enjoyed the fact that acting, phenomenologically, was close to arbitrary. He used to say ‘think of the word clap, Blundell, and its etymological significance.’ I got my first good notice when I played Hotspur with a rather fetching fake beard and page-boy haircut opposite Christian Williamson in William Shakespeare’s Henry the IV. Axel Clark, later a distinguished biographer, thought I was the best thing in the show. He said, ‘He acted with some nobility when the part demanded it, and on other occasions aided by his stammer a la Olivier, he generated considerable heat and anger, so Mr Clark wrote inFarrago. At his death scene, in spite of the ham acting all around him and the roars and giggles of the schoolkids, he touched on the tragic.’ Must have been the last time.

As I said some of the actors working in student plays were older and quite experienced and the directors were usually called producers in the English manner and they usually were amateur theatre hands like Ron Quinn, a short, thickset man who was already legendary for his architectural grouping of actors and his equally contrived tantrums. A lexicon of actors’ tricks emerged which you just picked up from watching these producers. You know: go centre stage, and where were the lights, and how to make an exit and pause before opening the door and say the lines over your shoulder. You learned so fast.

One night, at a party in Richmond the great actress Bunny Brook, suntanned and suave, with a cigarette flashing in and out of her extremely scary mouth told me: ‘I can’t act with anyone who can’t breathe, Graeme’. And she paused, eyeing off a younger actress whose breast had fallen out of her dress, and said, ‘breathing is the key to acting’. Now for an asthmatic person who had problems even breathing this was an elegant slap in the face. But from then on I twigged as young actors had to do and I always marked breaths into my script determining the rhythm of the speaking lines from the places where they accumulated. I was on top of it.

The motel where I stayed last night reminded me of where I first lived in Drummond Street, Carlton in this tiny little bathroom. It had a bath and this little table with an old typewriter on it and I learned to pace around that little room marking patterns on the floor working on a kind of grid as I memorised the lines. This is a really good technique; you should all try it. Sometimes I shouted the lines as I walked past the mirror. Then in 1965 David Kendall produced Harold Pinter’s comedy of menace, The Birthday Party. That was a turning point for many of us, Kerry Dwyer, John Wregg, John Dawson and especially me. The show celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Marlowe Society but it also celebrated the end of the Society’s reign as the founder of avant-garde theatre. Kendall’s direction was expert and sympathetic. He seized on the play and also invented a new form of direction. David learned that you could actually direct actors from the bar at Stewart’s pub. The thing was that while David was at Stewart’s the actors were often organising our own rehearsals.

You could even argue that David’s absence from those rehearsals was the starting point of all new Australian theatre. For me seeing the actors working together was a way of actually taking control of the means of production and finding our own voice. And we became independent and interdependent as we formed an ensemble aiming for an intensity that was usually impossible in student productions at that time. After the success of The Birthday Party, we formed another university society with John Reed and Louise Thorne called Melbourne University Student Theatre or MUST and we thought it was pretty cool. This was a response to changing international theatre practices that were alluded to before. We wanted theatre to be at the centre of campus, an act of radical politics, and like theatre in New York in the cafés, we produced new plays with no more than a licensee or landlord’s intuition. We too wanted to create a new theatre that thrived on the unknown and used improvisation and new techniques to write plays – anything that made theatre theatrical and encouraged this new Australian theatre that didn’t yet exist. We might not have had the necessary gifts to enact a renaissance but we needed to rid ourselves of the entrenched belief that what we were doing in Melbourne was only biding time. 

James

Thank you so much Graeme.

Bill Garner

Unlike Graeme I was not part of Melbourne University student theatre at all. I wasn’t particularly interested in it. I did see plays and I saw The Birthday Party with Graeme and Kerry Dwyer and John Wregg and John Dawson and so on. It stuck in my mind and I went to a revue – I can’t remember whether it was an arts revue – and I was sitting in the audience and all of a sudden next to me there was this drunken old man who stood up and started berating the actors and drunkenly staggered down and I thought, why wasn’t someone stopping him? That was my first experience of breaking down the barriers between the audience and the stage. It was fantastic. I did a little bit of theatre, some college plays; I did Six Characters in Search of An Author by Pirandello directed by Patrick McCaughey. He was a theatre director before he was an art director; when he directed a college play he would swan in with his overcoat draped over his shoulder and he’d have a very attractive female production assistant. And he also directedHamlet in the Tent, which was a fantastic production that Corrigan designed, and it was done in a tent put up by the swimming pool. A lot of the people involved in that subsequently stayed in theatre. I auditioned for the part of Hamlet and thought I had done really well – it was the Gertrude stuff and I was right on to it. And Patrick stammered very good, very good, but unfortunately I had in mind for Hamlet a six foot tall red-headed man. It was Peter Curtain! It was all bullshit; a lesson about casting was learnt at that point. The last thing I did, I played a role in Les Mouches, a Sartre play directed by Brian Davies who was one of the most important people in the film set around the university. Brian was one of the people who crossed the road and became one of the family directing people at La Mama.

I want to draw a connection here in that the association with film was profoundly important to us in that the new wave. When I hear the term new wave I think of the French new wave, the cinema, and on a Tuesday there were lunchtime screenings in the Union Theatre and there’d be a huge queue to get in; the theatre would be absolutely packed. Indeed, you had to pull strings sometimes to get in and you’d stagger out at about 2 o’clock in the bright sunshine and you’d have become French and we were all going around in threesomes because we’d seen it in the cinema! [laughter] Looking back on it, because of the sort of documentary style in which those films were made, you had the feeling that you were actually looking at real people and you could enter that world. It was a world that while I was in France you thought you were a part of somehow. This predated any sort of political action, a visceral sort of identification. I think that I sort of took on board the notion that you could change your life by acting. You could step into the film or the performance and you could become one of these other people. I didn’t consciously have that idea at the time but it’s one I think of now. For me the whole move to La Mama and the Pram Factory and so on was not fundamentally about theatre at all.

I actually left Melbourne at the end of 1966 and spent some time in Europe and came back at the beginning of 1968, by which time La Mama was established and all these things had been happening, just in time for some workshops. Well actually we didn’t even have the word ‘workshop’. It wasn’t a term, we didn’t quite know what it was. We were picking up the terminology from the Tulane Drama Review and one of us would read an article and then conduct the workshop with a thing called improvisation – again completely unknown. And the notion of group was an extraordinary idea. It was psychological and also very, very physical and one of the things was that theatre was about sex. Better than most other societies, the Rationalist Society for example. At least you felt there was a greater chance in the theatre! There was this move from the University across Swanston Street, which was absolutely critical and there is a structural explanation for that but I won’t go into that. There were a lot of large things going on in the world, which made it very timely for actors to go out into the world and into the suburbs, a particular suburb of Carlton. You try to think about how all these things happened and there is something mysterious about how they all came together. Partly it’s the condition of the world, partly it’s that things were happening in student theatre and it needed to define itself differently to get away from the mainstream, which was established by the Melbourne Theatre Company – to create some sort of alternative.

By 1968 there was this tremendous political upheaval that affected theatre and the women’s movement was sort of getting together and there were consciousness-raising groups across Carlton and every relationship was under intense scrutiny. There were the Vietnam moratoriums so we were looking at ways to engage politically in the theatre and the San Francisco Mime Troupe was one of our models where they used masks and so on. We were drawing ideas from everywhere. There was also the notion that all forms of authority were under question. That meant that the authority of the director was under question. And even though initially at La Mama there were people like Graeme and Brian Davies who took some sort of directorial responsibility, these workshops that we got going happened on the weekends. They started off with a few people, five or six. Within a few weeks we had two sessions of about 30 people; we were auditioning people to join the workshop. People like Peter Cummins and Rob Moore were coming from the western district; they were schoolteachers, driving in to get there. The ‘Maoists’ came from Monash! The workshops became a life in itself and they went on for months and months. Graeme, who had ambitions of keeping the theatre going, said perhaps we should do a production. And we said why bother, this is good! We don’t need an audience! It was quite a struggle actually to get to a point of getting it back to theatre. In some ways that was a point of tension between the theatricals and the rest of us and I was among the rest of us. There was a libidinous-anarchic sort of madness. The production wasn’t always the important thing. The script was an excuse for a production. It was essential so writers were regarded quite highly compared with directors, but we would take were extraordinary liberties with scripts. The more risks we took the more people loved it, for example, we did a production of Megan Terry’s Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dark Place [28:01], which is about American prison life. In the middle of that we inserted in every performance improvisation on the history of Australia. That would run for about ten minutes and the audience loved it. It was during the theatre festival in 1968/9, there was stuff going on at the university and also at La Mama. We put on five plays or something and it was raining and there was a line of people right up Faraday Street right around into Lygon Street to go to La Mama. You understood that something was happening and the audience were coming. We couldn’t describe what we were doing but whatever it was they liked it. For example in one play for an improvisation, I crawled up the little aisle and I bit one of the audience members on the ankle and went arrrgh, like that! And after the play he came up to me and he said if I get six people to come tomorrow night will you bite my ankle again?! We had this terrific relationship with the audience. I was looking at some old photographs of the original production of White With Wire Wheels and I could recognise everyone in the audience!

And then it became this huge sort of Melbourne focus with La Mama and the Albion across the road. The Albion was the pub, no question.

Graeme

Tony Bilson cooked there.

Bill

That’s right, it was amazing. And the people started to come from interstate and we didn’t go to Sydney, but we went to Adelaide. We went to do Jack’s Customs and Excise. Tim Robertson was a lecturer in Flinders in drama. He actually knows something about theatre. It was a sad story, we were scheduled to perform for the students and we were so drunk we couldn’t perform. I remember Tim wearing a suit and it reminds me he wore it inside out. The way Tim dealt with this catastrophe was that Tim invited the whole audience to his house for a party, which lasted two days! Somehow the plays got done and we didn’t talk much about the process but the political was talked about and the process was important. After we moved to the Pram Factory a whole lot of organisational things came to bear and the politics of the group became very intense, with large groups like the trade union movement and the Vietnam moratorium and the women’s movement and things like this. I wasn’t the only non-theatrical person. There were quite a lot: Jon Hawkes who was the editor of Go-Set, the rock n’ roll magazine; Peter Cummins was a plumbing teacher; Bruce Spence was an arts student. So it wasn’t just like-minded people who really wanted to get into theatre coming together to do this thing; there were different influences at work.

And the answer goes something like this. For some reason at that moment in history theatre was the perfect expression for an engagement with everything we needed to engage with at a personal level, a political level and an international level, at an artistic level and a level of self-management. And theatre was a form in which you could react very quickly to things, much faster than film. I mean film was going on and there were people out there with cameras and there was a big crossover, indeed, at that point. Before Melbourne film-makers got started you could say that theatre was the go and it had the capacity to absorb all these energies and occasionally to focus them all on some form of theatre production.

Graeme

The censorship battle was interesting. Bill kind of touched on that. Probably some of our best improvisation happened formally as a result of performance of Alex Buzo’s text,Norm and Ahmed. A number of us were arrested; Lindsay Smith was arrested for obscenity in a public place and I was arrested for aiding and abetting. We had the vice squad who were there that day to arrest us at a Melburnian restaurant where the play was first put on and it was the last line of the play that was considered obscene, ‘fucking boong’. We were arrested for that. These cops, one of them was called Sharky, used to haunt us. It became a major issue and we did street plays about that and eventually John Romeril wrote a wonderful piece called Whatever Happened to Realism? which we performed in the car park while inside Norm and Ahmed went on yet again in defiance of the County Court. This was one of the most amazing events that any of us had been part of. There was a coffin that was ‘banned’. On top of this podium with red curtains a coffin kept popping in and out and Bruce Spence was playing a character called the great Australian playwright and every now and again the great Australian playwright would pop up out of the coffin holding a script and this was the great Australian play. And at this point the relevant official would force the lid back on the coffin. There was a climax and the band set up a chant, ‘shit, fuck, cunt, fart, bugger off will ya’! The characters came out in their Ninja suits and at that point real relevant officials came through the door and the vice-squad cops who, at that point, started to arrest actors and members of the audience. It was the epitomy of improvisation text and theatre.

Bill

What happened too was that the real police arrested the fake police and were marching down Faraday Street to Carlton Police Station and the entire audience follow them chanting. They were taken into the police station and the police station was surrounded by a mob audience chanting this stuff. I was inside the police station because I was a civil liberties representative and they were saying bring in more cast, don’t put the sirens on we’ve got a situation!

Audience member

Were there any convictions out of that?

Graeme

Yes there were about 11 convicted.

Bill

Yes, and there was a trial where Jack Lazarus got Rivka Hartman off and the other charges were eventually dropped.

Graeme

My charge stood though and recently I was stopped in New York and I thought, oh God, I’m still on the books. But it was just about my passport.

Angela O’Brien

I wonder Betty [Burstall] if you could take five minutes to tell us what you were thinking when you came back from New York and why you decided to open La Mama?

Betty Burstall

Yes I could. I spent two years in New York with my family and we didn’t have much money and even going to a film seemed to cost too much. But then we discovered the off Broadway theatres which were in lofts or cafés or other venues where you didn’t have to pay anything. Where you could put a dollar in and you got a cup of coffee and it was just in a small room and I found them very interesting. And there was some terrible stuff but there was some good stuff. And I thought when I go back [to Australia] I’m going to do this.

Melbourne was a big enough town and I thought it would probably work.

So when we came back to Australia that’s what I did. First of all I talked to a few people about the idea, actors and a few writers, and there was support for it and they knew they weren’t going to make any money but it wasn’t about making money. I found a building and started to pay the rent on it and I began. And sometimes there was one person, sometimes there were two, sometimes there were three at the beginning for performances but it developed. People were writing things but what was missing were the directors. Directors were really hard to find. I chose the scripts, handed them out to people, swept the floor, made the coffee, took the money.

Angela

Betty, was this a full-time occupation?

Betty

I was teaching at the time and it wasn’t every day when it began. Initially I started it on a Sunday night because some actors worked. (audience laughter) Because I wanted a certain level or standard of acting I needed to have people who were experienced and so forth. I wanted to give chances to actors and writers and directors. And I found enough professional and non-professional actors who were interested in working there [La Mama] and it worked very well. And when the La Mama company came, they were terrific and they did the first plays. When they went away they thought it would be the end of La Mama but it wasn’t. So there was a place for it and that’s how it worked and because it didn’t depend on money and on making money it survived. And in the end after a few years I got some government backing and Liz who now runs it is very successful.

Angela

So how did you come to do Jack’s play Three Old Friends, which was the opening play?

Betty

It must have been that Jack was one of the first people I spoke to, I don’t remember now how I even knew about it.

Jack Hibberd

Well I was living in a hovel in Drummond Street. In May 1967 there was a stern rap on the door and it was Betty, and you said have you got any theatrical material?

Betty

I remember those stairs.

Jack

And I happened to have a few plays.

Jack

The first play we did was Three Old Friends but I can’t remember how it happened.

Betty

They were very successful.

Graeme

You spoke to me and then you spoke to Kerry (Dwyer) as well.

Betty

Yes I spoke to a number of people. I don’t know how I even found them.

Graeme

We possibly found you as well. I think we heard that this was possibly happening. That you’d found the off Broadway theatres and were coming back to start something of this kind. We kind of got to know somehow. Word got across Swanston Street somehow. We were already thinking of expanding a little bit. I was caught in this difficult situation right through this time because you were concentrating on new texts and finding directors. I had already been a professional actor for a few years working for the then UTRC (Union Theatre Repertory Company) with John Sumner and then the remarkable George Ogilvie. He’d come from Europe to impart all the knowledge he’d gained from about twenty years of working in Europe to the Australian theatre. And I had this mission that I carried on my back like a kind of turtle to develop as a director myself and to champion the cause of plays and playwrights in Australia.

David Kendall

I was one of the original six who began the Sunday workshops and Al Finney and Graeme use to drag me out of my bed to get me along and the driving forces were Graeme, the late Brian Davies and Al Finney. They were the three and there’s your film/theatre crossover. And you were the three that led us and I found out through you. I knew Bill and I knew Kerry but you got me there. And you can see there in the 1977Three Old Friends, I mean there’s me, there’s Bill, there’s Jack. I’m just saying it was major and as you say it wasn’t off the cuff as off the page and you would say ‘now, all do move left’ and we all would. And I wanted actors to have a real say rather than the Melbourne Theatre Company, as Jack put it, where actors were like poodles carrying on with balls in their mouths. So I thought it was going to be an actor’s revolution and I think we achieved that. Bill put it very well when he said we were athletic and aggressive but we listened to each other.

Graeme

It was interesting at the start. I obviously represented a theatre experiment coming from Ogilvie’s classes, which Alan also attended. And Davies wanted to develop an ensemble to continue his film career. But we used to discuss with Al what Al would do and Al had been a champion ballroom dancer and he said I’ll teach them all ballroom dancing. So that was Al’s wonderful contribution to the physicality of the group!

Jack

What about Brian Davies, if my memory serves me correctly, he organised a season of the theatre of the absurd. This was in 1966. It was a fabulous season

David

It was 1964. That’s when we saw The Chairs, Ionesco, Arrabal, and I reckon Jack was influenced by it.

Jack

Before you interrupted, I was about to say that it was fabulous season, mainly French and Beckett of course and the scales fell from my eyes.

Angela

I wanted to ask Betty another question. It may be a silly one but when this was all happening and you were contacting these playwrights and different people, did you have a sense that this might one day be discussed as we are discussing it today? Did you have a sense that this was important? That this might be the beginning of a real revolution?

Betty

No. I just wanted to go on seeing the sort of thing I’d seen in New York. And I’ll tell you something quite funny about this. Only about six or seven years ago an Australian was interviewing Ellen Stewart (founder of La Mama, New York) about La Mama and she’d heard about ‘my La Mama’ as I like to call it. She was apparently incensed that I hadn’t asked her to do her thing in Australia nor did I think it necessary to have a conversation with her but I knew there were another couple of La Mamas in other parts of the world based on hers. Anyway the person who went from Australia to have the interview with her told her about Melbourne’s La Mama and then talked to me about it and said Ellen was extremely angry. I rang her up and she was extremely angry!

Graeme

That’s quite disingenuous of her. I met Ellen Stewart in 1970 when I travelled overseas and spent two long sessions with her and several weeks after I arrived back to Australia she invited me to be a director in residence. I had been corresponding with her about La Mama in Melbourne for six months before.

Betty

Anyway, when I rang her, I said come on, I’ve said publicly that I’m copying you and so on and so forth. Really there’s no need to be angry and my husband said why don’t you ask her to come? So I did and she came over. She had to go somewhere or other so she turned up and I met her plane and she came and stayed with us and we took her around Melbourne and she stayed for a week.

Angela

That’s an extraordinary story. She came to two of the women’s playwright conferences too. It’s certainly true that she has a great sense of her place in off Broadway and New York. And she then moved into the international mainstream as an iconic theatre figure.

Betty

She’s got to be well into her eighties. She’s a bit older than I am.

Angela

La Mama was so important, both in New York and here. Betty, you said you didn’t realise it then, but now do you have a sense [of its importance]?

Betty

I’m absolutely thrilled that Liz carried it on and that La Mama plays were done in London and here tonight. For a long time people used to work in La Mama and then nothing else happened and surprisingly it consistently went on producing plays for a long time. When the first group, the new wave of the 1960s, went away, that was a bit painful but it was okay because there were lots of others whose work interested me and I wanted to put on.

Bill

But in line of your question Angela, I think the actors and the writers at that time had an experience and by the time we got established as the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory we had a very clear idea of historical mission. We were conscious of theatrical history in Australia. We were going to change it and we were quite clear about that. And probably did to some degree, you know. So it wasn’t like we would say oh isn’t that surprising? We would say oh, perhaps we should have done a bit more.

Betty

La Mama was a perfect place to look at actors working because the space is so small. You can’t project as you can in the theatre, as I witnessed last night.

Angela

On the image (slide of Who is shown with Jon Hawkes and Martin Phelan) behind, you can see and get a sense of how tiny La Mama is. You can see the actors working so closely.

Betty

I remember The Removalists where someone kills someone it’s not very pleasant when you’re sitting that close.

Bill

You can see in that picture [slide] that platform at the back, the demand for what we were doing was so great we built these platforms inside, and to get on to that platform up there you had to go up through a trapdoor to the ceiling. There were people sitting all the way up the staircase. And I think we crammed ninety people in there. No health and safety regulations!

Male audience member

A question for the panel and perhaps generally, and it’s about money and economics. There’s been reference to the people involved. Some were professional actors and who had already established careers and others were doing various things, mostly untrained, unlike now. And I’m interested in the economics of what was happening. My recollection is living on not very much. But how it did work and how people actually lived and what sacrifices, if any, were made.

Bill and Graeme

Only the children were discarded! [laughter]

Male audience member

It seems to me to be a contrast perhaps to now where you have a much more established process by which people go into theatre.

Graeme

I worked for Crawfords when I could get the work and did about twenty Homicidesplaying the same character. And Kerry, my eventual wife, was working as a teacher and there were other teachers in the group too. In fact we often had to rehearse before the teachers went to work. So we’d often meet at Genevieve’s for coffee and rehearse from 7.30am to 9.30am because they would teach from 10am on. Rob and Cummins were teachers and could adjust their shifts it seemed. Some became actors like Bruce Spence and got part-time work here and there, just enough to keep going. We ran a series of workshops, Kerry and I, Bill may have been involved, for the Judean Players and we knew nothing about the Jewish community. We thought we would do a workshop production about the Jewish community in Melbourne. And we got them to improvise about their lives for six months and put on a production that ran in the Jewish Hall down in St. Kilda. It was very successful and did a lot of that kind of work.

I directed a number of Jack’s plays for colleges at Melbourne University. Extraordinary things looking back with massive casts unlike what we did at La Mama. We did Clagand …

Jack

Aorta .

Graeme

Aorta, that’s right with a cast of thirty or forty and they would bring their entire cricket team. Paul Sheehan, who later became almost Captain of Australia (cricket) would come on in Clag waving his cricket bat in the ads. So we had various ways of making a living.

Bill

And there was the professional dole. If you had a University degree, there was a special office where you were treated with respect. There were also the collective houses and finally in the Pram Factory about thirteen of us were actually living in the theatre.

Graeme

We knew the sixties were over when people stopped exchanging sexual favours and started swapping vegetables. [laughter]

Sue

We also earned nothing but we never thought about money. We just did it. Somehow we made ourselves immune to that and we celebrated that.

Bill

I moved into Fitzroy in 1968, a two-storey terrace house, which was twenty-one dollars rent a week and we had two boarders who paid nine dollars a week each.

Sue

In 1967 I lived in sin with Graham Brady and no one was supposed to know and that was after I moved out of the tower and it was eleven dollars a week rent for 22 Carlton Street.

Adrian Guthrie

James, last night and this morning part of the subtext of our very interesting conversations and memories are two sets of influences: the American model and the European model of the avant-garde. Now we are happy to use the word although we’ve fought over it until the last few years. I’d be interested in people’s memories of the workshops for the La Mama group that Sue Neville ran along with Brian and Graeme and Alan. I have read that Sue who was a teacher in a teacher’s college had worked with Grotowski in Poland in the mid sixties in that period, reflected in the book Towards a Poor Theatre, which came out in 1968 in the English translation. This was something on the agenda and if I can be completely personal, that was where the student theatre festival at Camberwell High School was. That year was the ‘hold up Grotowski’ and let’s do it festival.

Jack

Well I think Grotowski was terribly important and he was certainly being read in 1968-69 round La Mama and I read it myself. It was the book for the actors and it was perfectly wedded to the space. The kind of acting that was compulsory at La Mama was lean and mean and direct and the (Grotowski) philosophy of Towards a Poor Theatre just fitted perfectly with La Mama.

Graeme

Certainly that group of ideas was important but it got very complex when people got into the kind of mysticism as far as people could ever understand it and I certainly couldn’t. Kerry was Welsh and she worked on Grotowski in the middle sixties and came back with many ideas and was always quite angry when her ideas were misinterpreted. The mysticism itself manifested in many of the workshops, which I wasn’t a part of.

Bill

When Grotowski’s company came to Sydney and they put on a performance, we all made a pilgrimage up there, but for most of us it was just too religious.

Graeme

I met Peter Cheeseman and I was more interested in what he was doing at Stoke-on-Trent. He pioneered conventional theatre in the round based on the Stephen Joseph’s work in Scarborough. He developed this theatre, which used playwrights who worked with actors who researched in their own community and brought the work back. The playwrights developed it. Sometimes it began with a text and sometimes it didn’t but there were always writers involved directly with researching actors. He went to see Grotowski in London and said to me I went to see this show and it had nothing to offer me!

Bill

Just on that point it’s important to know that we constantly sent out emissaries around the world. When these people went out to different continents they were expected to gather knowledge and bring it back.

Adrian

And to some extent the Minutes of the APG meetings reflected that.

Graeme

I didn’t see anything when I was overseas, I just wrote.

Angela

Peter Brook was very popular then, with his notions of the Open Space, Deadly Theatre and Total Theatre.

Graeme

I saw his work and he became very religious too. It was fascinating to watch these very physical actors entwining themselves around each other.

Adrian

That avant-garde model had become exactly that, quite reverential and spiritual whatever. And what was happening here taking many of the same impulses was extraordinarily earthy and direct. And entirely appropriate to our vernacular culture.

Graeme

Jack wrote a wonderful manifesto for the company talking about the give and take of rehearsals.

Alison Richards

And there was a fundamental commitment to materialism, which moved against the uptake of metaphysics really. I remember Bill Garner giving us lectures on materialism – generally in the back bar or in the car on the way to somewhere else.

Adrian

It’s interesting your evoking Peter Cheeseman and this earthy, regional, Marxist take on theatre as social action. I mean that was a stronger model in many ways for what we were reflecting on in Australia in the Melbourne material. And the other influences that you and we were aware of, the contending influences, not the ones that dominated but often the ones that were rejected, but not part of ignorance of lack of respect. They were not appropriate and were not being taken up. But the presence of that European material fascinates me. Amongst us I’m probably more concerned with the European tradition.

Bill

All these influences were at work but we were never captured by any ideology, theatrical or political. I mean yeah, we were sort of on the left. We would never have referred to a single inspirational theorist whose work we were being informed by.

Steve

I just wonder if anyone here today can comment on the smaller baby sister company, the Why Not Theatre, around that time. What was the function of Why Not and where did it fit into this history of local theatre off campus?

Bill

Why Not came out of one of those high schools and was a very young group. They worked out of a space just behind Lygon Street and involved Tess Lysiotis.

(A member of the audience mentions Dot Thompson’s role during this period.)

Graeme

I had dealings with Dot Thompson from New Theatre. They were looking for a venue and we were looking for a venue. You couldn’t go anywhere on a Saturday morning and not see other theatre groups looking at old shops, looking for a venue. And Dot rung Kerry and I one Friday night and said there’s this place down in Drummond Street so we drove straight down and saw the person next door at the Austral Auto hire.

Sue

For anyone who didn’t know the Pram Factory, there were those three windows upstairs and an office space and the rest of the building eventually got taken over by the Pram Factory. Another part of the building was a residency and in actual fact it had been empty for about six years or something when Penny Brown and I found it and started to live there in 1964 as Architecture students. And we took that over and it went on for another few years as a residence for university students. And eventually the Pram Factory was offered the lease when it came up and they took it over. And then the tower – they were then called the tower people who lived in it. This building was amazing because when Penny and I lived there we used to climb up over the roof and look down through the window into the space and it was a storage space and full of chairs.

Angela

There were some apocryphal stories about New Theatre and the Pram Factory that Dot told me. You were accused of selling their piano Graeme. One of the exciting things about the very early days of the Pram Factory was the New Theatre production of Athol Fugard’s Bloodknot which was the first production in the front theatre. Jack Charles was in that production and it was Dot Thompson working with Jack Charles in the play that really was the beginning of the emergence of Nindethana, the first Indigenous theatre company in Melbourne. Dot recognised that Jack was really quite an extraordinary performer and put together an indigenous ensemble working around Jack, which developed a revue style show, Jack Charles is Up and Fighting or It’s Tough for Us Boongs in Australia Today, which was first performed here at the university. It was the first production of Nindethana Theatre. After Bloodknot, the New Theatre people moved into the back theatre and eventually left the Pram Factory.

Graeme

We moved them (New Theatre) to the back theatre. Kerry and I looked at it that Friday night and had no idea of what to do and we went back and had a look on Saturday morning again and that afternoon. We were talking about this last night with John Timlin who is central in all this. Kerry said we’ll go and lease it but we’ve only got eighteen dollars in our account and you haven’t got a cheque book. Do we know anyone with a cheque book? Kerry was teaching with John Timlin’s wife, Anne, and she said Anne’s husband has got an agency business or something and he’ll have a chequebook. So we walked all the way from Carlton to their house in North Carlton and we entered a literary soiree, all these drunk would be poets and unpublished novelists and we had to ask John Timlin, have you got a chequebook? It was as bad as that and John said he would come and help us and we actually then set up the Community Arts Foundation to mastermind this. And that’s how the New Theatre came in and while we admired them historically we were almost slightly embarrassed by them because they were even more sort of raggedy than we were.

Kate Donelan

One more question to Betty. When you were looking at new playscripts and talking to playwrights, I was wondering what was your guiding vision for work you wanted to put on in looking at those scripts?

Betty

All I can say is that I had complete confidence in my judgement, which is ridiculous. I had no adequate background for that at all.

Kate

So it was just a feeling?

Betty

I guess I could work out a justification but I’d find it difficult to find one.

Bill

It didn’t mean you always liked the result did it Betty? Betty was the harshest critic of all work done at La Mama, not question about it. She was absolutely straight and would say she thought it was shit.

Betty

I mostly didn’t think it was shit. I’m sorry I can’t explain but I had no background in making those decisions. However I don’t think I made many mistakes.

Jack

Betty, the feeling that I got about La Mama when you were running it was that it had an open house philosophy.

Betty

Yes I didn’t want to run any particular line. Except that I didn’t like any propaganda stuff.

Jack

And didn’t you sense that the La Mama Company was becoming too possessive and taking over and excluding others?

Betty

Absolutely you are quite right.

Sue

It is interesting to know who went and who stayed at La Mama. Alan, you stayed and could talk about that.

Alan

I just loved La Mama and every weekend it was where I lived. It was my office and the best time was when we got the juke box machine. I think the excuse for that at the time was that dancing was good exercise. We just used to dance to all this music so every minute I spent at La Mama. I had no interest in going to the Pram Factory and I just loved that space so much and we’d started to do David Williamson’s stuff and Brian Davies and I saw La Mama as home. It was more that than any rejection of a political journey that was being undertaken. And we of course were wanting to take what we were doing into film and Brian wanted to do that and then Tim Burstall got involved and said he was going to make a documentary on La Mama and then changed it into theComing of Stork. He got funding for a documentary on the history of La Mama and did the Coming of Stork and wrote my part out of the filmscript. But he did give me a small role as a Jewish tailor for that performance.

Graeme

Meanwhile there was agitation that those of us who had income from our professional work as actors or directors mainly Lindsay Smith myself and Geoff Milne who was the lighting director of Melbourne Theatre Company, wanted to move, and Kerry was part of this too, ourselves into a much more formal operation, an ensemble company that pioneered new plays, especially Jack’s, Alex Buzo’s and John Romeril’s and for weeks we talked about different names and Jack suggested names from London, The Hessian Theatre, and The Marsupial Company we would met at Johnny’s Greenroom and talk about what the name would be who we’d get rid of!

David Kendall

I remember when I was living with you and Kerry and you came in one day and said ‘got the name, The Australian Performing Group’, was it you or Lindsay?

Graeme

It was decided around the table. I remember it very clearly, we were sitting around a table and Geoff Milne was part of that discussion about it being Australian because we wanted to do Australian plays, which was Jack’s manifesto, and Bill suggested it become the dominating idea of our lives. What would the group think?

Bill

There was a thing called the Group Grope. Why doesn’t anyone do this exercise anymore?

James

Okay we’ll take more question and that will have to be it.

Steve

Betty, I want to mention that extraordinary book that came out on the first twenty-one years of La Mama Theatre. You kept impeccable records of casts and playwrights and directors. Was that a conscious thing or was that a lot of pain to get all that documentation together?

Betty

No that was a conscious thing.

Steve

Because one of the sad things about Australian theatre history is the lack of documentation.

Graeme

There is much correspondence that is unpublished. I mean Jack and I corresponded for years from London to Carlton and Peter Corrigan and I corresponded for a similar number of years when he was in New York. And Romeril when he went to London as well wrote every two or three days with observations and ideas and one day someone will publish that material.

Sue

There is a Pram Factory website.

Angela

There is also the MUST website, the history of Melbourne University Student Theatre and I guess this is a real plug for anyone to send any information or copies of photos and we’ve got a lot of visual information on that website.

David

I haven’t looked at that website but Sue has gathered together personal testimonies on her website which could be useful for that site.

Angela

We do have some [testimonies] which are on the site. We’ll gather together the tapes from today and put them up on the MUST website.

Tim Stitz

Can I just plug La Mama’s fortieth anniversary birthday in late November, Monday 26 November at the Spiegel Tent and I think it’s going to be a great party and I think it’s worth celebrating forty years of La Mama.

Liz is very sorry she can’t be here today and the crux of what she wanted to say is that La Mama is still as relevant, especially to young artists today, as it was then and it’s been fascinating to hear all these stories today about its inception, and she just wanted to reiterate that. And look that’s where I got my start. I finished at uni and went straight to La Mama. And it still is that place and we get nostalgic about it but I think it’s worth celebrating how significant and important it is.

Bill

Well Alan and I aren’t going to that fortieth unless you bring that juke box back.

Sue

No the piano! [laughter]

James

There’s not going to be a natural place to stop this, so we’d like to thank our speakers.

 

Appendix

[Editorial comment: The following text by Bill Garner was read by Tom Considine as part of his presentation in Day 1, Session 4. It is appended here to add to the comments made by Bill Garner in the presentation transcribed above]

Harmonic Motion 1979
When Corrigan left the gym at half past seven he turned back to the ten exhausted and dejected-looking people sitting on the floor and threw one last jibe, ‘Welcome to the Pram Factory. It’s yours.’ This revived them enough to hurl a bucketful of jeers and cat calls at his hunched shoulders. They had just been given $100,000. For three days the selection group – comprising Robin Laurie, Carol Porter, Jon Hawkes, Bill Garner, Paul Hampton and Peter Corrigan had worked in the gym putting a long shortlist of 45 people through a demanding series of exercises, improvisations, and performances. They worked four groups for half a day each. By Sunday night they had come down to a short list of 16. They worked with this group all day Monday. At the end of that day’s work all those participating voted on who they thought should be in the group. The selection panel then added their considerations and the announcement was quickly made. Five women and five men. Phew! They are Robin Boord, Richard Healy, Peter King, Margot Knight, Laurel McGowan, Jude McHenry, Denis Moore, Danny Nash, Curtis Weiss and Jo White. No current members of the APG collective were included although some members of the ensemble have worked at The Pram. In an unprecedented display of critical self-management, the APG has purged itself and given itself a total heart, mind and body transplant. The new ensemble is marked by strength, intelligence and oddness. The combination of the talents of those involved is quite impossible to predict; there is no homogeneity, no line. All chiefs, no Indians, they will have to fight it out amongst themselves. The result should be brilliant. During the previous three months, members of the 1980 Programming Committee had interviewed more than 150 applicants. They had flown to Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Launceston. There can’t be a corner of the country now where there isn’t some small group pushing theatre, and we must have had applications from them all. We were astonished by the extent of this almost subterranean part of the Australian theatre – the small professional groups whose work goes largely unrecognised, who promote no stars but who generate more original work than all the major companies put together. All of those selected for the ensemble have had substantial group-based experience, as did the bulk of the applicants. We could have formed half a dozen ensembles; we rejected many capable people on the most esoteric of grounds (consistent, though, with the APG’s own eccentricity); and, no doubt, we have committed the most horrible injustices. But we are confident in the group we have selected and hope that those who missed out will follow their progress and visit the Pram Factory, where opportunities for work can be created by those who are determined enough, or mad enough. The 1980 ensemble comes on stream at the end of January 1980, but most of them will be at the next collective meeting. Their interim organiser is Peter King. All we ask of them is that they find the front, and push beyond it. We want a theatre of the 80s, not of the 70s, and certainly not of the 60s (glorious as it was). The Living Museum of 1968 is now closed.

Bill Garner, The Perambulator, December 1979.

 

END