Julian Meyrick
Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Judging by the size of the audience, this would be the conference about the New Wave [laughter]. My name is Julian Meyrick and I’m chairing this session. I’ve been allowed to speak for about ten minutes. I was asked to introduce the topic, but I imagine to some extent that it has already been done yesterday. I’ve got a few thoughts that might frame some of the contributions to today, then I’ll introduce the speakers all at the same time. They’ll deliver their papers, roughly twenty minutes each and we’ll have a formal response and then there’ll be time for discussion and questions at the end. That’s the intention.
It’s not simple, stupid. The papers offered in the session today are I think, not just in this session, but probably judging by the abstracts for most of today are ones of extension and complication on the main theme of the conference. And rightly so. Any in-depth examination of so-called New Wave Theatre will show it to be a more layered phenomena than its catchy title suggests. Metaphors, when applied to history, can be true, even undulating ones culled from evolutionary theory, but they exclude as they define tidy ways to tidy up. If the term ‘New Wave’ needs careful handling how much more cautious must we be when considering the characteristics now liturgically imputed to it.
[Julian’s introduction to the session is cut here, because his fuller paper is published elsewhere in this issue]
On to our speakers. We have two presenters and a formal response. I’ll introduce everybody now so we can flow on from paper to paper. Then there’s time for questions and discussion at the end. The first paper is from Ian Maxwell, currently the chair of the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Ian has written extensively about youth subculture, and, in particular, hip hop as it was practised in Sydney in the 1990s. His edited collection of the writings of Rex Cramphorn will be published next year. And his paper deals with Cramphorn’s reviews for The Bulletin and some of his practice based writing. After that Adrian Guthrie will look at some of the theatre-making activities centred around the University of New South Wales in the key late 1960s and early 1970s, including the work of the Jane Street Theatre. Adrian is a playwright and stage director who founded the Claremont Theatre in 1972, and he is currently the director of the media arts program at the University of South Australia. And finally our formal responder is John McCallum, theatre critic for The Australian and senior lecturer in theatre and performance studies at UNSW. His research studies include, I noted from his web page, humour studies and as such is not to be confused, as I temporarily did, with John McCallum who wrote a book called British Car Assemblers pre-retirement Attitudes to Retirement, 1963 to 1979 [laughter].
John McCallum
No, that was one of mine! [laughter]
Julian
Fascinating, no doubt, as that volume is.
[Here papers were delivered by Ian Maxwell followed by Adrian Guthrie. John McCallum was asked to respond]
John McCallum
At the time there was so much enthusiasm in Sydney. Yesterday when we were talking about the same period in Melbourne, I wasn’t a participant, I was just an audience member, so I can’t talk with all those wonderful entertaining stories they were talking about yesterday. But as an audience member, I think I can. Also I wanted to pick up on Tom’s [Considine] paper yesterday too, and Adrian mentioning PACT, and Yellow House in Sydney, I remember … well, in a blur [laughter]. When you look at the received history of this period in Sydney, it is the Jane Street plays and Nimrod and so on, but there were these other venues, such as Yellow House, and PACT, and PACT was a venue as much as anything else; I think it stood for Performers [Editor: actually ‘Producers’], Actors, Composers and Talent. So there were people involved in doing things there, but you just turned up. I turned up some time in the late 60s and Doug Ashdowne, who had a few hits later on, was sitting there and he sang the whole ofBlonde on Blonde, the Bob Dylan album. It was one of the things you could get away with in those days. So the venues were really exciting and really important, in the way I gather they were here.
I do want to say a few things about some of the productions that have been mentioned here. That Tempest [the Performance Syndicate’s production in 1972 in the Chapter House at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, referred to by Adrian Guthrie – see his paper in this issue] – to see those pictures had a big effect on me. That Tempest was legendary, it really was, more than Ten Thousand Miles Away [at Jane St Theatre in 1970, directed by Rex Cramphorn; see Guthrie’s paper in this issue]. That Tempest was such a new way of doing things, for us anyway, because we were acting students at the time. And the company was so focused and it was in a tiny venue, the Jane Street Theatre was a very tiny venue, a bit larger than La Mama here in Melbourne. There was no ceremony. Aerial was played by a long coloured streamer on the end of a wand, and whispered by the entire cast sitting around. I mean these are familiar devices now but they were then very revolutionary. Ten Thousand Miles Away I had one memory of. I was interested to hear about the running, because that seems to me to be almost all that they did. Because it was about the thousand miles to run between London and Sydney, that’s where the title comes from, as far as I can remember almost the entire show was running round and around and round in circles. It had that sort of effect that theatre can have on you, completely hypnotic but really really boring for about ten minutes. And then you sort of get hypnotised by it and you actually come out the other side. It really does work, that Grotowskian minimalism, I think, sometimes. But I really didn’t understand it at the time.
I want to say a few things about the Jane Street seasons too, partly because David Kendall has made slight references to it, being scornful about Greek legends being transposed into the outback. I suppose it is pretty corny and cheesy now to think of that, but just think of it in the mid 1960s when you’ve got a classical repertoire theatre, this was an act of very very aggressive appropriation of these stories. To bring them into the Australian outback and to tell a story set on a sheep station in western New South Wales, and also the tone was irreverent and mocking, in a way that we would associate with a lot of the APG appropriation. So this really was quite bold stuff in those days. And the fact that one of them went into a main stage season was really an important thing.
The play reading that we saw last night, Norm and Ahmed, that was an extraordinary event, that was on in the Jane Street theatre – but it wasn’t actually the Jane Street season then –
Audience member
No, it was the Old Tot, first Australian season –
John
– back in 1968, the Australian theatre season, the mainstage being the Old Tote, which was a tiny little theatre too. And that was on as a double bill with Douglas Stewart’s Fire on the Snow, which was meant to be the main one, and there was this other token little thing by this new guy. And I mean Fire on the Snow was boring.
Audience member
Wasn’t it tedious?
John
Absolutely. A beautiful piece to read and I’m sure it’s done well as a beautiful radio piece but on the stage it was static. And Norm and Ahmed was one of those key moments; just watching this story. And one of the things that wasn’t said yesterday in introducing it, is that it was set in a construction site, it was a very specific construction site. It was at the top of Martin Place, they were building the new ANZ bank then, and the bus stopped there, all the buses that went to the north shore, so it was a very very particular construction site in Sydney which most Sydneysiders knew very well. So when Norm says to Ahmed we’ll go up to the Leagues Club, the New South Wales Leagues Club was two blocks away up the road. So he’s pointing to another venue that we all know, so it had that real immediacy, and we had that experience at Max’s reading-production last night, that extraordinary conflict between these two people which is so resonant still.
Max Gillies
John, was that location a designer’s thing? Because there’s nothing in the text that says that.
John
Yes it was the designer, but as an experience in the theatre it was just remarkable. It made it worth having to sit through all that Doug Stewart stuff [laughter].
Tom Considine
John, is it accurate that in the Tote production they said ‘bloody boong’ at the end of the show [not ‘fucking boong’]?
John
I have read that since, I don’t remember that. But I think if they had said ‘fucking boong’, then, at the tender age of sixteen I would have remembered that. So I think they probably did say ‘bloody’. But it was a completely shocking ending, I mean even apart for the language, and the fact is the scene worked with or without ‘fucking boong’.
Allison Richards
Yes that was Dinny O’Hearn’s constant cry.
John
It was a completely shocking ending. We talked about that last night after the reading, by the time you get to that final moment, you’ve invested so much emotionally in these two, and it’s such a betrayal in a way of the audience’s emotional investment in the story.
Aubrey Mellor
Even though, interestingly enough, it was played by an Anglo actor, Teddy Hodgman.
John
And by Ron Graham as well.
Allison Richards
Did he put on an accent?
Tom Considine
He blacked up.
Allison
Really?
Tom
Well, he sort of blacked up.
John
Yes he did.
Allison
In Brisbane they had someone who also blacked up, the Greek actor, Lex Marinos wasn’t it? The closest you could get to a Pakistani.
Christine Comans
Not the celebrated production, no. I’ll remember soon, but no it wasn’t – the 1960s version.
John
I want to say one more thing, I mean a lot of it has been written about, of course, by Julian, but the other magic place, I’m just trying to remember yesterday from Melbourne, the other magic place, of course, was what is now the Stables Theatre. To hire the venue, and you used to hang around in Kings Cross at that time but not now. It used to be genuinely bohemian, not just sleazy. And to turn up and see The Removalists in that venue, and to feel the space, and the famous pillar which is gone now. Some said that the Sydney New Wave writing was based around that bloody great pillar in the middle of the stage. You had all these transport themes, masts of ships and so on. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. And then Williamson arrived and in a way you could think of Williamson in the 70s and The Removalists in 1972 as the end of the New Wave in the context of this conference, but any rate, it was part of the focus of that phase to turn a good play into a good marketing play. And suddenly all this energy and enthusiasm and youthful exuberance became mainstream. And that’s great, I don’t have a problem with that. But in a way it represents the end of this period in theatre.
But in 1972 The Removalists and Don’s Party arrived in the same year in Sydney and it was a real political issue, I’ve said this before, it was a real political issue about which one you liked. The Removalists was the political one and Don’s Party was the middle class one, it was a bit like the Stones and the Beatles. You were identifying yourself by whether you liked The Removalists or Don’s Party. And then things moved on of course. That’s all [applause].
Julian Meyrick
Well thank you to Ian, Adrian and John and we now have some time for questions and discussion.
Angela O’Brien
Look thank you so much, and that was so interesting for me because I don’t know a lot about those early days in Sydney because I was in Melbourne, and I come from Brisbane and so later today, I’m hoping there will be a chance for those of us who grew up in Brisbane to have some memories of those things, because there was an avant-garde there as well. But the point I wanted to make was that we were in correspondence with David Williamson for this conference, and one of the things that was amazing in our correspondence with David was that he really felt that he had been betrayed by Melbourne. He still feels that. We were all amazed by the extent of this sense of betrayal and therefore the sense that there were two different movements and two different scenes, which were not compatible somehow.
John
Barry Oakley talks in a similar way, or did, about the APG.
Angela
He [David] felt betrayed, and then of course he went to Sydney.
Adrian Guthrie
One of the bits of editing of my paper that I did, a point of clarification which is worth raising now, is that in a sense the debate that’s going on between Kippax and Katherine Brisbane, essentially Sydney-based critics, Katherine travelled a little bit although looking back, she didn’t travel as much as I had the impression she had, she was very much Sydney-based and Sydney-based writing. But they meet in that point of agreement, and it’s as though the time were right, that Melbourne, the robust Melbourne poetry of the theatre meets this other thing that’s happening in Sydney, which I think has got a lot to do with the Phillip Street revues, a populist theatre. It is a way of being funny and clever and it’s also having a good sense of what a show is. I mean I don’t know, the shows that I saw at the Tote were a catalogue of disasters really. But it was nonetheless in broader theatre culture in Sydney a very strong sense of performance theatre as a form of presentation.
Angela
If I could say one more thing as a Brisbane girl, I can remember when it was a requirement to publish plays – what was it, Yackandandah Press?
Audience Member
Yackandandah Playscripts.
Angela
And I remember our thinking, I mean we knew about that in Brisbane, we knew about those places before we knew about the Melbourne stuff because they were published a little later.
Adrian
There was the Heinemann Educational Drama series, or something like that, a series of books and anthologies for use in the classroom.
John
The Penguin volume was the one that brought the actual plays…
Angela
Exactly. And of course we all knew because O’Malley had toured and O’Malley was the big play of the late sixties that really hit Brisbane. And that’s why there were separate things there for us than Jane St.
Julian
Yes I think the delivery mechanism, as it were, of those ideas was quite complex. Because you had a mixture of touring, publication and word of mouth.
John
It’s a long discussion, and I don’t want to get into that Sydney/Melbourne thing, but Sydney grew out of institutions. Jane Street was actually set up by an institution that was then … they used to boast, the largest drama complex in the southern hemisphere, because there was the old academic school of drama and they set up Jane Street as this sort of ghetto for Australian plays. And it’s often been said that this was a problem for Sydney people. It was in many ways. But the continuity and the flow with the workers, people like that, all those people, into the industry in different ways was supported by the fact of the institution. And there was a mythology that it was good to be unemployed, whereas in Melbourne, from what I can gather, it came from universities, you had a student body rather than an institution.
Adrian
The considerable distance between each of the capitals was a problem for touring, and this remains a problem in terms of spreading your career around. But this is the generation where it is not an insurmountable problem. And I think there’s another narrative that we could be weaving of literally dozens of names in the last two days, key players, having parts of their careers in one community and then other elements in another community: Brisbane to Sydney to Melbourne, Adelaide to Melbourne and especially Adelaide to Sydney, were very commonplace in that generation. And operating differently, thanks to planes and cars, the mechanics of it, and so on … So Williamson’s peak at various things, including the old kind of colonial rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney, is kind of doubly strange. Because it seems to be a part of his personality. But he did in 1972 take it terribly hard, took several blows terribly personally, as I recall.
John
One of the things that is interesting in this symposium is that nobody has mentioned, both in Sydney and Melbourne, the revival of Don’s Party [at the MTC, in January 2007].
Angela
Well in our talk about WWWW, I actually thought that Susie Dee’s revival was far more a living revival than that of Don’s Party. I’m talking about the Melbourne one. I thought it was a little, a little …
Max Gillies
Can I use that as a jumping off point to pick up on a couple of things that have occurred to me in the course of this discussion? On Williamson and Don’s Party, I found his production which I saw in Melbourne, and I understand that it’s gone through a life as theatre pieces do, which is another one of the problems in talking about the same production, when we talk about different nights, and then tours and so on, but I found it exhilarating in the way I did this production of WWWW. I’ve been saying for two days about how fresh I still find a whole bunch of these plays, including Don’s Party, andWWWW. Julian was talking about, in a sense, a cannon in going back and how we look at that. But my point, when I launched this thing the other night, is that I think there is something about that whole bunch of early pieces that for me is like watching those early painters, Boyd, Tucker, Percival, all those who clustered around a particular place and created one of those creative explosions where people discovered new ways of seeing, and it was for people who saw them [the paintings] the shock of the new. At the same time it was embracing the original but it was also the instant recognition. You knew what they were about, and that’s a quality that these early plays, to me, have. It’s the shock of realising that there’s something here that we didn’t know how to do before and suddenly a whole lot of people found a way of doing it. And the significance of it, apart from the freshness of it, which is still there, is that after that there were no problems about writing plays. I mean, how many plays and theatre companies have been devoted to, you can argue not enough of them and without sufficient funding, but doing new Australian plays, nowhere quite the way in which in Melbourne, the Malthouse [formally Playbox] was, or Griffin now, are devoted to Australian plays.
John
And La Boite [in Brisbane].
Max
Yes. And now if those things now exist, we can argue about more funding; but I’ve recently been involved in judging the playwriting for the Premier’s Literary Awards and you read what was submitted, I had to read probably fifty Australian plays. And a handful of them were terrific pieces of writing with great theatrical potential. You could feel like, just give me that one, you know. So that stuff happened then, and it was the beginning of this period, in the same way I think with Australia artists.
But the one thing that seems to be common with all theatre groups and companies over time is the preciousness of their objective, as opposed to the people down the road, or the others. I mean it goes back well before this period, and it exists at the moment. I was talking with Aubrey the other day about how our theatre was the only one in this town doing what really needs to be done and it’s always in contra distinction to another one, in opposition to another one, a parallel. So I think that is a condition of doing theatre with small groups of people, taking their work very seriously, and having to justify theirs as being the authentic one in some way or another. And what was particular about this period we are talking about probably was an explosion of manifestos. I don’t know how many we had from Romeril [laughter] –
Tom Considine
They were all terrific!
Max
Oh yes. From the collectivist manifesto through to the guru, the tendency towards the mystical.
John
Speaking about manifestos, the other thing I wanted to pick up on actually, and I’m so glad you [Angela O’Brien] mentioned On Stage Vietnam, which I didn’t know, I didn’t get to see it … Mona Brand wrote a whole variety of different kinds of plays. Everyone talks about how eclectic the New Wave was, well she was a one-woman eclectic force herself.
Julian
Just on Don’s Party, I remember when we [MTC, in January 2007] staged that production, looking at it and very clearly having the thought that every actor in it by definition would not have seen the original. And I remember thinking about that from a marketing point of view, thinking, oh god, we haven’t got our usual balance here, kind of clean skins plus an old head, somebody that subscribers knew. It’s interesting and it raised the issue in a kind of drier way of what is the relationship between the material and that cohort of performers who were by definition doing a play that was a different one to doing plays for the first time. And it seems to me, looking at this more generally, that the issue of revivals and audience’s and artists’ relationship to revivals has been a key one throughout the year, in many different programs. And in another context, the idea and success of Don’s Party having thrown some kind of switch is intriguing because when I was looking through the Margaret Williams’ articles [see Meyrick’s article in this issue], the last one of which, the December 1972 one, I think was partly written in response to just the kind of anxiety that John was talking about, the sense that New Wave had suddenly gone bang in commercial terms.
John
It’s called an afterword.
Julian
It is, it’s an afterword, and she’s quite anxious, she never imagined that she was going to write that article, but she did and she wrote it to really deal with the critical fall-out, deal with the critical terms, but I think somewhere in this article she makes a remark about Don’s Party and the Three Sisters. And she says that literarily there is streets, miles between them. And I looked at that remark and I realised that you know you have a theatre on your hands when you know that isn’t true.
Max
Absolutely, and that was the thing you talked about, Margaret’s cool analytical frame and those earlier articles were really some kind of response to those manifestos, the wildness of the manifestos, and saying come on let’s look objectively at what’s being achieved here and … And it’s very interesting about the Williamson writing, because it is Chekhovian and so many years later he claims that that is his model, and claims that he’s continuing to write it. And I think he hasn’t been able to do it like Chekhov unfortunately did: three great examples of Chekhovian plays [laughter] and then he carked it, which is a pity [laughter], but you can see the growth in Williamson in some ways. I see it as a bit like the great ones happen early.
Julian
Yes well, Chekhov writes all the crap ones first, didn’t he.
Max
Yes that’s right. And I’m not saying, truly, I am not saying that everything David wrote after that was all downhill, there are some very good plays. But I just want to finish on this: you talked about David and that dissent and the class thing. I remember distinctly having a conversation with David in the Pram Factory on the last occasion I knew he’d been in the building and directed a production of Dimboola there, and he was now famous and commercially successful and he’d been commissioned by MTC to write a play and two others, travelling the country with Harry Miller and you know, it was a stratospheric thing. But at that stage he wasn’t wanting to lose contact with his roots or with the rest of us, but we knew he probably would. I remember talking to him about a project that he had in mind, and I said what’s the next thing you’ve got in mind and that I know you’ve been commissioned by these people but is it something that could work here, and he said yes, well, and I wish I could remember the detail, but basically it was like The Removalists in that it was a story that he had heard, someone had told him, that he found shocking and nightmarish, and he thought would make a brilliant and similar play, and it was about a buck’s night in a men’s urinal. And so the debate that was happening in Sydney over Don’s Party and The Removalist, he then never revisited the squalid world of the police station and the public toilet, and terrific stuff then came out of that and an extraordinary career, and an extraordinary voice in our theatre for particular parts of the theatre-going public. I often think about what happened.
John
I saw a play at La Mama last night called Hotel Obsino. Talking about getting into the nitty-gritty, there was an incredible world of alienated, outsider people, and it was an extraordinary and very impressive piece. It was so 1960s.
Allison Richards
That’s Adam Broinowski, he’s perhaps an intellectual treasure.
Angela
I just want to say one thing about Don’s Party. The amazing thing about Don’s Party is that Williamson actually crosses social groups in Don’s Party. I think that’s one of the great things about it. He’s got very different representations of people.
Audience member
Like Chekhov.
Angela
Yes, and that’s why I think it was one of his finest plays.
Allison
And actually in that context, it’s interesting that Charitable Intent, the play he then wrote for La Mama – was it ten years ago now, another something anniversary of La Mama?
John
It was one of the Jack Manning Trilogy plays.
Julian
Yes it was about ten years ago.
Allison
And that was very interesting, because David was deliberately trying to come back and do a Melbourne play, not where he was, but actually going back to write a play for La Mama which had a lot more class variation and a lot more overtly ethical and political concerns.
John
I think that whole trilogy is most interesting, very very interesting.
Julian
You’re right, he does have a whole range of classes talking to each other, in a face to face confrontation.
Adrian
Can I just pick on an observation of Max [Gillies] and his introduction to the whole symposium and repeated here, that is his recognition that this is to do with modernity. And that the art historians have done a better job and perhaps have had a clear go at describing what suppressed modernity in Australia. And it’s something I’ve tried to argue, and I think it’s worth bringing up here, that is why maybe it was a wave – it wasn’t a tsunami, it was just a wave – it has something to do with a resistance that we can observe. And I just pointed out that it is colonial in it’s construction, but there were real forces of great conservatism up to a particular point where I think they break down where youth culture, internationalism and the mediation of daily life just make it impossible for the gatekeepers to any longer suppress modernity. And if Betty Burstall comes back and says ‘I am going to open a coffee house theatre’ then no-one is going to be able to stop her. And were anybody to say ‘this is a most inappropriate and unnecessary thing to do’, we would laugh at them as a generation. So somehow the thing that Pioneer Players and generations of deeply talented, completely capable groups, have encountered, that they’d been stymied, those things were not longer nationally tolerated.
Allison
Well the Cold War, I mean there are a series, if you like, of barricades, fire-curtains that come down on that progression. And I think it’s really important to acknowledge both World War Two, the anti-communist hysteria of the fifties, the [Labour Party] split, the Menzies era and technology.
Adrian
Menzies – extraordinary! Academy of Arts, do you remember about that? They wanted to actually nationalise art making, in a kind of anti-communist rhetoric that was the most Stalinist.
Ian Maxwell
I just want to say something that is a reflection of this whole event, that was actually instigated by what you said before, Julian, about the current production of Don’s Party[at MTC in 2007]. It’s a little bit about an anxiety I have about history and particularly the way that what we are talking about here doesn’t exist in key institutions. I’m looking at Aubrey [at that time, Head of NIDA], in a sense, but it’s also about my own training at the VCA. I trained at the VCA between 1987 and 1989, as a director, with Rhys Muldoon, and Alison White who is now in this production [of Don’s Party]. We weren’t asked to countenance any of this. There was actually an ideological resistance to training us in this group. And to jump forward, I’m looking at the younger people here, with the collapse of Drama Departments around the country as well, and I’m thinking, where does this get taught? It gets taught at HSC level but in a sporadic cannon. And it loses the complexity of this eco-system, and it looses the excitement.
John
I disagree about this with the HSC in New South Wales. I think the drama teachers in NSW are a pretty impressive bunch.
Angela
And I’d say the same in Victoria.
John
I work with them a lot, and they are carrying the flag in a way that a lot of universities aren’t.
Ian
Yes I agree with that. But it’s interesting, Julian, you mentioned these actors in the MTCDon’s Party who have never seen the original production, and I reckon it works for not having seen it.
John
I agree with Max actually, about WWWW [the UHT production], I mean both productions live in extraordinarily exciting ways for me. Both of them old plays, and in both cases I found them nastier than I’d remembered them [audience agreement]. It’s obviously me that has changed, and got a lot softer, I guess. We sort of relished all that horribleness back then in a way I don’t think we do anymore. They’re still very funny.
Allison
Who’s we, boy? [laughter]
Angela
I found them nasty.
Ian
But to get back to the point I was making, I was worried about the radical philistinism of my training. It was enough to make you not want to be in Melbourne theatre, this was in 1989. I just walked away.
John
That’s why you went for hip hop [a research interest of Ian’s].
Ian
Well it actually is. Because when I sized up what was on offer, there wasn’t any theatre for me at that time, and academic work was an alternative, but it hadn’t been demonstrated to me that there was actually an interest in doing it.
Max
There were some quite reactionary policies, surprisingly, given that some of the people in charge of it – I don’t know whether you [John McCallum] were there but – some of them were part of this, but they’d gone beyond that.
Ian
Yes, well Jim Sharman [the Sydney theatre director] wrote this several years ago, that the absence of history can be liberating, but also condemns every generation to reinvent the wheel. All you get is more stories and anecdotes.
John
It’s the purpose of an analysis of an era, to generate …
Julian
Can we thank Ian and Adrian and John. I think that ends this discussion about Sydney Theatre and the New Wave [applause].
Paul Monaghan
And can we also thank Julian for coming along this morning. [applause].
END