"The play is set at the crossroads in the middle of nowhere. There will be a fifteen minute interval."
At the Crossroads, reviewed in The Canberra Times at its first presentation in February 1998, was described as "polished theatre from a longstanding, very experienced team, designed to be toured to city and country venues around Australia". Based on stories gathered from people in the bush, the play tempered an examination of racist attitudes - through the experience of a middle-class country woman whose mother is Aboriginal - with clever use of humour, movement and song. How has the tour gone, I wondered, as I sat down at the café in Gorman House to talk with the Women on a Shoestring: Camilla Blunden, Julie Ross and Chrissie Shaw.
"One man, you could call him a red-neck farmer," said Chrissie, "came up after the show and told us we were 'right on the edge', but he also said he enjoyed it." "It's treading a fine line," explained Julie, "between entertainment and being hard-hitting." "It depends on the writer - Jan Cornall, in this case - being able to get to the difficult thing with humour," said Camilla.
In between travelling, Shaw is well known for her accordion playing and came to Canberra (after teaching English to new migrants and working at New Theatre and with Pipi Storm in Sydney) as a Bombshell in the International Year of Peace, performing at TAU Theatre in 1986. Ross is a mother of two who did a project on Australia in Year 7 at school in Canada, came as an exchange student to Queensland, studied theatre at Studio 58 in Vancouver and settled in Canberra in 1991. Blunden is a Canberra institution by now, an actor and director who won a special ACT MEAA Green Room Award in 1997 for her contribution to theatre.
These women might be on shoestrings, but something remarkable is going on. After touring, just in 1999, throughout South-Western NSW, the Southern Tablelands, Cobar, Dubbo, Grenfell, Richmond, Katoomba and Uralla, as well as Tasmania and Victoria - ending in Melbourne on October 24 - the team, which includes Maria De Marco from Sydney and the outstanding Aboriginal actor Justine Saunders, have a strengthened 'family' feel as they discuss the development of Women on a Shoestring since its beginnings in the Womens Theatre Workshop in 1979, performing in the now demolished Reid House and Childers Street venues.
That's 20 years of professional theatre, in Canberra - and yet unsung perhaps because so much of their work has been designed to tour, with usually a short opening season at home and a return season after some months away. There are surely more people - from Adelaide to Alice Springs, Darwin to Devonport, Warrnambool to Wudinna - who remember Over the Hill, Empty Suitcases and now At the Crossroads than in Canberra. In fact these shows have been seen by an audience something close to 100,000 in the touring years since 1990. Yet we have come to believe that a professional theatre company never seems to last more than a year or two in this city.
Maybe funding is part of the answer to how Women on a Shoestring has survived: tours are supported by Playing Australia and the Australia Council and artsACT supports the work at home. Yet it is not just money that keeps this theatre going. I think it's a matter of principle.
The company plans productions by selecting themes derived from research into stories told by the very women who will form half the audience in the country towns. Rather than looking for quantity, the keys to the success of Women on a Shoestring are focus and relevance. Once a show is up and running, it may stay in the repertoire for several years - more than 6 years for Over the Hill. The government funding is used to guarantee that all the women in the company receive proper payment for their work.
In fact the need for women to take a fully professional role in theatre was a strong motivation back in the 1970's: the only compromise has been during the development phase of At The Crossroads when the company agreed to take a cut because of insufficient funding, except that the special grant from the Australia Council's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fund enabled full support for Justine Saunders' position. This play was clearly so important to country women, and men, of all backgrounds that one principle was broken for the sake of the integrity of the work. This has proved, of course, to have been the right decision, in the end financially as well as artistically.
The company operates in an interesting fashion, growing out of the cooperative group theatre structures of its early days. Blunden has provided the core of the company throughout, seeking out actors and writers who are happy to work in what I describe as "structured cooperation". As Director, Blunden's role is clearly defined: she sets up the workshops to explore the research material. The writers (Merrilee Moss previously and currently Cornall) observe and sometimes initiate workshops as they turn action into script. The actors, like the writers and director, all undertake extensive research, seeking out women's stories around the central theme, including their own experiences, creating in the workshops the characters and the scenes which are re-worked and scripted. In this way the actors, even some who have been auditioned for roles in what superficially seems a conventional way, work within bounds yet with a sense of freedom and commitment to the work.
Working this way has created a company which is continuously flexible, seeking out new people, new themes and new forms of theatrical expression, and within which people feel part of a strong network, which extends out to all the women who have provided their stories and who live in all parts of Australia.
At the Crossroads is booked for extensive touring again next year and Australia Council and artsACT funding has arrived for development of a new project on women in film.
This doesn't sound like the middle of nowhere to me, or an interval of fifteen minutes.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
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