It’s a bit of a worry when Tom Healey is called the curator of the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference 2006. I remember when he would have been the artistic director. Wot’s in a name? sez Doreen. Quite a lot, when the Australia Council is forced by budgetary constraints to either give their money to the ANPC or to the other main Australian playscript development organisation, Playworks; or to put developing new plays out to tender. Signs of our economic and political times.
Healey is kind enough to suggest that at least this gave the two contenders the option of joining together to bid, which means there will be a new organisation hopefully able to cover the diverse field of the ANPC and Playworks’ particular interest in women’s writing. What will it be called? “We don’t know,” says Healey, sounding far less sure than Doreen about roses being the same by any other name. “Curating”, to me, just sounds a bit too much like a museum function than “artistically directing”.
Ironically, perhaps, Tom Healey began his post-Lyneham Primary, Lyneham High and Phillip College career (and post-failing in all 4 Sydney University first year subjects while directing 11 productions for Sydney University Dramatic Society) when his step-father Ken Healey went to the American Playwrights’ Conference in 1984. Realising Tom had other things in mind than repeating failed subjects, Ken - well-known to Canberra Opera, original director of the ANU Arts Centre and Canberra Times theatre critic, and later theatre history lecturer at the National Institute of Dramatic Art - offered Tom the chance to attend a 3 month course in New York run by the American Playwrights’ Conference for college students.
With iconic teachers such as Stella Adler, New York became the 18-year-old’s theatrical heaven, until he had only enough cash left to get to his mother’s homeland, England. Janet Hough had been a well-known amateur singer whose second marriage to opera director Ken Healey was a fate her son could not escape. After seeing Madonna wed Sean Penn in New York, Tom became a dresser in West End theatre in London. Fate continued to “look after me” when he flew home and applied for NIDA and the Victorian College of the Arts, being accepted at VCA.
Was VCA second-best? In those days NIDA was the “industry-tough” training institution, but Healey had long experience of the discipline of opera. He had, as a result, a “rigid formal classical comprehension of theatre”. To his surprise and joy VCA, under the British-Canadian David Latham, where the industry was more or less ignored in favour of creative expression, was just the training he needed. This explains Healey’s pleasure at working with new Australian writers at the Playwrights’ Conference in Perth, and why the Conference needs him.
After directing and teaching theatre and opera in Melbourne for 10 years, in 1999 Healey became Artistic Associate at Playbox Theatre, where only premieres of new Australian plays were presented. Playbox closed in 2004, having been established in the Paul Keating era of belief in Australian culture in 1990, but unable to survive in today’s political climate. Healey thinks it would be “unintelligent” to simply blame our current prime minister’s cultural leadership, yet finds it hard to see the swing away from new Australian work in the programs of the main subsidised theatre companies as just a matter of a natural cultural see-saw which the government feels it has to follow, up or down as the case may be.
So Healey has just the right experience which the ANPC needs, and has put together an exciting program for the Perth conference. 11 new plays by a mix of new and experienced writers will be given the full workshop treatment, chosen from 140 submissions, while a special development and reading will be led by May Britt Akerholt for Jila’s Bush Meeting by Sam Cook, a Nyikina woman from the Kimberley region. Cutting to the short list of 20, and more especially from 15 to the 12 that funding allowed was “difficult”, says Healey, with no need to elaborate.
And speaking of Akerholt, who was artistic director at Burgmann College in 2002, will the Playwrights’ Conference return to Canberra? In the not too distant future, says Healey, while also pointing out that being in Perth means he can employ 10 West Australian actors this year who would not get this chance if the conference were always held on the east coast. But, hanging on to his mobile while stacking his dirty dishes and getting a coffee from the urn in the college canteen at University of Western Australia, he told me it feels just like Burgmann College of the old days, which he remembers fondly. The name may change, but the buzz remains the same.
Australian National Playwrights’ Conference
University of Western Australia July 2 - 15
Booking Enquiries: Phone (02) 9555 9377
Details: www.anpc.org.au/conference.html
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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