1999: Women on a Shoestring: Camilla Blunden, Julie Ross and Chrissie Shaw. Feature article.

    "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

2024: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

 

 

 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.  Free Rain Theatre at ACT Hub June 19-29 2024.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 26

Directed by Anne Somes
Associate Director: Dr Cate Clelland
Set Design: Dr Cate Clelland and Ron Abrahams
Costume Design: Fiona Leach; Lighting Design: Craig Muller
Sound Design: Neville Pye; Sound & Lighting Operator: Maggie Hawkins
Stage Manager: Maggie Hawkins
Vocal and Dialect Coach: Sarah Chalmers; Intimacy Co-ordinator: Karen Vickery
Marketing Director: Olivia Wenholz
Photography: Promotional – Janelle McMenamin; Production – Jane Duong

Cast:                                                            Ensemble:
Amy Kowalczuk as Blanche DuBois         James Morgan
Alex Hoskison as Stanley Kowalski          Mercy Lelei
Meaghan Stewart as Stella Kowalski         David Bennett    
Lachlan Ruffy as Harold Mitchell             Olivia Wenholz
Sarah Hull as Eunice Hubbel                     Rina Onorato
Tim Stiles as Steve Hubbel
Lachlan Elderton as Pablo Gonzales

“I don’t want reality” says Blanche DuBois in – perhaps – one of her more lucid moments.  What makes Free Rain’s production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire brilliant is how real Amy Kowalczuk makes that terribly disturbed character understandable; and how our empathy is engaged by Meaghan Stewart’s realisation of the impossibility of her sister’s situation.
 
Williams, of course, was the brilliant writer.  Perhaps a bit like Blanche he had his fantasies, calling himself “Tennessee” rather than Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), but then becoming considered, along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, one of the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

Putting this all together I need a better word for the work of all the actors, designers, coaches, managers and directors in this Streetcar – Exquisite.  As in the best-cut jewellery, the natural brilliance is brought out in all the detailed facets.  In this play about the contrasting lives of the two sisters, Blanche and Stella DuBois, the horror of emotional collapse which Amy captures is matched by the struggle Meaghan reveals that we all must face in coming to terms with reality.

And only then do we see it is the same for the men, represented by the man full of self-entitlement, Stanley, whom Stella has married; and Mitchell, hoping for and seeking comfort in Blanche while having to compete with the Stanleys of the male world.

And then it is amazing to reflect on the surrounding figures: the next door neighbours; the poker players; the passers-by in the street, all played with just the right simple clarity by the ensemble members.

I had arrived on a freezing-cold night in a somewhat distant mood at the old wooden Hub.  I left positively excited at how such top quality drama could take me out of the immediate into such a warmer understanding of humanity.  

After that, there are more reasons to see the play and, I think, this production.  Though Free Rain is an amateur company, I would hope that a way can be found to extend the run of their A Streetcar Named Desire, or take it to other venues.  It would certainly suit my favourite intimate theatre, Ensemble, in Sydney.  It’s set would not need much adjustment there, and would also work on stages like the Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse.

The quality of the acting, voice work and movement is all at professional standard.  The fact that this is true of Canberra’s small theatre productions at ACT Hub, The Mill and Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre has been under discussion for a long time, suggesting that we should be touring companies out as well as touring companies in.  In recent times Jordan Best's Playhouse Creatures was taken to the 16th Mondial du Théâtre in Monaco, and toured in Victoria, NSW and Queensland, but it’s a long time now since Women on a Shoestring, when I was writing in 1999:

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.
[ https://frankmckone2.blogspot.com/search?q=Women+on+a+Shoestring ]

I’m almost an historical monument myself now, but I think the issues of male and female relationships, with some touching on male-male and female-female lived experiences, which are central to the 1947 play by Tennessee Williams, are as important to deal with today is they were then – especially when it comes to women’s emotional and intellectual stability under the new pressures of what is called ‘social’ media and our new understanding of ‘cohesive control’.

As a homosexual man himself (before the word  ‘gay’), and having a sister who may have been a model for Blanche, Williams’ plays are surely exemplary for wider presentation today.  There’s an interesting study at https://theses.cz/id/7ogk1x/Sedlackova_bakalarska_prace.pdf .

And finally, in our local community, this production has a fascinating twist.  How could it be possible that Amy Kowalczuk, whom I mentioned in reviewing her first directing work [ The Boys - http://ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-boys_16.html ], - saying  that many will know her as Amy Dunham.  I must raise the possibility-of-bias flag, since I taught her parents, Kathleen Montgomery and Trevor Dunham, in the first drama class at Hawker College in 1976/77, when they directed, with Sue Richards, the first student written and directed show – a rock/folk musical Anna.  It’s great to see theatrical tradition continuing through the generations. – now has married into the Polish family Kowalczuk!

Not quite Tennessee Williams’ ‘Kowalski’?
Kowalczuk Name Meaning: Polish: patronymic from Kowal ‘blacksmith’. 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=Kowalczuk

So there is a special resonance when, in Streetcar, Stanley (what an English-sounding name) yells at Blanche in frustration that “Polish people are called Poles.  I am NOT a Polack.”  Which in Australia in 1947 would have been to call him a Wog.  Wogs in Australia have turned the insult on its head in recent times, as a joke.  Yet I remember, when performing, in 1965, Lick Jimmy, the next-door Chinese greengrocer in Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South, written in 1948, how the way my character was presented – though essentially sympathetically – as a bit of a joke because I couldn’t speak English.  My entrances, exits and returns were only because I had to use the Darcy’s toilet – with appropriate miming choreography.

In Free Rain’s production Alex Hoskison does a terrific job of making the deprecating insult a genuinely serious issue for Stanley Kowalski, as it should be today.  Yet it seems from the political use of anti-immigration sentiment that assumptions about social class and ethnic distinctions are not yet resolved.

In fact, the Poles in Williams’ American city seem to be as poor as the Irish in Ruth Park’s Surry Hills in Sydney in 1948.  Blanche can’t believe that her sister – born into the French slave-owning upper class of the Mississippi – could have married a Polack, even though she admits that their plantation property is ‘lost’.  It is Stanley who intelligently queries what has happened to the money, but Blanche can’t explain.  

So rather than see the play as a social-sexual psychological drama, you may see Blanche’s breakdown as the effect of social change bringing her down from seeing herself as part of French colonial aristocracy – an inevitable social change in an America which has just won World War II.

Stanley, then represents the new sense of self-entitlement that some would say is at the centre of the USA today.

What a play!  What a performance!  What a production success!

L to R: Meaghan Stewart as Stella Kowalski; Alex Hoskison as Stanley Kowalski
Lachlan Ruffy as Harold 'Mitch' Mitchell; Amy Kowalczuk as Blanche DuBois

Amy Kowalczuk as Blanche DuBois; Meaghan Stewart as Stella Kowalski
in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Free Rain Theatre, Canberra 2024
Photos: Jane Duong

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2005: Interview with Alana Valentine. Feature article.

Did you think "Shirley" as I did when I read the name "Valentine"?  Remember the housewife who breaks out of domestic boredom, goes on a permanent holiday to Greece and resumes her maiden name?  Her British suburban husband Mr Bradshaw comes to find her to take her home, but passes without recognising his wife, at her table outside the taverna at the edge of the sea.  "I'm Shirley Valentine.  I'll never be Shirley Bradshaw again."

I didn't ask Alana Valentine the origin of her name.  She is certainly not fictional, but like Willy Russell's Shirley, this Valentine seeks what she calls "magical reality".  Not on a Greek island, however enticing that may be, but through her writing - short stories, poetry, drama for radio, television, film and especially for the stage.  Living in inner-Sydney Redfern, her grandfather a fervent supporter of the Rabbitohs, Valentine didn't wait or deny herself like Shirley, but started young with a BA Communications at UTS in 1982, became a script editor for Grundy Television, wrote some 16 ABC radio programs, 5 film scripts, speeches for Judi Connelli and Max Gillies, 18 playscripts, gained a Grad Dip in Museum Studies (with Merit) at Sydney University in 2001 and in 2004 wrote Episode 89 of McLeod's Daughters, for Millenium Television.

Rather surprised, I wondered why McLeod's Daughters?  After all I remembered Mary Rachel Brown's very affecting performance of Valentine's Radio Silence under the vast wings of G for George at the Australian War Memorial soon after Episode 89 appeared.  Did Valentine need the money?  No, it wasn't the money.  It was to learn the craft of writing to a strict formula with the characters and their way of speaking and acting already decided.  You need this, she explained, to get more work as a television writer.

But what about the sentimentality? I asked.  We discussed craft and content, sentiment rather than sentimental, practicality and the writer's voice, theatre and community - her "magical reality".  What about her current Canberra play, Butterfly Dandy?  Her $20,000 grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts researching and writing a verbatim theatre piece Parramatta Girls, for Belvoir Street's Company B, about the Parramatta Girls Home and its past residents?  Or Run Rabbit Run retelling South's Rugby League fight for survival, or Savage Grace about a deeply religious man who falls in love with a younger man, "drawn together by sexual passion and driven apart by professional ethics"?  The accolades are there from a NSW Premier's Literary Award in 1989, through a Shakespeare Globe Theatre Writer's Fellowship, a Rodney Seaborn Playwrights' Award, an AWGIE from the Australian Writers' Guild, a Churchill Fellowship, an Australian National Playwrights' Centre Award.  I felt exhausted just talking to her.

Writing to a formula is not Valentine's style.  "Each play is a puzzle to solve.  You solve that puzzle in a different way," she says.  The text is "just one more brush" to add to set, costume, lights and all the other theatrical devices.  She might begin writing with an idea like exploring euthanasia (in Savage Grace), or material from a commission like cross-dressing women performers of 1900 (researched by Julie McElhone who performs in Butterfly Dandy), or making a museum exhibit come alive (in The Prospectors, originally for the Australian National Maritime Museum).  Then she has to find the drama in a character, pair or group who have to face up to a problem and, in trying to solve it, come to a different understanding of themselves.  And they need to be in Australia because that connects them to our community. 

The prospectors of the Gold Rush exhibit are an experienced Californian miner and a young Australian new-chum who gets taken up in the Eureka Stockade, against the American's advice.  Designed for 13 year-olds, the play is about friendship: "Do I do those things because my friend does it?"  Or should I not follow my American friend's opinions? 

In Butterfly Dandy, based on real-life women performers' experiences, Valentine's character Mirabella Martin is talked into performing in a man's costume because it is the 1905 fashion, though she has to struggle with her feelings to do it.  But with her stage success, she finds her feelings change from limited to liberated woman - with significant resonances for us in 2005.  This is not only a "delightful and very funny cabaret" but has been written strictly in the tradition of the Women on a Shoestring Theatre Company.  It is a perfect example of Valentine's central diamond of reality in a magical theatrical setting.  Her art is to make the magic reveal the reality to which we all can respond.

In doing so, Valentine also shows the way for new Australian theatre, drawing audiences like South's Rugby fans to the theatre and into a sense of community.  Live theatre is certainly not dead, according to this Valentine, and it's even better than escape to a Greek island.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2001: Eulea Kiraly - feature article

 Eulea Kiraly, Theatre Program Director, Tuggeranong Arts Centre.

    Sounds simple enough - just another dogsbody arts practitioner.  Well, not quite.  Since she and her colleagues, the whole Drama Department, resigned from a well-known school back in 1989 when the principal banned a stage production shortly before opening night, Ms Kiraly has become a central figure in Canberra theatre.  Only this year however - since she left the Rolls-Royce company (yes, the one which made the cars, or in her case the aeroplane engines) - is she properly recognised as the professional independent theatre director she has long known she needed to be.

    Knowing the continual flow of her work directing productions and play readings over many years, I was amused and not a little amazed to imagine her in straight skirts and shoulder pads 9 to 5 as an executive assistant to an aeroplane engine.  But this turned out to be the last of a long line of part-time jobs, a "proper day job, nothing to do with real life".  Real life began, significantly, on April 1 as Eulea Kiraly, Community Theatre Director, gained employment for 2.5 days per week funded by artsACT, 0.5  days from Healthpact and, from July 1, the rest of the 7 days per week (or more if she fails the executive time management test) at Tuggeranong, funded by Urban Services.

    Urban Services? I hear you cry.  What are they doing funding a theatre program?  The answer reveals the complexity behind the theatre scene in this city. 

    When I began teaching drama 30 years ago, the wisdom was that in "primitive" societies drama was an integral part of ordinary life, but in "sophisticated" societies - beginning with the Ancient Greeks - drama became separated from ordinary life, as plays were written to reflect on society: and thus began Theatre.

    Well, I guess I have to treat Canberra as an example of a modern sophisticated society - yet in the last 30 years "community" theatre has regained status.  The Australia Council, for example, has a Major Performing Arts Board, but also a Board for Community Cultural Development which funds theatre work.

    The distinction on the ground in Canberra has long been between "community" and "professional" theatre.  We have never succeeded in maintaining for long a professional theatre company, yet there are professional productions and much community theatre. Local professional productions attract very small audiences in competition with Sydney only 3 hours away, or imports to the Playhouse.

    And then there are amateur companies, which are not community theatres.  So we have among others Canberra Rep (amateur, sometimes with pro input, and essentially social rather than community); Free Rain (amateur, but offering opportunities for young people to work on pro style productions); Women on a Shoestring (pro, yet with community theatre themes); Elbow (pro, but so small it almost looks like a community theatre).

    And now Urban Services and Health seem to have picked up on the 1980's idea of the "healthy city" in which the arts are re-integrated with daily life. Healthpact has supported work at The Street Theatre for several years, and Urban Services' recently introduced Community Renewal Program supports projects from the Narrabundah community garden to the Tuggeranong theatre program, in recognition that where local people are engaged in professionally managed creative activities, the community benefits from a sense of cohesion, stability and purpose: the heart which Canberra is supposed not to have.

    Eulea Kiraly's work is to create theatre in, with and for the community.
 
At Tuggeranong, following work with Maude Clark of Melbourne's Somebody's Daughter Theatre earlier in the year, her Thursday evening group of some 28 people - indigenous and multicultural, from teenage to senior - are working on "Fam-ill-ease", expected to open on October 26. 

A play by Jay Bannister working with the Karralaika drug rehabilitation community and WIREDD (Womens Information Referral and Education on Drugs and Dependency), "White Track Miracle", will be presented as a reading at CMAG Theatre 8pm September 29 in the upcoming Festival of Contemporary Arts (FOCA).  This script has already been critically evaluated by the National Playwrights Centre: Bannister and Kiraly plan to take it on to full production after further development work.

Also for FOCA Kiraly plays her dogsbody role as the organiser of the Australian premiere of David Hare's "Via Dolorosa", with Sydney director Moira Blumenthal, at Tuggeranong October 3-6.  Performed by Patrick Dickson, the play is about "the volatile passions of faith" set in Israel and Palestine.

In December there will be a reading of a new play, "Coming to Canberra", by Sri Lankan-Australian Siri Ipalawatte, directed by Kiraly for the Canberra Multicultural Theatre Association.

And, finally, Kiraly is working with "Alphabet Soup", a women's group on a long-term theatrical exploration of their experiences living in the Allawa, Bega and Currong Flats, ranging from the 1950's memories of the Snowy Mountains Scheme era, through the public servant period, to inner city life today.  Though no date has been set, this work will be performed, probably within the context of the ABC Flats.

So this is Eulea Kiraly, Canberra's Rolls-Royce of integrated community theatre.  She can be contacted at TCA on 6293 1443 or by email: eulea@spirit.com.au

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2002: Eye of the Needle by Peter Robinson. Short feature.

Eye of the Needle by Peter Robinson, a script in development,  received its first public reading last Friday evening. 

    Elbow Theatre, directed by Canberra Critics Circle award winner Iain Sinclair, used its second last bucket of grant money to employ a professional team of actors for a week: new young actors, Lara Lightfoot and Tom Woodward, with the well-known Hec Macmillan, Camilla Ah Kin, Susan Lyons and William Zappa (recently seen here with Bell Shakespeare).

    The script is an interesting study, with a nice sense of humour and touching sadness, of a Canberra diplomat's attempt to bring his family together at what surely must be his Malua Bay coast house: he couldn't live in the Canberra house after his wife died, and now realises that he is on the way out too.  His son, daughter-in-law, her sister, and their children have a skeleton in their cupboards which becomes revealed to all. 

    Though in the form of a farce, the revelation leaves the future to a dysfunctional arrangement. At the end of the reading (at this point only an hour long), there was a palpable sigh from an audience wishing for more.  So Robinson now faces the task of either taking more time to reach the revelation, keeping the focus on the old man, or peeking into the inevitable emotional mess of a third act.

    I spent some time talking with William Zappa about the week's process.  He was clearly impressed with the easy relationship which Sinclair had set up between the actors and author: a thoroughly satisfying experience for him. I found myself immersed in top-quality  professional development discussion, here, at the Courtyard Studio in Canberra.  No need to go to Sydney, or Melbourne, or anywhere.

    Elbow Theatre is the descendant of Theatre ACT and Canberra Theatre Company: the in-town professional company complementing the largely touring Women on a Shoestring and the specialist Jigsaw Company.  But what's this about the second last bucket?

    The last bucketful will go on the development of Mary Rachel Brown's Intimate Strangers, to be seen in February/March 2003.  After that Elbow Theatre goes the way of its predecessors, ironically just as Iain Sinclair travels away on a Churchill Fellowship to build on his already extensive international training. 

    Once again at the political and administrative level Canberra fails its arts community.  What will happen to Peter Robinson's script - a play directly relevant to Canberra audiences?  Is the problem in the Cultural Council, in artsACT, in lack of Ministerial leadership?  Any other city of 300,000 worth its salt would have three Elbow Theatres.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2006: In Good Company - A manual for producing independent theatre by Lyn Wallis. Book review.

In Good Company - A manual for producing independent theatre by Lyn Wallis.  Currency Press 2005. $32.95 illustrated paperback.

Lyn Wallis was artistic director of The Jigsaw Company here in Canberra for 4 years in the '90s, and was largely instrumental in taking Jigsaw beyond its original theatre-in-education format to include young adult theatre, so successfully followed up by recent director Greg Lissaman. 

Wallis went on to become Downstairs Theatre Director at Belvoir St, Sydney, where she set up the mentoring program, B Sharp, for Company B. She has observed and assisted the development of independent ("indie") theatre alongside the "world of fully-paid professional theatre [where] an artistic director would have for each production a full complement of designers, a production manager, a rehearsal room, a season stage manager (and maybe ASM), a costume co-ordinator" while the employing company "would very likely have an in-house marketing and publicity department and graphic designer, and would act as overall producer of the work, under the watchful eye of a general manager or administrator".

"The independent situation is rarely so richly resourced!", she writes, but small companies still need to cover all the producing responsibilities - and her book tells you how to do it.  Written in a direct, sometimes even blunt, conversational style, In Good Company is a really useful book for what Wallis calls  "collaborators" in Canberra's   multitude of small independent theatre groups.  Wallis describes it as a "practical guide for producers of small-scale professional, co-operative and amateur theatre", and that's exactly what it is. 

For example, it gives you all the websites you need, to find out everything you've always known you needed to know but maybe never knew how to find.

I want to add drama teachers to the list of must-readers.  The book is both full of information teachers need to put on public performances, but it is also a model for teachers to use.  Wallis describes typical small company structures which can clarify how to set up a school student group as a production company, both to take the load off an individual teacher's shoulders and to teach the students about theatre in the real world.

And what is the real world of Canberra theatre?  It's jam-packed full of small-scale professional, co-operative and amateur theatre.  Some have lasted, it seems, forever - Canberra Repertory, for example - but many others are short-lived.  There was Theatre ACT, Fortune Theatre, Canberra Theatre Company, which were the forerunners of The Street Theatre.

Looking over the reviews I've written in the past 10 years, I re-discovered names like Culturally Innovative Arts (remember David Branson?), Company Skylark, Elbow Theatre, Eureka!, BITS Theatre, WildWood Theatre, Women on a Shoestring and other fully professional outfits. When I began counting groups like those run by former students of colleges and universities, individuals, amateurs who sometimes employ a professional director and a host of other combinations, I found a total of about 70.

Full Tilt, New Erektions, Hidden Corners, Bohemian Productions, Paradox Theatre, Odd Productions, Free-Rain, Aberrant Genotype Productions - the mind boggles at the variety.

For a new company, begin with clarifying how your group will work.  Write a Letter of Agreement between everyone involved, even if you remain an informal company.  Inc or not to Inc? is an important question: "incorporation vs incarceration", says Wallis. 

How independent do you want to be, or what can you gain from being associated with a venue which may provide box-office facilities, publicity, technical staff and other services in a "curated season".  This is the direction The Street Theatre went in the days when several professional companies realised that doing everything separately, in effect in competition with each other, was counter-productive.  Better to work co-operatively in The Season at The Street, so that funding applications had a firmer base, and costs such as publicity and ticketing could be shared.

What's the best way of managing the rehearsal and performance periods, covering your insurance and other legal requirements, setting up an Australian Business Number (ABN) and GST arrangements, handling the media, getting copyright right?  Everything is answered in this almost pocket-sized book.  "The more task-specific people you can build into your team the better, but most companies don't need (and don't have!) a dozen people to get a small-scale production up and running" and Wallis explains different options with real-life examples.

My advice is to read the book from cover to cover first, to get the big picture.  Then go back and tab the pages with the particular bits of information you need.  That's my only gripe.  I would like a double-page spread at the beginning or the end with a complete flow chart from first meeting, through planning, administrative and legal set-up, funding and publicity, rehearsal, venue arrangements, production week, performance season, project completion and on-going arrangements. 

Each twist and turn in the chart of the company's affairs could be flagged with the page number where you can follow through the details.  Then the book would be just about perfect.  And it may well save many theatre collaborators much angst, and even extend their - theatrical - lives. 

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2012: Widowbird by Emma Gibson

Widowbird by Emma Gibson, directed by Joanne Schultz at The Street Theatre, September 8-16, 2012.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 8

An epic play of mythical proportions, Widowbird is interesting for its ancient Greek tragedy sensibility.  It is still a work in progress, coming out of the Street Theatre’s Hive Development Program.  Emma Gibson is surely a busy bee.  There’s enough honey here to make the presentation of the work worthwhile at this stage, but the royal jelly will take some more buzzing.

The meaning of the title eluded me – until I looked up Percy Bysshe Shelley.  I didn’t understand what he meant either.  But he gave me a clue to the sort of buzzing Emma Gibson might need to make.  Shelley’s rhymes can sometimes be execrable, but Emma needs poetry to give her work regal quality.

Her entirely original folk tale of a woman whose sympathetic tears instantly heal anyone’s illness or injury is exactly on the money in modern times.  Just send $13 a month and the world will be saved.  But what would happen if your charitable tears really worked?  Gibson’s mediaeval-style King just uses the woman’s tears to repair his battalions and keep his wars going until ... well, until he chooses to stop being King, which he will never do.  Political parties of all modern stripes, from Al Qaeda and the Taliban to the ALP or the LNP are not so different in their desire to be in, or stay in, power.

That’s some of the honey – the symbolism which allows you much metaphorical interpretation – but in the second act, where the now blinded woman tries to protect her daughter from the world by blinding her so that she cannot produce tears, we see dramatic quality beginning to gel.  In Act 1 the story is told and acted out with accompaniment on drums and xylophone, all a bit too illustrative rather than emotionally engaging.  In Act 2, the action becomes more central, while the story-telling becomes more explanatory, so we understand and identify with the implications for ourselves and our family relations.  A bit more like Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone.

But the heightened effect of the Greek tragedies was achieved by the dialogue being in verse, not ordinary prose, and sung by the Chorus, with music to which the actors danced.   If Gibson can turn her play into a total poetic work, in words, movement and music, then her symbols and metaphors will begin to vibrate with meaning.  Experiencing a performance will then be a real buzz.

At this point praise must be awarded to Caroline Stacey, The Street’s director and originator of the Hive.  Canberra’s role has long been the incubator of original new work, hiving off performers, writers and directors from myriad small companies to the big cities which think of themselves as the real Australia.  Despite many attempts previously to coordinate our theatrical creativity – think Carol Woodrow (Fool’s Gallery and Wildwood), Camilla Blunden (Women on a Shoestring), David Atfield (BITS Theatre) or the CIA (Canberra Innovative Arts) and maverick David Branson – only recently have we begun to get our act together.

Stacey brings in solid professional help for new writers, like Peter Matheson, one of Australia’s best recognised  dramaturgs, who has worked with Emma Gibson to turn an idea – “For me, this play really began as an exploration of how far a person must be pushed before their goodness is corrupted” – into a story on stage.  Stacey’s abiding purpose is to provide the theatrical “infrastructure” for the writers to transport themselves to a place where they find their “voice”, and thus their confidence, learning the skills of playwriting along the way.

But rather than a linear journey, it’s all about collaboration and networking – buzzing and dancing like bees in a hive – all supported by government through artsACT, the Australia Council through the Local Stages program, and Canberra 100, as well as the ACT Government supporting Gibson to attend the recent Women Playwrights International Conference in Stockholm, where Widowbird was first presented as a reading.

May Stacey’s work continue and grow to match the extensions of The Street Theatre, coming soon.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2003: National Forum on Performance in Cultural Institutions No 2. Feature article.

Spotlight on Performance: National Forum on Performance in Cultural Institutions No 2.  October 23-25 at National Museum of Australia, The Australian War Memorial, ScreenSound Australia and Old Parliament House.  Chaired by Nigel Sutton (aka Hans the Storyteller).

    This was the second of the biennial forums arranged by the National Museum of Australia as a member of the International Museum Theatre Alliance.  There is almost a symbiotic relationship with the Museum of Science in Boston, USA, where 2001 keynote speaker Catherine Hughes established IMTA.  This year's keynote speaker was John Lipsky, Associate Professor of Acting and Playwriting at Boston University's College for the Arts, who is also Associate Artistic Director of Vineyard Playhouse on Martha's Vineyard.  He writes and directs mainstage plays, as well as shows for the Museum of Science, a Planetarium and the Catalyst Collaborative (about science, scientists and scientific issues) and for the Boston History Collaborative (dramatising Boston's history).

    From Australia, NMA Director Dawn Casey welcomed a long list of performers and cultural institution managers, with papers/performances presented by ACT's Jigsaw Theatre Company, Women on a Shoestring, Shortis & Simpson and The Street Theatre (with Violine opening October 30) alongside X-Ray Theatre, ERTH Visual & Physical Inc, storytellers Nigel Sutton, Ed Miller and Mary French, Sovereign Hill Museums Association, Australian National Maritime Museum, Art Gallery of NSW, Artback NT Arts Touring Inc, Cairns Regional Gallery, Parliament House Education Officer Camilla Blunden, Australian War Memorial, University of Newcastle, Robert Swieca on evaluation models, Melbourne Museum, freelance writer/actor Stephen Barker and ScreenSound Australia.

    A packed program over 2 days, followed by a day of practical workshops led by Lipsky, obeyed the first and only commandment for performers: Thou shalt not be boring.  Lipsky described how he wrote about the concept of gravity by creating Jumping Jack Flash, jester to Queen Gravitas.  Though Jack believed only in levity, his Queen proved in the end he couldn't defy gravity.  He also demonstrated how the American entrant in the Rooster's Olympics found it difficult to accept that other countries' roosters didn't say "cock-a-doodle-doo" (the French entrant said "coquerico") in a show about understanding other cultures.

    Speaking of his play about the debate on stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, which included talking embryos, Lipsky raised the key issue of the forum: cultural integrity.  In his context, this was about presenting performances which are true first to the emotional life of complex characters (whether roosters, embryos or historical figures) and only then to the factual information museum educators and curators need to impart.  The point is that people remember the scenes - and the embedded information - only if they have emotionally identified with the characters: an interesting twist on the Brechtian theory of theatre.  Writing for museum performances is thus as demanding as writing major mainstream plays; and museum pieces are often only 20 minutes long.

    From Boston to the Northern Territory, cultural integrity was the common theme.  Andrish Saint-Clare of Artback NT explained that "fitting the institution to the performance" is crucial where indigenous performers are engaged.  He was highly critical, for example, of galleries using indigenous performers for a first night opener, where the traditional dancers are not paid.  This marginalises their performance, as opposed to the "real business" of selling paintings.  "Curators," he said, "need to understand the place of performance in indigenous cultures."  Performances are not merely re-creations of traditional pieces, but are new creations which are necessary to maintain peoples' cultures. 

Institutions need to budget for professional technical support, dramaturgy, appropriate venues, proper negotiation with indigenous elders, and proper payment so that indigenous performances take their proper place in the total Australian cultural scene.  He concluded, as many speakers from quite different perspectives agreed, "If you can't do it properly, don't do it." 

   
© Frank McKone, Canberra

2017: Platform Paper No 50, Currency House.

Restless Giant: Changing Cultural Values in Regional Australia by Lindy Hume.  Platform Paper No 50, Currency House, February 2017.

Commentary by Frank McKone
February 23


“The Regional Australia Institute, the Canberra-based independent research and advocacy body for regional Australia, uses the following definition in which Darwin and Hobart would count as regional centres:

"Regional Australia includes all of the towns, small cities and areas that lie beyond the major capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra).

"This definition will not satisfy everyone it seeks to encompass”, writes Lindy Hume.

I suppose I’m pleased that Canberra is nowadays a “major” capital city rather than the “regional centre” which was how it looked to me from my acting/directing role in distant Broken Hill Repertory Theatre, with Canberra Repertory Theatre and Canberra Philharmonic Society vaguely in my sights in 1965.  So I went to Sydney for a bit of academic study, then moved out of Sydney to the Wyong Drama Group 1967 to 1973. 

Finally arriving in Canberra revealed, in 1974, Reid House from which new theatre alongside Rep and Philo (including Tertiary Accredited Drama in the secondary school system by 1976) grew into a myriad of often short-lived companies and the complex scaffolding of today, incorporating Queanbeyan’s The Q and all the participants in the annual CAT Awards from an ever-increasing region.  This year the CATs were awarded in Dubbo, some 400 kilometres away, and the company has dropped its original title – Canberra Area Theatre awards – in favour of just plain CATs.  With an 800 kilometre diameter, surely this makes Canberra and its region “major”, now.  With the blessing of T S Eliot no doubt.

But there’s still a difference between Canberra and the others: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.  Though our population is reaching towards 400,000, we still do not have the same kind of top quality tertiary level drama or dance training institutions here (despite many valiant attempts) – and even the School of Music has struggled, in my view ever since it was taken over by the Australian National University.  Nor do we have a long-term full-time fully professional theatre company, despite the past successes of the now-defunct theatre-in-education The Jigsaw Company (1976 – 2014) among several others with shorter lives, such as Women on a Shoestring and the recently formed Aspen Island Theatre Company.   Maybe Canberra fits somewhere between those other capitals and Hobart and Darwin.

Of course, in visual arts and literature, and even in movie-making in recent times, Canberra has been one of the giants, but our theatre is still very much in the restless stage.  Hume refers to Lyndon Terracini’s A Regional State of Mind—Making art outside Metropolitan Australia saying “it was, and ten years on is still, an inspiring and prescient read”.  Terracini “celebrated what is now widely known as the Culture of Place, and invited us to imagine a great Cultural Pyramid whose ‘summit’—Australia’s professional companies— is supported by a broad base, the grassroots community activity flourishing across regional and urban Australia. I revisit these concepts in the context of the new leadership, inspiration and innovation I see all around me, and the rise of a new, more assertive ‘regional state of mind’." 

And, in fact, we could easily say that Hobart and Darwin in some ways seem more assertive than Canberra.

But it’s also true that Hume notes the leadership and inspiration of one-time Canberrans, such as Elizabeth Rogers who was Director of Canberra Arts Marketing for more than six years and is now CEO of Regional Arts NSW, and Lyn Wallis who was Artistic Director of The Jigsaw Company for four years, and now runs HotHouse Theatre in Wodonga.  Also quoted is someone I might call a Canberra original restless giant: “Mikel Simic, better known as the flamboyant Mikelangelo of Black Sea Gentlemen fame, recently relocated from Melbourne to the high country outside Cooma:

“It’s not airy fairy to say that the natural environment changes the way you function as a human being, it has an effect on you as an artist. The river, the sky, are characters in my work, they’re more than just a background setting.”

Lindy Hume has also made the move from big city life as “one of Australia’s prolific festival and opera directors” to the far south coast near Cobargo, “where I served for several years as Chair of South East Arts”, saying “I wanted to write on this subject because I sense a moment of shimmering potential, an alignment of the great forces of Australia’s psyche—our regional and our city cultural identities. It’s a vast and challenging notion, and it’s thrilling to consider.”

It’s her enthusiasm for changing the perspective of artists (not only theatre practitioners who are her main interest) away from the conventions and expectations of artistic life in cities like Sydney or Melbourne that is the key to this Platform Paper.  The point was made by poets like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson more than 100 years ago and the distinction between the ‘big smoke’ and ‘the bush’ is still a standard concept in Australians’ thinking, even if we do use ‘metro’ and ‘regional’ instead. 

And I still find myself remembering, as I review shows in Sydney’s Roslyn Packer Theatre, at Belvoir, and even at the more local small theatres like Eternity Theatre in Darlinghurst or Ensemble Theatre in Kirribilli, the community spirit of searching all over town for the correct Japanese sword to use in Broken Hill Rep’s The Teahouse of the August Moon, and finding the exact model of Jeep way down in an open-cut mine (with a loose gear lever and no brakes – but I still drove it up and onto the stage).  While nowadays I’m impressed not only by the acoustics and sightlines of The Q in Queanbeyan, but also by the friendly, indeed homely atmosphere there, even compared with nearby Canberra.

In the end, Lindy Hume’s essay is not just a bureaucratic plea for better funding for the arts in regional areas (though she even manages to praise ex-Arts Minister Brandis:  “One of the most highly valued initiatives is the Federal Government’s Regional Arts Fund (RAF): $12.5m over four years targeted ‘to activities that will have long-term cultural, economic and social benefits.’ RAF is delivered on behalf of the Federal Ministry for the Arts by RAA and its member state organisations. Another is Catalyst, the controversial Brandis-created funding instrument, which has proven an unexpected boon to regional artists, with 37% of $23 million ($8.5 million) of total grant monies awarded to regional projects as at May 2016. Time will determine the impact and longevity of this new funding avenue.”)

The essence of her contribution is to say, of living in the country:

“It’s where I come for nourishment and escape from the ambient noise of the world. My experience, and that of many Australian artists in my community, reflects Don Watson’s, in his book The Bush: travels in the heart of Australia:

"As much as the grime, in the city there is the din of predictable opinion, especially one’s own opinion, which week by week, year by year, becomes a sort of metronome sounding at some distance from whatever remains of a sense of actual self.

“In summary, the diversity of my experience has created a framework for reflection. I write as an artistic director, an advocate for excellence in the arts in regional Australia, but primarily from the personal perspective of an artist who chooses to live and work in regional Australia. Mine is both a passionate appeal and a challenge, in this time of cultural flux, to explore the abundant possibilities of imagining our national cultural landscape in a different way, as an integrated metro-regional ecosystem that truly reflects the adventurous and enterprising contemporary identity of ‘the heart of Australia’.”

So perhaps that’s where Canberra fits: as a metro-regional or in the latest vernacular, announced at today’s launch, ‘hyper-local’ ecosystem reflecting the adventurous and enterprising contemporary identity of the heart of Australia.

I certainly hope so.  The launch here today, with Julian Hobba (Artistic Director, Aspen Island Theatre Company); Mikelangelo (alone, without the Black Sea Gentlemen); Kate Fielding  (Director, Regional Arts Australia); Karilyn Brown (Chief Executive Officer, Performing Lines - producers of new and transformative performance) joining Lindy Hume for a panel discussion, which went 45 minutes over the allotted time, was very encouraging.

Perhaps the essential theme was that ‘hyper-local’ means that excellent work should flow around the nation beyond its local place of generation, a new structural network of artistic creation rather than the pyramid of old.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

1998: At the Crossroads by Jan Cornall

At the Crossroads by Jan Cornall.  Women on a Shoestring directed by Camilla Blunden at the Street Theatre Studio, 8.30 pm February 18 - 28, 1998.  Professional.

    This is Australian theatre of the best traditional kind: entertaining in a slightly larrikin way, encouraging the audience to clap, cheer and whistle, while also eliciting silent appreciation of the reality of people's lives in the bush.  A travelling show like the melodramas and music halls of last century, with a touch of Dad and Dave, At the Crossroads has a long touring future in the Northern Territory first up, with the other states to follow.

    Justine Saunders plays Bernice, an educated middle class person whose Aboriginal mother was denied her rightful inheritance.  In an unexpected twist of history, Bernice becomes the legal owner of the land at the Crossroads "in the middle of nowhere".

    Alice (Chrissie Shaw) is a traditionalist farmer's wife: great organiser in dust, flood and fire.  Liliana (Maria De Marco), banana farmer, has all the social ebullience of her original Italian village.  Charmaine (Julie Ross) is educated and green, married her farmer for love and works for a sustainable future on the land.

    Now that Beryl is dead, though not forgotten - she was the President and Secretary and everything else of the CWA, the Bush Fire Brigade, the local Red Cross and all the hundred or so other organisations run by country women - who should now be elected President at this Extraordinary General Meeting?  Through song, story and dance we find out the truth behind each candidate, take part in the vote, and discover the power of the deceased Beryl.

    At the Crossroads is polished theatre from a longstanding, very experienced team, designed to be toured to city and country venues around Australia.  Issues are confronted through the women's stories, gathered in research across the nation, not in an ideological way but with humanity, humour and sensitivity to how complex are the questions of land ownership, ecological degradation, love, loyalty and spirituality.  The perfect antidote to the Pauline Hanson black spectre view of history for country and city audiences alike.  Not to be missed.
   
© Frank McKone, Canberra