Belonging: Australian playwriting in the 20th century

Australian playwriting in the 20th century

John McCallum

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781921429460
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Scrittura di pièce teatrali

This new history explores the relationship between twentieth century Australian drama and a developing concept of nation. The book focuses on the creative tension sparked by the duelling impulses of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Also competing are artistic seriousness and larrikin populism. This book examines the influence of European high culture and popular theatrical forms on Australian drama, the ambivalence (between affection and aggression) of much Australian humour, and the interaction between the personal and the political in drama.

1 THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

‘Australians are fond of the drama, but have no drama of their own.’

Alfred Johnson Buchanan, 19071

For much of the twentieth century, Australian drama had very little to do with Australian theatre—local plays were not often performed. That basic fact pervades this book. While huge theatres at the end of the nineteenth century were filled with sensations, pageants, choruses, ballets, orchestras, comedy, sex, violence and passion—things we all still want—the first seventy years of this book is mostly a tale of small activities in small rooms.

On the nineteenth-century stage the whole world, and a few other worlds besides, was dragged kicking and screaming into the theatre. Real horses galloped up scenic mountainsides, jumped vast gorges and fell into flooded rivers as their riders leapt to safety. Overblown exotic scenes were transformed into even more extravagant worlds of fairies, wizards and tricksters. Crowds of up to two hundred performers danced, sang or fought battles across great stages. Lovers lost and found each other, villains crowed and underdogs triumphed. When white heroes wilted they were saved, at least in Australia, by women and blackfellas.

This spectacular melodrama was appropriated from England and the United States and localised by the great Australian actor–managers. It outlasted its forbears, surviving in Australia into the twentieth century. In addition to melodrama the theatre boasted grand historical and military dramas that have their equivalents in Hollywood epics and war movies; early stage forms of theatrical farce and domestic comedy whose descendants are sitcoms and soap operas; and pantomime and the music hall, whose traditions have been inherited by Tonight shows and reality television.

One of the last of the great hands-on actor–managers was George Musgrove. He had been part of ‘The Firm’, as J. C. Williamson’s (JCW’s), the largest commercial company, was known. When Musgrove retired, businessmen who had never performed in the theatre began to take over and the commercial theatre changed its emphasis. In the 1920s and 1930s, under the management of the Tait brothers, Williamson’s began producing imported thrillers and plays of intrigue alongside their trademark musical theatre repertoire.2 They had long specialised in the musical theatre, doing everything from light musicals to grand opera, and especially Gilbert and Sullivan, to which they had early acquired the Australian rights. The few commercial producers who did Australian work also began to change their repertoire—from sensation melodrama through domestic melodrama to bucolic comedy.

By 1915, some of the old forms, particularly melodrama, had begun to disappear but the commercial theatre flourished until the ‘talkies’ started up in 1928. A Commonwealth Government Entertainment Tax introduced in 1916 was compounded by an additional state tax from the late 1920s. Because the new cinemas had lower ticket prices and could avoid them, entertainment taxes discriminated against live theatre. The taxes, the talkies and the Depression combined to destroy mass live entertainment as a lucrative business. At the beginning of 1929 Melbourne had ten live theatres. Eighteen months later there were five.3 Between 1929 and 1939 the number of live theatres in Sydney fell from ten to three.4

Some commercial theatre survived partly by moving to the high-cultural or middle-class end of the market. JCW’s, overwhelmingly the dominant entrepreneur until the early 1970s, did particularly well touring opera and operetta, training a generation that would later form the core of the national opera company. They also managed the 1932 tour of Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike.

On the vaudeville circuits, a golden age of Australian comedy (Roy (‘Mo’) Rene, George Wallace and Jim Gerald especially) lasted, despite hiccoughs, until just after World War II, when David N. Martin took over the new Tivoli circuit and looked overseas for performers. Australian variety artists who had made a good living at the Tivoli in the 1930s drifted into radio and later television. The rural touring companies, tent-shows doing the rounds of local agricultural shows in country towns, lasted a little longer. George Sorlie, for instance, was known as ‘J. C. Williamson of the road’.5 When he died in 1948 Bobby le Brun and Sorlie’s wife, Grace, kept Sorlie’s going until 1961. (In 2001, Margery and Michael Forde wrote a tribute to the old tentshows, Way Out West, which toured Queensland for the Centenary of Federation.)

In the same year that Sorlie’s folded, Patrick White first gained attention as Australia’s greatest modernist playwright when The Ham Funeral was produced in Adelaide. Also in the 1960s the Music Hall Theatre Restaurant in Sydney nostalgically, and with proper respect, parodied the traditions of melodrama. Its success sparked the establishment of a series of suburban theatre restaurants with names like ‘Dirty Dick’s’ that burlesqued (another grand nineteenth-century tradition) the old forms and styles. With more earnest aims, and without the commercialism, many nineteenth-century popular theatre conventions were gleefully appropriated and reworked during the neo-nationalist New Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1970, for instance, the Australian Performing Group produced Marvellous Melbourne, scripted by New Wave writers Jack Hibberd and John Romeril and created by the company. It incorporated scenes from Alfred Dampier’s popular 1889 melodrama of the same name and also exploited twentieth-century vaudeville and music-hall performance styles. To top it off, one of its characters was a gloomy Louis Esson, whose work as a polemicist and playwright is discussed in the next chapter.

The transition period

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the starting-point for this book, such an appropriation of old genres was a long way off. Instead writers and campaigners rebelled, in some cases perversely given their populist hopes, against the sensations and passions of the popular theatre of the day. Some sought refuge in the new middle-class genres of European drama. Others looked for models in the nationalist dramas of countries outside the imperial centre—America, Ireland, Russia.

The most extreme turned to a localised drama of exile. Its themes of alienation and a searching for home and identity are common to postcolonial cultures everywhere. Polemicists in the journals and small literary magazines frequently wrote about using art to build a new nation, either by importing European high culture or by starting afresh to define a new Australian identity. For at least fifty years dramatists turned their backs on popular culture, even as they used the rhetoric of ‘folk’ and ‘the people’ to explain their work. Some of their projects look quaint now but many have had an extraordinary longevity.

The theatre in the first three decades of the twentieth century may be loosely divided into three categories. In drastically decreasing order of size these are the commercial theatre already described; the repertory theatre movement, which dealt mostly with the ‘serious’ contemporary repertoire from overseas; and the nationalist theatre, which focused on local drama. In a very small theatre scene, the three were intimately interconnected with writers, actors and producers constantly moving between them. The Adelaide Repertory Theatre, for example, produced two plays by Arthur H. Adams, a writer who had sold his first script, Tapu, to JCW’s, for whom he later worked on salary. Gregan McMahon had been an actor in the commercial theatre before he started a couple of amateur repertory companies and then sold out (according to many of the amateurs who were suddenly left out in the cold) to Williamson’s new managers, J. and N. Tait. The Taits put him on a retainer to run repertory companies in Sydney and Melbourne, funding the productions and taking both the members’ subscriptions and the supposed profits. At a crucial point in his battle to establish a nationalist theatre Louis Esson, the patriotic purist, found that his friend and collaborator Vance Palmer had sent one of his (Palmer’s) plays to McMahon, who had in turn sent it up the commercial line to actor–entrepreneur Bert Bailey, where it sank without commercial trace.6

The year 1922, when Esson’s The Battler launched the Pioneer Players, may be taken as exemplary in the interplay between commercial and amateur theatre. JCW’s imported a company from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the source of Esson’s chief influences, W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge. The Abbey toured Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen and other plays from their repertoire. They travelled around the country from early June to late October but the tour was not a box-office success. It took an average of £470 a week at a time when Williamson’s New Comic Opera tour was taking in £2,380.7

Also in 1922 Arthur Hoey Davis, writing as Steele Rudd, tried to repair his financially ailing fortunes by embarking on a national lecture tour. He took a print of Raymond Longford’s silent film version of his On Our Selection stories. Bert Bailey had already had a huge commercial success with the stage version, which had opened ten years previously and was still revived, but Davis was making nothing out of it. Some commentators saw Esson’s The Battler as a response to the commercialism of On Our Selection.

These sorts of overlaps and connections lead to one of the vexed questions that faced every producer in the 1920s and that pervaded discussion of Australian drama until at least the late 1970s—that of ‘Australianness’. As in many postcolonial cultures, especially settler colonies such as Australia, this starts with an interest in ‘local colour’ within adopted forms and genres. Then come periods of strident nationalism, interspersed with times of outward-looking internationalism, which, in Australia’s case, lasted through the century.8 During the 1920s local theatre workers and writers began to disentangle themselves from the centralised structures of commerce and empire and look for what they called frontiers. Pretty soon, as the land began to open and fill up, these became border zones and marginal lands.

‘Australianness’ and Australian playwrights

By the 1920s the bush legend of the 1890s (re-mythologised in the 1950s by writers and historians, and again in the 1970s by filmmakers and advertisers) was well-entrenched. The scenic spectacle of the grand melodrama of the late nineteenth century had already, ironically, become tangled up with new notions of realism. A desire for ‘authentic’ Australian settings became part of this otherwise highly artificial and conventional form.

In this celebration of ‘Australianness’ a new interest in local colour was twinned with the spectacle demanded by theatrical tradition. Animals loomed large in this project. In the 1890s, late in his career, the prolific ‘Gorgeous’ George Darrell (best remembered now for The Sunny South (1883)9) produced a dramatic version of a racing novel, The Double Game, in the 1890s in which he staged the running of the Melbourne Cup with twenty real horses.10 Bland Holt’s 1903 production of Arthur Shirley’s The Breaking of the Drought was, one critic wrote, full of ‘charming fidelity’ to bush life, at least partly because it included a ‘casual emu wandering about the homestead’ and, for the famous drought scene, real crows flying down from the flies and picking at the skeletons of cows dotted picturesquely about the stage.11 The Squatter’s Daughter (1907) opened with a flock of sheep, a pack of dogs and, on cue as the stage lights came up, trained kookaburras that started laughing at ‘dawn’.12

Some of this theatrical splendour continued into the early twentieth century, but its days were nearing an end, and not simply because of commercial pressures. The tone of the reviewers and columnists became increasingly cynical—sarcastic, even—from the late nineteenth century. In 1911 Edmund Duggan’s My Mate: A Bush Love Story was advertised (not just reviewed) as having a ‘saving sense of restraint running through it’.13 In the commercial theatre the thrills were increasingly based in realistic spectacle: a horse falling into a flooded river for instance.

This emphasis on realism was the crucial link between the old commercial theatre and the new drama. The huge technical resources of the nineteenth century popular theatre were being directed towards a...