The Unique Theatre of Stanley Walsh

Stanley Walsh is Australia’s least-known most successful playwright. Between 1970 and 1979 he wrote and directed seven melodramas which each ran from almost twelve months to an amazing eighteen months—yet when he died in 2008 he was probably best known for having been a producer of Neighbours.

Born in England in 1938, Walsh was an actor in Z Cars before migrating to Australia in 1964. During the 1970s his plays were performed six nights a week for record-breaking runs at the Music Hall in Sydney’s Neutral Bay until what had seemed like a permanent home for popular culture vanished when the theatre closed down in 1980, a victim of stringent new fire restrictions created after the deadly Ghost Train fire at Luna Park. Walsh moved on to acting, theatre and television production. His theatrical legacy is obscure because the plays were not taken up by professional theatres or amateur groups, and the scripts were unpublished until after his death a friend and colleague, Charles…