Different Stages

William Goldman looked at Brigitte Bardot’s bottom and saw the future: of movies, and theatre. Goldman’s 1969 book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway is a classic account of a Broadway season. Goldman, a screenwriter, playwright and novelist, saw the plays and musicals—the good and the awful—swam through the red and black ink of profits and losses, and interviewed directors, actors, critics and audiences. In that single season, extraordinary by our standards, were new works by Williams, Pinter, Miller and Albee and a range of plays and musicals which included Hair, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, There’s a Girl in My Soup, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Little Foxes, How Now, Dow Jones, Staircase, Plaza Suite, Loot and George M! Goldman was a knowledgeable observer. His film writing credits include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Marathon Man—that’s the one with Olivier as an ex-Auschwitz dental-drill-wielding Nazi, come from Paraguay to New York, where he develops an intimate and painful acquaintance with Dustin Hoffman’s oral cavity. The Season comes from a time when writers could still talk sense about theatre.

Bardot’s bottom, said Goldman, was “one of the significant cultural events of this half-century”. Roger Vadim’s film And God Created Woman was, because of Bardot’s anatomy, an adults-only box office success. Before this, argued Goldman, film-makers believed “that all people had to like all pictures”. The lesson they learnt from the film’s success was that fragmented audiences could be cultivated and profitably grown. Goldman suggested it was also a lesson for Broadway: plays aimed at specific audiences would draw in new patrons.

Theatre-going has fragmented but not exactly in the way he imagined, and it may not have increased overall audience numbers. The less appealing facet of fragmentation, but possibly its most important element, was already present when Goldman was writing. He asked a young man why he hadn’t been to see a Pinter play on Broadway and was told, “Frankly, I don’t want to be associated with that kind of audience.”

Play-going is not solely about seeing a play. Completely without any supporting research, I suggest that people who go to live dramas don’t go to the theatre, they go to a theatre. The audiences at Belvoir and Malthouse are not the people you see at the MTC and STC, and obviously vice versa. Likewise the audiences at amateur productions, commercial musicals and independent theatre (indie theatre) are different beasts—though there would be some crossover between Belvoir, Malthouse and indie. Our theatres are fragmented but not all the fragments are growing.

In Australia the smaller subsidised and indie theatres know their audiences—who are very similar to the theatre-makers: younger, new class, politically impassioned. The same professionals also make the theatre for the big subsidised theatre companies. In this new setting they are from widely separate generations, have very different life experiences and do not share the same expectations for what makes a successful performance as their audience. In this environment the theatre-makers lack an instinctive or shared understanding of their subscribers.

A concrete example of the disconnect is even present in the architecture. New Sydney and Melbourne main-stage theatres are difficult of access for elderly patrons—cramped and badly designed, with long unbroken rows of seats which mean dozens of toes to be trampled on, they have Escher-inspired staircases and cramped foyers which resemble stockyard holding pens. Yet this ageing demographic is fast growing and holds an intelligent audience well worth cultivating. Despite the very visible sexual imbalance in the composition of the audiences, which is mostly older female, the companies show little interest in attracting older men—gay coming-out plays, football plays or combinations of the two are not quite the way to do it.

When the subsidised main-stage companies try to attract new patrons they turn to a youth audience which doesn’t want to mix with their elderly patrons and is already catered for by the vibrant small companies. Unfortunately also, when they think young audience they think sex and vulgarity, not intergenerational appealing wit and humour. The subsidised nudity and sex onstage aren’t much fun when you are seated beside someone’s grandmother. When a company like the MTC stages a successful season of independent theatre, as they have done with their Neon seasons, all they are really doing is temporarily bringing an audience borrowed from Malthouse and the indie companies to fill one of their small auditoriums. The audience won’t be sticking around to join the pensioners for upcoming seasons.

The smaller companies, especially Malthouse and Belvoir, are an onstage/offstage product. They attract and keep audiences returning, not just with the plays they present but for the cultural capital they are selling. The audience members, simply by being present, feel they are part of a fashionable, youthful, committed and assertive cultural community. It doesn’t matter that individual plays may be lousy; being there is the thing. Belvoir especially does this very well. At the smaller theatres the foyers are chatty and welcoming places—for initiates. They like being there and are noisily advertising their own social superiority. From an outsider perspective there is a strong gay influence at Belvoir and feminist at Malthouse. The latter may not be a successful element for running a theatre. Where feminism is strong the workplace is unhappy, and creativity flees. Or perhaps it is a Sydney–Melbourne difference with traditionally cosmopolitan Sydney theatre versus a feminist academic and mummsy ABC-influenced Melbourne theatre. The result is an introverted theatre (the same audience is courted by indie groups and influential small production companies) unconcerned with creating an Australian popular drama or playing beyond the chardonnay belt.

At the MTC and STC, as patrons dodge the wheelchairs and buy overpriced drinks and programs, they are also conscious of being part of a “good” and high-minded cultural experience, asserting their social superiority over the uncultured—it may also be what wealthy people do. Why else would they pay far too much for far too little? And applaud bad plays, very bad plays, and Kosky plays?

Goldman traced the influence of the 1960s “Snob Hits” on Broadway. The phenomenon was then slightly different from what we know:

A second requirement of the Snob Hit [the first was a British pedigree] is that it must manage somehow to be at least a little unintelligible. This is because the audience that goes to a Snob Hit must be convinced that the “average” theatregoer wouldn’t understand it. Or, third, like it. This third and last requirement, of course, is the greatest of all hypocrisies concerning the Snob Hit, because the people who go to see them don’t like them either.

The British element is no longer relevant. That the play marks a perceived cultural superiority remains important. Indigenous theatre is a clear marker between cultural insiders and outsiders. Gay or “queer” theatre is another marker which even defines generations of homosexuals. Old-fashioned homosexual pub drag was working-class—an observation made by UK theatre director Neil Bartlett—“queer theatre” is new-class snobbery. Even snob hits no longer attract a universal audience but play to their own groups (probably with only a small number of free-moving ambassadors wandering between theatres). The River (a very White indigenous drama) played to STC middle-class women, Angels in America to Belvoir hipsters.

Writing about theatre is also fragmented. If he was writing about theatre now, Goldman might find a paragraph for “Snob Crits”. Newspaper and online critics use something recognisable as English while academia has adopted feminist full-moon-speak. Here is Australian theatre academic Professor Peta Tait on circus and physical theatre:

The cultural significance of body surfaces in physical theatre is evident in the changing shapes of exertion which confuse differentiation. In the execution of dangerous and risky tricks, the body sweats across the skin’s surface as if it is leaking. [Elizabeth] Grosz writes that “Body fluids flow, they seep, they infiltrate; their control is a matter of vigilance, never guaranteed.” While she argues that the female body is conceived to be in a state of uncontrollable corporeal flow as “seepage”, it would seem that such “seepage” is especially socially regulated.

Writing like that has to be learned. The Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies gave an award for the “Best Postgraduate Paper” given at their 2013 annual conference:

This paper effectively addressed the conference theme through examining the collaboration between Vulcana Women’s Circus and a group of both deaf and hearing women in a physical theatre production of an adaptation of the Wizard of Oz.

Where The Season is really dated is that theatres in the 1960s promised entertainment, and their patrons expected it, and theatre tickets cost $15.

Television history

There, on page 3, is the Reverend Mr Thomas Hastie. I know him. On Christmas Day 1854, just weeks after Eureka, he married my great-grandparents (James, thirty-four, Selina, fourteen) in a settler’s hut in Horsham. The novel’s young heroine, Sally May Lorne, has just refused his invitation to attend the new school he has set up in Buninyong.

It’s an old-fashioned novel I’m reading. On the now brittle cover a young woman is driving a carriage, a whip in her right hand, reins in the left. Before her is a handsome young man on horseback. He stares. Around about are a flurry of other characters, women and men, and a military redcoat peers over the busy scene from the far right.

It’s op-shop found fiction, The Fury by E.V. Timms, romance number eight in a best-selling series of novels published by Angus & Robertson. It’s an historical romance written before our history writing turned sour Left. Edward Vivian Timms died in 1960, having completed ten novels in his Australian saga. The Queensland-born writer was wounded in the Gallipoli landing and was on duty at Cowra on the night of the mass escape.

In the desert of Australian history on television these discarded books could be a base for bringing life to the past. Filled with incident and characters, they are strongly story-oriented. The historical background is alive and imaginatively detailed. Much of the factual detail comes from period newspapers. Timms’s gold-rush Geelong is laid out and explored with material from the Geelong Advertiser, and brought alive with his own enthusiasm for the world he was visiting.

Timms loved Australia. The books were written in the 1940s and 1950s when we were still allowed to be passionate about our country. His characters can be hard and cruel but they are striving to create something worthwhile. Modern academia has taken notice of the books, not for their storytelling, but for his treatment of race.

Though the period language is dated, and the stories melodramatic, the writing pulls the modern reader along. The books have already served for one historical television series: Luke’s Kingdom, a thirteen-part mini-series, was made in 1976. It starred Oliver Tobias and two episodes were directed by Peter Weir. A boxed set of the series is now available in DVD stores, and some of the episodes are on YouTube.

Timms’s Australian Saga begins in the 1830s and follows histories of settlement in Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.

John Adams, a 2008 HBO mini-series, suggested a way that Australian history could be told on television. In the story of America’s second president, based on the book by David McCullough, many of the great events he took part in, costly to film, happen offstage as the story looks in detail at his life. It’s a sophisticated treatment that could work equally well to open up our past on television.

E.V. Timms’s old books offer an opportunity to step outside modern platitudes and catch up with a different vision of Australia. If approached with sympathy and imagination, not cynicism, they could introduce the beginning of a new past.