Theatre Street v Skid Row

Welcome to Theatre Street. The weather is fine today, and the year is twenty-something. Although you could be in Sydney or Melbourne, I’ve placed my fantasy street in the great Pacific city. Not long ago this was a dusty and decaying thoroughfare, not far from Central Station. Now, it’s a dynamic streetscape which houses half a dozen new, mainly medium-sized theatres. The stultifying old-lady matinee atmosphere of the subsidised Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Companies is gone, replaced with the liveliness of crowd-attracting commercial productions. Along Theatre Street are new plays, new and old musicals, new dance. Not far away, Off-Theatre Street productions take place in old factories, shops or converted terraces.

Look about you. The faces of the theatre buildings are interesting and appealing. These are not background for tourist selfies, like the Opera House and Melbourne Arts Centre, these are the homes of dynamic businesses that seek to draw in customers for brilliant entertainments.

Australian theatre has changed, for the better. Theatre-making in the huge English-speaking world now stands on three legs—London, New York and Sydney. Along Theatre Street you may catch a new Broadway success before London, a Shaftesbury Avenue hit before New York, and a remarkable Australian play before it lands in the US or UK. You may also enjoy a great new drama within months of its original production in Ghana, China, Venezuela, Germany or France. There may be a new production of an old musical just transferred in from the Châtelet in Paris via its Tokyo season or a wildly popular new Australian musical which is using a television talent program, perhaps turned into an Australian musical by a brilliant French-Algerian choreographer-director.

Sydney, not before time, is a theatre city—in fact, just in time, before a more dynamic India moved into the vacant spot. The change has occurred because of Theatre Street, and the new Australian National Theatre, both of which are in Sydney.

The National has replaced the dismal subsidised main stage theatres in Melbourne and Sydney. Following the wishes, so often and so strongly expressed by the theatre-makers themselves, for a more inclusive theatre environment, the National was built in the population centre of Western Sydney. Now, Eastern Sydney feminists and gays embrace the opportunity of meeting up close their more macho co-citizens and their wives. The old companies passed away to make place for the new. The STC has turned itself around, and without government subsidies, presents some quite credible community productions which they tour around the retirement village circuit. The MTC has returned home to Melbourne University and has an acting membership of international students for their, sadly irregular, Bollywood musicals performed in Lygon Street. As a peace offering to the southern city the federal government made the sensible decision to relocate both the National Library and National Archives to that city. The move delighted elderly genealogists wanting to use the collections.

The Theatre Street auditoriums were largely funded from selling empty air, the space above the theatres. Private enterprise planned and built Theatre Street. Above the auditoriums, on this now prestigious street, are offices and apartment buildings. All levels of government were involved in the planning and creation of the Street, but they did not dominate.

Yet, Theatre Street was built on co-operation and friction. Once the buildings were completed the theatres were sold or leased. Private developers did not have to be soft in the head about theatre—the real estate involved was tangible and designed to be profitable. It was not surprising that some famous London and New York companies invested and brought in successful management techniques, while local professionals adopted and developed new techniques for exploiting previously undeveloped marketing and management opportunities.

The major source of friction was the existence of the black-death theatre unions which no one ever, ever mentions. Old style commercial theatre was murdered by the unions and the Australia Council-funded theatre companies. The unions with their nineteenth-century policies of cronyism and protectionism existed into the twenty-first century because government-funded theatre companies could afford to meet their taxing financial demands. Though the modern theatres along Theatre Street required only small flexible workforces the archaic union practices would have destroyed any possibility of their free-market economic survival. Only by success in that battle was Theatre Street able to survive. The defeat of the frozen-in-time unions also reinvigorated the interstate and regional theatres from which the Street draws its brightest talents.

The facades of Theatre Street theatres are seductive invitations to enter. International and Australian stars are on these stages. To survive and succeed, the doors are open to more diverse audiences, and theatre practices have been adapted to simplify the process.

Getting in, and out, of auditoriums has been streamlined with better theatre design and more appropriate audience management. Ticket buying, online or at the theatre, is simple. There are no seat reservations, you pay for a ticket and find your own seat. Perhaps a couple of back rows are reserved for latecomers. None of these theatres are cursed with horseshoe seating arrangements. There are side and central aisles to make entering and leaving smoothly efficient. Seats are comfortable and there is room for people to find places without treading on feet.

The new theatrical timetable presents plays when audiences want to see them. Evening performances take place from Wednesday to Saturday and there are matinees on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Theatre buses from the suburbs, country and interstate roll in and out of the Street. Major hotels operate shuttle services while pedestrians have a short, safe walk to Central trains and buses and the light rail links to Circular Quay. Tourists from Asia, the Americas and Europe have added a visit to a performance in Theatre Street to their must-do list.

New playwrights, writing for our diverse population, are the backbone of Theatre Street. Previously Australian playwrights didn’t write for audiences but for the bureaucrats who funded them, and a play only ran for a set time. In Theatre Street a play runs for as long as audiences are willing to buy tickets. Theatre Street likes crowds and it needs them in order to survive. In doing so, largely by uncovering new writers, Theatre Street offers a showcase for Australian drama and has pushed successful authors and actors into the international world. A play that breaks records in Theatre Street can be marketed internationally.

In Theatre Street there is a small plaque inscribed with these words by David Mamet:

In our free society, the theatre is free: to please, to displease, to affront, to bore, to succeed, or to fail according to no rules or pattern whatsoever. It is the province not of ideologues (whether in the pay of the state and called commissars, or tax subsidized through the university system and called intellectuals) but of show folk trying to make a living.

The real world is nothing like my fantasy. In early October 2017 the biennial Theatre Forum was held in Adelaide. Welcome to Skid Row.

The generously funded event was called “About Time: Listen. Examine. Speak. Celebrate.” The 312 delegates, 101 with special dietary requirements, represented the Australian subsidised theatre establishment. Major performing companies, the Arts Council, the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Arts Centre were represented as well as “approved independents”.

This is how they saw themselves: thirty-one Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, forty-seven CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse), twenty-five disabled, three deaf but not disabled, five “them or they”, fifty-eight LGBTQI+, seventy regional, seventy-eight young and emerging. Dialogue from an unwritten play: “I’m not queer, I’m regional.”

The Australia Council funds segregation. The elitist participants at this elitist theatre conference couldn’t even talk freely to each other. At the same time as the impressive names and major institutions were drowning in welcome-to-countrys and acknowledgment of traditional owners the forum allowed a presentation by the National Blackfulla Performing Arts Alliance which was divisively presented as “a closed session for First Nations Peoples only”. Similarly a “Working Group on Women as Leaders in the Arts” indulged in gender cleansing: “This session is open only to women, including trans-women as well as non-binary people. We welcome discussions with male allies outside of this limited session time and space.” The limited session time was two hours, the space was the Lucky Dumpling VIP Tent.

The Theatre Forum resembled an expensive group outing for depressives: they all shared a hobby, theatre of a sort; they were being creative, without creativity; they were with friends in a sheltered environment; they were enjoying an outing to Adelaide. It is no surprise that taking a nap was included in activities between sessions.

Obviously the business of theatre is an unknown, un-subtitled foreign language. Representatives of our major theatre institutions lectured and were lectured on “The Queer Space on the Australian Stage”; “Who are the New Voices of Political Dis­sent Today?”; “Power Shifting Models”; “Sacrificing Your Career on the Altar of Activism?”; “Cultural Safety as a Key for Great Art”.

At a time when white men are being attacked and masculinity is derided, young males who reside in Skid Row are collaborationists. As in France in 1942 they choose to side with the stronger: their submission is close to sexual deviance. Luckily, colour-conforming excluded males would have found comfort in the closet-like safety of the “Autonomous Safe Place for First Nations and People of Colour Only”.

A keynote address by Teila Watson was published on the far-Left New Matilda website. Earlier in the year the “singer, poet and lyricist known as Ancestress” won $20,000 prize money in the Australia Council’s Dreaming Award, a category in the National Indigenous Arts Awards. Her words are an insight into our applauded high culture as it was in 2017:

I was asked to talk about our culture and the planet in the last two years. I wanted to take the opportunity to not only look at what the last two years have been like, but also how things got this way and where we go from here. I’ve realised in the last two years, how quickly two years can pass. How much can happen in two years and how important the next two years are. So I will start at the beginning, beyond 60,000 years ago, because that is still how many of us locate ourselves.

Watson’s generational concerns are with climate change, First Nations sovereignty and “pressing global issues”:

Furthermore it is safe to say, that prior to colonialism, every inch of this continent was regularly maintained sustainably, by First Nations groups, through similar relationships. But it wasn’t just our relationship with land, that was sustainable in this way. Our relationships required and thrived off social sustainability as well. Our boarders [sic] never changed, at times they may have been adjusted, because of the ice ages and such but there was never open warfare. The idea of stealing land, simply just didn’t exist. A lot can be learned in 60,000 years. Yet First Nations peoples continue to suffer from genocide in this continent, in the last two years, two hundred years and the last two weeks.

The seriousness of the issues she raised must have been a revelation to her audience:

In the last five years particularly, more and more people are becoming very seriously politically engaged. Right across the continent and the world. People are starting to wake up to what is happening socially and ecologically as well. Part of this, I think, is because its cool to be woke.

Theatre Street is a dream of a future new theatre; Skid Row is the nightmare reality of our present.