When Katharine Brisbane Went to the Theatre

Katharine Brisbane became the national drama critic for the Australian in 1967. For the next seven years she put it all together, writing the story of Australian theatre as a new chapter in our cultural history, as if it were important. Published on the leader pages of a young, lively newspaper, she told her readers what was happening on stages around the country and furnished them with names worth remembering. It was exciting stuff, regular reports for an episodic serial recounting the irresistible rise of a new generation of theatre-makers as they bludgeoned their way from university stages into the soon-to-be-funded mainstream. Dear God, some of them are still there.

Vietnam War protests were bringing a generational and political conflict onto the streets as a slightly older generation were staging and winning a culture war in the theatres. They needed, they deserved state funding, she said, and while describing the efforts of the Gorton government to set up an Australian Council for the Arts she told us that the soon-to-be-replaced Elizabethan Theatre Trust was a “rancid old bone” not worth saving.

Though Brisbane has stated that her best commentary was written for journals after she left the Australian it is the earlier pieces of news and reporting that are invaluable. A brief collection of these writings appeared in her 2005 collection Not Wrong—Just Different: Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Australian Theatre, which is still in print.

The year before she began flying between the states, George Johnston published The Australians. It was a long, lost time ago when Brisbane could write approvingly of a search for “a national style of theatre” knowing it was a sentiment her readers would approve of and endorse. That Australia died on April 30, 1975, when a war was lost and our government betrayed the very people who had trusted and worked for us in a not very distant land.

On the still youthful Left we saw the victory of the communists we had supported and turned our eyes away from the prison camps and massacres we helped bring into being. Feminism turned from an ideal of equality into a soured reality of special treatment and inequality. After this date we opened our country to immigrants, many of whom now loathe it, its history and our democratic institutions.

Brisbane wrote in a forgotten time, the dark ages of history before the present generation of theatre-makers was born. Her language was still a cultivated world away from the now everyday obscenity and dominating victim tones of the present. Midway on our journey into barbarism a statement by Kristin Williamson in 1992 preserves a moment of bitterness: “in Carlton only five playwrights were ever performed. They were called the New Wave and they were all men.” And one was her husband.

On one side of April 1975 George Johnston’s affectionate uniting book and on the other a present-day library shelf of publishing divisiveness from tyrannical minorities: Growing Up Asian in Australia/African in Australia/Aboriginal in Australia/Queer in Australia. The self-publicising introduction from one volume exhibits the monochrome left-wing nursery racism that also envenoms funded theatre writing: “African-diaspora Australians are settlers, albeit black-bodied, on black land—Aboriginal land—of which sovereignty has never been ceded.” The film It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain, directed by Bruce Beresford and Albie Thoms in 1963, had accurately foretold our present.

Brisbane’s very old articles are unsafe for the young. She used he as a collective pronoun instead of the dumb and ugly he/she which blots modern writing, and correctly used the word indigenous in its traditional Australian meaning, “to describe the work of emerging writers, to distinguish them from British or American work”.

Her years in the Australian record and mourn the physical destruction of the beautiful nineteenth-century theatres that gave city centres their coherence. By the time she was writing, their working-class audiences had adopted television. The intellectual class who fought to save them was the same one that had stolen their political party and who would never perform theatre that spoke to them as good-natured equals. In a play from an earlier decade, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, set in 1953, the working-class characters go out to see “shows”. A few years later the cashed-up cane-cutters would have splurged in buying a television set and the solid sitting-room furniture in the Carlton living room would have pointed towards the box in the corner. The campaigns to save the old theatres were supported by the young. If the lost buildings had been saved they would never have entered them, and the green-ban-protesting unions would have ensured they would never have been financially viable.

As Brisbane writes, the Opera House is finally finished, and she abuses its hideous drama theatre. New civic culture centres were being erected. Government money began its dull work of leftist homogenisation. Already pre-Whitlam she noted that “Australians tend to be too dependent on government aid.” Ironically Currency Press, the drama publishing house which she and her husband set up, has always been heavily dependent on arts-funding dollars. When the very new Queensland Theatre Company was founded she described a certain coolness towards it from locals: “This is partly because Brisbane [the city] has not before had a civic theatre company, and one suddenly imposed by law does not suddenly impose a taste for theatre upon its citizens.”

Brisbane set about her task seriously and with great affection for the theatre and promised “to recognise the thing attempted before labelling it good or bad”. Four months later the newspaper was sued for defamation by actor Peter O’Shaughnessy after she reviewed his Othello and spoke of “the waste and dishonesty of this production”. The case increased her readership.

She asked herself if a bad review could hinder a play and decided not and that “word of mouth is the only true arbiter”. At the same time, even as she led readers through a fascinating narrative of what was happening in the theatres her reviews may not have actually inspired readers to race along and buy a ticket. Young readers stored away the information about what was on and who the actors and directors were but didn’t actually head off to see for themselves. There were other more exciting entertainments. In Carlton it was more fun to go to a terrible Soviet movie at the fleapit and then on to Genevieve’s for a cappuccino and spaghetti bolognaise than wander down to La Mama. We were a generation who got our theatre at the movies.  The Russell Street Theatre may have been a temple but the exterior was dull and dusty, and buying expensive tickets in advance was less interesting than impulsively deciding to go to a new picture or finding an interesting foreign film. In Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Olive reminded Roo that to see the “shows”, “you’ve got to book ahead, y’know, you want decent seats”. It was all a bit too much like the world of the old. When there were protests over theatre censorship or demolishing a theatre the young crowds arrived but they didn’t stick around. If attracted to theatre, then as now, they were probably more interested in making it than sitting through it.

Good plays and bad plays were written and staged and classic plays were vandalised. We are still coping with the unintended results of the time. The first Lonely Planet guide was published in 1973, the same year Penguin republished a book first called simply Plays in 1970 and which now became Four Australian Plays. For those who had not seen them onstage but had noted the praise, reading them was something of a shock; they were as dusty as a Carlton street in midsummer. Lonely Planet made South-East Asia enticing; these plays kept us at the movies.

The New Wave may have been a flurry in our intellectual puddle but there was still some popular theatre about which caught Brisbane’s attention:

one corner of the industry stands inviolate from the quarrels of art and cultural responsibility and has a truly indigenous gilt-edged formula for popular theatrical success, and that is the music-hall restaurants … The people behind them are theatrical dropouts who have found making money and making people enjoy themselves more attractive than art.

The seasons in the music halls, as Brisbane explained, “run from six months to a year”. The first music hall restaurant opened in Sydney’s Neutral Bay in 1960:

At first this was determinedly disowned by the greater part of the legitimate theatre … the music hall was beginning to develop a style which was more comfortable to audiences than the more refined form other theatres were offering. Gradually and inevitably this style has begun to creep into the serious theatre.

Which explains, but does not excuse, Bell Shakespeare.

The music halls could possibly have created an audience for popular Australian plays. Brisbane lists Stanley Walsh among a list of well-known playwrights. With long runs at the Sydney Music Hall he was perhaps the most successful playwright of the period. After the hall closed he became a television producer, most notably of Neighbours, and died in 2004. Michael Boddy, co-author of The Legend of King O’Malley with Bob Ellis, also wrote several music hall plays—serious melodramas. The taste that was being catered to and created could, in the best of all possible worlds, have developed into a strong commercial theatre. But it didn’t. Successes of the period with wide appeal like The Legend of King O’Malley and Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola were not built upon.

Overseas travel added a sophisticated Qantas dimension to Brisbane’s articles. The year following the student protests of May 1968 Brisbane was in France and went to a student revue called I Don’t Want to Die an Idiot by “the revolution’s cartoonist” Georges Wolinski. In 2015 it was restaged in his honour after he was murdered by Islamists in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The killings finally marked the end of 1968.

Parisian boulevard theatre held little interest and Brisbane trod the conventional highbrow path. French theatre, she decided, was “patently in a bad way”. It recovered. Several weeks ago Figaro Magazine offered twelve good reasons for going to the theatre and suggested twelve plays, from among many more, with twelve actors, largely unknown, who were nightly filling twelve Paris theatres. Chez nous the Sydney Theatre Company is doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, again.

In England, valiantly rediscovering Brecht, and despite the images of Göring, Goebbels and von Hindenburg painted on the players’ faces, and despite the staged terror, and despite the Nazi salutes, she was sceptical when, “in the comfortable chaos of Labour London”, an actor came forward at the play’s conclusion to warn the audience, “It has happened before and it can happen again.” On then to Germany for another performance of the same play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, this time by East Berlin’s famous Berliner Ensemble. Twenty-four years after the defeat of fascism and having seen the desolation of the Eastern Zone which resembled the onstage setting of 1930s Chicago, the play’s warning of the revival of Nazism seemed “frighteningly real”. That the marvellous actors on stage were surely informing on each other to the Stasi wasn’t part of the play or the review.

If ever an old play text did call for updating it is Brecht’s Arturo Ui. Imagine a production where the gangsters’ Chicago is replaced by the thuggish Left playground of Sydney University. Drop the elderly Nazi face-painting exercise and instead terrify audiences with oversized fright masks of Waleed Aly, Bob Brown and Yassmin Abdel-Magied. At the ending a leering actor should wander to the footlights and utter not a warning but a boast, “Suckers, it has happened already.”

Brisbane also made a pilgrimage to Hellebaek, outside Copenhagen, to visit Jørn Utzon—“the exiled architect of the Sydney Opera House”.

Back home and a January 1971 production of As You Like It, directed by Jim Sharman, was an un-liked shambles. Brisbane struck back with accuracy at “the yawning gap that lies between our theatre directors and the library of experience in their professional heritage”. All these years later a further observation from her describes our present theatrical malaise: “The worst aspect of the damage to Shakespeare’s play is that the director does not seem to know what he has discarded.”

The difference between then and now is that modern audiences also don’t know what has been discarded and what has been added. What seemed youthful experimentation has aged into Alzheimer productions of the classics which have lost all sense and any sensibility. “To create a new state of mind out of an old play is a valuable thing to do, even an essential, but it must bear some relation to what the author has written.” Those sensible words are counter-revolutionary.

She went a second time to see Sharman’s production: “And once I overcame familiarity with the play and the fact that almost no one on stage understood what they were saying, the production had a great conviction and certainly a great life of its own.” In a note, written in 2005, she added a further comment:

it still causes anguish today—perhaps even more so—when a director, in pursuit of a personal “vision”, ignores or discards without reference the theatre history and social history that went into the making of that work. So often the mind of the author is more interesting than that of the interpreter.

In 2010 I noted that when Barrie Kosky did Euripides his Cassandra “spoke gibberish then mimed an encounter with an invisible Greek penis which swam upwards from her crotch to her mouth and then she ate it—still miming of course”. At that performance a woman and her daughter walked out. At the Australian, critic John McCallum loved the production and hated the audience: “I know our theatres need to pay attention to the box office, but really, some people are simply dreadful.” Mine was the only negative review.

Before the critics joined the barbarians, there was Katharine Brisbane:

Richard II at the Opera House: “We need to recognise that this is a great play breeding great thought, with great lines that have been spoken by great actors.”

The Tempest for school children: “Prospero for much of the time seemed too much under the influence of his magic mushroom to dictate the action.”

Henry IV (Part I) at the Octagon in Perth, “the most exciting new theatre building in Australia”, with Frank Thring as Falstaff:

For me the one great moment of the evening was when he drew his dagger upon the dead but still-heaving body of Hotspur. A section of the audience drew its breath, and one cried out involuntarily, “Oh no, don’t do that”. Mr Thring acknowledged the shouts of laughter with a gesture of gratitude and for a moment there was a friendly understanding of what the business of playing Shakespeare was all about.

And for a moment Australia had a friendly critic who knew what civilised theatre was all about.

Not Wrong—Just Different: Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Australian Theatreby Katharine Brisbane
Currency Press, 2005, 384 pages, $24.99