General articles
Cheryl Threadgold
Dr Cheryl Threadgold OAM
Since 2005 Cheryl has been the honorary theatre writer/reviewer/review coordinator for the 'Melbourne Observer' newspaper, and presented the non-professional theatre report on 3AW for six and a half years. She convenes the Bayside U3A Writers Group, and casts and directs the writers' radio plays for broadcast on 88.3 Southern FM.
Personal involvement in amateur theatre commenced in1958 in a play titled 'A Must for Dolly' (a sequel to 'Man and Superman' by George Bernard Shaw) written and directed by J. Beresford Fowler at the Arrow Theatre, Middle Park.
After working in ABC Television behind the scenes for 29 years, more recent amateur theatrical activities include performing, directing, choreographing, writing full-length productions and short plays, publicity, adjudicating, committee and front-of-house.
A love of amateur theatre inspired Cheryl to undertake a PhD research project with Swinburne University of Technology to explore the history and culture of the theatrical arts sector in Victoria. Her self-published book In the Name of Theatre: the history, culture and voices of amateur theatre in Victoria is based on the award-winning thesis and won the 2020 Collaborative Victorian Community History Award.
Friday, 09 December 2022
Barry Dickins
Barry Dickins shares almost fifty years of his life as a playwright and author in conversation with Dr Cheryl Threadgold.
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Thursday, 01 September 2022
‘Australia’s Stratford-on-Murray’: Swan Hill National Theatre and the Shakespeare Festivals
In 1947, under the auspices of Marjorie McLeod the Swan Hill Branch of the National Theatre Movement held the first of their annual Shakespeare Festivals. CHERYL THREADGOLD recounts the story of a remarkable woman who brought the Bard to the bush.
Every autumn for almost thirty years, the Victorian town of Swan Hill became famously known as ‘Australia’s Stratford-on-Murray’ when the Swan Hill Branch of the National Theatre Movement brought ‘the Bard’ to regional Victoria. Swan Hill’s annual Shakespeare Festivals, believed to be the largest Shakespeare Festival in the southern hemisphere, combined street processions with splendidly decorated floats, fairs, entertainment, debates, films and Shakespearian performances. Colourful Arts Balls resembling those held by Melbourne’s National Theatre soon also joined the event line-up. From a fledgling start of presenting one Shakespeare play in 1947, confidence and talents developed, more townsfolk became involved, and the annual Shakespeare Festival grew into a five-day event attracting national interest. There were attendances from State Governors, Vice-Regal patronage, interstate visitors, broadcasts by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, visits from theatrical and academic notables, and press coverage from big-city journalists who visited Swan Hill and wrote glowing stories for their newspapers and magazines.
Marjorie McLeod, c.1953. Founder of the Swan Hill Branch of the National Theatre Movement. Photo by Mario Zaetta.
Image courtesy of David Quayle, Swan Hill Theatre Group
Shakespeare Festival in Riverside Park, Swan Hill, c. late 1940s-early 1950s. Photo by Mario Zaetta.
Image courtesy of Swan Hill Theatre Group Records
In April 1951, Norman Dunbar from Melbourne’s Argus newspaper recognised the cultural benefits of the Swan Hill Shakespeare Festivals in his article titled ‘William Shakespeare of Swan Hill’: “The bearded Bard of Avon is being enshrined in the Murray River town with the same pomp and extravagance as he has in his home town of Stratford, the mecca of the English-speaking world. Instead of being an excuse for vivid costuming and violent enunciation by an amateur company, Shakespeare in Swan Hill is the cause of a nearly 100 per cent community effort … I may as well be completely gauche and say it is the healthiest sign of cultural development I have seen in any country town in this state.”
Two years later, in a 1953 article for the Department of Interior titled ‘Shakespeare is Enshrined on Australia’s Murray River’, John Loughlin described Swan Hill as ‘a bustling little town in Australia’s Murray River Valley’. He writes of the town ‘celebrating the birthday of Will Shakespeare this year with a whole-hearted fervour usually evoked by rodeos, agricultural fairs and football premierships. They opened their five-day Shakespeare Festival with Elizabethan pageantry. They carried it along with a dizzy whirl of parties, entertainments, plays and films. They brought it to an impressive conclusion by packing a fifth of the population of 5,000 into the town hall to watch a praiseworthy performance of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night’.
According to Loughlin, one critic described the Twelfth Night performance presented by the Swan Hill National Theatre as a ‘theatrical rarity’. Identical twins Marjorie and Josephine Lockhart, the young daughters of a local farmer, were especially praised for their portrayals of the twins Sebastian and Viola. ‘Altogether it was a brilliantly-staged affair, conducted in a warm friendly atmosphere with gusto and skilled direction.’
The initiative taken to form the Swan Hill Branch of the National Theatre Movement, the concept of the Shakespeare Festival, and the productions, organisation and dramatic coaching of Swan Hill locals are all thanks to former Melbourne resident Marjorie McLeod. Marjorie brought her professional theatre skills to Swan Hill and developed an unshakeable faith in theatre for the community in her new home town.
In 1940, Marjorie McLeod was a well-established actor, award-winning playwright and President of the Dramatists Club, Melbourne. On three occasions she had won the Australian Literature Society’s award for the best one-act play: A Shillingsworth (1931), Moonshine (1932) and Travail (1934). Her four-act drama Within These Walls, a period piece dealing with the early colony of Victoria, premiered at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre in 1936. In the same year, Marjorie and fellow playwright John Ormiston Reid won a monetary prize offered by the Melbourne Presbyterian Church to write and produce a celebratory centenary pageant. Presented in the King’s Theatre, the grand pageant featured young people from Melbourne Presbyterian Church groups re-enacting events representing one hundred years in the life of the church.
Married in 1913, and mother to a daughter and son, Marjorie also worked for the Australian Broadcasting Commission for six years as an actor and playwright, taught voice production and dramatic art at two public schools, and conducted Shakespeare classes at the National Theatre, Melbourne, established in 1935 by her friend and associate, Gertrude Johnson.
Marjorie’s lifestyle would change after the outbreak of World War II, when her husband Norman found employment in the Victorian town of Swan Hill, situated 338 kilometres north west of Melbourne. Marjorie was familiar with country life, having been born in Dimboola in Victoria’s Western District on 27 February 1893 to Frederick and Agnes Young, and educated at Clarendon Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Ballarat. Her concern was lack of opportunity to pursue her passion for theatre. Marjorie could never have envisaged then that in 1977 she would be honoured with the British Empire Medal (BEM) for her dedicated work for theatre and the people of Swan Hill.
On arrival in Swan Hill and attending the John Knox Presbyterian Church, Marjorie was asked to form an amateur dramatic group for young people in the congregation. In June 1943, The John Knox Players’ first production, The Six Miss Seymours (by Isabel Handley) was presented in the Swan Hill Memorial Hall. Many Swan Hill men were absent serving with the forces and this play conveniently required eight females and just one male. Ticket sales raised funds for local radio station 3SH Women’s Club Merchant Navy Appeal, Soldiers’ Parcels and POW Funds.
Further plays included the comedy The Family Upstairs (by Harry Delf) in 1944, The Whole Town’s Talking (by Anita Loos and John Emerson) in 1945 and Pandora’s Box in 1946, all directed by Marjorie McLeod. Eventually a new independent group called The Barnstormers was formed under the direction of Marjorie McLeod, fundraising for charities and patriotic causes. Their first production in late 1946 was A Night of One Act Plays and Music.
After peace was declared and the Swan Hill soldiers returned home from the war, the men found many of their lady friends enjoyed acting with the drama group. It made sense to join them, and now with more male members it became easier to cast plays, and the drama group became a social club for interested young people.
Returned serviceman and former Mayor of Swan Hill, Duncan Douglas, had become interested in play readings and amateur theatre while serving in the Air Force in Canada. He called a public meeting of citizens to discuss forming a theatre group to present plays in the Swan Hill Town Hall. After an enthusiastic public response, Douglas was elected President and Marjorie McLeod was to be known as the Founder/Director/Producer.
Swan Hill Town Hall, c.1945. Murray Views No.2.
State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Marjorie suggested the group align with the Australian National Theatre movement in Melbourne with which she was already connected, so the Swan Hill National Theatre formed in 1947. In April 1947, The Barnstormers’ production of The Rising Generation (by Wyn Weaver & Laura Leycester) fundraised for the Swan Hill Hospital and also the National Theatre.
The Swan Hill National Theatre group planned to entertain audiences with plays, but Marjorie McLeod envisaged more. She loved Shakespeare, had acted in many Shakespearian plays in Melbourne, and recognised more prestige for the group if they attempted productions by ‘the Bard’. School teachers were divided between wanting to help, or being wary of Marjorie’s temerity. Luckily, some ‘handsome young stripling’ lads, newly returned home from boarding schools in Geelong and Melbourne, had been introduced to Shakespeare’s plays and agreed to try acting. In August 1947, the most experienced actors presented scenes and songs from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Marjorie recalls the audience being ‘tolerant’ and the actors enjoyed the performance. Manager of radio station 3SH, Gordon Lewis, read continuity linking the scenes and farmers loaned their lorries. These were transformed into floats and decorated by Swan Hill shop proprietors for a street procession, described by Marjory as ‘itself rather a novelty for the town’. Before long, almost the whole town would become involved and more than twenty floats, decorated according to the annual theme chosen by Marjorie, would feature in the processions.
Miss Gertrude Johnson OBE, founder of the Australian National Theatre in Melbourne with which the Swan Hill group was now affiliated, launched the first official Swan Hill Shakespeare Festival in May 1949. The smartly uniformed Swan Hill brass band led the procession of floats into Riverside Park, where the community enjoyed entertainments such as junior plays, Peter Leonard’s puppet shows for the children and maypole dancing. In 1950, the Shakespeare Festivals were officially recognised by the Swan Hill Council, and Swan Hill’s business community strongly supported the Shakespeare Festivals for their local economic benefits through tourism.
On one occasion, a float merged Shakespeare with Australiana to represent the theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a Fairy Queen and Puck in a woodland setting, and children dressed as fairies using a mass of eucalyptus branches for the woodland bower. Henry VIII was the theme for another year and six beautiful young women in period costume surrounded King Henry VIII on the float. For another festival, local high school students constructed a scale model of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the right size to be carried on a lorry. One year, the festival theme was ‘The Swan of Avon’ and a large cooperative Swan Hill store built a great white swan over a small motor car. The driver had trouble steering while peering through the small window and ran into the town clock, causing even more excitement.
Rehearsals in the early days were held in the McLeod’s sitting room in Pritchard Street. Marjorie’s non-theatrical husband Norman tolerated the enthusiastic performers rehearsing most evenings and Sunday afternoons inside their home or on the lawn. However, he is said to have ‘threatened revolt’ when three packing boxes, each three foot high, placed end to end and draped in black for Juliet’s bier and other rehearsal purposes, were positioned for weeks in the centre of the McLeod sitting room. Early one morning, Norman encountered the dark mass on his way to the kitchen to light the fire. Marjorie and her actors persuaded him of the importance to leave the bier in position for rehearsals until being moved to the town hall stage. After the performance, the bier returned to Pritchard Street, and was reportedly chopped up with gusto in about six minutes … by Norman McLeod. Eventually the group rented a small house in Rutherford Street for rehearsals, set building and committee meetings.
Bet Stephen (Mrs. Lamb) and Bill Norton (Mr. Lamb) in Charles & Mary, 1950. Photo by Mario Zaetta.
Image courtesy of Swan Hill Theatre Group Records
Swan Hill Shakespeare Festival, 1959. The setting for this procession of Elizabethan pageantry is the river gums of Swan Hill on the Murray River. Photo by Neil Murray.
National Archives of Australia, A1200, L30143, Item ID 11751802
As well as Shakespeare, the Swan Hill Branch of the National Theatre Movement presented plays under Marjorie McLeod’s direction. The first, The New Dress (Charmeuse) by E. Temple Thurston, was presented in August 1948. This production was then taken to Melbourne for the Annual Drama Festival for branches of the National Theatre Movement, held in Eastern Hill, opposite St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Swan Hill team returned home with the cup for Best Play and Best Acting Award. This success was repeated in 1950 when they took Charles and Mary by Joan Temple to Melbourne, and in 1955, the Swan Hill group travelled to the Frankston Mechanics’ Hall to perform The Cloak by Clifford Bax in the Victorian Drama League’s fourth One-Act Play Festival.
Three of Marjorie McLeod’s original plays were also presented by the group at various times: Within These Walls, Mine a Sad One, about explorer Robert O’Hara Burke, and Horizons which tells of the assimilation and integration of the first immigrants in the irrigation areas around the Murray River in 1952. Joan Pullen writes in Marjorie’s book All the World’s a Stage: ‘Marjorie all the time guided and advised and gave us something to do. For young people growing up in a country town, the National Theatre group was of vital importance. It gave us a sense of community, achievement and fellowship. It was a training ground for life.’
Public accommodation was limited in the 1950s and Swan Hill families generously opened their homes, farms and stations to host visitors from Melbourne and interstate. In November 1953, a Council of Adult Education documentary film The Wise Owl of Russell Street, based on the play Horizons written by Marjorie McLeod, was produced in Swan Hill, directed by Colin Dean of the Department of the Interior. The film was completed before the Royal Tour and screened in Australian cinemas before being sent abroad. Dignitaries who travelled to Swan Hill for the festivals included the Governor of Victoria, Sir Dallas Brooks, who opened the 1955 Swan Hill Shakespeare Festival from the town hall, and returned to attend the festival in 1958.
John Sumner of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust opened the festival in 1958 from the town hall stage before the production of Much Ado About Nothing, and joined the young actors afterwards for refreshments while offering advice and answering questions. Another Governor of Victoria, Sir Rohan Delacombe, opened the Shakespeare Festival in 1965 and in 1972, Sir Edmund Herring, Governor of Victoria, became patron of Swan Hill. In 1973 when the Premier of Victoria, the Honourable Rupert Hamer opened the twenty-sixth Swan Hill Shakespeare Festival, he asked Marjorie why she had chosen Romeo and Juliet for the first full-length festival play. Marjorie explained she felt that almost every young woman believed in her heart she was a Juliet, and her experience with students had taught her that every young man enjoys playing with swords!
Bet Stephen (Juliet) and Brett Freeman (Romeo) in Romeo and Juliet, 1951. Photo by Mario Zaetta.
Image courtesy of Swan Hill Theatre Group Records
It was big morale boost for the actors and town of Swan Hill when Frank Clewlow, Director of Drama at the Australian Broadcasting Commission, visited one of the early Swan Hill Shakespeare Festivals. He was so impressed with the community effort, the colourful floats in the street procession and the performance of the play As You Like It, he arranged for a landline direct from Swan Hill to the ABC and used it to broadcast a play presented by Swan Hill National Theatre actors, to be heard by all ABC listeners.
The new Supervisor of Drama and Features, Henry Cuthbertson, continued the ABC’s interest in the Swan Hill National Theatre, first visiting the town to include the group’s actors in the ABC’s plan for regional drama. He had heard of the high reputation of the Swan Hill National Theatre’s Shakespeare Festivals from his home town in Perth. After auditions, a production was recorded and broadcast on the ABC. Henry Cuthbertson opened several of the festivals, bringing professional Melbourne actors with him to present some Shakespearean scenes which were also broadcast on the ABC. These actors included Wyn Roberts and Patricia Kennedy presenting scenes from Macbeth (1961), Beverley Dunn, Sydney Conabere and Douglas Kelly, who presented scenes from Othello, and Frederick Parslow featured in scenes from Julius Caesar in 1965.
Supporters who attended the Shakespeare Festivals from the education and arts sectors included theatrical entrepreneur Garnet Carroll and his wife Kitty, Colin Badger (Director of the CAE), Major General Ramsey OBE (then Director of Education), artist Ola Cohn, theatre director Wal Cherry, Australian Children’s Theatre producers Joan and Betty Raynor, Dr. Brian Cox (President of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society), Winifred Moverley, Professor David Bradley (Monash University) and drama teacher, Dulcie Bland.
Swan Hill Shakespeare Festival Parade, 1955. Gertrude Johnson (left), Dorothy Douglas, Judy Whitlock, Rod Curnow, Jack Swinton, Nancy Cato (front right), Mrs. Larmour, Les Larmour, Peter Hourigan, Marjorie McLeod. Photo by Mario Zaetta.
Image courtesy of Swan Hill Theatre Group Records
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1955. Bet Jenvey (Helena) with Brett Freeman and Jack Swinton. Photo by Mario Zaetta.
Image courtesy of Swan Hill Theatre Group Records
Actors in the Shakespeare Festival who went on to perform professionally included children’s television show presenter Nancy Cato, theatre actor Gordon Goulding, and Don Taylor who enjoyed a career in radio. Zena Cohn had been a a professional songwriter in London before marrying Swan Hill businessman John Cohn. A gifted pianist, Zena enriched each production of Shakespeare’s plays with incidental music and accompaniments to his songs.
Dedicated company member Betty (Stephen) Jenvey, who portrayed Juliet in the very first Shakespeare Festival, has worked tirelessly for her theatre company in various areas for seventy-five years. Now in her ninety-fifth year, Bet’s roles have included actor from 1943–1970, company secretary, treasurer, committee, board of directors, producer, front of house, ticket sales, costume coordinator, mentor, and costume hirer. Photographer Mario Zaetta’s dedicated work over many years resulted in invaluable, wonderful images to publicise the Shakespeare Festivals.
Marjorie McLeod introduced Swan Hill residents of all ages to the performing arts. The town became famous for its thirty annual Shakespeare Festivals, the first of their kind in Australia, each involving a wonderful collaboration between Swan Hill community organisations, businesses, schools and individuals.
Long-term Swan Hill Theatre Group member, David Quayle
Image courtesy of David Quayle
Swan Hill Memorial Theatre, 47 McCrae Street, Swan Hill. Photo by David Quayle.
When future Mayor of Swan Hill, Councillor and Civil Celebrant David Quayle arrived in Swan Hill in 1974, another theatre company, the Musical Comedy Society, was rehearsing Showboat. Its members also belonged to the National Theatre group, but neither company was well off financially. David, who also performed in the Swan Hill National Theatre’s 1975 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, suggested merging the two groups to become known as the Swan Hill Theatre Company.
During his 47 years of honorary involvement in Committee/Board membership with the Swan Hill Theatre Group, David was particularly keen for the company to reach out to young people. Today, just as in the 1940s, the Swan Hill Theatre Group offers a vital activity for many of the town’s young people, who look forward each year to being part of the shows.
The company now owns the well-appointed Memorial Theatre at 47 McCrae Street, Swan Hill, having purchased it from the Returned Services League in 1981 when they moved premises. At this time, the company name changed to Swan Hill Theatre Group Co-operative Limited. Swan Hill was also fortunate in 1985 when theatre professional Ron Field retired to live in the town and was responsible for thirty-one musical and non-musical productions presented over twenty-three years.
The Memorial Hall’s centenary was celebrated in July 2022 with a sell-out one-night nostalgic concert titled ‘Raising the curtain on 100 years of the Memorial Hall’.
Marjorie McLeod returned to Melbourne in 1965, continuing to take a keen interest in the theatre company’s activities. School teacher and actor Bill Norton took over directing the Shakespeare Festivals. Marjorie passed away in 1988, aged ninety-five. In the Epilogue of All the World’s a Stage, Pat Fraser writes that Marjorie’s framed portrait takes pride of place above the mantelpiece in the Swan Hill Theatre Group members’ room.
‘I like to think that she is still watching over us,’ says Pat, ‘and she will be proud of the generations who have graced the boards since 1965 and of those still to come, for she has left a great love behind her in Swan Hill.
‘To quote her beloved Bard: “Love’s gentle spring doth ever fresh remain” (Venus and Adonis).’
Thanks to
Phyl Braybrook
Betty Jenvey
David Quayle
Swan Hill Theatre Group
References
Marjorie McLeod, All the World’s a Stage, Reflections on The Swan Hill National Theatre, Research/Editors Bet Jenvey and Joan Pullen, Barn Publishing, Mt. Eliza, 1980
Swan Hill Guardian, ‘Swan Hill Theatre Wins in Melbourne—Congratulations Mrs. McLeod’, 31 August 1948. Article provided courtesy of David Quayle.
Swan Hill Theatre Group 2013, Swan Hill Theatre Group Reunion 1941–2013
Trove, ‘Swan Hill in films’, The Argus (Melbourne), 20 November 1953, p.7, National Library of Australia, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/23313279 (accessed 11 August 2022)
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Wednesday, 01 June 2022
Australia in 50 Plays: Book Review
BOOK REVIEW: Australia in 50 Plays by Julian Meyrick, Currency Press, 2022
Any notion that Julian Meyrick’s splendid book Australia in 50 Plays is a history of Australian drama is swiftly dispelled by Meyrick in his Introduction: ‘it is about the history of the nation seen through the lens of some of its plays’.
Accordingly, fifty plays written and staged since Federation have been chosen from the Australian drama repertoire after an intense selection process. To ensure varied social, political and cultural representation from an assembled long list of one hundred and twenty plays, Meyrick applied a ‘tri-dimensional professional/cultural/political rubric’. Criteria for assessing the final shortlisted plays included suitability for their future repetition and interpretation and gender balance. There are no one-off dramatic events, few adaptations, and no plays that Meyrick has personally developed or directed.
Meyrick’s impressively broad qualifications in politics, economics, research and the performing arts, his obvious passion for theatre and conversational style writing voice, combine to make an enjoyable, informative, thought-provoking read. A reflection on Australia’s early performance history includes First Nations People and acknowledgement of the later ‘extraordinary flowering of Indigenous drama in Australia’ over the past twenty-five years.
Rather than categorize the selected plays into their respective genres, Meyrick’s method is to read different plays into each other and into those of earlier periods. He cleverly entwines fifty unique Australian plays written over the past one hundred and twenty years, all varying in content, era-authentic settings and voices, with an observational, often entertaining, chronological overview of the history, politics, culture and economics of Australia’s development as a nation.
The diverse literary smorgasbord of selected Australian plays commences with the early 20th century comedies On Our Selection by Steele Rudd and Louis Esson’s The Time is Ripe. Both plays premiered in 1912, and their contrasting styles, settings and social class of characters reveal insight into Australian rural working class and city upper class life at the time. To avoid giving too much away, but also to whet readerly appetites, this review will mention just a few more of the fifty plays Meyrick uses as a mode of enquiry into collective aspects of Australian life: Brumby Innes (1929), Ned Kelly (1944), The One Day of the Year (1960), Diving For Pearls (1990) and Life After George (2000).
In the final chapter, Meyrick acknowledges the large body of works in Australian drama between 2006 and 2020, and for this period has chosen eight plays with varied authors. Similar to the selected early 20th century plays, the two most recent works reveal a balanced insight into contemporary Australian life, with their contrasting styles, setting and culture. There is Counting and Cracking (2019) the four-generational Australian family story about a Sri Lankan Tamil immigrant family by S. Shakthidharan with Eamon Flack, and Triple X (2020) written by transwoman playwright Glace Chase, which tells of a love story between a New York investment banker and a transgender performance artiste.
If Australia’s development as a nation since Federation has been incremental, so has the publication of books seriously documenting Australian writers and their plays. Leslie Rees writes of the first known attempt to compile a list of local playwrights by W.H. Waters in Harry Emmet’s Theatrical Holiday Book. Published in Melbourne in 1885, sixty-two authors were included, averaging two or three titles apiece, covering a range of twenty years. A London publication, The Dramatic Year Book of 1892, featured a large Australian section, with the anonymous correspondent declaring: ‘There is perhaps no country in the world, where the drama had made such rapid strides and has attained such high standard in so short a period as Australasia.’
Since Federation, significant reference publications documenting Australian drama include Leslie Rees’ two-volume work The History of Australian Drama (1973 and 1978), in which the plays have been selected for their contribution culturally and socially to ‘the emergence of an Australian Idea.’ Companion to Theatre in Australia (1995) edited by Philip Parsons with Victoria Chance, presents a comprehensive reference book presented in an encyclopaedic format, covering theatre in Australia in all its forms since 1788.
In the 21st century, Julian Meyrick brings a new perspective to the history of Australian drama, having discovered after many years of research that Australian theatre history is situated in ‘a broader cultural narrative’. This led to the investigation of other art forms and influences. There is, however, a notable absence of reference to ‘amateur’ theatre in the book. This is surprising, because the early 20th century amateur actor contributed to Australian drama by performing in locally written plays rejected by commercial theatre. Since the 1850s, it is historically documented that hundreds of amateur theatre companies have contributed to their communities by presenting theatre in regional and urban Australia, including donating box-office takings to patriotic causes during two world wars. The terms ‘Repertory’, ‘non-commercial’, ‘Little’, ‘pro-am’ and ‘alternative’ theatre are used in the book to describe early Australian theatre, as well as professional. Perhaps the business-like term ‘non-commercial’ refers to the amateur theatrical arts sector. On the other hand, maybe the term ‘amateur’, meaning ‘for love’ and historically accurate, still needs to overcome a ‘cultural cringe’.
The first two selected plays in the book were written and staged during a time of hope and optimism for most Australians, when uniting the six states strengthened a sense of nationhood. The final two plays emerged at a time when Australian theatre mostly stopped in the 2020-2022 global pandemic. The book itself was admirably conceived, researched, drafted and published during the same pandemic, and coincides with the 50th anniversary of Australian publisher Currency Press.
Congratulations to Julian Meyrick on contributing a new, historically valuable Australian theatre reference book. Australia in 50 Plays also achieves Meyrick’s aim to ‘bring Australian drama into proper consideration of questions concerning the life of the nation. Seeing drama as one of the sinews of public debate on significant issues facing Australia.’
In Meyrick’s words: ‘To study the plays of the nation is to study the nation’.
References
Julian Meyrick, Australia in 50 Plays, Currency Press, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2022
Leslie Rees, The Making of Australian Drama, A History of Australian Drama: Vol. 1 from the 1830s to the late 1960s, Angus & Robertson, Australia, 1973
Leslie Rees, Australian Drama in the 1970s, A History of Australian Drama Vol. II: A Historical and Critical Survey, Angus & Robertson, 1978
Philip Parsons, General Editor with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia, Currency Press, Australia, 1995
Cheryl Threadgold, In the Name of Theatre: the history, culture and voices of amateur theatre in Victoria, Published by Cheryl Threadgold, Australia, 2020
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Tuesday, 01 March 2022
Behind the Plaque: The Arrow Theatre, Middle Park
with Diana Phoenix
The building in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Middle Park that once housed the Arrow Theatre still stands, and as CHERYL THREADGOLD and DIANA PHOENIX discover, it was a site of rich cultural activity for over sixty years.
The multi-purpose brick building erected in 1907 on a vacant allotment at 1-3 Armstrong Street was a welcome addition to the Middle Park shopping and entertainment precinct. Situated next to the hotel and opposite the railway station, the building accommodated two shops facing the street and a public hall at the rear, accessed via a narrow passage. Rates records show that the property was number 1-3 Armstrong Street, with the brick hall situated at number one. Fast forward more than a century later and the first owners, real estate agents Watts and Chandler, could never have imagined their building is now regarded as one of Melbourne’s theatrically iconic sites, best known as Frank Thring’s Arrow Theatre.
The new Middle Park building was first used as a post-office, savings bank, Masonic Lodge and a public hall, which Rosemary Goad, Diana Phoenix and Kay Rowan describe as soon becoming ‘the centre of Middle Park’s entertainment’. Other early tenants at 1-3 Armstrong Street included operators of a luncheon room, billiard saloon, printing business, milliner, blouse manufacturer, hairdresser and solicitors.
Between 1909 and 1943, ‘The Hall’ housed a cinema, initially presenting biograph entertainment screened by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, using projectors illuminated by hand-cranked oxyhydrogen gas or limelight, until the installation of electricity in 1910.
Middle Park Picture Theatre c. 1920s. Rose Stereograph Company, State Library Victoria,
P. 3455. ID: 1767922.
By 1918, records show Alfred King Smith, a printer, was lessee of the brick hall and in 1920 is described as the cinema’s first owner/operator. Smith used two projectors which were at first hand-cranked, but later motor driven. His entire family was involved in the cinema business, with wife Constance the ticket-seller and usher, son Frederick the assistant projectionist and daughters Winifred and Constance were pianist and violinist. Novelty nights were popular, comprising dance and fancy dress nights. Alfred King Smith, sold the business in 1923 after patrons sought the more lavish picture palaces. New owners Basil and Jack Flae introduced sound and ‘talkie’ movies, renovated the cinema to accommodate 340 people and renamed the premises the Middle Park Picture Theatre.
The Middle Park cinema had several owners and admirably survived the Great Depression, but audience sizes diminished during World War Two, partly due to competition from newly opened nearby cinemas such as the Kinema and Park Picture Theatre in Albert Park and others in Port Melbourne. Screenings were reduced to Saturday nights only by 1943, but the final straw for the cinema operators occurred in April that year when a newly delivered film left on a seat was deliberately set alight. Damage was minimal with 4,000 feet of film destroyed and some seats ruined, but the Middle Park Picture Theatre closed after 34 years.
The hall was used intermittently for community singing before being leased in 1945 by Melbourne actress/drama teacher Lorna Forbes and amateur theatre producer/engineer Sydney Turnbull to become the Melbourne Repertory Theatre. They extensively renovated the venue, enlarging the stage and fitting 210 upholstered tip-up seats. The Melbourne Repertory Theatre Group was formed and Forbes often performed in the shows she directed, including portraying Mrs Candour in the first production, The School For Scandal by R.B. Sheridan.
Lorna Forbes (date unknown)
Gift of Michael Lynton, 1999. Nellie Stewart Collection. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Lorna Forbes
Courtesy of Frank Van Straten AM
A fourth-generation actor, Ada Lorna Forbes (1890-1976) first acted professionally at age fifteen in Two Little Sailor Boys in Ballarat and toured Australia as an understudy in her father’s company. Mimi Colligan writes that Forbes preferred to use her second given name, Lorna. She was invited to join Allan Wilkie’s touring Shakespearian company in 1916, and performed a wide range of Shakespearian roles. Between 1924 and 1957 Forbes owned and operated the Lorna Forbes School of Drama in Melbourne, and in 1930 when Wilkie returned to England, she established her own touring theatre company with Alexander Marsh. Forbes became a familiar voice in radio drama from 1934, performing in radio plays for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Dorothy and Hector Crawford. She also formed The Lorna Forbes Repertory Players in 1941, presenting drawing-room comedies in various venues. The Melbourne Repertory Theatre established in 1945 by Forbes and Turnbull in Middle Park aimed to encourage emerging acting talent.
Ray Lawler had studied voice with Lorna Forbes and was also a keen playwright, with his first full-length stage play, Hal’s Belles, scheduled to open in the new Middle Park theatre on September 29, 1945. Hal’s Belles tells of a reincarnated Henry VIII meeting his reincarnated wives in a contemporary London flat setting. Casting the role of Henry VIII proved challenging until someone suggested 19 year old Frank Thring Junior looked like Henry VIII, but had never been on stage before. Frank was cast in the role, Hal’s Belles was a success in Middle Park and was transferred to the National Theatre for further performances. This was the beginning of Ray Lawler and Frank Thring Junior’s highly successful professional careers in their respective fields – Ray Lawler OBE as a playwright and Frank Thring as an international stage, screen and television actor.
In 1947, the Theatre Guild presented their inaugural production of William Shakespeare’s Othello, The Moor of Venice for a season of nine nights at the Melbourne Repertory Theatre, Middle Park. Directed by Warwick Armstrong and produced by Paul Hill, the ballet segment was choreographed by Xenia Borovansky and presented by the Borovansky Ballet Academy.
Theatre program for Othello, the Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare, 10 July–19 July 1947, presented by the Theatre Guild at the Melbourne Repertory Theatre, Middle Park. Courtesy of Frank Van Straten AM. View full program.
After four years, Lorna Forbes became involved in teaching projects and she and Turnbull did not renew the theatre lease when it expired in 1949. The theatre building’s freehold owner, St Kilda resident Mrs Mary Harriet Jones, stipulated the lease must be used to present drama and the written word. In October, 1951, Frank Thring Junior, now 25, decided to start his own theatre group and established the Arrow Theatre Company, opening with a highly praised double bill comprising Oscar Wilde’s Salome starring Frank as Herod with June Brunell in the title role, and Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix to Remember, directed by Irene Mitchell. Financed by his mother Mrs Olive Thring, Frank could now present plays of his own choice. Peter Fitzpatrick points out that Mrs Thring would ‘certainly have endorsed any arrangement in which Frank guaranteed himself all the best roles’. In addition to covering production costs, Mrs Thring loaned items from her glamorous wardrobe including rubies and minks, but the actors remained unpaid.
Fitzpatrick writes that the new company aimed to be ‘radical in its ambitions, and collaborative in its practice’. Frank felt the repertoire was radical because it comprised the best classics and acclaimed works from contemporary Europe, avoiding the ‘bourgeois popularism’ he viewed as dominant in Australian theatre. From another perspective, Fitzpatrick believes the repertoire was actually ‘quite conservative’. Twenty-two plays were admirably presented at the Arrow Theatre over three years, including: Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), Othello (William Shakespeare), Volpone (Ben Jonson), The Critic (Richard Brinsley Sheridan), Point of Departure and Ring Around the Moon (Jean Anouilh), Present Laughter (Noel Coward), Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde), A Phoenix Too Frequent and Venus Observed (Christopher Fry), Our Town (Thornton Wilder), The Letter (Somerset Maugham), The Green Bay Tree (Moredaunt Shairp), The House of Bernarda Alba (Federico Garcia Lorca), The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can’t Take It With You (George S. Hart and Moss Hart), Rope and Murder Without Crime (J. Lee Thompson), the fantasy Beauty and the Beast, and the melodrama Maria Maren or The Murder in the Old Red Barn (Randall Faye). The only Australian play, Ralph Peterson’s The Square Ring, was co-produced and presented by the Arrow Theatre and Kenn Brodziak’s Aztec Services in July, 1953, before transferring to the Princess Theatre the next month.
Frank Thring Junior reportedly decorated the Arrow Theatre in flamboyant colours for opening night, featuring deep blue and chartreuse, with bright pink in the foyer. Critics such as ‘J.W.K.’ (James W. Kern) of the Port Phillip Gazette felt the youthful colour scheme symbolized the Arrow Theatre’s ‘new lease of life’.
Actor Barry J. Gordon performed at the Middle Park Repertory Theatre in the late 1940s and also at the Arrow Theatre before transitioning to a professional career in the United Kingdom. Gordon recalls Frank Thring Junior taking over the ‘ailing’ venue as artistic director, at one time painting the venue all black, and sparing no expense on refurbishment. Gordon also remembers Thring’s delight when producing his large personal collection of chunky stage and costume jewellery to bedeck himself for the role of Herod in Salome, and later for Volpone, designed and directed by Robin Lovejoy.
Frank Thring, Arrow Theatre, Melbourne, 1952. Photograph by Helmut Newton.
Gift of the Estate of Frank Thring, 1995. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
The Arrow Theatre floor plan.
Courtesy of Frank Van Straten AM
Textile designer and printer Frances Burke undertook redecoration of the venue and would later become renowned as an interior designer, receiving a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for Services to Design. The renovated Arrow Theatre comprised a small stage with minimal wing space, seating accommodation for 199 patrons and a male and female dressing room located in the basement. A passage ran from the street front past a sweet-shop-milk bar to the theatre entrance. Off this passageway was a small room used for the foyer, and upstairs a smaller room served as ‘the office’. At the alley side of the theatre was a small area designated as ‘The Wardrobe’. Scenery was constructed partially under the stage or on the tiny stage itself.
English actor-director Frederick (‘Freddie’) Farley became Thring’s resident artistic director at the Arrow Theatre, including directing Othello in 1952 with Frank Thring in the title role, Zoe Caldwell as Desdemona and Alex Scott portrayed Iago.
The Arrow Theatre Company operated without any government assistance, generously financed by Mrs Olive Thring to ensure lavish settings and costumes. The company was, however, regarded as amateur because the actors were unpaid. Goad et al. describe shows presented by the Arrow Theatre Company under the aegis of Thring as ‘The best of contemporary and classical plays … staged in an avant-garde fashion, decidedly radical and non-mainstream in their presentation’.
Theatre directors included Robin Lovejoy, Irene Mitchell, Alan Burke and director/performer Freddie Farley, with Sheila Florance as Stage Manager for several productions. As well as the plays presented at the Arrow Theatre, a popular monthly Sunday musical evening attracted packed houses, chaired by Melbourne musician and composer Kevin McBeath, who later founded Thomas’s Record Bar.
Three years and twenty-two productions later, the Arrow Theatre Company was sadly in financial trouble. In an article in The Argus on 16 September, 1953, theatre critic Frank Doherty angrily accused Melbourne of being ‘indifferent to its own artistic talent’ and not being prepared to travel beyond the Golden Mile. Doherty wrote of Frank Thring and his staff maintaining ‘the highest standard set by any group of amateur players for many years’. Cost had been no barrier and Thring was said to have lost much of his own money. Doherty blamed Melbourne audiences for thwarting ‘the hopes, aims and ambitions of a young man willing to sacrifice his money and work hard for his goal’.
A significant impact on the Arrow Theatre Company at that time was the offer of professional work to amateur actors, including those at the Arrow Theatre, by newly arrived Englishman John Sumner. In 1953, Sumner recognised the potential of experienced amateur actors to perform in his newly established Union Theatre Repertory Theatre Company at Melbourne University, later known as the Melbourne Theatre Company. Arrow Theatre Company actors who accepted Sumner’s offer of professional work and became well known in their field included Bunny Brooke, Zoe Caldwell, Alex Scott, Michael Duffield, Frank Gatliff, June Brunell, Sheila Florance, Wyn Roberts, Ron Field, Moira Carleton and Robert Gardiner.
In October, 1954, upset at the closure of his Arrow Theatre Company and the death of his mother, Frank Thring Junior relinquished his theatre lease. Before leaving for London with Frederick Farley, Thring asked Barry J. Gordon to keep the Arrow Theatre as a ‘going concern’. At 21 years of age, Gordon took over as Manager and with actor Frank Gatliff registered the Arrow Associate Company in 1956.
The Arrow Associate Company’s first show, Sweeney Todd, was directed by Moira Carleton, with fruit pies supplied by the Four ‘n Twenty Pie Company for the audience to eat at interval. Unfortunately some patrons used the pies as missiles, with one said to have hit a distinguished guest on the back of his head.
The Arrow Theatre was now available for hire to other companies such as Spotlight Theatre Productions, the first fully professional company to perform at the Middle Park venue. John Van Druten’s comedy Bell, Book and Candle was presented under the joint direction of Letty Craydon and John Edmund, opening on 26 April, 1954.
Program for Bell, Book and Candle by John Van Druten, opened 26 April, 1954, presented by Spotlight Theatre Productions at the Arrow Theatre, Middle Park. Courtesy of Frank Van Straten AM. View full program.
Gordon and Gatliff worked hard to keep the theatre financially viable, assisted by their talented friends. Displayed for sale in the narrow foyer were ceramic tile paintings created by Gordon’s friend, an unknown artist named Arthur Boyd. Priced at £20 each, not one was sold. Arthur Boyd would become prominent in his field, as did the company’s photographer Helmut Newton, husband of actress June Brunell. Frank Thring and John Sumner resolved their differences after Thring’s success in London, and he too eventually joined Sumner’s Union Theatre Repertory Company (later to become the Melbourne Theatre Company) as a professional actor.
During rebuilding of the South Yarra-based Little Theatre in St Martin’s Lane between 1955 and 1956, the Arrow and National Theatres became temporary homes for Melbourne’s Little Theatre Movement. Plays presented at the Arrow Theatre during this time were: The Prisoner (directed by Irene Mitchell), Junior Miss (Peter Randall), The Love of Four Colonels (Irene Mitchell), The Guinea Pig (Brett Randall), Waters of the Moon (Irene Mitchell), Serious Charge (Irene Mitchell), The Lady from Edinburgh (Brett Randall), Only an Orphan Girl (Irene Mitchell), The Orchard Walls (Henry Allan), The Secret Tent (George Fairfax), The Lark (Irene Mitchell), Job for the Boy (George Fairfax), Sabrina Fair (Irene Mitchell), I am a Camera and A Question of Fact, both directed by George Fairfax.
The Arrow Theatre was once again leased to various companies to present theatre shows, such as George and Hana Pravda’s production of Anouilh’s Point of Departure, and Peter O’Shaughnessy’s King Lear in 1957, which played to capacity crowds with O’Shaughnessy in the lead role.
Poster advertising Waiting for Godot at the Arrow Theatre, 2-14 September, 1957
Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Programme cover, A Must for Dolly at the Arrow Theatre, 31 October, 1958
Waiting for Godot was presented at the Arrow Theatre from 2–14 September, 1957 starring Peter O’Shaughnessy, Phillip Stainton and Barry Humphries. In the same year, the Coburg Charity Players staged two productions at the Arrow Theatre, with profits going to the Middle Park Old Buffers, and another to assist old age pensioners.
Burning Bright, 1959, Set Design by Anne Fraser, Act 1, Scene 1. Presented in association with HSV-7 at the Arrow Theatre, Middle Park. Gift of Anne Fraser, 1996. Australian Performing Arts Collection. Arts Centre Melbourne.
On 31 October, 1958, actor/director/producer Jack Beresford Fowler hired the Arrow Theatre for his production of A Must for Dolly, a sequel to George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, presented by The Players’ and Playgoers’ Repertory Players.
Also in 1958, The Shell Company of Australia leased the theatre for eighteen months to screen 16 millimetre films three nights a week. Popular with children, the hall became known as ‘the bug house’.
In October, 1959, the Arrow Theatre was hired to stage and record Burning Bright by John Steinbeck, presented in conjunction with HSV Channel 7. The set designer was Anne Fraser.
The venue was then temporarily named the Amazu Theatre, until becoming known as ‘The New Arrow’.
Live theatre resumed at The New Arrow Theatre on 28 March, 1960 with the opening of Sons of the Morning by Catherine Duncan, presented by Delphic Productions, followed by Noel Coward’s Relative Values. Displayed in the foyer was an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by National Gallery students.
Between 1960-61, the Malvern Theatre Company was among groups hiring the New Arrow Theatre to present productions. Moral Re-Armament, an international moral and spiritual movement, presented Annie the Valiant, with free admission.
Theatre Program cover for Outrageous Fortune!, June 1962, presented at the New Arrow Theatre. View full program.
Courtesy of Frank Van Straten AM
Program cover for Don’t Make Waves (1962). View full program.
Courtesy of Frank Van Straten AM
Jon Finlayson and Barbara Angell hired the New Arrow Theatre to present their revue Outrageous Fortune!, a professional show, opening 28 June, 1962.
After the success of their first revue at the New Arrow Theatre, Jon Finlayson and Barbara Angell rehired the theatre, opening on 12 October, 1962 with another revue, Don’t Make Waves.
Another professional production, the revue Christmas Crackers, was presented December 11–21, 1963 at the Arrow Theatre, directed by Peter Homewood and featuring Helen Thomas.
Cambridge Film and TV Productions leased the theatre during the 1960s with the upstairs area converted into a dance school. Seats and the stage were removed in 1965 and the next year the first floor became Greek Club Rooms, registered as The Order of the Australian Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. In 1971 while Cambridge Films still occupied the theatre, parts of the movie A City’s Child, written by Don Battye, with music by Peter Pinne and direction by Brian Kavanagh, were shot at the Arrow Theatre. The movie received an Australian Film Institute Bronze Award and actor Monica Maugham received Best Actress of the Year Award.
In 1981, a Greek community group, the Lemnian Brothers Club, acquired the building and remain the current owner. Today, the two street front shops are available for lease and a popular gymnasium/health club, Middle Park Fitness, has operated in the rear former hall and Arrow Theatre since 1998.
Framed photographs of Frank Thring (Othello) and Zoe Caldwell (Desdemona), in the 1952 production of Othello at the Arrow Theatre, displayed on the wall of 1 Armstrong Street, Middle Park. Images courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts Museum. Framed Images Photography: Sherryn Danaher. Image enhancement: Paul Danaher.
Two framed images of Frank Thring Junior (Othello) and Zoe Caldwell (Desdemona) from the 1952 production of Othello, proudly adorn a wall of the Middle Park Fitness health club, formerly the Arrow Theatre. Accompanying these theatrically historical photos is a personal note written in 2012 by New York-based Zoe Caldwell OBE to the current health club owner/trainer Jack Reven. This note was organised by Zoe Caldwell’s niece Sherryn Danaher.
Letter (2012) from Zoe Caldwell OBE to Jack Reven, owner/trainer of Middle Park Fitness which operates in the former Arrow Theatre
The original hand-written letter is reproduced as typed text by courtesy of Sherryn Danaher
1-3 Armstrong Street, Middle Park, home of the former Arrow Theatre
Courtesy of Frank Van Straten AM
Sherryn Danaher brought the note home from New York in 2012 after visiting her now late Aunt Zoe. For clarity of reading, Sherryn has kindly reproduced the hand-written note as typed text.
The ongoing occupancy of 1–3 Armstrong Street ensures the premises retain an active presence in the Middle Park Village. The community participation enjoying health and fitness activities in the former Arrow Theatre captures ‘that dear little theatre’s joy and spirit’ described by Zoe Caldwell in her delightful message.
Tribute plaque to The Arrow Theatre at 1-3 Armstrong St., Middle Park and acknowledgement of the traditional owners, The Boon Wurrung People. Photography: Malcolm Threadgold.
A commemorative plaque supported by the Middle Park History Group and Councillor Judith Klepner was presented by the City of Port Phillip in 2010. Affixed to an exterior wall of 1-3 Armstrong Street, the plaque respectfully acknowledges the land’s traditional owners, the Boon Wurrung People. The plaque also pays tribute to the building’s colourful theatrical days from a bygone era, reminding passers-by of the iconic site’s cultural significance in Melbourne’s theatre history.
Further resources
View programs on the THA Digital website
Thanks to
Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne
Dr Mimi Colligan AM
Sherryn and Paul Danaher
Elisabeth Kumm
The Middle Park History Group
Diana Phoenix
Frank Van Straten AM
References
AusStage, Hal’s Belles 1945 (accessed 28.11.21)
AusStage, The Square Ring 1953 (accessed 27.11.21)
AusStage, Christmas Crackers 1963 (accessed 27.11.21)
Mimi Colligan, ‘Forbes, Ada Lorna (1890-1976)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1996 (accessed 28.11.2021)
Peter Fitzpatrick, The Two Frank Thrings, Monash University Publishing, Victoria, Australia, 2012, pp. 332-343
Rosemary Goad, Diana Phoenix and Kay Rowan, ‘The Heart of Middle Park’, Stories from a Suburb by the Sea, The Middle Park History Group, Middle Park Historical Series Number One, draft chapter for First Edition, 2011
Rosemary Goad, Diana Phoenix and Kay Rowan, ‘The Heart of Middle Park’, Stories from a Suburb by the Sea, The Middle Park History Group, Middle Park Historical Series Number One, 2014, pp.28–42
Barry J. Gordon, ‘Aiming the Arrow’, Victoria Theatres Trust, On Stage, Vol. 7, 2006, pp.22-25 (accessed 28.11.21)
J.W.K. (James W. Kern), Port Phillip Gazette, volume 1, no. 1, Winter 1952, p. 33
Diana Phoenix, ‘Halls of Fame: a Hidden Past’, History News, Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Issue 343, August, 2019, p.6 (accessed 16.12.21)
‘Middle Park Picture Theatre’ (accessed 23.11.2021)
Frank Van Straten, National Treasure: The Story of Gertrude Johnson and the National Theatre, Victoria Press, Melbourne, 1994, p.95
Published in
Stage by stage
Tagged under
Wednesday, 01 December 2021
Jack Beresford Fowler: A life well spent (Part 3)
CHERYL THREADGOLD concludes her personal tribute to theatrical all-rounder J. Beresford Fowler.
Challenges—Encore—Final Curtain
Melbourne actor, writer, director and producer Jack Beresford Fowler was by nature optimistic and indomitable, but did regret a decision made in the 1930s. Opera singer/stage director Miss Gertrude Johnson had returned from England and contacted Jack about her exciting plans to form a National Theatre. The proposal was ready for submission and Jack was invited to join the company as producer. On two occasions he declined, explaining to Miss Johnson he was busy with his own flourishing Arts Theatre Company, but later admitted to doubting the National Theatre proposal would succeed, particularly after previous unsuccessful attempts. Miss Johnson admirably persevered, secured the services of producer W.P. Carr, and the National Theatre Movement became a reality, eventually receiving financial assistance from the Premier of Victoria, Thomas Hollway. Jack would forever ponder the unknown possibility of achieving ‘big things’ if his Shakespearian knowledge and experience had been utilised with financial support from the National Theatre grants.
Changes to Melbourne’s theatre scene during the 1940s impacted adversely on Jack Fowler and his beloved Arts Theatre Company. Formed in 1925, the Arts Theatre Company had enjoyed success for almost twenty years, treating Melbourne audiences to classic plays which at that time were ignored by commercial theatres. Dedicated casts performed under the enthusiastic, passionate direction of J.B. Fowler, and sell-out shows relied on favourable reviews published in the daily press.
But now venue hire costs were increasing and more amateur and small theatre companies formed, competing for box office takings and audience disposable income. The biggest issue for the Arts Theatre Company was the decision by daily newspaper editors to only review fully professional shows. Although professionally directed, the company’s plays were mostly performed by amateur actors. Jack greatly appreciated continued supportive show reviews from the Melbourne weekly publication Listener In, which coincidentally commenced as a radio magazine in 1925, the same year as the Arts Theatre Company formed. But broader coverage and reviews of the company’s productions in the daily press were necessary to ensure full houses and cover costs. Savings from Jack’s professional theatre employment soon depleted, but driven by theatrical passion and determination, he persevered to present shows. The result was a decline in production standards and subsequent damage to Jack’s reputation as a successful theatre producer/director.
Determined to overcome these financial challenges encountered in the 1940s, Jack devised an innovative fundraising concept. He would collect autographs from world-famous people and use proceeds from selling the autographs to establish an Art Theatre. An early recipient of Jack’s request for an autograph was Australian poet Dame Mary Gilmour. Dame Mary replied that she knew of Jack’s 1942 collaborative play with Sylvia Archer and had a family connection with General Sir Hector MacDonald, the play’s protagonist. She acknowledged her signed letter was intended for his autograph collection and generously included a cheque for £10, ‘ … because you are doing good work’.
Jack Beresford Fowler with some of his bulging autograph albums
From ‘Tricks of the Autograph Trade’, People, 4 March 1959
American playwright Clifford Odets also responded to Jack’s request for an autographed message to help augment Art Theatre funds, writing on bright yellow notepaper:
‘I heartily approve of an art theatre for the people. When countries are dead at the top, we must build them from the bottom.’
Amid successes and knock-backs to autograph requests came an amusing reply in 1946 from President Eisenhower, then Chief of Staff of the US Army. Written on US War Department letterhead, the message read: ‘While I am quite in sympathy with your Art Theatre Players, I have made it a practice not to autograph any material which might have commercial appeal. I am sure you will understand my position. With every best wish. Sincerely, Dwight D. Eisenhower’ (signed in his own handwriting).
Barry O. Jones and Peter O’Shaughnessy write that in his later years, Jack Fowler’s impressive collection of autographed letters, documents and photographs was sold over time to help his survival.
In 1943, 20 year old professional radio actor Peter O’Shaughnessy performed as an amateur actor in Jack Beresford Fowler’s productions until 1947. At this time, the venue for shows presented by the Arts Theatre Players was the Old Players and Playgoers Association Hall on the north side of Little Bourke Street, between Elizabeth and Queen streets. The Association later dropped the ‘Old’ from their title. Peter O’Shaughnessy attributes his successful professional theatrical life to that earlier ‘close acquaintance’ with the great plays presented by Jack Fowler: ‘Few actors, in whatever country they worked—never mind about the cultural desert of Australia—had such an opportunity to become familiar with the works of Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen and Coward.’
Jack Beresford Fowler in costume as King Lear, c.1945. Photographer unknown. This studio-based promotional portrait was gifted by Mr and Mrs Fowler, 1984.
Courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne, 1984.092.001
Actor Peter O’Shaughnessy, 1961. Photographer unknown.
National Archives of Australia, Canberra
A theatrical encore awaited Jack when joining the Melbourne Shakespeare Society. Formed in 1884 and still operating today, the Melbourne Shakespeare Society is one of the oldest literary societies in Australia. Since the early 1920s Jack had remained indebted to Allan Wilkie, founder of Australia’s first touring Shakespearian company, for sharing his Shakespearean performance and directorial knowledge. Barry O. Jones and Peter O’Shaughnessy describe Jack as inheriting ‘something of the expansive acting style and much of the “stage business” contrived by the actor-managers Sir Frank Benson and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’. In 1925, Allan Wilkie was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to theatre, particularly relating to Shakespeare and education. As Jack began sharing his inherited Shakespearian knowledge and expertise with members and audiences at the Melbourne Shakespeare Society, he felt his prestige returning. He would also meet new friends with similar interests.
When casting juvenile roles, Jack Fowler visited Melbourne elocution or dance teachers for their recommendations. These teachers included Maie Hoban, Jenny Brennan, Louise Dunn, Dulcie Bland and Alice Uren. Miss Uren sent me to audition successfully for the title role in A Must for Dolly, Jack Fowler’s sequel to George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, presented in 1958 at the Arrow Theatre, Middle Park. The show was restaged in 1960 at the Arts Theatre, Richmond, with Helen Pickering in the role of Dolly, and I performed in various plays under Mr Fowler’s direction for the Melbourne Shakespeare Society.
Programme for the Melbourne Shakespeare Society presentation on 13 June 1959 at McEwan House, Fourth Floor, 343 Little Collins Street, Melbourne, including excerpts from King John
Sylvia Archer was the hostess for this 1959 Melbourne Shakespeare Society event, and often sat in on rehearsals in Albert Park. Miss Archer was a beautifully spoken, elegant close friend of Jack Fowler and a former leading actor in his Art Theatre Company and Melbourne Repertory Theatre Company. She also collaborated with J.B. in 1942 to co-write the controversial play General Sir Hector MacDonald. Jack never married, and although admitting to falling in love with several leading ladies, Sylvia Archer remained his favourite. In 1960, her death in Fremantle at age 55 whilst travelling to England, would have been devastating news for Jack.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream was presented on 9 March 1963 in the Russell Street Theatre Conference Room, where Jack Beresford Fowler played the role of Bottom. J.B.’s vigorous direction has ensured the closing speech of Shakespeare’s mischievous sprite Puck remains indelibly etched in my memory.
Programme for Melbourne Shakespeare Society presentation on 9 March 1963 in the Russell Street Theatre Conference Room, including scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Notable patrons of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society in 1963 were the Right Honourable R.G. Menzies, Allan Wilkie CBE, Professor William Alexander Osborne and English poet and writer, John Masefield OM. Jack Fowler later became President of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society
Jack Beresford Fowler also shared his Shakespearian performances with students, either visiting their schools or hiring city venues such as the Postal Institute. The students would see their studied Shakespearian texts transformed into theatrical performances in J.B.’s unique style. Theatre historian Frank Van Straten AM remembers discovering Shakespeare ‘or a form of it’ when Beresford Fowler visited his school. In the city venues, it was not uncommon for students to bring pea-shooters or other items to try to interrupt performances. Jack’s familiarity with Shakespeare’s plays also enabled him to play multiple roles.
J.B.’s happiest memories included touring Australia pre and post-World War One with Bert Bailey’s company in On Our Selection. In the early 1960s Jack took up Peter O’Shaughnessy’s suggestion to rewrite the On Our Selection script from memory. In 1962, fourteen cast members, including myself as Sarah, rehearsed weekly in Jack’s Albert Park one-room bedsitter and Jack typed the script progressively. The programme reports that after typing copies of the script, one disappeared, ‘causing Mr Fowler to copyright the play.’ The performance venue was St David’s Hall, Latrobe Street, Melbourne, two doors from The Argus office.
When arriving at the theatre for the show’s first dress rehearsal, Mum was astonished when Mr Fowler handed her a brush to finish painting a backdrop. J.B.’s endearingly quirky, unpredictable style of doing things may have been interpreted by some as chaotic, but on reflection, he was a versatile, hard-working one-man-show, a determined, independent operator with a passion for creating theatre. He had adapted the script, typing all copies on a manual typewriter, had cast and directed the actors and performed the role of ‘Dad’. J.B. would also have paid to hire the venue, organised the scenery and props, designed and printed the programme, marketed the show and sold the tickets.
Cover of programme for On Our Selection, presented in 1962 at St David’s Hall, Melbourne
Cast list from programme for On Our Selection
On Our Selection was presented from 17-22 March, 1962. The cast included Peter Brown, Ray Fedden, Kitty Virgoe, Cheryl McPhee, Brian Lockwood, Jean Voller, J. Beresford Fowler, Clive Barton, Frank Booth, Reg Campbell, Robert Davidson, Edward Thomas, George Sullivan, Peggy Pearl Oakley and Simone Cohen. I had not noticed J.B.’s deafness until we performed onstage in On Our Selection and observed his intense lip-reading of fellow actors delivering their lines. He was determined not to miss a cue—and never did. A wonderful effort.
During rehearsals, J.B. had continually praised Laura Roberts who portrayed Sarah Rudd in Bert Bailey’s 1915 touring production. I was now guardian of this role, and Laura’s legendary performance was a lot to live up to. Thankfully, J.B. later wrote this positive message inside the cover of his book Stars in My Backyard:
Looking back on his life, Jack wondered if he should have returned to professional theatre when his personal savings diminished, instead of persevering to present shows of a deteriorating standard. A director of the J.C. Williamson firm had discussed offering Jack a place in the company, but by then his hearing was deteriorating badly and Jack knew performing unfamiliar plays would be difficult. He was familiar with Shakespearean dialogue and that would have been fine, but entire companies were now presenting Shakespearean plays.
During his theatrically successful years, Jack Fowler was disappointed and baffled by jealousy from fellow colleagues, hence the title of his autobiography The Green-Eyed Monster (1968). Jones and O’Shaughnessy describe Jack as ‘gallant, indomitable and quixotic’ and ‘mercifully oblivious of criticism’. The AusStage online national performing database records Jack Beresford Fowler as having participated as performer, director, or both, in thirty-five shows presented in Melbourne, regional Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania from 1916. This does not include Jack’s national touring seasons such as with On Our Selection with Bert Bailey pre and post-World War One, and other productions not yet recorded which would substantially increase this total. One of his last roles is said to have been playing the Grave Digger in a production of Hamlet at the Union Theatre.
Regardless of negative or positive views regarding Jack Beresford Fowler’s productions in the final third part of his life, Jack’s splendid overall contribution to twentieth century Australian theatre was unquestionably the result of resolute determination, dogged hard work and passion for his craft.
Our family always exchanged Christmas cards with Mr Fowler and I am extremely grateful our life paths crossed. In his later years, I regret not visiting the kind, talented man with twinkling eyes who warmly welcomed Mum and I at his front door for an audition in early 1958. Just as he did for so many others, J.B. would introduce me to the wonderful world of theatre.
On 18 July 1972, The Age published a page two article titled ‘A Noted Thespian Makes his Exit’, which attributes the late ‘Veteran Shakespeare actor J. Beresford Fowler’ as keeping Australian theatre alive during the Depression years. Jack would be rightly proud to read this, and would no doubt chuckle in delight at the article reporting his birthplace as England, when records and his autobiography reveal he was born in Darlinghurst, Sydney. This conflicting information at the end of Jack’s life resembles the quirky debate surrounding his birth date so many years earlier. His mother’s friends remembered young Jack’s birthdays because they insisted he was born on the shortest day of the year, 21 June 1893. However, the official date registered for his birth is 21 July 1893.
Jack Beresford Fowler, actor, playwright, producer, director, novelist, memoirist, soldier, son, brother and friend, took his final curtain call in Albert Park on 17 July 1972.
A life well spent.
References
The Age (Melbourne), 18 July 1972, ‘A Noted Thespian Makes His Exit’, Google News Archive, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=MDQ-9Oe3GGUC&dat=19720718&printsec=frontpage&hl=en sourced per Bayside Libraries 8 October 2021 (accessed 8 October 2021 via Bayside Library Service)
Bauer Media Pty. Ltd., People, ‘Tricks of the Autograph Trade’, 4 March 1959, p.43
Jack Beresford Fowler, A Puppet’s Mirage, Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, United Kingdom, 1957
Jack Beresford Fowler, Stars in My Backyard, Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, United Kingdom, 1962
Jack Beresford Fowler, The Green-eyed Monster, Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, United Kingdom, 1968
Barry O. Jones and Peter O’Shaughnessy, ‘Fowler, Jack Beresford (1893–1972)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 14, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1996, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fowler-jack-beresford-10228 (Published online 2006)
James Murray, illustrations by Verdon Morcom. The Paradise Tree, An Eccentric Childhood Remembered, Allen & Unwin, London, 1988
Peter O’Shaughnessy, ‘J.B.’ On Stage, Vol. 8, No. 4, Theatre Heritage Australia, https://theatreheritage.org.au/images/OnStage/backissues/2007-4.pdf , Spring 2007, p.9
Peter O’Shaughnessy, ‘Autobiography Part Two’, 2012, https://sites.google.com/site/peteroshaughnessyinfo/autobiography---part-2 (accessed 5 November 2021)
Television.AU, ‘Remembering Listener-In, TV Scene’, https://televisionau.com/2017/06/remembering-listener-in-tv-scene.html (accessed 14 July 2021)
Cheryl Threadgold, In the Name of Theatre: the History, Culture and Voices of Amateur Theatre in Victoria, publisher Cheryl Threadgold, Victoria, Australia, 2020, p.1
Published in
Profiles
Tagged under
Thursday, 27 May 2021
Jack Beresford Fowler: A life well spent (Part 2)
CHERYL THREADGOLD continues her portrait of actor, director and producer J. Beresford Fowler, picking up his story in 1916 when he enlisted as a soldier in WWI and left Australia for the battlefields of France.
War—Theatre—Adversity
Jack Beresford Fowler enlisted on 10 July 1916 to serve his country in World War One, having left Bert Bailey’s Australian tour of On Our Selection after two years. His soldier training soon commenced in Melbourne’s Domain before transferring to Seymour to join the Third Pioneer Battalion. When the Bailey and Grant company passed through Seymour returning from a Sydney season, Jack was granted leave to meet them at Seymour Station. With no dining-cars on the trains in those days, Seymour was a refreshment stop. Jack reckoned the kisses he received from the theatre company ladies were the envy of the Military Police and reasoned good-naturedly that soldiers expected ‘the natural feminine response to our heroism in volunteering for “the big scrap”.’
Attestation Paper of Persons Enlisted for Service Abroad—Jack Beresford Fowler, 10 July 1916
Courtesy of National Archives of Australia. ‘Discovering ANZACS’
On 21 October 1916, the Third Pioneer Battalion embarked for England on the troopship Port Melbourne, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and Sierra Leone to avoid mines and submarines in the Suez Canal. During the ten-week voyage Jack participated in debates and concerts, with his most popular monologues derived from C.J. Dennis’s The Sentimental Bloke and Ginger Mick.
After arriving in England and training at Larkhill, Jack was assigned to the Dental Unit in Salisbury Plain for eighteen months. Although grateful for his mechanical dentistry training in Melbourne which secured this position, Jack confided feeling uneasy ‘with so many fine cobbers on the other side of the duck-pond’ (cryptic term for The English Channel). During limited leave, Jack saw famous theatrical stars of the era in shows and festivals in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bath and Stratford, including unknown young actor Noel Coward playing a small part in Scandal with Arthur Bouchier. Jack also enjoyed entertaining troops with his Battalion concert-party, including a proud performance in a production number at London’s Aldwych Theatre, where he recited ‘The Singing Soldiers’ from C.J. Dennis’s Ginger Mick.
In March 1918, all available soldiers were summoned to the Somme, and Jack joined his Third Pioneer Battalion at Heilly. A talented entertainer and cricketer, Jack conceded he was, however, not a particularly good soldier, especially when digging trenches with blistered hands. ‘I was out of my element in the Pioneers doing pick and shovel work, but I had some good cobbers.’ The soldiers engaged in infantry work at Villiers Brettoneaux, Bray-sur-Somme and Tincourt. During a lull, Jack wrote a one-act play titled The Dame of Corbie, which he presented at Corbie after the Armistice. One night Jack accidentally walked into enemy lines. After his mates brought him back, Jack queried how they knew with nothing on the track as a guide. They blamed his being a ‘city bloke’.
Jack Fowler wrote little of war’s horror and grief, pointing out ‘the war has been written by many able pens.’ In A Puppet’s Mirage, he describes slain bodies beside a road: ‘They were silent voices that spoke more eloquently than any saga or epic of the greatest epoch in history.’
Allied Forces launched ‘the big push’ on 8 August 1918, a huge Western Front offensive to push through enemy front lines. News of signing the Armistice and peace arrived on 11 November as Jack’s Battalion awaited orders to return to the line for what they believed would be the final great battle. When the Battalion later moved to Daours for sporting recreation, Jack captained a cricket team and managed the sports store in Huppy, another French village, before returning to Salisbury Plain and entertaining troops in the concert-party.
In August, 1919, Jack arrived home on the troopship Rio Pardo after another ten-week voyage, once more via Sierra Leone and The Cape. His mother and brothers met Jack in Melbourne in a hired car decorated with the Third Battalion’s purple and white colours. Jack wasted no time re-joining the Bert Bailey and Julius Grant Company and toured for twelve months with On Our Selection, Grandad Rudd and Duncan McClure, all adapted from the works of Steele Rudd (pseudonym for Arthur Hoey Davis).
Jack then independently staged his own amateur production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at The Playhouse, located just over Princes Bridge, playing the lead role of John Borkman. In a dramatic opening night, Jack’s leading lady was said to have suffered a nervous breakdown in the dressing-room and all takings were returned to the audience. Professional actor Emmie South was hired to learn the part over the weekend, but the leading lady recovered and the production was well received by audiences and the press.
Extracts from Melbourne newspaper reviews reflect high regard for Jack Fowler’s shows at this time: ‘A very successful entertainment much above amateur standard was given at The Playhouse last night’ (The Age); ‘J. Beresford Fowler as Borkman achieved a notable success’ (The Herald); ‘An absorbing play … J.B. Fowler gave a realistic portrayal of Borkman …’ (The Sun); ‘The part of John Gabriel Borkman, egotist, ruined bank manager, who bartered love to further his ambition, was capably taken by Mr Fowler’ (The Argus). Jack then staged a successful Australian premiere production of Ibsen’s Ghosts. In May, 1922, The Pioneer Players invited Jack to stage manage Louis Esson’s play The Battler at The Playhouse before English actor/manager Allan Wilkie employed Jack as actor/stage-manager in Australia’s first touring Shakespearian Company.
Allan Wilkie, 1922—founder of Australia’s first professional touring Shakespearian company; photograph by Stirling Studios
State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Jack Beresford Fowler as Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew, 1923—Allan Wilkie Shakespearian Company; illustration by Vernon Hayles
From Stars in My Backyard: a survey of the Australian stage by J. Beresford Fowler, p.62
In professional theatre, Jack’s shortish stature was ideal for character roles and one of his favourites was playing Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew.
Three years later, Jack believed his sacking from Allan Wilkie’s company was due to requesting a sleeper when travelling to Sydney (to which he was entitled), after having just joined the Actors’ Federation. Regardless of his sacking, Jack remained indebted to Wilkie for sharing his knowledge of acting and producing Shakespearian plays, and they remained friends after Wilkie disbanded his company in 1930 and returned to England.
Buoyed by the success of his earlier independent productions, Jack made ‘the momentous decision’ to form his Art Theatre Players in 1925. He chose The Queen’s Hall for the company’s first production, The Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. The theatre’s location in Collins Street, almost opposite The Athenaeum Theatre was convenient, but its tiny stage proved challenging for larger shows.
Packed audiences enjoyed A Doll’s House, revivals of John Gabriel Borkman and Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler. The plays were again well-received by the press, with The Argus reviewer writing: ‘Hedda Gabler was played last night with the same high standard of skill that The Art Theatre Players have shown in their handling of other pieces.’
More praise followed for Jack Fowler in a review by The Age for Ibsen’s The Wild Duck: ‘This is not the first occasion on which this courageous and enterprising actor-producer has delighted drama lovers with the production of this truly great play, but it is certain he has never achieved such success as that which signalled last night’s splendid performance. It was a perfectly cast production and The Queen’s Hall was packed to capacity’.
Pages from the theatre programme for ‘A Season of the Greatest Modern Plays’ presented by the Little Art Players, February-March 1926 at Queen’s Hall, Collins St., Melbourne
Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne, 1989.032.028, Gift of Lola Menhennit, 1984
Jack moved larger shows to The Playhouse, but began encountering difficulty for the plays to pay their way. The first of two productions for bushfire relief was Man and Superman presented in conjunction with The Players’ and Playgoers’ Association. One critic wrote: ‘Bernard Shaw and Beresford Fowler in pleasing collaboration: and with the advantages of the bigger Playhouse stage and real scenery against the dog kennel platform and monotonous green curtain of Queen’s Hall, Fowler’s Little Art Company begins to live.’
The second bushfire relief production was Othello’s third scene between Iago (Fred MacDonald) and Othello (Jack Beresford Fowler). A production of Shaw’s Major Barbara later followed at The Playhouse. Jack also worked with Bert Bailey in a professional season in Adelaide of The Sentimental Bloke in September, 1926, playing the crook ‘Spike’ Wegg. In 1929 when Gregan McMahon returned to Melbourne from Sydney to work under the J C Williamson banner, he engaged Jack as stage-manager. Based in Melbourne to be near his beloved St Kilda football team, Jack also presented shows in Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, Albury and Colac.
Jack Beresford Fowler’s company The Art Theatre Players treated Melbourne audiences to an impressive variety of theatrical culture for almost thirty years. Barry O. Jones and Peter O’Shaughnessy describe the Art Theatre Players as ‘an oasis in Melbourne’s cultural desert’. Playwrights included William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Noel Coward, Eugene O’Neill, Anton Chekhov, Hermann Sudermann, Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Baker, Haddon Chambers, Arthur Schnitzler, August Strindberg, Arnold Bennett, Stanley Houghton, Githa Sowerby, John Drinkwater, John Van Druten and Australian playwrights.
Professional and leading amateur performers in Jack’s casts included his mother Fanny Fowler, Sylvia Archer, Ray Lawler, Keith Eden (later a leading radio artist), Paddy Tuckwell (who became model Bambi Smith, Countess of Harewood), Peter O’Shaughnessy, George Lomas, Robert Earl, Lucy Ahon, Mollie Locke, Ruth Conabere, Mona Pepyat. Marjorie McLeod (established the Swan Hill National Theatre branch), Nancy Fryberg, Thora Coxhead, Lilian Lavender, Linda Newcome, Joan Wisdom, Lois Cooper, Richard Ross, Norman Foote, Douglas Kelly, Wilfred Blunden, Norman Heymanson, Leslie Moxon, Mostyn Wright, Kevin Miles, Marjorie Carr, Michael Bolloten, Claude Thomas, June Clyne, Ruby May, Winifred Moverley, William Clarkson, Norma Canfield, Nell Boreham and Bruce Henderson.
Marjorie McLeod, c.1953—Art Theatre Players actor and later founder of the Swan Hill National Theatre Branch; photograph by Mario Zaetta
Image courtesy of David Quayle, Swan Hill Theatre Group
In 1942 Jack collaborated with friend and fellow actor Sylvia Archer to write the controversial stage play General Sir Hector MacDonald (a play in nine episodes), a defence of a Scottish soldier who suicided in 1903 when accused of homosexuality. The Melbourne Argus wrote, ‘The authors seek to clear the name of one of the most tragic figures in the history of the British Army.’ Positive reviews included from the Scottish newspaper in Ross-Shire where Hector MacDonald was born. In contrast, The Lord Chamberlain in England banned its production and George Bernard Shaw described the play as ‘unpleasant and economically impossible in commercial theatres.’ General Sir Hector MacDonald received a public reading in Melbourne, but was never performed onstage. Several libraries purchased copies, but Jack believed its ‘scandalous nature’ prevented it being placed on library shelves. The manuscript is now available from State Library Victoria.
Two years later, Jack sent the manuscript to George Bernard Shaw, who returned the covering letter with signed hand-written comments:
Letter from J. Beresford Fowler, 1944, to George Bernard Shaw regarding manuscript of General Sir Hector MacDonald, with hand-written reply from Shaw
By courtesy of The Hon. Dr Barry Jones, AC
Jack Beresford Fowler was a passionate, talented theatre maker but no businessman. He would later admit his mistake in not realising that whether broke or not, productions must be kept up to standard, and now they were not. He attempted to present too many shows, putting them on quickly with insufficient rehearsal ‘in an effort to get three meals a day and a roof over my head.’ He believed jealous enemies were showing their teeth, ‘gathering like vultures around my carcass.’ A war pension at this time would have been a huge financial help to Jack, but with savings from professional work now exhausted, he had no money left to live on.
The press began ignoring Jack Fowler’s shows and some newspapers were annoyed he responded to criticism. In hindsight Jack regretted doing this, conceding ‘it is probably more harmful to be ignored, especially when you have been accustomed to more eulogism than attack.’ Jack would later reflect: ‘The productions went off and my reputation sank to zero.’
Melbourne’s post-World War Two theatre scene was changing, and numerous amateur theatre companies were forming in regional and urban Victoria, assisted by the newly established Council of Adult Education (1947) and The Victorian Drama League (1952).
Although financially poor, Jack Beresford Fowler remained culturally rich, modestly acknowledging: ‘On their own small scale, my productions over three decades were worthwhile.’
JCW Producer Gerard Coventry’s advice to young Master Fowler forty years earlier was not forgotten, and would fuel J.B.’s optimistic, indefatigable spirit for coming decades: ‘Persevere for success and never give up or lose heart.’
References
AusStage, www.ausstage.edu.au
Barry O. Jones and Peter O’Shaughnessy, ‘Fowler, Jack Beresford (1893–1972)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 14, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1996
J.B. Fowler, A Puppet’s Mirage, Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, United Kingdom 1957
J.B. Fowler, Stars in My Backyard , Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, United Kingdom, 1962
J.B. Fowler, The Green-eyed Monster, Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, United Kingdom, 1968
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Wednesday, 03 March 2021
Jack Beresford Fowler: A life well spent (Part 1)
CHERYL THREADGOLD first met J. Beresford Fowler in the 1950s, when, as a young girl, she was selected to play the title role in A Must for Dolly at the Arrow Theatre in Middle Park. The first in a series of articles, Cheryl tells the story of a man whose incredible optimism and enthusiasm for life was infectious, despite suffering from acute deafness and other hardships.
Boy—Actor—Soldier
Born in 1893 in darlinghurst, sydney, Jack Beresford Fowler’s middle name given by his father honours the distinguished First Sea Lord Charles Beresford. A sip of ale would save the baby’s life when near death in the cradle, yet after that Jack remained a strict teetotaller because ‘I heard of so many actors ruined by drink’. His registered date of birth is 21 July, but Jack believed it should be 21 June because his mother’s friends said they never forgot his birthday as it was on the shortest day of the year. Such quirky debate would be synonymous with Jack Fowler’s colourful 79 years, dedicated mostly to his passion for theatre, sport, and literature.
I first met Mr Fowler in 1958. He had visited a Saturday afternoon class at The Alice Uren School of Stage Dancing where singing, acrobats, ballet, toe, and tap-dancing lessons had been taught since the 1920s. Alice Uren’s huge studio was located on the first floor of the Mutual Arcade in Flinders Street, Melbourne and many of her students went on to perform professionally, such as Val Jellay, Toni Lamond and Helen Reddy. Miss Uren chatted to the gentleman visitor and later told my mother that a director, Mr Fowler, had called seeking a girl to play the title role in his play A Must for Dolly (a sequel to George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman) to be presented at the Arrow Theatre, and I had been suggested. We were to meet with Mr Fowler at 97 Graham Street, Albert Park.
A single-storeyed Victorian terrace house matched the address, and while Dad and my young brother waited in our F.J. Holden, Mum and I were greeted at the front door by a smiling, cardigan-wearing gentleman with twinkling eyes who introduced himself as ‘J.B.’. When J.B. warmly ushered us into his compact one-room bedsitter, I instinctively sensed something special. The well-used typewriter with cluttered papers, theatrical scrapbooks and autograph albums stacked on shelves, costumes hanging on a rack and framed photographs adorning the walls formed part of a wonderful, atmospheric space enriched by Jack Beresford Fowler’s marvellous positive energy.
As we prepared to leave after the audition, actors began arriving to rehearse and Mum and I were asked to stay for at least another two hours. J.B.’s endearing unpredictability led to Dad organising driving lessons and a little Austin A30 for Mum to undertake future rehearsal runs. Until then, Dad and young brother Bernie spent rehearsal nights watching football at the South Melbourne Football Ground. A Must for Dolly, written and directed by J. Beresford Fowler, was presented by the Players’ and Playgoers’ Repertory Players on 31 October 1958 at the Arrow Theatre, Armstrong Street, Middle Park. The cast included J. Beresford Fowler, Violet Auburn, William Allen, Reg Campbell, Dawn Mott, Cheryl McPhee, Russell Johnson, Edward Jobbins, Dalene Koops and Frank Booth.
Throughout his life, Jack Fowler was an avid fan of football, cricket and the performing arts. The latter was thanks to his uncle Garnet Walch and parents Frank Harry Fowler and the former Fannie Adele Ellard. English-born Frank was a well-known musician in Brisbane who founded and conducted the Brisbane Liedertafel. Jack’s mother Fannie performed professionally during the 1870s and early 1880s as actress Ethel Adele with theatrical big names of their time such as Alice Dunning Lingard, Maggie Knight, Fred Marshall, J.C. Williamson, Maggie Moore and visiting American actor William H. Leake (Mrs Fowler’s first name officially spelt ‘Fannie’, is written as ‘Fanny’ by son Jack).
Frank Fowler died when Jack was just three months old, leaving Fannie to care for four boys. She moved Horace, Frank, Noel and Jack to Melbourne in 1896, and lived in Elsternwick, Brighton, Armadale and Hawksburn, where Jack would attend Hawksburn State School. His uncle, Garnet Walch, had dramatized Rolf Boldrewood’s novel Robbery Under Arms into a stage production for Alfred Dampier, and Jack recalled getting free seats to see his first-ever play. Jack’s first musical theatre experience was at age three in 1896, seeing the pantomime Djin Djin presented at the Princess Theatre by J.C. Williamson and George Musgrove, with music by Leon Caron and libretto by J.C. Williamson.
Fannie Fowler enjoyed Dickens, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the ‘good theatre’ of the day, as well as taking her children to the Tivoli to see Paul Cinquevalli the juggler and Dante the magician. She produced two successful juvenile productions of HMS Pinafore to augment her income, having played Hebe in the first Australian professional production. An Elsternwick performance involved the Fowler brothers: Frank as Captain Corcoran, Horace played Sir Joseph Porter, Noel was Dick Deadeye and Jack portrayed the Midshipmite. A non-singer, young Jack was hooked on theatre performance. The second juvenile production featuring Jack’s classmates from school, was presented at the Prahran Town Hall. One day Jack overheard the family Doctor talking with his mother. ‘Jack is deaf’. His mother was in disbelief, but the Doctor insisted, ‘Yes, I’m sure he is’. Jack reckoned it was not until twenty years later that outsiders noticed his deafness.
Jack’s first employment was with M.S. Sowerby’s Dental Depot in the Burke and Wills Chambers at 145 Collins Street, Melbourne, starting at 5/- per week and staying for two years. He describes ‘varying fortune’ with other dentists, including a sacking after one week ‘for not being good enough’.
In 1910, aspiring young playwright Jack Beresford Fowler‘s first play about Major-General Robert Clive, first British Governor of the Bengal Presidency, was courageously sent to J.C. Williamson producer Gerard Coventry. The play was not produced, but Mr Coventry invited Jack and his mother in to see The Catch of the Season. Undeterred, Jack submitted his next attempt, a dramatization of Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. Gerard Coventry returned the manuscript twelve months later before leaving for England, encouraging ‘Master Fowler’ to persevere for success and to never give up or lose heart.
Sydney professional producer and actor Gregan McMahon launched his Melbourne Repertory Theatre Company in 1910 and Jack Fowler contacted him. For his first production, McMahon alternated presenting Act Two of Richard Sheridan’s The Critic and St John Hankin’s The Two Mr Wetherbys with Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, presented at the Turn Verein Hall, an old German beer hall in Victoria Parade, East Melbourne. Medical student Frank Kingsley Norris portrayed Borkman and J.B. Fowler played Foldal, the Old Clerk. A reviewer from The Booklover praised both players as being ‘startlingly good’. The Age described Norris’s portrayal of Borkman as ‘unparalleled among amateur achievements for many a day.’ Jack Fowler was later invited to present a scene with Norris from John Gabriel Borkman on the same program as Nellie Melba for the Conservatorium of Music. Frank Norris would later become Major-General Sir F. Kingsley Norris KBE, CB, DSO, ED.
Prominent people appearing in McMahon’s early productions included Mrs Fanny Fowler, Doris Fitton, later producer for the Independent Theatre in Sydney, Jack Cussen, son of Judge Cussen, Louie Dunn who taught Irene Mitchell who would work at St Martin’s Theatre and Gregan McMahon.
Gregan McMahon, 1910s; photograph by Mina Moore
State Library Victoria, Melbourne, Accession no. H38782/691
Bert Bailey as Dad Rudd in On Our Selection, c.1912; photograph by Mina Moore
State Library Victoria, Melbourne, Accession no. H38782/48
Jack Fowler performed with Gregan McMahon from 1911 to 1914. He transitioned to professional theatre just before his twenty-first birthday, performing in 1914 with the J.C. Williamson firm in Louis N. Parker’s dramatization from Genesis, Joseph and His Brethren at the Theatre Royal. He recalled prejudice against amateurs and being introduced to producer Cecil King with: ‘This boy is only an amateur. He has played however in Ibsen.’ Mr King reasoned that Joseph and His Brethren were earlier than Ibsen and cast Jack as an Extra. During the show’s run in Adelaide, actor Godfrey Cass was missing and Jack Fowler, waiting in the wings, went on and played his scene, delighting producer King. When Jack made one hundred in a cricket match between the Theatre Royal and His Majesty’s Theatre, King shouted him a drink and Jack requested a part in the next touring production, Sealed Orders. George Musgrove invited Jack in 1914 to join Nellie Stewart’s touring company opening in Sydney, as actor and assistant stage manager in David Belasco’s Madame Du Barry and Paul Kester's Sweet Nell of Old Drury.
Writer/director/theatrical manager Albert Edward (Bert) Bailey, actor/playwright Edmund Duggan and business manager Julius Grant, united in 1911 to lease The King’s Theatre from entrepreneur William Anderson, establishing The Bert Bailey Dramatic Company.
The On Our Selection company collects for the Red Cross from a lorry through Melbourne streets in 1915.
From left: Billy Bearup (J. Beresford Fowler), Sarah (Laura Roberts), Mum (Alfreda Bevan), Dad (Bert Bailey), Uncle (Billy Driscoll), Maloney (Edmund Duggan) and Carry (Richard Bellairs)
From J.B. Fowler, The Green-eyed Monster, Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, UK, 1968
Jack joined the company for two years playing Billy Bearup in an adaptation of Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection, touring Australian towns from Geraldton in Western Australia to Cairns in Northern Queensland. Jack also acted at Melbourne’s King’s Theatre on Easter Saturday, 22 April 1916, in the company’s reproduction of the play The Squaw Man by arrangement with J.C. Williamson Limited.
In July 1916 Jack Fowler enlisted to serve his country in World War One. On his last night with the Bailey and Grant Company, he was presented onstage at the King’s Theatre with a luminous dial wristlet watch. The inscribed message from the company wished Jack ‘the best of luck in the part you are going to play in the world’s greatest tragedy.’
References
‘Miss Ethel Adele’, Brisbane Courier, 20 August 1928, p.12
J.B. Fowler, Stars in My Backyard, Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, 1962
J.B. Fowler, The Green-eyed Monster, Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., Ilfracombe, Devon, 1968
Barry O. Jones and Peter O’Shaughnessy, ‘Fowler, Jack Beresford (1893–1972)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 14, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1996
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Wednesday, 03 June 2020
‘The Show Went On’: Hiawatha
In late 1939, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's dramatic cantata of Hiawatha was performed at Melbourne's Exhibition Buildings. As Cheryl Threadgold discovers, in the audience was a small boy, just six years old. His name was John Aldous. And his mother was one of the thousand singers, musicians and dancers who defied the gathering clouds of war to make musical history.
Almost one thousand professional and Amateur performers had been rehearsing the musical pageant Hiawatha for several months, carefully planned by the Melbourne City Council to coincide with the 1939 Spring Racing Carnival.[1] The announcement of World War Two in September that year did not deter those involved with the production, and Hiawatha with pageantry, music and drama, opened on 21 October, 1939. Presented until 4 November at the Royal Exhibition Building, Carlton, the well-attended season included thirteen evening and two matinee performances.[2] Seven thousand school children had been invited to see two dress rehearsals.
Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem and comprising three cantatas composed by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the pageant Hiawatha was adapted, dramatized and produced by Thomas C. Fairbairn. This was the first time Hiawatha had been performed in Australia, but the spectacular musical pageant was already well-known in England, having been presented annually by Fairbairn at the Royal Albert Hall between 1924 and 1939.[3] The only exception was in 1926, when the production could not proceed due to the United Kingdom’s General Strike between 3 May and 12 May.[4]
Thomas Charles Fairbairn (1874-1978), producer.
Image © The Museum of Music History.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), composer.
Image © The Museum of Music History.
Fairbairn had been asked by London’s National Institute for the Blind to present a charity event in the Royal Albert Hall, and he premiered Hiawatha there in 1924. The production featured a real waterfall, 10,000 square feet of backcloth, a snowstorm, ballet, hundreds of ‘Native Americans’ and a medicine man played by a genuine Mohawk called Chief Os-Ke-Non-Ton, a trained singer.[5] Australian baritone Horace Stevens was cast in the lead role, and Hiawatha Coleridge-Taylor, the composer’s son, conducted the first performances.[6] In later performances, Fairbairn cast another Australian in the lead role, baritone Harold Williams, but when a third Australian, Norman Menzies of Geelong fell ill at a final rehearsal and could not perform, it was the first time the role of ‘Hiawatha’ had not been sung by an Australian.[7] Fairbairn’s recognition of Australian talent also included artist Frederick William (Fred) Leist, who designed the costumes for the 1924 Royal Albert Hall production and also painted the huge backcloth depicting the Rocky Mountains, fir trees and wigwams for the oratorio, Song of Hiawatha.[8] Horace Stevens would later reprise his title role in the 1939 Melbourne production, sharing the role with another Australian, opera singer Walter Kingsley. This news would have surprised a writer in the Junior Section of The Age who had advised his readers that a ‘Native American’ would be playing the lead role.[9]
Exhibition Building & Flags of World War II, Novelty Card Company, Melbourne, c.1939-1945.
Museums Victoria Collection, Item SH 961007.
Extracted from Iroquois folklore, Longfellow’s poem tells of the deeds of legendary Native American hero Hiawatha, a Mohawk Indian chief (or described by some sources as leader of the Onondaga tribe) born circa 1525. Hiawatha is attributed with having united five tribes to form the Iroquois Confederacy.[10]
For Melbourne’s three-act production, Fairbairn installed a stage in the Exhibition Building measuring one hundred and fifty by forty-five feet.[11] The cast of almost one thousand performers and musicians included a chorus of seven hundred singers (aged sixteen to sixty-four) from various Melbourne Choral Societies, a ballet of eighty dancers under the direction of Miss Jennie Brenan, principal dancers Laurel Martyn, Serge Bousloff and Lawrence Rentoul, and a seventy-five-piece, full symphony orchestra led by Edouard Lambert under the musical direction of Bernard Heinze.[12] Fairbairn’s significant overall role in presenting Hiawatha is emphasised in this sentence in the theatre programme: ‘Entire Production under the Personal Direction of T. C. Fairbairn’.[13]
The cast of Melbourne’s three-act production was led by Horace Stevens as Hiawatha. Performers alternating in principal roles included Walter Kingsley (Hiawatha), Thea Phillips and Strella Wilson (Nokamis), Phyllis Curnow and Vera Hickenbotham (Minnehaha) and Marion Daniels and Elizabeth Coote (Fever). Other principal roles were performed by Fred Collier (Iagoo), Tom Minogue (Famine), Wilma Berkeley (Spring), Browning Mummery (Chibiabos and The Monk), Cecil Atkinson (role not listed in programme) and Reg Hood (Gitchie Manito). Principal dancer Laurel Martyn’s performance in Hiawatha was noticed by ballet director Edouard Borovansky, who successfully persuaded her to join his fledgling Borovansky Ballet in 1940.[14]
Some Hiawatha cast members assembled outside the Royal Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne, 1939.
Royal Exhibition Building Collection, Museums Victoria Collections, HT 35085.
The Prefatory to the original musical score explains that composer S. Coleridge-Taylor initially only planned to set ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’, which was produced at a students’ concert presented at the Royal College of Music, South Kensington, London on 26 October, 1898.[15] The second section, ‘The Death of Minnehaha’, resulted from a request that the composer contribute a choral work to the North Staffordshire Musical Festival produced at Hanley on 26 October, 1899. The third section, ‘Hiawatha’s Departure’ was written for, and performed with the preceding sections by the Royal Choral Society at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 22 March, 1900.
John Aldous was six years old when attending the Exhibition Building to see his mother, professional performer Mabel Aldous, sing in the 1939 Hiawatha pageant.[16] John says his first memory is of the height of the ceiling and the glow of light. ‘My mother, a contralto, was in the second bottom row of the choir, dressed as an Indian squaw with her cheeks daubed with coloured stripes’. John remembers the lead performer, Horace Stevens, making his appearance high up at the back of the stage. ‘Dressed in a brown tunic with a large feathered headdress, with its feathers hanging down to his waist. With his arms outstretched, he called to the choir, the singers got up as one, and in a flurry of brown tunics they ran towards him’.
John clearly recalls walking with his parents across the gardens to the cable tram wheelhouse at the top of` Swanston Street, which he says later became the Carlton Brewery. ‘I believe my mother in costume was with my father and me on the ride from the city to the St Kilda Esplanade’, reflects John. ‘The inside of the cable car was dimly lit and the varnished timber walls and ceiling were very dark for a sleepy six-year old’. John remembers alighting at the stop outside the St Moritz Ice-Skating Rink. ‘My father carried me across the little park to Pollington Street, where I was put to bed’.
Front cover, ‘Scenes from The Song of Hiawatha’ by H. W. Longfellow, music by S. Coleridge-Taylor, Op.30, Novello & Company Ltd., London, 1928.
Courtesy of Dr John Aldous.
Hiawatha theatre programme, 1939.
Image courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Sponsored by the Melbourne City Council headed by The Rt. Hon. Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Councillor A. W. Coles, this grand-scale spectacular was presented in aid of the Australian Red Cross and related funds.[17] During the months of pre-production planning and rehearsals for Hiawatha, the organisers had not known that World War Two would commence before the show’s scheduled opening night. The decision to proceed with presenting this production at a time of war was regarded by some as questionable when other Australians were selflessly committing to enlist in the Forces.
The contrasting moods of this new wartime era, only one month after the outbreak of conflict, can be recognised in the Hiawatha theatre programme. Earlier pages describe various theatrical aspects of the production, then in serious contrast, the last page contains an advertisement for The Argus newspaper: ‘READ the WAR NEWS’, and ‘SEE the WAR NEWS in Airmail pictures and up-to-date COLOURED WAR MAPS’. On the back page, in another change of mood, is an advertisement for sparkling wine, featuring a glamorous, silky-gowned lady triumphantly holding high a glass of wine in celebratory style. The patriotic, goodwill intentions to stage the well-received production would appear to justify such grand scale entertainment proceeding at this difficult time in Australian history. Patrons in the three thousand, five hundred strong audience on opening night included the Governor, Sir Winston Dugan, Lady Dugan and other leading Victorian citizens.[18]
An article written by Kenneth R. Hendy, published on 21 October, 1939 in Melbourne’s The Argus newspaper, attempts to counteract concern with staging the production by pointing out the patriotic value of presenting Hiawatha at this worrying time. Headed ‘Hiawatha Comes to Melbourne’, and sub-headed ‘An Anglo-Scot Uses Greek Form in a Play about an Indian by a Half-caste Negro’, the article first tells of the old legend of Hiawatha. Hendy reminds us that the great native American prophet, statesman and teacher had played a part in building the British Empire with his formation of a powerful confederation of five Indian tribes, which fought with the British settlers in the wars and brought Canada under British rule. Seeking to justify presenting this show at a time of national uncertainty, Hendy suggests the Hiawatha production symbolises a form of weaponry: ‘Now the dramatic presentation of part of the Hiawatha legend is to aid the Empire in its fight against Hitlerism’.
Hendy also recognises the international influence associated with Hiawatha, such as the story of a Mohawk Indian told by an American poet, set to music by ‘the half-caste West African negro, Coleridge Taylor’ (English-born composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, known as the ‘Black Mahler’ was the son of a doctor from Sierra Leone) and dramatized by an Anglo-Scot, Thomas C. Fairbairn. Hendy believes the production ‘has taken something of the form of the ancient Greek drama’ and praises Fairbairn as ‘probably the only Englishman since Milton who has attempted such an enterprise’. Convinced that Fairbairn had done more than merely adapt the Greek form to English presentation, Hendy writes: ‘He has captured something of the Greek outlook on life, of the spirit of the great civilisation that reigned 500 years before the Christian era’.
Professor Bernard Heinze (1894-1982), conductor.
Musical activities in Australia including Australian artists abroad, 1936-1966 : scrapbook, PROMPT Scrapbook 6, National Library of Australia.
Soprano Thea Phillips (1892-1960), one of the principals.
Elisabeth Kumm collection.
The Argus newspaper favourably reviewed the thirteen-night production, and an article titled ‘Pageantry of Hiawatha’ described the show as ‘an event which musical Melbourne will long remember’.[19] The review praised the show, saying ‘Mr T.C. Fairbairn, the musical director, Professor Bernard Heinze, the leader of the orchestra, M. Edouard Lambert, the principals and the one thousand performers came through a herculean task with high honours’. The review notes that, ‘the great audience of three thousand went home thoroughly satisfied and happy that, though the war had caused the cancellation of most of the events of the Melbourne spring carnival, Hiawatha had survived’.
The 1939 production of Hiawatha in Melbourne was elaborate and large scale, but was not the first musical performance staged in the Royal Exhibition Building post-World War One. Mimi Colligan’s article titled ‘From Hallelujah to Hiawatha’ refers to musical ‘occasions’ presented from 1920 to celebrate various grand events. [20] Hiawatha, together with Fairbairn’s lavish staging, fringed Indian costumes and feathered headdresses, is described by Colligan as having a ‘spectacular visual impact’.[21] On 1 July, 2004, there was global recognition for the Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens when the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, becoming the first built heritage site in Australia to be declared ‘World Heritage’.[22] A later study of the Exhibition Building concludes that the two-week run of the choral pageant Hiawatha in 1939 was ‘one of the most extravagant musical concerts ever to be staged at the Exhibition Building in the twentieth century, and, ironically, one of the last’.[23]
Endnotes
1. Kenneth R. Hendy, ‘Hiawatha Comes to Melbourne’, The Argus, Weekend Magazine, 21 October 1939, p. 2; https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11248349 (accessed 24 April, 2020)
2. Mimi Colligan, ‘From Hallelujah to Hiawatha’ in Victorian Icon: the Royal Exhibition Building Melbourne by David Dunstan with contributions by Mimi Colligan [and fourteen others],The Exhibition Trustees in association with Australian Scholarly Publishing, Kew, Victoria, 1996, p. 345.
3. Jack Cowdrey, ‘June Story of the Month: The Royal Choral Society and the Royal Albert Hall, 2012, https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2012/june/june-story-of-the-month-the-royal-choral-society-and-the-royal-albert-hall/ (accessed 6 May, 2020)
4. BBC News, ‘What was the General Strike of 1926?’, 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-13828537 (accessed 1 May, 2020)
5. Cowdrey, Ibid.
6. Colligan, p. 344.
7. Hendy, Ibid.
8. Martha Rutledge, ‘Leist, Frederick William (Fred) (1873-1945)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1986, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/leist-frederick-william-fred-7166 (accessed 28 April, 2020)
9. Ralph Rover, ‘The Musical Pageant of Hiawatha’, My Weekly Chat, The Age, Junior Section, 29 September 1939, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/206338665 (accessed 25 April 2020)
10. HistoryNet, ‘Hiawatha’, https://www.historynet.com/hiawatha (accessed 25 April 2020)
11. Colligan, Ibid.
12. Hendy, Ibid.
13. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne, Hiawatha theatre programme, 1939, presented by the Melbourne City Council, The Specialty Press Pty. Ltd., p. 3.
14. Michelle Potter, ‘Laurel Martyn (1916–2013)’, 2013, https://michellepotter.org/news/laurel-martyn-1916-2013 (accessed 28 April 2020)
15. Henry W Longfellow. & Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Prefatory Note, ‘Scenes from The Song of Hiawatha’, Op.30, Novello’s Original Octavo Edition, 200 pages, Novello and Company, London, 1928. Courtesy of Dr John Aldous, 2020.
16. John Aldous, Recollections of attending Hiawatha in 1939 (2020).
17. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Ibid.
18. Hendy, Ibid.
19. ‘Pageantry of Hiawatha’, The Argus, 23 October 1939, p. 2, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11265689 (accessed 25 April 2020)
20. Colligan, pp. 342-343.
21. Colligan, p. 345.
22. Victoria State Government, ‘About Heritage in Victoria: World Heritage’, https://www.heritage.vic.gov.au/about-heritage-in-victoria/world-heritage (accessed 6 May 2020)
23. Peter Lovell & Kai Chen, Royal Exhibition Building & Carlton Gardens World Heritage Management Plan, Melbourne, The Exhibition Trustees, Museum Victoria, Volume 1, 2.12.6, 2013, p. 55, https://www.heritage.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/55202/Vol-1-2.0_Part4.pdf (accessed 7 May 2020)
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Monday, 10 December 2018
Early Colonial Amateur Theatre in Australia
Theatre Royal, Melbourne (formerly the Pavilion), painted in 1875 by Wilbraham F.E. Liardet (1799-1878). Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H2002.127.
Having recently given a talk on the history of amateur theatre in Victoria at a booked-out event at The Channel, when THA presented their last event for the year in association with Arts Centre Melbourne, Cheryl Threadgold now explores the early days of non-professional theatricals in Australia and the first performances by convicts.
It is important to respectfully acknowledge the cultural performances presented by Aboriginal Australians over many centuries.
These Indigenous rituals, sacred ceremonies, and Dreamtime stories of Creation represent the first known performances presented in Australia by members of a community, for their community.
Aboriginal Australians continued this entertainment for white incomers, and today are respected and admired worldwide for their high-quality music, dance, song and dramatic performances
On the high seas on a warm summer night, 2 January 1788, convicts entertained passengers on board the Scarborough ship with a play and songs. Amateur theatre would soon arrive in a mysterious, unknown land, but for now, after tedious difficult months at sea, the magic of live performance would glow for the passengers like a warm, comforting beacon.
Pretending to be someone else, even temporarily, is an escapist phenomenon common to many art forms enjoyed by practitioners and audiences through the ages. At the time the first fleet left for the Great Southern Land, later known as Australia, amateur and professional theatre in England and Ireland had a well-established history. People from all walks of life had the opportunity to enjoy live performance of different genres in venues of varying sizes and prestige, either as participants or spectators.
The convicts, free settlers and officers arriving in Australia would have included actors and playgoers, who most likely would have brought play texts on their sea journey. Props were no problem for improvised or scripted live performances as the convicts could source naturalistic items such as trees, grass, water, and real blood if required.
Almost half a million Irish immigrants re-settled in Australia between 1788 and 1921, and although only twelve percent of convicts were of Irish nationality, it did not take long for Irish theatre to impact on this early colonial settlement.
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The Scarborough: Voyage from New South Wales to Canton, in the year 1788: with views of the islands discovered by Thomas Gilbert, London, 1789.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, DSM/Q981/26A1.
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Leongatha Lyric Theatre Incorporated presented Our Country’s Good in 2017.
Image courtesy of David Tattersall, archivist for Leongatha Lyric Theatre Inc.
The Recruiting Officer
On 4 June 1789, just eighteen months after the arrival of the first fleet, Irish dramatist George Farquhar’s comedy, The Recruiting Officer, became the first recorded amateur theatrical performance presented in Australia. Presented by convicts in a make-shift theatre in Sydney Cove to celebrate the birthday of King George the Third, the audience comprised approximately sixty-five people, including Governor Arthur Phillip.
According to Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1991 play Our Country’s Good, based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker (1987), Governor Arthur Phillip was supportive of convicts presenting theatre. His character in Wertenbaker’s play refers to theatre offering an expression of civilisation to the convicts, encouraging a more refined way of speaking, and providing temporary escapism from the image of ‘despised prisoners’. Wertenbaker’s play and Keneally’s novel have influenced public opinion that the first production of George Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer in Australia, was initiated and led by officers.
In contrast, historian Robert Jordan points out that theatre in that era was mostly motivated by convicts, many bringing with them to Australia an existing cultural knowledge and ability to present their own theatre productions. Jordan emphasises he is not criticising Keneally and Wertenbaker’s researched fictional works, but his research into convict theatre reveals the views disseminating a popular image of the cultural environment in early colonial Australia, may not be entirely accurate.
Convicts were known to write their own plays, and some were of a high standard. For example, the three-act comedy Jemmy Green in Australia, written by English-educated convict James Tucker in the 1840s, was eventually broadcast nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1987.
Tucker also wrote the novel The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh, discovered years later when the three hundred-page, hand-written manuscript appeared at a Royal Australian Historical Society exhibition in Sydney in 1920.
Written during the 1840s and first published as a novel in 1929, the story exposes the horrors of convict life, presumably from Tucker’s own personal experiences. Shining amid harshness and brutality is the character of Cockney comedic prisoner Jemmy King, who obtains the Superintendent’s blessing to establish a theatre company in the camp. Tucker reveals Kings’ inventiveness to make costumes from bags and left-over materials, lamps from tin and their orchestra playing a ‘tolerable melody’ which included a tin violin, a flute, tambourine and a drum.
Ballads were popular among the transportees, with original lyrics often used to protest about living conditions in their new environment. Songs of complaint written by convicts included ‘The Plains of Emu’, ‘The Convict Maid’ and ‘The Death of Captain Logan’. But while convicts and their audiences may have enjoyed the escapism offered by theatrical performances, opinions differed between free settlers and authorities regarding the moral and political suitability of entertainment in a penal colony.
Undaunted by these conflicting opinions, convict theatre remained active, particularly on Norfolk Island between 1793 and 1794, at Emu Plains near the Blue Mountains in New South Wales in 1822, and at Port Macquarie and Parramatta in 1840. Considered ghastly by today’s standards, an alternate form of entertainment during early colonial settlement was the viewing of executions, presented to mass audiences. An even worse popular form of entertainment were the publicly performed dissections on bodies of the executed in hospitals.
In 1796, theatre-lover Robert Sidaway, also a watch-case maker and former convict, used convict labour to build Australia’s first regular theatre containing one hundred and twenty seats in Bell Row, now Bligh Street, Sydney. Alas, authorities closed the theatre two years later, for as well as the rowdy audiences, convicts were suspected of pickpocketing patrons and robbing their homes while they attended the theatre.
Earlier allegations of misbehaviour influenced the third Governor of New South Wales, Governor Philip Gidley King, to disapprove of theatres after his appointment in 1800. Public live performances also declined because potential actors became assigned to private masters in isolated areas. Early nineteenth century playwright, Scottish journalist David Burns, wrote The Bushrangers after witnessing the hanging of convict-turned-bushranger Matthew Brady in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land in 1826. With its criminal protagonist, romance and observations of torrid conditions in the penal colony, The Bushrangers was performed three years later in Edinburgh, Scotland, but not in Australia until 1971, when presented by high school students in Sydney.
Merchant Barnett Levy introduced the acting profession to New South Wales after first staging concerts in 1826 in the assembly rooms of the Royal Hotel in George Street, Sydney. He eventually obtained a licence from Governor Richard Bourke to open the Theatre Royal inside the hotel in 1833, and the first show presented was the Gothic melodrama The Miller and his Men. When Levy died in late 1837, the theatre closed. It is interesting to note that these performances were advertised as ‘amateur theatricals’ to convey respectability, in view of theatre’s rowdy reputation at the time.
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Cover of novel The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh by James Tucker, Currey O’Neil, South Yarra, Vic, 1981 (first edition published 1929).
State Library of Victoria, SLT 819.93 T797A (1981).
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Playbill: For the benefit of J. Butler and W. Bryant, George Hughes, Govt. Printer for Theatre, Sydney, 30 July 1796.
National Library of Australia, nla.obj- RBRS N 686.2099441 F692.
Victoria
It would not be long before amateur theatre would commence in Victoria, influenced by the performative styles and content of English and Irish traditional productions presented by early colonial theatre.
In 1842, Melbourne’s first live theatre, The Pavilion (later known as the Theatre Royal) opened in Bourke Street. Theatre at that time was associated with public houses, so accordingly, The Pavilion theatre was located next to the Eagle Tavern. Accessed from Bourke Street, the wood-structured Pavilion measured sixty-five feet by thirty-five feet. The Colonial Office in Sydney initially refused to issue a licence for professional performances, suspecting the venue would operate inappropriately with rowdy audiences.
Six gentlemen enrolled themselves as an Amateur Theatrical Association for charitable and benevolent purposes, and the Sydney authorities permitted The Pavilion to open for monthly theatrical presentations.
Amateur theatre had now arrived in Victoria. Eric Irvin believes theatre was ‘in the blood’ of the people in the early nineteenth century, and it is pleasing to observe that two centuries later, nothing has changed. Today, over one hundred amateur musical and non-musical theatre companies operate in Victoria alone, with thousands of volunteers throughout Australia dedicating their time, talent and skills, for the love of theatre.
This is a revised version of the article originally published December 2018
References
Paul Bentley, ‘Australian Culture 1789-2000’, With a Roar of Laughter 1789–1850, The Wolanski Foundation Project, Paper no. 4, part 1, October 1999, www.twf.org.au/research/culture
Katharine Brisbane, ‘Amateur Theatre’, in Companion to Theatre in Australia, Philip Parsons (gen. ed.), Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, Sydney, c.1995
Mimi Colligan & Frank Van Straten, ‘Theatre’, eMelbourne, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne, July 2008, www.emelbourne.net.au
Eric Irvin, Theatre Comes to Australia, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1971
Robert Jordan, The Convict Theatre of Early Australia 1788-1840, Currency Press, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2002
Peter Kuch, ‘The Irish and the Australasian Colonial Stage - Confrontation and Compromise’, The Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 10, 2010, pp.106-107
Harold Love (ed.), The Australian Stage: a documentary history, University Press in association with Australian Theatre Studies Centre, School of Drama, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, 1984
Paul McGuire, The Australian Theatre: an abstract and brief chronicle in twelve parts, Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, London & Melbourne, 1948
Lisa Murray, ‘Sydney’s First Theatre’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2017, http://home.dictionaryofsydney.org/sydneys-first-theatre
National Museum of Australia, ‘Irish Convicts’, Not Just Ned: a true history of the Irish in Australia, exhibition, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 17 March to 31 July 2011
Bill Scott, ‘Traditional Ballad Verse in Australia’, Folklore, vol. 111, no. 2, October 2000, pp. 309-313
Ross Thorne, ‘Sydney’s Lost Theatres’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2016, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/sydneys_lost_theatres
James Tucker, The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh, 3rd edn, Currey O’Neil, South Yarra, Vic, 1981
James Tucker, Jemmy Green in Australia: a comedy in three acts, Radio Play, ABC FM, Sydney, 1987, https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/22282149
Margaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage 1829–1929: an historical entertainment in six acts, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983
Robert Willson, ‘Convict Life Revealed’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 2014, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/convict-life-revealed-20140121-3166l.html
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