Theatre

Last year marked the centenary of Robert Helpmann’s birth. Apart from a tribute at the Helpmann Awards ceremony – the ‘Bobbies’ – in July 2009, no Australian performing arts company celebrated the anniversary of this polymorphous artist and early advocate for a national artistic life created by Australians, not by northern-hemisphere exporters. Two new books and a vibrant touring exhibition went part of the way towards providing a fitting tribute.

One view of the relationship between the word and the creative act is Goethe’s admonition: ‘Bilde Künstler, rede nicht’ – ‘Create, [the German word actually places more emphasis on the idea of shaping and forming than on artistic imagination] artist, don’t talk’. Typically, of course, his own Conversations with Eckermann (1823–32) show him frequently ignoring this precept, when the occasion (or the questioner) demands. And the last forty years have seen a proliferation of books in which actors, directors and designers talk – sometimes revealingly, sometimes unproductively – about their approach to the creative or re-creative act.

What is it that endows an actor or performer with stage presence? Jane Goodall introduces her exploration of this phenomenon with three disparate examples: Maria Callas commanding an audience of 20,000 at Epidauros, including a ten-year-old girl who would never forget the experience; Bob Dylan recalling the professional wrestler Gorgeous George making an entrance ‘in all his magnificent glory’; and a young Simon Callow, who, employed in the box office at the Old Vic, sneaks into the empty theatre and, setting foot on the stage and declaiming a few lines from Hamlet, is shocked by the ‘physical, or even psychical, power released, a small earthquake’.

With 827 pages of entries on individual performers, shows, composers, lyricists, directors and choreographers, together with almost another hundred pages of appendices covering the chronology of musicals, guides to recordings and awards, a bibliography and an index, this compilation is an impressive volume to appear under the name of a sole author. Thomas Hischak has already published more than a dozen works on various aspects of the American musical, and the present study is as comprehensive and many-sided as the genre itself.

Jim Sharman and Rex Cramphorn (a future artistic director of Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre) first met at NIDA in the 1960s, and Sharman returned there as a tutor in the 1970s. He was then a ‘radical populist’, while Cramphorn was scholarly, mad about Racine and Corneille. But they agreed that theatre was a vocation, and shared a ‘crypto-mystical’ interest in the slippery relationship between reality and illusion. They would set up a short-lived theatre company at the Paris Theatre (later demolished), and mount two premières of Australian plays, Dorothy Hewett’s Pandora’s Cross (1978) and Louis Nowra’s Visions (1979).

It has been the opinion of many, most Christian Queen, that the ancient Greeks and Romans, in representing their tragedies upon the stage, sang them throughout. But until now this noble manner of recitation has been neither revived nor (to my knowledge) even attempted by anyone, and I used to believe that this was due to the imperfection of the modern music, by far inferior to the ancient.

Thus writes poet Ottavio Rinuccini to Maria de’ Medici, dedicatee of Rinuccini’s Euridice. Set to music by Jacopo Peri and performed in Florence in 1600 as part of the festivities to mark the marriage of Maria de’ Medici to Henri IV of France, Euridice is one of the earliest surviving operas. Rinuccini, Peri, Caccini and the other inventors of opera sought to address ‘the imperfection of the modern music’ by advocating a type of solo vocal music that took as its starting point the meaning and sentiment of the poetry (as Claudio Monteverdi later put it, the words were ‘the mistress of the harmony’). Hand in hand with this was a manner of delivery that placed emphasis upon dramatic declamation and expression.

In the myths that inspired Wagner to write Der Ring des Nibelungen, the World Ash-Tree (Die WeltEsche) is the symbol of Wotan’s power and enlightenment and eventual downfall. As a young god, he cut a branch off the tree to fashion into his spear. In The Ring, it is not until the Prologue to Götterdämmerung, as the three Norns are weaving their rope of fate, that we are told the World Ash-Tree is withering and dying, as the gods themselves will do by the end of this long evening. As with most of the objects in The Ring, symbolism is never too far away. The tree: the spear: the twilight of the gods. On Wotan’s orders, the branches of the tree (as the Norns tell us, and as Waltraute is soon to tell her sister Brünnhilde) are split and piled around Valhalla, where the gods sit, waiting for their fiery end.

When Prince Hamlet cried ‘The play’s the thing’, he was about to use a performance of The Mousetrap to demonstrate a point central to his purpose: he intended to ‘catch the conscience of the king’. Nearly 400 years later, British playwright David Hare endorsed and expanded Hamlet’s utilitarian approach, writing: ‘Indeed, if you want to understand the social history of Britain since the war, then your time will be better spent studying the plays of the period … than by looking at any comparable documentary source.’

Theatregoers with long memories may well hug to themselves the ‘golden years’ of the Melbourne Theatre Company’s tenancy of the Russell Street Theatre in the 1960s, a time in which plays as varied as Hochhuth’s The Representative, Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s infallible matinee version of Henry James’s The Heiress, and many others jostled for attention. It was the time when an actor called Clive Winmill stepped on stage in the swinging London comedy The Knack and, instead of saying his lines, treated the audience to a passionate anti-Vietnam involvement speech. It was a time when the provocative new and the venerated classic made equal claims on a theatrical ensemble which achieved real importance in Melbourne’s cultural life.

A review of Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers, first performed by the Melbourne Theatre Company in April 2005. The Sydney Theatre Company is presenting the same production at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until July 2. It then moves to Canberra’s Playhouse (July 14 to 23).

Not so long ago, Melbourne theatre-goers would say of Sydney audiences, ‘If it moves, they’ll clap it.’ These days, it would seem, Melbourne is the new Sydney. No snobbish snipes at the northerners’ perceived lack of sophistication will wash any longer; such parochial bigotries have been found out. No extensive cultural investigation was required to expose the hypocrisy. A visit to the Melbourne Theatre Company’s recent production of Hannie Rayson’s latest play, Two Brothers, would do. As dud joke followed dud joke, the evidence mounted. As one preposterous scenario begat another in a genre-jumble of farce (though not intended to be farce, I fear) and political thriller (or lame attempt at it), Sydney took on a cultural loftiness I’d never noticed before – and I grew up there and admit to lowbrow parentage. When, at the end of Two Brothers, the audience cheered and applauded, there could be no doubt: the play moved, and they clapped it.