John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre Australian Playwrights

Series editor

Peta Tait

Founded by

Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt

Developed by

Veronica Kelly

VOLUME 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ap John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

By

Adrian Kiernander

LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Measure for Measure, directed by John Bell, Bell Shakespeare Company, 2005. Photographer: Andrew de la Rue. Permission granted by agent.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930704

ISSN 0921-2531 ISBN 978-90-42-03933-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-94-01-21215-1 (e-book)

Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

Series Editor’s Preface 7 Acknowledgments 9 Note on References 15 Abbreviations 16 Introduction 17

Chapter One: A National Theatre 33 The Guthrie Report 33 What constitutes an Australian national theatre? 35 Nationhood and gender 36 National belonging 38 The University Players 42 Bell at the (new) Old Tote 44 Henry in a tent 47

Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 53 Old Tote, new Nimrod 53 Not just a matinee idol: Arturo Ui 56 Exploring Australian Shakespeare: Petruchio and 58 Nimrod expanding 67 Richard III and the Dismissal 68 Two great roles and an Australian “Theatre of Panache” 72 Volpone at the Nimrod 76 Playing on regardless 77 Intermission 80 The Bell Shakespeare Company 83 Irreverent Shakespeares 85 Settling in and branching out 88

Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 95 Australian history and The Legend of King O’Malley 95 An Australian venue: Nimrod and Biggles 105 6 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Two new Australian playwrights: Ron Blair and 107 Reclaiming the past: Peter Kenna 112 A bigger theatre for Australian plays 117 Contentious realisms: Jim McNeil 118 Sexuality and celibacy: Mates and Brothers 120 Playing away and at home: Nowra’s Inner Voices and Williamson’s The Club and Travelling North 124 The and The Venetian Twins 129 Staging the history of 131

Chapter Four: Entrepreneur and Teacher 135 Australian venues, companies, styles and identities 135 The decline of the Nimrod 141 A new start 143

Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 149 Local Shakespeare 149 Ritual and supernatural Shakespeare 153 Carnivalesque Shakespeare 154 Merry and tragical: inverting genres 163 Kingdoms and republics: the Henriad and the referendum 168

Epilogue 179 Australian Shakespeare in the new millennium 179

Appendix: Table of Productions 187 Bibliography 193 Index 203

Series Editor’s Preface

John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre is about actor-director John Bell’s work on new plays and classic Shakespearean drama, and reveals how Australian theatre developed a distinctive national style and yet remained part of theatre internationally. The complex theatre that emerges from Adrian Kiernander’s very readable, celebratory exploration of Bell’s oeuvre also confirms the importance of scholarship offering comparative perspectives over decades for the recognition of what has been achieved in theatre nationally. A comprehensive study of this type facilitates appreciation of how theatre contributes to society and its values. Volume 16 marks the end of a decade for me as the ‘hands-on’ Series Editor for the Rodopi Australian Playwrights and Performance series. This series remains the only ongoing list on Australian theatre and drama scholarship, and I pass on the role as its editor as the reputation of Rodopi strengthens further. It has been my privilege to work with such wonderful authors and editors on volumes 11 to 16 in the series, and to nurture the publication of these important books, usually the first in an area. I am very proud of what has been achieved with this series.

Professor Peta Tait FAHA May 2014

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book first came to me when I had the privilege of working with John Bell in the beginning of 1992, during rehearsals for the second season of the Bell Shakespeare Company. I made a suggestion to John, which he graciously accepted, to write something about his work as an actor and director. His career had already been extensive, and when some of the most important developments in Australian theatre happened, he was there, often making a significant contribution. Even though I lived in New Zealand in the 1970s and early 1980s, I knew that something interesting was happening in Australian theatre – knowledge derived from several visits of my own to Sydney and ; from actor friends who travelled there; from Australian actors who moved to Auckland; and from tours to Auckland by the Old Tote Theatre of The Legend of King O’Malley in ’s production in 1972, and by the Australian Performing Group in 1975 with John Romeril’s Mrs Thally F and Jack Hibberd’s The Les Darcy Show. Some of the New Wave plays were given local productions; Mary Amoore, the director of Auckland’s Central Theatre, scheduled several of these. I remember productions of Biggles by Ron Blair, Michael Boddy and Ray Cooney in 1973, and Peter Kenna’s A Hard God and Alex Buzo’s Coralie Lansdowne Says No in 1975. The idea of writing something like this had occurred to me already – books about Australian theatre were very helpful in recording aspects of theatre history, but for reasons to do with the available technologies, most of this history was based around the work of playwrights, and this practice continues today. There was little written about and from the point of view of directors and actors, and I wanted to write about theatre in performance. I naively thought that I would be able to write the book quite quickly, but for many reasons, including the distraction of other projects funded by the Australian Research Council, this was not to be 10 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre the case. I have been able to publish articles and conference presentations about John Bell’s work, but the broader scope of the book required more clear air than I have often been able to find. The delay has been frustrating, but there is a silver lining: twenty-one years later, I have written the kind of book which I could hardly have imagined when I started. Some of this is due to being able to watch at least reasonable-quality video of many productions, variously in the Bell Shakespeare Company offices, in the television archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and in the Stage on Screen Collection at the University of New England (UNE). An even more recent research tool has been the web – useful for finding information, both factual and interpretative – especially via the AusStage database of theatre in Australia. Sunday Gullifer and Leigh Travers have been particularly helpful in accessing photographs and obtaining permission to reproduce them, as has Judith Seeff, the archivist, and Julia Mant at the archives of the National Institute of Dramatic Art. However, more traditional forms of historiography have been essential, and I am grateful to those many people who agreed to be interviewed, and who have lent me their collections of press clippings. Even though some of these have, frustratingly, been clipped and collected without bibliographical references, they have been invaluable and will continue to be so until the major Australian newspapers comprehensively digitise their archives for the second half of the twentieth century. In the early part of the project, valuable research assistance was provided by Lynne Bradley, Lynn Everett, Jeremy Gadd, Paul Galloway, Delyse Ryan, Graham Seaman and Ruth Thompson, who scoured archival newspapers, magazines and microfilm to find missing bibliographic details for newspaper clippings of articles and reviews (usually, but not always, successfully). I thank Robert Love for his eagle-eyed proof-reading and copy-editing. I should also note the help of the staff of several libraries who have gone out of their way to answer difficult questions – the Mayne Library, including the Hanger Collection, at the ; the Mitchell Library, which is part of the State Library of in Sydney; the Fisher Library at Sydney University; the Dixson Library at UNE. I am deeply indebted to Sylvia Ransom from the Dixson Library for making house-calls to help with new techniques of Acknowledgments 11 referencing, and for saving me on occasion from scrambling the entire text. Matthew Fernance has generously helped with computer issues, and Gill Willis in the UNE School of Arts has, as always, been a wonderful resource in solving urgent problems with software. I am also indebted to current colleagues, including Dr Anne Pender, Dr Elizabeth Hale and Professor Darryl Poulsen at UNE, and Dr Jonathan Bollen and Dr Bruce Parr, all of whom have given me much-needed support and scholarly advice. Similarly, my gratitude goes to former colleagues at the University of Queensland, Professor Richard Fotheringham and Professor Veronica Kelly, who helped me to establish myself as a researcher in theatre history when I arrived in in 1986. My UNE colleague Sue Fell’s imaginative teaching is a constant reminder of why theatre is worth recording and writing about. International colleagues who have contributed to my knowledge of both Shakespeare studies and modern theatre history include Michael Best, Evelyn Gajowski, Michael Mangan, Kate Newey, Eric Rasmussen, Laurence Senelick, Bruce R. Smith, Lisa Warrington, and especially Stephen Orgel. Some of the material has been published as book chapters and journal articles, and much of it has been presented, in different form, as papers at conferences – most importantly, those of the Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (ADSA), the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA), and also the 2006 World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane, the Shakespeare Association of America meetings in Chicago (1995), Miami (2001), Bermuda (2005) and Chicago (2010), and at the 2009 conference of the Shakespeare Association of Southern Africa in Grahamstown, South Africa. I have benefited from feedback given to me by colleagues in a critical but supportive way for over twenty years. Those years are taking their toll: like many of us, I will miss Geoffrey Milne, or ‘gjm’ as he unpretentiously titled himself, for his encyclopaedic, first-hand knowledge of Australian theatre practice (including puppetry) over the past two decades, but most of all for his generosity, both intellectual and personal. He filled several gaps in this narrative. ADSA was the starting point and home base for AusStage, and one of the benefits has been the pleasure of spending face-to-face time with wonderful colleagues and friends as part of the early 12 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre management of the project – Bill Dunstone, Joh Hartog, Julie Holledge, Paul Makeham, John McCallum, Richard Stone, John Thomson, Joanne Tompkins, Dave Watt and Jenny White. The UNE Stage on Screen database of video from the archives of ABC Television contains documentary evidence about many plays, interviews with both practitioners and commentators and, most valuably, extensive recordings of some important productions. The database would not have been possible without a pilot project funded by UNE, the cooperation of Salvatore Russo, Manager of ABC Research Services, and Mary Jane Stannus, formerly head of the ABC’s Archives and Library Services, Wendy Borchers, an astonishingly talented archivist, and the dedication of Jeremy Gadd, who worked with the ABC Television Archives to identify and document over three thousand film clips relevant to theatre in Australia. His familiarity with the makers of Australian theatre since the late 1960s allowed him to identify many important events and participants in the surviving records. In particular, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Professor Peta Tait for her scrupulous attention to detail in reading and commenting on an early draft. The book is much the better for her perceptive comments. Friends from other academic fields at UNE have shown interest in the topic and their encouragement has been important: Gail Hawkes, whose beautifully situated house has been a welcoming refuge from unpleasant distractions; and Monique and Ross Delaney for their generous hospitality at a time of significant pressure. Also Brian Byrne, John Davies, Su Dorland, Kerry Dunne, Diana Eades, Gwen Johnson, Bill Noble, Michelle Schouten and Jeff Siegel, who have all given me the benefit of their friendship, scholarship and advice. I want to acknowledge the support of Kent Laverack, whose patience has been tried many times over the past few years, and who has been ready to offer support and sustenance despite having to live with the book for longer than I would ever have thought necessary. I dedicate it also to Nimbus, who offered both of us his unique forms of devotion for nearly ten years. I formally thank the University of Queensland and the University of New England for giving me study leave to work on this and other research projects over many years, and funding for research. Acknowledgments 13

This research was directly supported by two grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC): in 1997–99, ‘Carnival in Australian Theatre: The Influence of John Bell as Actor and Director on Australian Theatre and National Identity since 1970’, and in 2002– 04, an ARC Linkages Grant for ‘A Cultural and Historical Analysis of Australian Live Theatre Recordings Preserved in the Archives of ABC Television and Channel Nine, Stage on Screen’, LP0218607. Less directly, this research has been enabled by other ARC- assisted research infrastructure projects: 1999 ARC Large Grant, ‘Physical and Dance Theatre in Australia since 1985: A Descriptive Analysis and Annotated Research Collection’, A59906521 2000 ARC RIEF Grant, ‘National Electronic Facility to Promote Research into Australian Performing Arts, AusStage Phase 1’, R00002742 2002 ARC Discovery Grant, ‘Marking Masculinity in Australian Theatre, 1955–70 and 1985–2000: A Movement-Based Analysis of Performed Masculinities in Historical and Cultural Contexts’, DP0210510 2003 ARC LIEF Grant, ‘AusStage: Australian Performing Arts Gateway, Phase 2: Enhancement and Information Retrieval, AusStage Phase 2’, LE0346553 2007 ARC LIEF Grant, ‘AusStage: Gateway to Australian Live Performance, Phase 3: Enhancing Collaborative Research Methodologies through Digital Networking Technologies, AusStage Phase 3’, LE0775527 2010 ARC LIEF Grant, ‘AusStage Phase 4: Harnessing Collective Intelligence and Pioneering New Visual Methodologies for Innovative Research into Australian Live Performance, AusStage Phase 4’, LE100100028.

Note on References

The letters AS followed by a numeral indicate that the event under discussion is included in the online AusStage directory of theatre in Australia (ausstage.edu.au) and that further information about the event – cast, dates, companies, tours, venues – can be found there by searching for the event ID number (without the AS prefix). Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays can be problematic; modernised texts are easier to read, but may lose some of the feel and detail. More significantly, different editions will have different readings and, sometimes, different scene and line numbers. My solution in this book, which might seem quaint, is to use the spelling and layout of the online First Folio texts in the Internet Shakespeare Editions project (internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/). They are referenced with the Act and scene number, followed (where relevant) by the Hinman Through-Line Numbers (TLN), e.g. (Hamlet Act 5 scene 2, TLN 3898–9). The letters SoS followed by a numeral indicate the existence of video footage of the production in the Stage on Screen Collection in the School of Arts at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales. Most of the video sequences are subject to copyright and can be viewed on site for research purposes but cannot be distributed without permission from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A full reference for a production will consist of the AS number, the date of the premiere or, where relevant, the first date of a different production, the SoS number(s) of video clips of the production, separated by semi-colons, and the bibliographic record of the published script, where this exists. For example, a full in-text reference to the first production of The Legend of King O’Malley would read: (AS 28133, 1970, SoS 648; 649; 720; 1516; 2964, Boddy and Ellis 1979). The author’s discussion is based on some productions that have been viewed live and some that are in recorded form.

Abbreviations

ABC The Australian Broadcasting Corporation AETT Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust APG Australian Performing Group BSC Bell Shakespeare Company MTC Melbourne Theatre Company NIDA The [Australian] National Institute of Dramatic Art n.d. no date n.p. no page number QTC The Queensland Theatre Company RSL Returned and Services League SMH Sydney Morning Herald SUDS Sydney University Drama Society STC Sydney Theatre Company UTRC Union Theatre Repertory Company (later the Melbourne Theatre Company) VFL Victorian Football League

Introduction

Under the leadership of Artistic Director and founder John Bell AO [Officer of the Order of Australia], Bell Shakespeare has operated on one core motivating principle – to use the works of and other classic texts to explore and re-imagine contemporary Australian life. (Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, Bell Shakespeare Company 20th Anniversary Program, 2010.)

In September 2006, on the occasion of the launch of an Australian film version of Shakespeare’s that was set in the gangland world of Melbourne, John Bell was interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) for their television news program, the 7.30 Report. He was asked to comment on the appropriateness of making such a film in Australia. His response was that there should be more Australian film versions of Shakespeare’s plays, and that “they should be done in a very Australian way. Just as our theatre Shakespeare is very Australian, so our films should express something that is ours, uniquely ours” (Bell 2006). It was hardly surprising that Bell, as the Australian actor and director most closely associated with Shakespeare’s plays, should have been chosen to comment on the film. Furthermore, if it is true that our “theatre Shakespeare” is very Australian, more credit should go to Bell than to any other single Australian theatre practitioner, past or present. This book is a study of Bell’s contribution – as an actor and director, not only in Shakespeare productions but also in the productions of newer, Australian playwrights – to a theatre which speaks as directly as possible to Australian audiences, giving them pleasure as well as encouraging a continual rethinking of what Australia means both in itself and in its relations with the rest of the world. Bell has performed and directed with his own two companies for all but five years between 1970 and 2013: from 1970 to 1985 as co-director of the Nimrod Theatre, and from 1990 to the present as artistic director of the Bell Shakespeare Company (BSC). During his 18 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre fifteen years with the Nimrod Theatre, he was one of the theatre directors most active in encouraging new Australian writing for the stage. In addition, he has been widely recognised as one of Australia’s most important classical actors, and he is unchallenged in his position as the most experienced and influential performer and director of plays by Shakespeare in this country. He has received both national and industry recognition: an OBE in 1978, AM [Member of the Order of Australia] in 1987, AO [Officer of the Order of Australia] in 2009, the 2002 Helpmann Award for best male actor in Michael Gow’s production of Richard III (AS 22148), the 2003 Cultural Leader of the Year Award, and in 2009 the J.C. Williamson Award for lifetime achievement in the performing arts. He has used his talents, profile, position and reputation in an attempt to bring theatre – new and classic, Australian and European – into an ongoing cultural dialogue about the image of Australia as a culture and as a nation; in other words, his efforts have been dedicated to making Australian theatre matter. This book outlines Bell’s achievements as an actor, director and entrepreneur, focusing on the ways in which he has brought theatre practice into the mainstream of public debate about social and political issues, and reciprocally how he has brought the urgent and important issues facing Australia into the theatre – including into productions of plays from the past – where they provide the force and precision necessary to create memorable performances and might stir cultural sensitivities among the audience. It investigates Bell’s professional achievements in a way that I hope will inform, encourage, enable and inspire newer generations of theatre practitioners, so that they can develop techniques that will continue to enliven the work of Australian theatre and make it a continuing force to encourage national celebration, certainly, but also introspection. It singles out, as case studies, a number of particularly significant productions from Bell’s prodigious output and describes in some detail how they worked on stage, and how they explored a range of techniques in order to bring the performance of plays, especially but not exclusively those from the past, into a closer relationship with the here and now. Although this book necessarily contains some biographical material, it is not a biography; it is a study of a career which has been influential on the shape and direction of Australian theatre during Introduction 19 more than half of the life of the Commonwealth of Australia. Seeing the history of Sydney theatre from the point of view of one of its most respected, articulate and multi-talented practitioners provides new insights into what happened. This book tries to account for the impact of political and social changes on theatre practice in this country, and vice versa. There is no shortage of biographical material already available for those interested in Bell’s life story rather than his work, including his own autobiography, The Time of My Life (Bell 2002). In particular, there is a very informative episode of the ABC Television’s series Talking Heads, a weekly half-hour, one-on-one interview by the host Peter Thompson with guests who are in the news. This interview contains archival photographs and short film clips showing excerpts from Bell’s performances and the venues where they were performed (Bell 2008). From very early in his career, Bell concerned himself specifically with the question of a distinctive Australian theatre and, in particular, Australian Shakespeare. When he was starting out, the idea of a proper, solemn, reverential and English way of doing Shakespeare was dominant. What, by contrast, an Australian Shakespeare would look and sound like was not at all clear at the middle of the twentieth century, even though intermittent quests by theatre directors, actors and designers had been underway for several decades (see Golder and Madelaine 2001). There have been two clearly opposing ideas about why an Australian Shakespeare is necessary and what it might be. Both are bound up with wider concepts about national identity. The first is the older tradition. There have been previous Australian Shakespeare companies, most importantly Allan Wilkie’s from 1920 to 1930 (Warrington 1995: 640), and John Alden’s (in different manifestations) between 1948 and 1961 (Robertson 1995: 36). Their strategy was to appeal to national sentiment by highlighting the quality of Australia’s artistic achievements, their own productions presumably being among them. Their aim was to demonstrate that Australian high culture could be as high as that of anywhere else, even . This aim required performers of Shakespeare in the Antipodes to act competently within a set of traditional criteria established by the metropolitan centre (or a recollection of it from the past) and policed by the local establishment. Theatre scholar Alan 20 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Brissenden suggests that a convenient form of praise in the presence of conventional excellence was to claim that an Australian production ‘could have arrived the day before from Stratford or London’ (Brissenden 2000: 251). Those favouring the second approach have been happy to achieve similar international renown, but they have succeeded by being as different as they could be from the values and practices of London’s West End. The object was to discover forms of theatre that spoke more powerfully to local audiences rather than responding to criteria set by conservative English practitioners and the influential London critics, who could be devastatingly resistant to innovation. Their power was entrenched, though during the second half of the twentieth century it was waning; Bell recalls discussing with Clive Swift, an actor friend in London, the astonishing Richard III by the Georgian Rustavelli Company, with Ramaz Chkhikvadze as a giant toad-like Richard. Swift agreed that the production was wonderful, but pointed out that if a major British company were to try something similar, they would be crucified by the critics (Bell 2011: 104). John Bell’s career has been characterised by experiments with new, risky, innovative ways of staging the plays, attempting to reveal what this would be. All that could be predicted was that it would look and sound distinctively different from the way the plays had normally been performed in Australia by the previous companies like Wilkie’s in imitation of British theatre companies. Alan Brissenden claims that

Wilkie was thoroughly traditionalist and shuddered at the thought of Shakespeare in modern dress. Bell is just as thoroughly anti- traditionalist. ‘Our aim’, he says, ‘is to bring Shakespeare to as many Australians as possible in productions that identify the plays with the world we live in, not deferring to European models or what is imagined to be a “classical tradition”. (Brissenden 1994: 214)

It is important to note that the term English, as used pejoratively in the discourse of Australian theatre practice, is misleading. It is for the most part a convenient shorthand term for a set of reverential assumptions and conventions about theatre in general and productions of Shakespeare in particular. It is not in any general sense anti- English; these conventions were to be found in Australia as much as they were in Britain, and to some extent the term English was used as Introduction 21 a code for the work of individuals like Tyrone Guthrie and Robert Quentin (K. Horler 1993). The real clash was between ‘establishment’ and ‘alternative’ approaches to staging the classics within Australia. The Nimrod Street Theatre was set up as a venue for alternative theatre, in contrast to the museum-like performances which were to be found in Europe at the Comédie Française and the Moscow Arts Theatre, as well as at the Old Vic in London. Indeed, Bell conceded that ‘the English classical tradition has been more self-critical than most’ (Bell 1975: 422), and he has written in admiration of the innovative achievements of English-based companies and individuals. He praises English actors from the established theatre, including Edith Evans, and , and acknowledges that “the [British] National Theatre has opened its arms to such figureheads of rebellion as Peter Brook [and] Jonathan Miller” (ibid.: 428). He identifies a significant alternative theatre in the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in London, which had launched the careers of new playwrights including John Arden, Edward Bond, Ann Jellicoe and John Osborne (ibid.: 430), and was the venue (in its experimental Theatre Upstairs) for the 1973 world premiere of The Rocky Horror Show scripted by New Zealander Richard O’Brien and directed by Australian . Richard Wherrett freely acknowledged that some English practitioners, notably Joan Littlewood, were influential on himself and other Australian actors living in Britain on the need to break away from the social elitism of classic theatre (Wherrett 1995). In his autobiography, Bell has laid out a clear manifesto for a distinctively Australian way of staging the classics, especially Shakespeare, and it is worth quoting at length:

Does Australia need Shakespeare? Can his work be part of our own national culture? Is there, and should there be, an ‘Australian way’ of performing him?

Shakespeare is not fixed in time and place, but capable of infinite malleability, constantly demanding reinterpretation and re- presentation. Through him we address ourselves and our immediate concerns. Some of these are universals – the love, ambition, revenge motifs that apply across the board to all humanity. But then there are the particulars to do with nationalism, racism, sexism that will be of more immediate concern one year than the next. A successful and ‘relevant’ production is one that expresses the universals while 22 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

homing in on some theme of immediate local concern and articulating it in a way that is fresh and revelatory.

If this is the approach taken by Australian directors and actors, then the plays will readily become part of our own national identity, speaking in our own voices about things that concern us. If, on the other hand, we eschew the local and the topical and aim for some vaguely ‘classical/traditional’ production, the work will indeed seem remote and pointless.

As for an ‘Australian way’, it is certainly emerging and needs to be nourished. At its best Australian Shakespeare is informed by an energy, a freshness of approach, generous ensemble playing and lack of pretentiousness. We avoid most of the worst manifestations of the English system of hierarchy and star-vehicle selfishness. (Bell 2002: 84–6)

The so-called purist (or “classical/traditional”) approach to Shakespeare has largely disappeared – at least, it is much less influential than it was in the middle of the twentieth century – but Bell describes how he has occasionally been taken to task by members of the public for not doing Shakespeare “the right way – the English way” (ibid.: 50–1). The idea that there is a right way of doing Shakespeare is not always just naive nostalgia. It has been a powerful tool in the hands of the established professional theatre companies to maintain their prestige, attract audiences, and preserve their privileged access to funding through government subsidies and corporate sponsorship. Bell notes that, when he was setting up the BSC in 1990, the competition for funding was a “dogfight […] among theatre companies scrounging for money” and that for the new company to apply to the funding bodies would only “enrage the rest of the industry” (ibid.: 187). Theatre scholar Richard Fotheringham calls this activity “boundary riding” – the established theatres making sure that their territory is safe from the “claim jumpers”, the newer companies with different skills who might start attracting attention and the resources that come with it (Fotheringham 1998: 33–4). Julian Meyrick argues that the superiority of the major subsidised theatre companies is measured by criteria that favour what they do best. Using terms like standards and excellence, professional theatre practitioners and administrators can stigmatise newer, more Introduction 23 exploratory and less conventional ways of staging plays as wrong, below standard, falling short of excellence (Meyrick 2002: 5). As the epigraph to this Introduction indicates, it has become an accepted part of mainstream discourse that John Bell has used the works of Shakespeare and other classic texts to explore and re- imagine contemporary Australian life. The task is important because it has never been clear what contemporary Australian life might be – except that it keeps changing – nor what theatre can do to have an influence on it. It can include ideas about appropriating Shakespeare for our own purposes – which can mean doing the plays as if they had been written about and set in Australia, or doing them in a way that brings their concerns into line with current events in our present time, or just performing them in some ways better, which often means more energetically, colourfully and physically than is conventional. Physicality is one of the most commonly identified features of Australian acting, especially in Bell’s productions. This is in part attributable to Keith Bain, a choreographer and movement tutor who worked extensively with Bell. Bain was a dancer who moved into choreographing dance sequences for theatre productions, and from there to an influential role as a stage movement teacher and coach. He was for many years the principal teacher of movement at NIDA (the Australian National Institute for Dramatic Art), and he taught many of their most successful students, including Cate Blanchett, Judy Davis, Richard Roxburgh, Baz Luhrmann, Mel Gibson, and . Blanchett wrote a Preface to Bain’s 2010 book on movement, acknowledged that “there is no doubt Keith was and is the biggest influence on my work as an actor; and my guess is, on all of us who were taught by him” (Blanchett quoted in Bain 2010: viii). He worked as choreographer and movement consultant in many of Bell’s productions for over twenty-five years, starting in 1970 with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (AS 22964), The Legend of King O’Malley (AS 28133, Boddy and Ellis 1979) and Biggles (AS 5995, Boddy et al. [1970]), through to Much Ado About Nothing (AS 23251) in 1996 and Jim Sharman’s 1997 Tempest (AS 23284) in which Bell played Prospero. There is no need to make extravagant claims for Bell’s uniqueness in the world, or even in Australia. Theatre practitioners in Britain and much of the English-speaking world have struggled against the weight of traditionalist or conventional understandings of 24 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre theatre in general and Shakespeare in particular. They have defied or ignored tradition in order to create theatre that looks fresh and touches the lives of audiences more profoundly. Many theatre-makers have sought to experiment with unfamiliar or neglected theatre forms and rework or hybridise them in order to expose the distinctiveness of their own societies. The techniques which they use can celebrate, critique or deplore the local features of the play’s world. They range from the interpolation of familiar local and topical references in the sets and costumes, local accents and recognisable character types, through to major redirections of audience sympathy so that the hierarchies of value implied in the world of the classics are inverted – privileging the underdogs and exposing the often concealed failings of the establishment. Bell made the point in a television interview in 1981 about The Venetian Twins (AS 71954) that he, together with the actor Drew Forsythe and translator , believed that Goldoni’s sympathies lay with the “smart” twin, Tonino, and that the “stupid” twin, Zanetto, was just the butt of jokes. The decision to give Zanetto an Australian accent was a conscious attempt to connect with a modern Australian audience’s compassion for the little guy (SoS 1265). In trying to understand the politics of such techniques, it may be useful to think of Australia, in the international context, as the global equivalent of a remote community theatre, isolated from the English metropolitan mainstream but with a clear agenda to question the influence of the centre and to celebrate its own difference. British playwright and critic John McGrath, who worked extensively in community theatre, identified a series of features that define non- mainstream theatre, and explains how they aim to enhance social justice. McGrath suggests that creating this kind of theatre can help a subaltern group to define itself in opposition to the more powerful group. It can challenge the homogenising of culture and consciousness, leading to a greater richness and diversity within a culture. It can have a useful place in allowing subaltern groups to control their own definition and destiny to some extent. It can interfere with the process by which the values of the dominant groups are unexamined and automatically universalised as “common sense”. (McGrath 1990: 142). All these factors, at different times, can be used to explain the importance of Bell’s work. Introduction 25

Bell’s theatre practice has been representative of an approach which existed, in different local manifestations, around the world in the 1960s and 1970s. Richard Wherrett, one of Bell’s earliest collaborators at the Nimrod Theatre, has pointed out that Bell and he did not single-handedly fashion themselves as theatre practitioners; their sometimes radical approaches and values were influenced by the theatrical legacy of the innovative English director Joan Littlewood (Wherrett 1995). Peter Brook’s directing of Shakespeare – especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream and – has been another powerful influence on Bell. Brook’s The Empty Space (Brook 1968) celebrated the idea of rough theatre. This was reinforced by the 1969 translation into English of Polish scholar Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre (Grotowski 1969). These two influential books taken together provided models by which to uphold and flaunt the self- consciously Australian roughness and poverty of the early Nimrod years. As John Bell’s work in the theatre and much of the commentary on it demonstrate, the quest for a definitive national identity is an important social and political issue which has become apparent many times during Bell’s career, and it has often been an important assessment criterion used by critics as a way of evaluating the purpose, the interest and the success of any given production. What do these plays have to do with us? What do we do with them? Bell has made a substantial contribution to creating a repertoire of distinctively Australian techniques for staging Shakespeare’s plays. He has, at various times in his career, sought to make use of concepts, styles and modes of theatre performance that show how Shakespeare and other classic playwrights can connect with Australia. He has written about the changes that were happening around that time:

When it comes to acting Shakespeare now, things are a lot less clear- cut than they were, say fifty years ago when I first set foot on stage. Back then it was pretty widely accepted in England, Australia and America that there was a definable Shakespeare ‘style’ appropriate to the Tragedies and the Comedies – a manner of vocal delivery, accent, posture, an attitude to the material that marked it out as ‘Shakespeare’. This aesthetic edifice was already beginning to crumble, but there were enough actors, directors, critics and drama teachers of the old school still clinging to the wreckage. (Bell 2011: 81)

26 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

This process does not consist just of finding a simplistic formula and sticking with it, like setting Chekhov’s Three Sisters somewhere in the Australian outback where the characters fantasise tearfully about moving back to Sydney. More sophisticated solutions to the problem abound, but they are always provisional, needing to be constantly modified, discarded, rediscovered and revised. They can be affected by a wide range of outside influences. Bell is eclectic in his sources of inspiration and influence. His productions have freely and openly borrowed from the approaches, ideas and achievements of productions and practitioners both overseas and in Australia, including his famous, high-powered Much Ado About Nothing (AS 6053, 1975) performed in exuberantly overdone fake Italian accents. This was influenced by a production by Franco Zeffirelli, also using Italian accents, which premiered at the Old Vic in 1960 – though interestingly, Richard Wherrett who saw this production in the mid- 1960s has no recollection of the Old Vic actors using Italian accents (Wherrett 1995). Bell has explored Australia-oriented productions in many different ways during a professional career spanning more than half a century. Part of this success has to do with his own personality and abilities. He has the entrepreneur’s apparently inexhaustible energy and capacity for risk, the actor’s ability to transform himself and reflect back others to themselves, and the director’s skill at gently but quickly persuading others to see and agree with his point of view. The distinguished Sydney Morning Herald theatre critic H.G. Kippax listed three factors which he thought contributed to Bell’s acting style. The first is his intuition for theatrical timing, which allows him to own the stage and appear effortlessly to take all the time in the world while still holding the audience’s attention – a rare talent that Kippax thought he shares with some of the most renowned British stage actors of the twentieth century, such as Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson. The second is his relish for words, which Kippax lamented was unusual in Australian actors at the time when Bell’s career began. The third is Bell’s broad education and his extensive knowledge of dramatic and theatrical history (Kippax 1992). According to Bell’s former colleague Richard Wherrett, one of the most important factors in his success is that he is prepared to take on the “ultimate risk” and mount productions that break radically with what the more conservative Introduction 27 critics and audiences might expect and think that they want (Wherrett 1995). What is more, Bell can switch easily from one mode of operating to another. In 1991, in the precarious second year of the BSC’s operations, he took on an enormously diverse workload. The company had recently suffered a major financial blow with the collapse of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT). The Trust had sunk, along with the BSC’s funds which they were administering. The survival of the company was in real danger. In response to the crisis, as well as taking on major responsibilities for administering the fledgling organisation and handling publicity for the upcoming season, Bell was fully engaged in the artistic side with a range of responsibilities that would make most professional actors and directors blanch: he had undertaken to play the physically demanding role of Richard III in a new production (AS 15271, 1992) which he himself was directing, while simultaneously rehearsing a revival of the previous season’s The Merchant of Venice (AS 13374, 1991; AS 15276, 1992), directed by Carol Woodrow, in which he played Shylock, and at the same time re-rehearsing a production of Hamlet (AS 13572, 1991; AS 15279, 1992) with a substantially new cast (including Christopher Stollery, who was taking over from in the title role), in which he also played the Ghost. These three plays were then performed in repertory. Bell’s early work as an actor in Australia and England gave him the reputation of a young matinee idol. It became a journalistic commonplace to refer to him as a budding ‘Australian Olivier’, and he worked on important roles with some of the most prestigious theatre companies and directors of the time in both countries – Tom Brown, Robin Lovejoy and Robert Quentin with the Sydney-based Old Tote Theatre and the AETT, and at the Royal Shakespeare Company with Peter Brook, Peter Hall (Bell played Rosencrantz in Hall’s production of Hamlet) and Michel Saint-Denis. He has established a career pattern with four interlocking aspects. The most public is his work as an Australian interpreter of the European classics as an actor. The second is his innovative practice as a director of contemporary Australian scripts, especially those written by emerging playwrights. The third is his directing of European classics, almost always done with a twist to make the production more accessible to Australian audiences. The fourth is his entrepreneurial 28 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre ability in expanding the possibilities for different kinds of performance in different kinds of space. These are interwoven but distinct narratives. For the sake of clarity, this book has been structured so as to treat each thread separately, as four parallel stories. In each of the four threads there is a pervasive sense of quest and exploration. The concept of a national identity for Australia is so unstable that its exploration in theatre has often had the qualities of improvisation, rather than something that adheres to a definitive script established and memorised in advance. Improvisation has been one of Bell’s preferred rehearsal techniques, and it is a useful metaphor for his long-term engagement with representing Australia. Successful improvisation in theatre demands attentive responsiveness to a constantly evolving situation and an ability to transform when the given circumstances of the improvised world change. This is what Bell, throughout his career, has striven to achieve. When the term Australia is used, it might in some cases be more accurate to specify ‘Sydney’ or ‘New South Wales’. I have often decided to use Australia(n) nevertheless; while it is true that Bell’s acting and directing practice has been based in Sydney, working with the Old Tote, the Nimrod, the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) and the BSC, his productions have toured widely, to all the major cities in the other states and to regional centres. His company is based in Sydney, but his influence has had a much wider impact on Australian theatre practitioners and audiences. One feature that distinguishes this book from others that have been written about the history of Australian theatre is that, in addition to the normal historiographic materials such as newspaper reviews, articles, books and interviews with many generous and knowledgeable people, it uses as evidence the surviving video records of live performances. The Stage on Screen (SoS) research collection at the University of New England contains over 3,000 video sequences from the archives of ABC Television relating to the history of Australian theatre from the mid-1950s until the end of the twentieth century. Some of these are very short excerpts, but there are also complete performances of some plays based on live theatre productions, including Bell’s great performances in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (AS 18414, 1971, SoS 711), The Taming of the Shrew (AS 5629, 1972, SoS 806) and Hamlet (AS 6024, 1973, SoS 924; 930). Introduction 29

These recordings have made it possible to undertake a much more detailed description and analysis of many of the significant productions which Bell has directed or acted in. Using video of live performance is problematic, but so is any technique used to record and reconstruct the past, including the memories of those who were there at the time. Even though the experience of watching an archival video is a cooler activity than watching a play live, leaving out much of the hot emotional experience of sitting in a theatre, video nevertheless shows some of what the audience saw and heard on stage. Being able to see and hear some of the most celebrated Australian actors in the roles that have made them famous is a great privilege. The collection includes televised interviews with many theatre practitioners and critics, making it easier to understand how these productions were seen at the time. The same is true of AusStage, the online database of Australian theatre. Without this tool, this book could not have been written in anything like its present form. It enables a great deal of otherwise inaccessible material to be recorded and sorted in different ways that provide information that is valuable for our ongoing understanding of Australian theatre history. This Introduction lays out the issues that provide a historical and theatrical context for the rest of the book and outlines its four-part structure. Chapter One deals with the perennial question of representing an Australian national identity, its potential benefits and dangers, and looks at how theatre practitioners have engaged with nationhood throughout much of the twentieth century. Theatre has been a way to reflect the nation, to evaluate it and, where appropriate, to mock or critique it. Chapter Two concentrates on Bell as an innovative actor in plays from the European tradition, mainly Shakespeare – he has hardly ever played modern Australian characters. Chapter Three explores the factors involved in Bell’s success as a director of new Australian plays, and his role in launching and enhancing the reputations and careers of Australian playwrights. Chapter Four highlights Bell’s abilities and achievements as an entrepreneur who has co-founded and administered two historically important theatre companies and created two of the most exciting venues for live theatre in Sydney. It touches on the way that Bell has used his practice to enhance the talents of less experienced actors by giving them roles alongside highly skilled, older actors. Chapter Five 30 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre deals with Bell’s ongoing desire as a director to find new ways of staging Australian Shakespeare as a director, and linking the world of a play to events outside the theatre. This chapter is divided into a series of sections which examine a variety of different techniques that Bell has created. These include relocating the action of the plays into different eras and places which make them more vivid for Australian audiences. Other sections deal with Bell’s use of carnivalesque and circus imagery, disrupting expectations of genre by finding ways of incorporating theatrical elements into tragedy using techniques normally associated with comedy and farce. The conclusion brings the four stories up to date, and concludes with an account of two recent productions where the roughness, vulgarity and physicality of an Australian tradition blend with a level of excellence, a term that was used by some critics and professionals after the middle of the twentieth century as a hallmark of success.

Introduction 31

John Bell, 2014. Photographer: Pierre Toussaint. Bell Shakespeare Company ©. Reproduced with permission.

32 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Rehearsal for Hamlet. Desmond Digby, designer (left), Tom Brown, director (centre) and John Bell (right), , 1963. Photographer: unknown. NIDA Archive ©. Reproduced with permission.

Chapter One: A National Theatre

The Guthrie Report In 1949, the celebrated English actor and director Tyrone Guthrie was engaged to visit Australia and write a report with recommendations concerning the current state and future of Australian theatre. The invitation is often considered an extreme example of the cultural cringe – the deferential feeling of being uncivilised and inferior to the English – and there is certainly a rather patronising tone in the report, but it makes interesting reading in the light of subsequent developments. The report addressed the obvious question about the raison d’être for a national theatre. Among other suggestions, Guthrie argued that a high-quality Australian National Theatre would help Australians to find a wiser way of expending their excess leisure time and income than drinking and gambling (Guthrie 1949: 78). He draws attention to the question of theatre and the formation of national identity in blunt terms:

A community is judged abroad, and perhaps more importantly, by posterity, upon its works of Art. Until recently Australia has been dominantly a primary producing appendage of Great Britain; now, growing national consciousness and national self-respect demand further means of expression. Hitherto the extreme paucity and poverty of Australian expressions have been rightly explained by the newness of the community. But in the cities the pioneer days are over; newness will not serve indefinitely as an excuse for brashness and dullness. (Ibid.: 79)

(In fact, the Australian theatre audience’s appetite for both newness and brashness was far from exhausted, and continued into the 1980s.)

The standard of performance, whether professional or amateur, has nowhere begun even to approach what I consider best world-standard […] Standards are very low both of performances and, more importantly, of appreciation – the public, with no standards of comparison, does not know what to expect of theatrical performance, nor how to discriminate between gold and dross. (Ibid.) 34 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

He observed that the implementation of his recommendations “would be an important element in the resolution of a complex that is seriously detrimental to Australian self-confidence” (ibid.: 82). Part of Guthrie’s mission was to make recommendations not only about theatre in Australia but about an Australian Theatre – in other words, about an Australian equivalent of the National Theatre in Britain. This idea has been a minefield. No professional subsidised theatre company in Australia would be happy to see one of the other state theatres adopt the national mantle officially, since that would have to mean less prestige and, even more importantly, less funding for all the others. Nor, for the same reasons, would they welcome the creation of a new, national organisation. During the twentieth century, there were several attempts to found a national company (Rees 1995: 393–4), including the National Theatre Movement in Melbourne from 1935 to about 1975 (Andrews 1995: 395–6), the National Theatre and Fine Arts Society in Hobart from 1949 to 1974 (Winter 1995: 394–5), and the National Theatre Company in from 1956 to 1984 (King 1995: 395). A unilateral and desperate attempt by the Nimrod to snatch the crown in 1982 was met with outrage and derision from the industry (Meyrick 2002: 184–5). Guthrie’s report made one particularly bizarre recommendation with regard to the nature of an Australian National Theatre. He suggested that the way forward was to send promising actors, directors and technicians to England for proper training, and then to set up an Australian national theatre company in London where those who wanted to stay in England would work with Australian directors on a repertoire of classic English drama, augmented in the fullness of time by the work of Australian playwrights with a distinctively Australian style (Guthrie 1949: 81). Paradoxically, although Guthrie’s report has been widely disparaged as patronising, parts of his recommended model almost exactly describe the early part of Bell’s career. Unexpectedly, he also advocated the use of Australian accents when performing non-Australian classics. “The actors should not waste their time learning to speak with an English accent. One of their functions should be to set a standard of Australian speech” (ibid.).

Chapter One: A National Theatre 35

What constitutes an Australian national theatre? As Australian theatre historian Geoffrey Milne notes, part of the problem is definitional (Milne 2004: 12). What are we talking about? A national theatre could refer to a number of different kinds of entity: an entrepreneurial organisation, a producing organisation, a touring organisation, a repertoire of Australian playscripts, a company of actors, or even just a building. Milne’s conclusion is that an Australian National Theatre company does exist, but that it is polymorphous and decentred, depending to a large extent on the state companies coordinating their seasons, exchanging productions, and touring in non-metropolitan regions:

The Australian “national theatre” is the sum of its parts in the state- capital theatre companies – large and small, subsidised and non- subsidised, touring and static – together with those in some of the regional centres […] While Australia may never have a single- institution “national theatre” […] it nevertheless does have something resembling a national repertoire. (Ibid.: 14–19)

With or without a national theatre, an inclusive, self-confident and flexible national identity can be beneficial for the inhabitants of a country, bonding groups of people who largely agree on and share (or at least think that they share) a set of fundamental beliefs, without which free speech and democratic government can be ineffective. Comparing, sharing and exchanging cultural practices with diverse groups can bridge cultural divides, without which multicultural diversity is weakened (Putnam 2000). Older established democratic nations, such as many in Europe, have from time to time established for themselves favourable national identities, and it is understandable that New World nations like Australia should want to explore what, if anything, makes them different from, and not derivative of, the Old World. If we are not significantly different from England, does that mean that a distinctive Australian culture is somehow surplus to requirements? A recommendation by the national theatre critic , in a review of Jack Hibberd’s White with Wire Wheels (AS 88957, 1970), made the issue of theatrical influence on nationhood clear. She wrote that “no one in Sydney who is interested in what makes our current playwrights different from their colleagues overseas should miss the opportunity of seeing this performance” (Brisbane 2005: 175). 36 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Assuming that there might be distinctive, unconventional features of Australians, what are they, where do they come from and how are they disseminated? Is there a sceptical, anti-authoritarian quality in the national DNA that lingers on as a heritage from the convict settlers? Is there something in the vastness of the Australian landscape that makes us as people healthier, more generous, happier, more gregarious, more open-minded? Or are we more dependent on good luck than hard work? Has immigration since the end of the Second World War diluted the ethnic and religious unity of the country, or has it instead invigorated the bloodlines and made us culturally richer and more tolerant of difference? Can we see multiculturalism as an aspect of who we are, or is the term multicultural identity an oxymoron? Above all, can theatre be an effective means of collectively and publicly exploring our society, celebrating what is positive, satirising or critiquing our less attractive features, and exposing darker impulses?

Nationhood and gender One significant feature needs comment: Australia has almost always been gendered masculine and the exploration of Australian national identity looks by default and almost exclusively at men as role models (but see Bollen, Kiernander and Parr 2008). It is all too easy to think of Roo in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll as somehow being representative of an ideal Australian of the time. However, it is much less familiar to think of Olive, or any other well-known female character, as an icon of Australia. What is the role of women in a masculinist society and a male-dominated theatre profession? The narratives that this book explores are largely based on gendered role models that relegate women to support status only. With a few exceptions, like Susan Hearty in Edward Geoghegan’s The Currency Lass (1844, Geoghegan 1976) and Sally Banner in Dorothy Hewett’s The Chapel Perilous (1971, Hewett 1972), the major depictions of a recognisable Australian type in live theatre up to the 1980s, positive and negative, have likewise almost always been male and ideally associated with the outdoors (Kiernander 2005; Kiernander 2006): rugged outback misogynists like Brumby Innes (1948, Prichard 1974); shearers in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955, Lawler 1978) and Reedy River (1953, Diamond 1970); soldiers (and their sons) in The One Day of the Year (1960, Seymour 1962) and (1948, Chapter One: A National Theatre 37

Locke Elliott 1980); laconic farmers in The Bastard Country, also called Fire on the Wind (1959, Coburn 1963); larrikin heroes and anti- heroes in The Legend of King O’Malley (1970, Boddy and Ellis 1979) and Flash Jim Vaux (1971, Blair 1989), and much of David Williamson’s early work, especially The Removalists (1971, Williamson 1972) and, to a lesser extent, Don’s Party (1971, Williamson 1973). Robert Quentin, Associate Professor of Drama at the University of New South Wales and the founding director of NIDA, the Old Tote and the AETT, wrote the Foreword to Ten on the Tote, a booklet published to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Old Tote Theatre Company (South and Scott 1973), and implies that women would have had nothing to contribute to the business of serious theatre. Quentin wrote, “The creation of the Old Tote was primarily the work of four men, Professor Philip Baxter, Dr H.C. Coombs, Tom Brown and myself” (Quentin 1973). There were many women who provided invaluable support for theatre in the middle of the twentieth century, after cinema took away its mass audience, most of its income and, with it, the resources needed to sustain professional careers. Susan Pfisterer and Carolyn Pickett, in Playing with Ideas, note the relative absence, in the 1960s and 1970s, of women in decision-making positions in theatre when they had been so visibly active up until that time. Curiously, they note, this marginalising of women in the practice of live theatre came precisely when theatre subsidy began (Pfisterer and Pickett 1999: 18). Those strong-minded women were to be found in almost every major city in Australia and New Zealand. They typically had their own theatres, some of them in their own houses, and often scheduled new, innovative and outspoken plays, some from local playwrights, rather than the lightweight work that many of the amateur theatre groups are sometimes accused of presenting. They include Jean Trundle, Joan Walley and Rhoda Felgate in Brisbane; Doris Fitton and Doreen Warburton in Sydney; Patricia Hackett in ; Olive Wilton and Fifi Banvard in Hobart. More recently, Betty Burstall founded the influential Melbourne La Mama in 1967 and Chris Westwood in the early 1980s co-ordinated a women directors’ workshop and a women-in-theatre project under the aegis of the Nimrod. Feminist theatre scholar Peta Tait notes that the crucial issue which emerged from the Nimrod Women and Theatre Project was representation. That theoretical issue, for many of the participants, had 38 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre material goals: to “challenge gender stereotypes both on and off stage, to become decision-makers and to forge a space for women practitioners within designated theatres” (Tait 1994: 134–5). The Nimrod itself, in its first decade, is usually thought of as the product of three men: Bell, Ken Horler and Richard Wherrett; this overlooks the contribution of Lilian Horler, a lawyer by training, who helped to formally establish the company and was its first general manager. Other women who have made significant contributions on stage and behind the scenes in the Nimrod and the BSC include Anna Volska (actor and director); Robyn Nevin (actor, director, former artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company and the first female artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company); and former vaudeville performer Gloria Dawn, who helped to preserve and pass on the skills that she had practised and who took the central role of the mother in Peter Kenna’s A Hard God (AS 66499, 1973, Kenna 1974). Plays by women playwrights are fewer; two whose work was produced by Bell at the Nimrod are Alison Lyssa with The Boiling Frog (AS 93522, 1984, Lyssa 1984), and Linda Aronson with Dinkum Assorted (AS 603, 1988, Aronson 1989). Women working as journalists and reviewers have also been influential in setting the context for theatre practice, most significantly Katharine Brisbane, who has been not only a respected critic and commentator on theatre nationwide (she was the national critic for The Australian in its early years), but also the co-founder of Australian theatre publishers with her husband Philip Parsons. Her book, Not Wrong – Just Different, which collects and contextualises her most important reviews, is a fascinating and informative document which tracks the changes in Australian theatre from the mid-1950s (Brisbane 2005).

National belonging While shared national identities can be socially useful, they have a dark side. When ideas of nationality become prescriptive, the effect is to promote the concept of a unified, xenophobic “one nation” and the various political movements that seek to enforce homogeneity on the entire population. Australia has witnessed overt examples of this, from the exclusion of Aboriginal people from citizenship and the right to vote until 1967, the anti-Chinese leagues of the nineteenth century, the White Australia policy on which the Commonwealth was founded in Chapter One: A National Theatre 39

1901, and more recently to the political career of the extreme right- wing Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party, together with the 2005 riot in Cronulla pitting young white Australian men against others “of Middle-Eastern appearance”. The long-time theatre critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, H.G. Kippax, noted a shift in Australian attitudes in the period when Bell was establishing himself as an actor and director – a rejection of the concept of “patriotism” and its replacement by what he called “nationalism” (Kippax 1992). The distinction between these two terms as Kippax used them warrants some discussion. Although they overlap, they are different. Both have their beneficial and their dangerous aspects. Patriotism, which Kippax said had recently become a dirty word, is focused more on defending the country from external threat, and is characterised by the notion of service and self- sacrifice to a greater social good, whether that means laying down one’s life in war or just getting out of bed early on the one day of the year to attend the ANZAC dawn service commemorating soldiers and their service. That Australia and New Zealand together commemorate as a public holiday a disastrous military defeat in the First World War, incurred in the process of invading another country, has something perverse about it – but also something that recognises personal sacrifice in the performance of patriotism. Nationalism by contrast is focused more on the people than the place – who we are and what we own – and can be characterised by a sense of exclusivity and entitlement. What we might call comparative nationalism, where citizens of a country or members of a group use familiar stereotypes of other countries or cultural groups as a benchmark to evaluate their own distinctive values and practices, is generally harmless. Xenophobic nationalism is much more dangerous. In this view, Australia is not an abstract concept needing to be preserved and defended so much as a concrete place to be owned, enjoyed and exploited. Kippax felt that Australian theatre in the 1970s was shifting from a self-sacrificing patriotism to a more aggressive and demanding nationalism. Bell noticed the same phenomenon when he came back to Australia in 1970.

I was a little shocked to find how much the country had changed. There was a nationalism in the air, assertive and at times aggressive 40 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

[…] The new Australian plays were identifying the Ocker, the Ugly Australian: a crass, vulgar, drunken loudmouth. (Bell 2011: 98)

Theatre scholar and critic John McCallum’s history of twentieth-century Australian playwriting is aptly titled Belonging. The perceived lack of and search for a stable sense of belonging in Australia is closely linked to the questions about national identity that many Australians were asking at various points in the twentieth century (McCallum 2009). Indigenous playwright Bob Maza, writing from an observant outsider’s point of view, illustrates his understanding of the problem of belonging that he believes has beset mainstream theatre in Australia: “In the main, white writers are preoccupied with justifying and qualifying their existence in this land, even to the point of trying to clone European theatre […]” (Maza 1995: 14). The situation that Maza outlines requires the late twentieth- century versions of currency lasses and lads (that is, the locally born white Australians) and their playwrights to imagine an identity and a conceptual space where they do belong, awkwardly positioned as they are between the original Australians, whom they have never been, and their British immigrant forebears whom they (often quite assertively) no longer are. In the early nineteenth century, the locally born white Australians started to call themselves “natives”, creating a potential for misunderstanding which, for example, drives the plot in Edward Geoghegan’s 1844 play, The Currency Lass; or My Native Girl (Geoghegan 1976). Nationalism can expose a series of dangerous binary opposites: between those who qualify as insiders and those who are excluded from the group; or between those who wave, fly, or wear flags on Australia Day, or have the Southern Cross tattooed onto their chests and backs, and others who are deemed by contrast to be un-Australian. The “love it or leave it” motto has a slight but worrying hint of ethnic cleansing, and the bumper sticker assertion “Fuck off, we’re full” implies that white Australians have the right to determine who, if anyone, comes to stay in this country and under what circumstances, on no other authority than that “we” got here first. One extreme nationalist position is based on the notion that white Australians are building a world of our own, that no one else can share. The increasingly competitive and assertive aspects of nationalism on Australia Day are a sign that Australian national Chapter One: A National Theatre 41 identity is still a contentious issue, and that Australia has many versions of it which clash with each other. At different moments in history, and in different contexts at any one time, there can be many incompatible versions of what typical, representative or authentic Australians are thought to be like, what they should be like, and about the range of meanings that the word Australian conveys, both to Australians and to the rest of the world. Performance-makers of all kinds can, through their work, contribute to social and political debates, reaffirming or challenging those clichés which prescribe how particular groups of people should look and behave. They sometimes find that the characters they create are seen not only as inhabitants of a fictitious world but also as iconic representatives of the nation. Peta Tait writes about the now almost forgotten early twentieth-century Australian high wire-walker Ella Zuila, noting that

she was performing an idea of Australia within the British Empire. Her act was timely given a cultural imaginary that associated Australia with the risky frontier stretches of the Empire, and ideas of conquering new territory. (Tait 2003: 80)

The stakes are high, and stereotypes matter. Extreme examples of national stereotypes at work are ’s characters Edna Everage and Les Patterson. Theatre scholar Anne Pender quotes the prominent Australian lawyer and (since 2004) politician, Malcolm Turnbull, being interviewed on the ABC in 1998, condemning Humphries for “basically making a quid out of denigrating Australia” in order to “delight the Brits” (Pender 2010: 365). Tyrone Guthrie, in his autobiography, waspishly demonstrates how even a positive stereotype can be subverted. He commented on his expectations of Australia:

One […] thing surprised me at the time: I suppose it was the influence of the immigration propaganda – all those high-coloured posters of Sunburnt Sicklemen of Autumn Weary – but I had expected to find Australia full of handsome, laconic men; shy but tremendously virile. Perhaps when I was there all these types were temporarily out back. Certainly the cities seemed to be full of excitable, nervous little gentlemen with light voices and rather a lot of jewelry. It was the women who were handsome, laconic and tremendously virile. (Guthrie 1959: 279)

42 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

The Sydney University Players As a child, Bell built model theatres where he performed plays (including Hamlet) for family and friends using cut-out paper actors. His school, the Marist Brothers in Maitland, had little tradition of theatre performance, but with the support of two of the teaching brothers, Elgar and Geoffrey, Bell pushed for plays to be produced. The school staged a performance night featuring excerpts from King Oedipus and Henry IV in which Bell played leading roles. On leaving school, he auditioned for and was accepted into the first intake of the new National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 1959 but, under some pressure from his family, he rejected the offer and instead chose to enrol in an Arts degree at Sydney University. It was here that his talent as an actor first came to prominence, not with the well-established Sydney University Drama Society (SUDS) but with the newer Sydney University Players (Bell 2002: 27). Where SUDS focused on new plays by innovative dramatists like Beckett and Brecht, the Players preferred classics, which allowed Bell’s talent to be recognised almost as soon as he arrived. As an undergraduate, Bell was quickly recognised by the Players as an actor with boyish good looks, unusual talent, charm and, most importantly, a very strong stage presence. Playwright Ron Blair recalls seeing Bell appear on stage as (an improbably young) at the age of twenty-one, directed by fellow student Ken Horler (AS 71588, 1961).

On stage there were all these people, and suddenly you were aware that a weight, some weight, had been added to one side of the stage, a psychological weight – ‘What’s happened?’ It was John’s first entry, upstage, and he just quietly stepped on stage, but it was the feeling […] that a weight had been added to the stage […] He wasn’t centre- stage, there was no light hitting him. You looked to see what’s happened, and there behind everyone, John had actually stepped on the stage. It was a very undramatic entrance but it was extraordinary, his dramatic presence was so strong – even though you couldn’t see him, you could sense the power that was there. (Blair 1992)

According to Blair, others whom he spoke to had had the same sensation. This is supported by a review in the Sydney University student newspaper , which thought his entrance magnificent, describing it as a “great theatrical moment […] where one becomes slowly aware of a commanding presence” (J.J.H. 1962: 8). Bell was Chapter One: A National Theatre 43 praised by the Sydney Morning Herald critic Roger Covell (writing as R.C.) for managing to dominate the whole performance despite the fact that he was “a stripling […] in a tunic too short for him and sandals that appeared too big” (Covell 1962: 10). Andrew McLennan, one of his fellow students, recalls that Bell used to take great care with his theatrical makeup, and that the effect in this case was that he looked like Coriolanus from the shoulders up, but from the shoulders down he was more like Peter Pan (McLennan 1992). Sydney University in the early 1960s had a large number of brilliant students who would go on to achieve national and, in many cases, international prominence. Most of them were involved in or attached to the University theatre scene, and many worked closely with Bell. They included future historians, critics, scholars, actors, theatre and film directors and entrepreneurs: , , , Leo Schofield, , , and Ken Horler. Productions by the Sydney University Players in which Bell appeared included Twelfth Night (AS 71500), playing Malvolio, and John Ford’s ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (AS 71580). His frantic pace as an actor during his undergraduate years was to a considerable extent at the expense of his studies, but his ability to focus meant that he could successfully cram a year’s work into a few days before the final exams (McLennan 1992). Bell spent four years at Sydney University, from 1959 to 1962, completing an Honours degree in English, but even before the results of his last year had been finalised he was making a bid for professional recognition as an actor. In October 1962, he was given the use of the in Sydney’s central business district to perform a solo show entitled This Scepter’d Isle (AS 32434), which he compiled himself, using excerpts from Shakespeare’s history plays. He performed for three nights and the short run sold out; there were suggestions that he could have doubled the length of the season. A review in the Sun-Herald displayed a bold headline: ‘The Young Man They Call a Future Olivier’, with contrasting photos of Bell as Hamlet and Richard III. It went on to praise Bell for his energy, his “wonderfully dramatic face”, and above all his ability to transform his appearance in order to play sixteen different characters (Pratt 1962: 89). The frequent practice in the press at this time of proclaiming Bell as a “future Olivier” or an “Australian Olivier” was a dangerous 44 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre practice, not only judging Australian talent by British criteria, but also potentially building an audience’s expectations beyond what most young actors could live up to. In 1962, Olivier was in his mid-fifties. He had been working in theatre since the 1920s, had toured Australia in 1948, and was widely known for his Shakespeare films; Bell at this time was twenty-two, with almost no formal theatre training beyond some private voice coaching. But the comparison probably did him no harm, and his earliest professional acting roles would only reinforce the parallels; within two years, he had successfully taken on two of Olivier’s great roles: Hamlet and Henry V.

Bell at the (new) Old Tote The bold gesture of performing This Scepter’d Isle attracted immediate attention and he was offered a role in the first play to be performed by the newly constituted professional theatre, the Old Tote Company, which had been created as an adjunct to NIDA. He played the student Trofimov in a highly praised production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (AS 5512), directed by Robert Quentin, in February 1963. He then took the lead in Hamlet (AS 5501) four months later. This was a role that Olivier had made his own fifteen years before in his 1948 film, which became an international benchmark and was, for a long time, the “definitive” interpretation of the part. Bell’s casting helped to reinforce the idea that he was Australia’s up-and-coming answer to Olivier, while also revealing him as an innovator rather than the custodian of long-established traditions. The Old Tote production provides early evidence of his self-confidence in the face of tradition, and for the first time reviews speak of him as an actor with a fresh, young approach who was willing to defy convention. Critic Frank Harris noted that Bell “kicked tradition out into the wet Tote courtyard” and exclaimed enthusiastically that Bell’s Hamlet could laugh. “It’s a long time since Hamlet has laughed. Mr Bell killed off the ‘gloomy Dane’.” Harris then commented on a series of qualities that have become recognised as Bell’s trademarks as an actor: an intelligent sense of humour, a combination of dazzle and depth, athletic exhilaration in performance, and a down-to-earth quality which showed nobility without mooning over it and savoured poetry without mouthing it (Harris 1963: 16). The Sydney Morning Herald critic, Roger Covell, compared Bell’s performance with Olivier’s, noted Bell’s “face of sculptured Chapter One: A National Theatre 45 mobility [sic]”, and acknowledged his stage presence by referring to his “manner of immediate command” (Covell 1963: 6). However, Norman Kessell in the Sun newspaper prefigured later criticisms by the more conservative commentators about Bell’s work as an actor, regretting that the physical energy of Bell’s performance seemed to him to betray a “peasant uncouthness” with too much “jerky head- shaking and angular body-twitching” (Kessell 1963: 37). An interview with Jan Smith, who described Bell as “a slight, intense young man with buttermilk hair and cheekbones ideally made for princely weltschmertz” (Smith 1963: 17), suggests that he had not yet fully formed what were to be his later views on Shakespeare. He was aware at the time of a range of then-current approaches to playing the role, and commented on what he had heard and read about newer British actors who were performing contemporary takes on the character. But he was dismissive of this modernising tendency.

Peter O’Toole played Hamlet as a beatnik-type at Stratford last year, and Richard Burton did him as an angry young man. But the trouble with [this approach] is that it dates. Hamlet should be ageless, timeless, for all centuries and all people. (Bell quoted in Smith 1963: 17)

In this sentiment, Bell seems to be echoing the views of Tom Brown, the play’s Australian-born and English-trained director, who likewise described Shakespeare’s writing as “ageless” (‘A Man of Many Parts’ 1963: n.p.). Nevertheless there are foreshadowings of Bell’s later practice in his comment that he wanted to make Hamlet appropriate for a twentieth-century audience sceptical about classically perfect heroes: “I want to show him arrogant, intolerant, cruel, bawdy, but noble too. The Elizabethans had anti-heroes, as we do. That’s the way I see him, as anti-hero” (ibid.). The heretical question of a Shakespeare style suited to the Australian theatre was already being asked openly, and Hamlet was in some ways a relatively early example of an attempt at a new and recognisably Australian Shakespeare, even though it was clearly very traditional by the standards of today. Director Tom Brown’s stated aim, which was a fairly commonplace articulation of directorial intent for the time, was a simple staging which would permit the text to speak for itself – if any play text can really be said to speak for itself independent of the production in which it is mounted. The costume 46 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre design by Desmond Digby was generally very traditionalist and “authentic”, with some of the publicity pointing out that “[o]ld Danish handcraft methods were used in the making of many of the costumes” Covell 1963: 2–3). An indication of the overall restrictive pressure of conventionalism is given by a facetious report in the Daily Mirror saying that “Mr Digby had thrown everyone into a brouhaha by breaking away from tradition and putting Hamlet into a pair of ruffled trousers instead of the usual tight hose” (‘Hamlet Lies Late Abed’ 1963: 55). Robert Quentin, the then director of drama for the AETT, suggested that the simple approach to staging in this production of Hamlet was particularly suited to Australia.

In the past few decades Shakespeare’s plays have become so adorned with pictorial sets, lavish costumes and extravagant gestures by the actors that the texts have almost been swamped […] This is an entirely new interpretation of Shakespeare by Australian actors. We are trying to remove the barrier between Shakespeare and the audience (Quentin 1963: 74).

The rather patronising idea that simplified Shakespeare is somehow more suitable for uncultured Australians predates Quentin’s claim by several decades: a review of the early twentieth-century actor-manager Allan Wilkie’s 1924 production of The Winter’s Tale (AS 87166) credits his company with having evolved “a new Shakespeareian [sic] school, of which Australia has been the birthplace’ (‘Prince of Wales Theatre’ 1924: 10). This “school” seems to have been characterised, in Wilkie’s mind, by simple staging, a focus on language rather than spectacle, and a “natural method of delivery” which brought the lines “home to the present age with undeniable force” (ibid.). Forty years later, Brown at the Old Tote was more aware that there was still a problem with Shakespeare in Australia, requiring exploration of possible solutions to the challenges of the task ahead:

With […] smaller theatres, we feel we are on the right lines […] but we still have to find a style. We’ve got away from thinking of theatre architecture in terms of the Italian-style opera house, but we still have to find a way of acting which suits these smaller theatres and which suits Australia. (‘Tom Brown’s Hamlet’, 1963: 3–4)

Chapter One: A National Theatre 47

This approach may be seen simply as the result of changing international taste, a late modernist reaction against elaborately fussy stagings like that of the rather old-fashioned Old Vic production of Twelfth Night which had toured Australia in 1961. On the other hand, a review by Brek (the nom de plume of H.G. Kippax) in Nation agreed that the simplicity of the Old Tote’s Hamlet and its focus on the plot might have been specifically appropriate to Australian conditions:

This innocent faith in the author’s powers and the intrinsic fascination of his story [Hamlet] – the kind of approach we may well have in a young country breaking away from the conventions and sophistications of older cultures – collaborates with a businesslike concern for what happens next. (Brek [H.G. Kippax] 1963: 16–17)

It seems strange now, half a century later, that the reverential austerity of this production should have been regarded in any way as being characteristically Australian. Paradoxically, it is the young lead actor of that production who has done as much as anyone else to explore and establish a new and more recognisably Australian approach to Shakespeare, an approach very different from Brown’s Hamlet in that it was iconoclastic, vulgar, energetic, physical, carnivalesque and excessive – all attributes that the previous generation of directors might have considered a breach of what they defined as excellence (Meyrick 2002: 5). The artistic success of Hamlet justified the faith that the Old Tote Company and the director Tom Brown had placed in this young and relatively untrained actor who had turned down the offer of a place at NIDA and was now overshadowing the first graduates. This is especially surprising since Brown had been, since 1961, deputy director of NIDA and that institute’s director from 1963.

Henry in a tent Bell’s next major role was the lead in Henry V (AS 31423, 1964), another part which at the time was in the shadow of Olivier. The production was mounted by the AETT and opened in March 1964 at the , moving back to Sydney at the end of the month. One of the striking features of this production was the venue: a huge circus tent allegedly seating 1,700 spectators, intended to give the production an unconventional feel, bringing Shakespeare out of the established theatres and emphasising the potential of the plays as 48 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre popular entertainment. A newspaper article by Ron Saw noted facetiously that this choice of venue was a breach with high-art tradition in that it was asking “easily-bruised aesthetes to perform under canvas like carnival strippers and flea-trainers” (Saw 1964: 18– 19). The article notes that the purchase of the tent was a joint venture between the high-art AETT and the popular-culture Perth entrepreneur Eric Edgley, who wanted it for a proposed 1965 tour to Australia by the Moscow State Circus. Promoters Jack Neary and Ken Brodziak and Bullen’s Circus were also said to be involved. Inside the tent, the stage was a thrust with the audience on three sides. To pre-empt the inevitable criticisms about authenticity by critics and conventionally minded audience members, Tyrone Guthrie was invited to write a Foreword in the Sydney program, where he noted the greater authenticity of a theatre-in-the-round for playing Shakespeare, and the desirability of a closer relationship between actors and audience. He also made the point that with the overwhelming popularity of film, the move away from an end-stage disposition to in-the-round (which had previously been used by Guthrie himself at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, and by Olivier at the festivals in Chichester and Minneapolis) would help to re-emphasise the special qualities of live theatre (Guthrie 1964). Frank Harris wrote that Bell again dominated the production. His self-confidence as an actor showed through in his irreverent approach to the role.

He was the very essence of ardent, headstrong youth, cheeky at first and almost irresponsible in his seeking a reason for war with France, then taking on his manhood magnificently as the war got under way. (Harris 1964: 13)

The critic Roger Covell, in the Sydney Morning Herald, saw in Bell’s portrayal of the young monarch an attempt to create a less idealised, more psychologically realistic character than usual. Bell played a Hamlet who was

gauchely uncertain in his initial defiance of the French ambassador, failing to hide his edgy apprehension during the night before the battle, even fumbling the process of reconciliation […] It is a more fallible, young and likeable Henry than usual, but also less of a hero and a leader. (Covell 1964: 4)

Chapter One: A National Theatre 49

The same critic suggested that Bell’s approach to the role was not just a production concept but also a way of counteracting what several commentators at the time felt to be his major weakness as an actor: a lack of vocal technique. There is praise for the versatility and the pleasing qualities of his light tenor voice, but also a recurring feeling that there was not enough power to play a heroic role:

Bell’s reluctance to sound a bugle in the speeches that call for it seems not to be solely a matter of theorising choice: the husky shredding of his voice on occasions suggests that he still lacks the sheer vocal technique necessary to give practical effect to the idea of culminating kingship inherent in his portrayal. (Ibid.)

Nevertheless, the intelligence and daring of Bell’s characterisation earned high praise, and a prediction of future greatness from Geoffrey Dutton, writing in The Age in Melbourne:

The time has come to make our own stars, and the young Sydney actor John Bell impresses me as the most exciting talent to emerge from the Australian theatre in years. (Dutton 1964)

Performing in Henry V was a watershed for Bell. It enhanced his reputation as a talented actor and a future star of the Australian stage, proving that his Hamlet had not been a flash in the pan. It was his first professional experience of a populist approach to Shakespeare, emphasising not high art but down-to-earth entertainment in a venue which was designed to be shared with circus and pop music; and it was an experiment that he would return to nearly thirty years later when he launched the BSC in 1991 with a production of Hamlet in a tent (AS 13373). Bell has written that the idea of performance under canvas rather than in a conventional theatre is something that he has always felt attracted to:

I was having a whale of a time playing Henry. It was a role I had idolised and coveted ever since first seeing the Olivier movie – and here I was doing it, declaiming all the great speeches, making love to Anna Volska – and in a circus tent! My love of sawdust and canvas was as ardent as it had been in the days of Sorlies’ and Bobby le Brun. In fact circus tents have cropped up throughout my career. The Bell Shakespeare Company began its life in one; and if I couldn’t have a real one, I sometimes reconstructed one inside a theatre as I did for a 50 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

couple of my most successful shows, Nimrod’s Much Ado About Nothing and The Venetian Twins in the Opera House Drama Theatre. (Bell 2002: 46)

He acted opposite Anna Volska, who played the role of Princess Katherine. She was a young NIDA graduate who had joined the Old Tote at about the same time as Bell, playing the maid Dooniasha in the 1963 Cherry Orchard (AS 5512). Their onstage courtship in Henry V was paralleled by an offstage romance, and Bell by now was a sufficiently public figure for this to be reported widely in the popular press (Burns 1964: 14–15). Bell took part in two more solo recital-type performances in 1964, By Royal Command and All the World’s a Stage, in both of which he demonstrated his versatility by playing multiple roles. He also performed opposite Robert Helpmann in what seems to have been a single performance of a half-hour version of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Story [sic] for the AETT, which was filmed by the ABC and scheduled to be broadcast in both Australia and Britain. Unfortunately the footage no longer seems to exist, and there is no evidence that it was actually screened. This project came at the suggestion of Helpmann, who had seen and admired Bell in Henry V. It entailed a slight delay to the next phase of his career: earlier in 1964, he had been awarded a British Council scholarship to study theatre in England at the Bristol Old Vic Drama School. He departed Australia at the end of September 1964, and Anna Volska joined him in England not long afterward. They married in 1965. Soon after his arrival at the Bristol Old Vic School, he was offered a place at the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of a small, experimental company led by a group of directors including Michel Saint-Denis. He then played supporting roles in main stage Shakespeare productions, including the two Shakespeare plays in which he had taken the lead back home: Hamlet (as Rosencrantz, directed by Peter Hall with David Warner as Hamlet) and Henry V (as the Governor of Harfleur). In 1967, he took the role of Richard II for the Oldham Repertory Theatre, and later he played Romeo and then Mirabell in Congreve’s The Way of the World at Lincoln. During this period, he re-established professional links with other Australian actors and directors working abroad, including Phillip Hedley and Richard Wherrett. But by this time, he and Volska had two children, Hilary and Lucy, and they were beginning to think Chapter One: A National Theatre 51 seriously about returning to Australia. There was no doubt some ambivalence about interrupting a career that was just starting to get going; Wherrett remembers his own desire to return at about the same time being met with surprise by English friends. ‘Why’, they asked, ‘would you want to go back to that barbarous place?’ (Wherrett 1995). But when John Clark, the new director of NIDA, offered Bell a position as an acting tutor, they made the move back to Sydney in 1970.

52 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

John Bell in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Old Tote Theatre Company, 1971. Photographer: unknown. NIDA Archive ©. Reproduced with permission.

Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition

Old Tote, new Nimrod When Bell left Australia for Britain, it was as a promising young actor but it was as a director that he made the first big impression on his return. Soon after arriving in Australia, wanting to do more than teach acting, he approached Robin Lovejoy, artistic director of the Old Tote, for work as an actor, but was turned down. Then, after directing an in- house production at NIDA of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (AS 22964, 1970, SoS 650) in March 1970, he created, along with writers Michael Boddy and and the cast, The Legend of King O’Malley (AS 28133, SoS 648; 649; 720; 1516; 2964), which premiered in June. This knockabout, farcical look at Australian history was his first public production as a director. (For an extended discussion of this watershed event, see Chapter Three). The success of King O’Malley created the environment where a new, alternative company with its own venue could be imagined in Sydney, with the aim of performing something that could be recognised as Australian theatre. The consequence was the formation by Ken Horler and Bell of the Nimrod Street Theatre, located in a cramped former stables in King’s Cross. The early aims of the Nimrod, in Bell’s words, were

to make theatre less stuffy, more confronting and more Australian. Drawing on old popular traditions of music-hall, vaudeville and pantomime we encouraged the cheeky, irreverent aspect of the Australian character to invade the temples of high art. (Bell 2002: 148)

Bell’s partner in this enterprise, Ken Horler, had worked with Bell at Sydney University on several productions. Horler had been thinking about starting a theatre for some time, and when Bell returned from Britain, he identified a space:

54 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

I found a broken-down warehouse which became the first Nimrod in an inauspicious site which seemed to have the knockabout quality and potential. It had been both a Sunday school and a brothel. (K. Horler 1993)

Horler insists that the Nimrod Street venture was not political in any partisan sense, but defined itself, in his mind at least, in opposition to the status quo:

Most of the plays [produced in Sydney] in the 1960s were pretty bloody awful. Australians young and old who had seen exciting theatre out of Australia needed to have our own form of theatre. I don’t think we can say in hindsight that we had a precise view of the sort of theatre that we wanted to do. We wanted to be different – I suppose part of it was wanting to be different for difference’s sake, but the museum theatre, Professor Robert Quentin’s theatre, was what we didn’t want. (K. Horler 1993)

Larry Eastwood, who was to become the main designer for Nimrod productions in the early years, was another driving force in the refurbishment of the building, as was the architect Vivian Fraser, who would go on to design the conversion of empty spaces into workable and important Sydney theatres, most prominently the Belvoir Street and the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) Wharf theatres. What links Fraser’s theatres is their attention to the actor– audience relationship. His designs are intended to take the public by surprise and are based on a principle of asymmetry. They are designed not as end-stage layouts but as irregular spaces where the acting area is partly surrounded by the seating, so that spectators can see and be aware of each other as well as the actors, and so that they see the production obliquely (Fraser 1992). Bell’s interest was in an assertive, irreverent new Australian theatre. This goal suited his approach as a director more than his skills as an actor, which perhaps explains why he did not take an acting role at the Nimrod until 1973, after he had directed a number of successful productions there. His first performance with his own company was in a new production of Hamlet (AS 6024), which he also co-directed with Wherrett. It is worth noting the oddity of the fact that Bell and Wherrett were both directors of the Nimrod, which defined itself in opposition to the mainstream and conservative Old Tote, but in the Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 55 early 1970s they both continued to work for what they called ‘the competition’. Indeed, during the early days of Nimrod, Bell’s acting was restricted to a few high-visibility guest-star appearances with the Old Tote, though this involvement diminished during the 1970s. The success and the rising profile of Nimrod, together with the move to the much larger theatre in Belvoir Street, meant that there was less time for Bell to work with the established company. In May 1971, he played the title role in Wherrett’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (AS 18414, 1971, SoS 711) and, later the same year, Khlestakov in Gogol’s The Government Inspector (AS 5619, 1971, SoS 1867). The following year, he played Petruchio in Robin Lovejoy’s production of The Taming of the Shrew (AS 5629, 1972, SoS 806) at the Old Tote. Ui, Shrew and Hamlet, were recorded and broadcast in their entirety by ABC Television. The television versions, while inevitably different from the stage performances, were nevertheless closely based on them and are the most complete record that we have of Bell’s work as an actor at that time. In any case, in the early days of television drama in Australia, acting for television was much more like live theatre than film or television now. Veteran actor cannot recall any discussion or direction about the difference between acting for the camera and acting on the stage. He has described how the procedure worked in a made-for-television production of The Taming of the Shrew (SoS 177) in which he played Petruchio, broadcast by the ABC on 22 August 1962. The bulky cameras were in the centre of the studio and all the sets were assembled in booths around the walls, in much the same way as the simultaneous staging used in some forms of medieval theatre. The whole play was recorded in sequence on the afternoon of the broadcast. No editing was possible, except for the insertion of an outdoor scene which had been pre-recorded. The actors performed in one continuous run, as in the performance of a live play, changing costumes and moving from set to set as required, and the recording was completed only an hour before the broadcast (Haddrick 2008).

56 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Not just a matinee idol: Arturo Ui The first of the televised performances featuring Bell was based on the 1971 Old Tote production of the Brecht play. Arturo Ui, a gangster figure modelled on Hitler, was unlike any role that Sydney had seen Bell perform to that time. Part of his success as an actor had been his matinee-idol good looks, but in this role he was made up and physically distorted to look like a cross between Hitler and Richard III – after this, there was no fear that he might be limited to playing young, handsome and charming characters. One of the features of this performance which helped make the production a success was Bell’s transformation in the lead role, which mirrored Ui’s rise to power. At the start of the play, Bell appeared as a tiny (though certainly potentially vicious), rodent-like creature, often hovering watchfully and enviously in the background to the action. With dark hair flopping over his forehead and pale makeup, his face was dominated by a long, thin, pointed nose, accentuated by a Hitleresque toothbrush moustache. The pallor of the face also emphasised dark, darting eyes, which looked about constantly in what seemed like fear, but also perhaps on the lookout for opportunities to benefit from any situation. Ui’s voice was harsh, with a curious accent that incorporated features of American, German, Italian and Irish. In the early part of the play, Bell was hunched over and uncoordinated, and he wore a baggy, shapeless trench-coat buttoned near the bottom but gaping at the chest. This allowed him to make nervously expressive gestures by pulling at the lapels and at times trying to hide inside the coat. At the same time, the open coat allowed the escape of an unstylish tie which flapped around when he moved and added to a sense of unpredictable foolishness. The result was a timid, cowering, cringing figure. The early scenes were opportunities for virtuoso buffoonery. In Ui’s first major encounter with the forces of established power, Bell performed an extended clown-like routine where he created minor havoc for the other characters with a soda siphon, glasses of whisky and finger food. The effect was to make the character look even more ridiculous, but at the same time more dangerous. While his mishandling of the physical objects in his world made him look clumsy and stupid, the physical damage that he caused was to other people, not himself. The turning point of the characterisation was the most famous scene of the play, where Ui hires a classical actor to coach him in Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 57 deportment and speech. This sequence developed in a series of increasingly ominous lazzi where Ui, proving a surprisingly good pupil, rapidly acquired the rhetorical techniques of his tutor. It looked as if the tense and twisted body of the terrified, small-time crook had been unleashed, releasing a monster of great power. The Old Actor’s instructions to Ui to lift his head up and to walk with his toes extended provoked a physical transformation – at first clumsy, robotic and ridiculous but developing into an upright and well-executed goose- step. Likewise Ui’s handling of Shakespearean text – Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ speech from Julius Caesar – quickly surpassed that of the teacher. Bell as Ui began to find forceful gestures to accompany a few key moments in the speech, incidentally discovering the Nazi straight-arm salute in the process. He explored the speech, rattling through parts of the text in fast-forward, then slowing down to extend the important moments. Gradually, the whole speech came impressively and ominously alive. From this point on, Ui began to dominate the stage, growing in confidence, in posture, in status, and in style – the flapping trench- coat was abandoned in favour of a dark suit – and the first time he genuinely smiled was frightening. Equally frightening was the impassivity at other times of the blank, porcelain face which could without warning burst into savage action. The play concludes with Ui/Hitler at the height of his powers, making an authoritative and potent public address on a rostrum over the stage, exhorting his followers to go out and take over the entire world. This is then followed by a brief epilogue warning the audience that, even though “the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is on heat again”. This speech was spoken by Bell, still made up as Ui, but using his normal voice emanating from behind the grotesque, mask-like face. One criticism made of the production was that it was too flashy and funny and not sufficiently political, in the sense of being linked with issues of immediate concern to Australians in 1971. This would not be the last time that Wherrett’s productions were accused of being too glossy and depoliticised, but it is a particularly pointed criticism in the case of a play by Brecht. It was suggested by the critic Katharine Brisbane that, though the final words of the Epilogue pointed to something ominous and imminent, the production itself did not make it clear what were the local areas of concern, and where the new 58 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

“bastard” to succeed Hitler might be coming from. It was especially unclear in what ways this play might be regarded as an Australian production or addressing specifically Australian concerns (Brisbane 1971). These are criticisms of the director’s work – an actor has more limited ability to respond to such questions. Bell was acclaimed for this performance. The initial season sold out and had to be brought back for a second run after an interstate tour. This success opened the way for him to continue to act and direct at the Old Tote in between his responsibilities to the Nimrod. His next acting role, later in 1971, was as Khlestakov in Gogol’s The Government Inspector (AS 5619), a nobody of a clerk who is mistaken for an important official by the corrupt residents of a small provincial town. According to Kippax in the Sydney Morning Herald, this production used a similar technique to that which Bell had used in Brecht’s play: under the direction of Philip Hedley, Bell created another grotesque figure who grew from a “thoroughly vulgar would- be dandy” into “a monstrous parody of aristocracy as he embarks on great, gushing cadenzas of fantasy” (Kippax 1971: 16).

Exploring Australian Shakespeare: Petruchio and Hamlet Bell returned to Shakespeare in another star acting role for the Old Tote in 1972: Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (AS 5629). The stage production by Robin Lovejoy was televised by the ABC in 1973. It was innovative in that the production was localised, being set in the Australian outback – though it was criticised at length by the director and critic as being superficial and logically inconsistent in its attempt to make Shakespeare relevant to Australian audiences of the time (Cramphorn 1972: 26). It was an early example of what became known as “ockerised Shakespeare”. In the early 1970s, updated or modernised Shakespeare was an international trend. By this time, Bell had already mounted non-period productions of Macbeth (AS 6006, 1971) and Measure for Measure (AS 6007, 1972) at the Nimrod, and the Prospect Company from London had toured Australia with a rock music production of Love’s Labour’s Lost (AS 19252, 1972). However, productions set in an Australian context were less common. Lovejoy’s production of The Taming of the Shrew was an early experiment with the use of non-standard English in Shakespeare. This was made easier, or at least more justifiable, through the device of the Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 59 play-within-the-play. The frame is a prelude (sometimes inaccurately called “the Induction”) which is often cut in performance. It features a drunken tinker called Christopher Sly, who becomes the victim of an elaborate prank. After being thrown out of a tavern, the drunken Sly passes out in the gutter and is discovered by an aristocrat and his entourage. Still asleep, he is carried back to the lord’s house and, when he wakes, is fooled into believing that he is really the owner of the property. The lord and his household convince him that, for some time, he has been out of his right mind, thinking he is a tinker. They pretend to rejoice that he has come back to his senses, and, to celebrate, the play of the taming of Katherine is performed for his benefit by a troupe of conveniently passing players. Lovejoy not only used but made a feature of the frame story, with Sly played as an Australian swagman and the lord as a squatter. Sly remained on stage throughout the performance until almost the final scene, commenting noisily and interjecting directly. Because he was played as an ignorant man, and since within the fictional world of the play he is the main audience for the story of Katherine and Petruchio, it was a challenge for the itinerant troupe of actors performing the play-within-the-play to find a style of performance that would plausibly please him. The opening scene was played with conventional British accents, but this was interrupted by Sly’s bored and disgusted comments about Poms and how much he hated them. Then Ron Haddrick, playing Baptista, who was also the manager of the company, on the spur of the moment decided to play his role in an improvised Italian accent as a way of piquing Sly’s interest. The other actors, to a considerable extent, followed his lead, though Arthur Dignam playing Hortensio adopted a broad Australian accent, and curiously a few of the male characters and the main female roles of Katherine (Lyndell Rowe for the live production; replaced by Carol Macready for the televised version) and Bianca (Kirrily Nolan) were performed with the kind of standard British accents employed by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Bell as Petruchio used an Irish accent, the only member of the cast to do so. This presumably was dictated by the requirements of the director’s approach: Petruchio in this production was played as an Australian soldier from around the turn of the twentieth century, with a plumed slouch hat, so an Italian accent would have been out of place; but Bell’s Petruchio needed to be much more volatile, violent 60 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre and talkative than the stereotype of the laconic Australian digger, and it might have been difficult to find a recognisable Australian version of the character that would make sense. The Irish accent was a reasonable compromise, not entirely implausible for an Australian soldier, and the stereotype served to make dramatic sense of the extroverted, madcap antics and hot temper of the character. It worked for at least one critic, who wrote: “All the feted characteristics of the Irish were there in good measure and it seemed almost inconceivable that Petruchio could ever have come from anywhere else” (Collins 1972: 35). Frank Harris made the comment that the role of Petruchio, as it was usually performed, was outside the range that Bell’s physique would suggest, and that the performance was successful despite “his limitations for the usual towering, thundering picture of the roguish hero” (Harris 1972: 19). He played the role with a beard, signalling a move away from the youthful appearance of his Hamlet and Henry V. His Petruchio was a likeable adventurer, despite the early lines which announce clearly that he has come to Padua to “wive” it “wealthily”, and that he does not care whom he marries as long as she brings a large dowry. Nevertheless there were indications in his performance that, having encountered Katherine, he becomes fascinated with her, and that underneath the brawling, rampaging madman is a caring (or perhaps patronising) observer who knows exactly what he is doing. His actions, as he sees them, are a means toward domestic harmony and peace, a word highlighted in Bell’s delivery of his lines at the conclusion of the play. Bell’s handling of Shakespeare’s language stood out in what was overall a very accomplished cast. Though his accent was not always consistent, Bell had acquired a flexibility in his delivery of the dialogue which managed to seem easy and casual while remaining responsive to the changes and obscurities in the text. For Cramphorn, though, there was a price to be paid for the control and clarity of Bell’s handling of the language. He suggested that the casting of Bell and Lyndell Rowe “is of a kind to emphasise the intellectual and verbal aspects of their struggle rather than the physical and sexual ones which are usually made so much of” (Cramphorn 1972: 26). Again, Bell chose to let his performance creep up on the audience by surprise. His first entrance was relatively restrained, avoiding the temptation to engage in overly physical brawling with Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 61 the servant Grumio, which the dialogue might encourage. He appeared sane, controlled and restrained, likeable and urbane, though with hints of the energy and humour that would be let loose only later in the play. The first real sign of what was to come was his appearance at the wedding (Act 3 scene 2). He wore a white pith helmet adorned with huge pheasant feathers, an officer’s dress jacket with a knitted patchwork blanket for a cloak, and across his chest a winner’s sash from an agricultural show emblazoned with the words ‘1 Prize Ram’. His trousers were ragged and full of holes, and he had mismatched boots, with a brass trombone and a sword dangling from his waist. The end of the sequence was marked by rapid changes from good humour to explosions of temper. Assisted by Grumio, also eccentrically dressed in a singlet and shorts, he all but kidnapped his unwilling bride while beating off those who would rescue her, intimidating them with wild slashes of his sword. It was Bell’s next appearances at Petruchio’s house that constituted the bravura centrepiece of the play. Here he worked an elaborate double act with Drew Forsythe as Grumio, which allowed him scope to range the stage, beat the servants mercilessly, throw food in all directions and drench Katherine as if by accident with a basinful of water held by an attendant, all the while vowing deeply felt concern for her well-being. He picked up a chair and threatened to break it over the heads of the servants, and by the end of the scene, furniture, props, food and items of costume were strewn all over the set. The production did not really succeed in subverting the harsh misogyny in the play, but it proved very popular. It toured to Canberra, was filmed by ABC Television and was revived for an extended season at the end of the year. It was also an important step forward in thinking about recognisably Australian productions of Shakespeare. Watching the version filmed by the ABC, it is hard to imagine that many people in the audience could have preferred those more sedate sections of the script spoken in classic English diction to those delivered flamboyantly with physical abandon in less conventional accents. The expressive, broad Australian accent of Arthur Dignam as Hortensio helps to make the character more accessible and easier to understand. This is even more the case with the two actors who used Italian accents: Ron Haddrick playing a warmly genial and benignly generous Mediterranean host as Katherine’s father Baptista, and John Gaden playing Gremio, the older 62 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre suitor for Bianca’s hand, as a dapper spiv with a waxed moustache. These were both easily recognisable Italian stereotypes, and the language delivered in exaggerated Italian accents became more vivid, more expressive, clearer and more deeply felt. It also, inevitably, had a liberating effect on the bodily expression of these two characters, who became much more physically demonstrative. There were lessons here to be learned, and Bell would put the ideas into practice in his direction of Much Ado About Nothing (AS 6053, 1975) and (AS 6168, 1979) in the coming years. Bell’s performance as Hamlet (AS 6024, 1973, SoS 924) was the only time that he acted on the tiny and very intimate stage of the first Nimrod. This production was to be a major event in Sydney theatre. By this time, Bell was hailed in a Nimrod Theatre press release as “one of Australia’s finest actors” (Nimrod Theatre Company 1973) and it gave him a chance to rethink and extend his success of ten years earlier. He was now three years older than the character rather than seven years too young, as he had been at the Old Tote. Insisting on co-directing the play gave him much more control over the context in which his performance was to be seen. The result was a production which “at point after point […] coheres in credibility” and gave Bell the freedom to play the role at an emotional full throttle (Kippax 1973b: 14). The set was dominated by panels of mirrors which reflected both the actors and the audience, emphasising the idea of self- discovery. It dealt with the close examination of both political corruption and personal torment. In Bell’s performance, the inner personal torment was very evident. He played Hamlet as someone who is not just putting on an antic disposition, but genuinely on the verge of psychological breakdown – described by Brian Hoad as “neurotic, a schizophrenic, almost at times a psychopath” (Hoad 1972: 46). However, the manic depressive quality was played with great variation, suggesting not only hostility toward Claudius, Ophelia and Gertrude, but also a compulsive need for the companionship that Horatio provided and, toward the end, a deeply felt sorrow for Laertes whose father he had killed. As usual, Bell started the play quietly and relatively calmly, taking advantage of the potential for intimate acting which the confined nature of the old Nimrod afforded. Kippax described Bell’s performance at the start of the play as being “muted, torpid, almost Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 63 paralysed by his grief and disgust” (Kippax 1973b: 14), and at times in the soliloquies he whispered sections of the text – a technique which would be impossible in larger venues. The moody depressiveness of his first appearance allowed him the space to reveal the character as “passion’s slave” and build towards the role’s emotional and theatrical outbursts in a series of high-energy scenes around the middle of the play – the nunnery scene, where he has an angry confrontation with Ophelia; the mousetrap scene, where the court watch the play of The Murder of Gonzago; the closet scene, where he attacks his mother and kills Polonius, culminating in the clash with the King over the whereabouts of the dead body which he has hidden. Bell’s Hamlet was rough and abusive to Ophelia, switching from concern and affection to wild rage in an instant. In the nunnery scene, he grabbed her viciously by the face, and flung her from him. There was no suggestion in this production that Hamlet was aware that his actions were being watched by Polonius and the King. The fury that he showed towards her seemed to come from inside himself, rather than being a show put on to persuade the spying King and councillor that he is mad. The next outburst came in the play scene, where Hamlet hopes that his uncle, the King, will betray his guilt when confronted with a representation of the murder of his brother. In this production, owing to Hamlet’s own lack of self-control, nothing of the kind occurred, except apparently in Hamlet’s own mind. Even before the Players began, he behaved dangerously, violently flinging Ophelia down into her place in front of the entire court. As the play-within-the-play progressed to the point where the onstage murder is performed, Bell as Hamlet grew more and more excited and irrational, laughing inappropriately, clapping impatiently, leaping up and moving around with a strange, lopsided gait, making wild outbursts and disrupting the proceedings. He particularly reacted to the lines criticising the Player Queen’s actions in remarrying, and it looked as if the point of the performance was a public insult to his mother, rather than an attempt to expose the murder of his father. Then Hamlet loudly noted the fact that the murderer, Lucianus, was not the brother but the nephew to the King, and finally threw himself at his mother and attacked her. It was his outrageous misbehaviour and the thinly veiled threat to the life of Claudius by his nephew that formed the major action of the scene, and when the King stopped the proceedings and left the chamber it seemed 64 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre more like a proper response to Hamlet’s offensive behaviour towards Ophelia and Gertrude and the outrageous public threat that he had made to Claudius, rather than a public acknowledgement of his own guilt. The closet scene (Act 4 scene 1), where Hamlet visits his mother in her apartment, was the climax of this section of the play. Here the relationship between the two was played as unambiguously Oedipal. The scene started at a high pitch with Beverley Phillips as Gertrude strongly attacking her son for the offence that he had caused. Bell as Hamlet retaliated aggressively and physically, threatening her with a sword. This built rapidly to the moment of the most extreme violence where the hidden Polonius is killed, and then turned into a revelation of sexual intensity as Hamlet enacts his disgust that his mother has remarried. Bell’s performance at this point became erratic, leaping from mood to mood. At times hostile, at times conciliatory, he became more and more physically intimate with his mother, touching her roughly, manhandling her and throwing her around the room, forcing her down on the bed and sitting astride her, nuzzling his head affectionately against her neck, until almost at the end of the scene they kissed passionately. Then, having apparently achieved some kind of satisfaction, he seemed to relax in her presence, and curled up on the bed with her, his head in her lap. The pose could have suggested either marital harmony or a small child with his mother – what made it grotesque was that this was a woman with her thirty-year-old son who has luridly berated her for her sexual activity with her second husband, and who has committed violent murder on a senior court official whose dead body is still lying in the room. After Act 4 scene 3, in which Hamlet is sent to England to be assassinated, he remains off stage for a reasonably long time, something which must in this production have been a relief considering the enormous energy that Bell gave to the role. When he returns (Act 5 scene 1), his language suggests that a major change has taken place – he seems markedly calmer and more objective. Here Bell’s good humour and intelligence came to the fore, and he presented a character who has experienced so much that the anxiety about death which the “to be or not to be” speech expresses has been replaced by a surrender to fate or providence. In the scene of Ophelia’s funeral, he was notably more restrained than Laertes and, though responding to Laertes’ fury at moments, he nevertheless kept Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 65 himself under control. The final scene with the duel showed him well in control, and in the fencing bout he remained cool and plausibly fought with more skill than the anxious and distressed Laertes. By the end of the play, Bell managed to justify the eulogy of Fortinbras that he was likely, “had he beene put on/ To haue prou’d most royally” (Act 5 scene 2, TLN 3898–9). Bell’s delivery of the text, given the intimate scale of the production, was masterly. He was able to range in volume from barely audible whispers to full-volume shouting, and the pace varied from a measured, pensive and meditative lingering over the text to high- speed volleys of words that he fired like machine-gun bullets. He coloured individual words and phrases selectively so that they supported his overall characterisation of the role, wincing with familiar pain on the word heartache, and recoiling in terror at the idea of “something after death”. In a talented cast, which included Anna Volska as Ophelia, Bell nevertheless stood out, as he did in all three of these plays which have been recorded by the ABC. It is of course expected that any actor playing Arturo Ui, Petruchio or Hamlet should dominate, and it is partly the nature of the text that makes this possible – these characters are almost constantly at the centre of the action. Production decisions also play an undeniable part in this, since the blocking of scenes will usually make these roles the focus of attention. But there are other factors at work in Bell’s predominance in these plays, some of which are almost indefinable. There is with Bell a thoughtful confidence which shines through his acting, a playful and somehow knowing smile often hovering almost imperceptibly at the corners of his mouth, at points where other actors might tend to play nothing but solemn intensity. Bell conveys a reassurance that he is in control of the role, that he will make sure the audience have a good time, and that the text and the action will make sense. He shows a willingness to reject convention and play a role according to its own strong internal logic, following the clues in the text which tradition has often obscured. He manages to play the complexities and subtleties of a character with an unusual lightness of touch, making some other actors, however competent and skilful, look contrived and heavy by comparison. The features of his face, especially his famously high cheekbones, have provoked descriptions like “brooding intensity” and are another important factor in his ability to 66 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre communicate moods and emotions (O’Grady 1980: n.p.); Bell’s angular face becomes especially expressive under stage lighting, with the angles forming shadows which change as he moves. This is particularly evident in the black-and-white television recordings which tend to wash out the faces of some actors, leaving them looking blank and impassive even at moments of high emotion; even under these conditions, Bell’s face retains its definition and helps to convey a clear sense of what the character is thinking, feeling and doing, moment by moment. There is his strong onstage presence and high- performance energy which can be revved up in response to the ever- changing demands of the dramatic situation. However, none of this fully explains Bell’s success as an actor; there is something else which makes him seem almost to radiate or reflect light on stage, something that draws and holds the eye and which changes constantly; one commentator writing for Vogue Australia later described it as “a phosphorescent quality that glows across the footlights” (Tulloch 1982: n.p.). At his best, Bell has the ability to become, as the actor Yoshi Oida puts it, somehow invisible or transparent (Oida 1997). If this is a story about the development of an explicitly Australian theatre, this Hamlet might seem like a digression from that aim. There was nothing overtly Australian about it. Nor was it seen by everyone as being particularly innovative; an otherwise favourable review by Ian Robinson, when the production later toured to Melbourne, commented with a tinge of disappointment:

Nimrod Street Theatre has a reputation for being an experimental theatre group of the same ilk as Melbourne’s Australian Performing Group. However, there is nothing particularly revolutionary or daring about their production. It lacks any unifying purpose other than the exploration of Hamlet’s character. (Robinson 1973: n.p.)

Nevertheless, in an indirect way this performance can be seen to have made a contribution to the quest. Among the features that Bell would like to attribute to an Australian Shakespeare is a combination of freshness of approach and high skill in execution, and this production managed to achieve this aim. In addition, there is no denying that Bell’s performance, compared with the great actors of the classical tradition like Olivier and Gielgud, had a quality of raw physicality – another feature shared by many Australian Shakespeare productions. The physicality of Bell’s performance was emphasised in the major Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 67 scenes in the middle of the play by a torn and gaping shirt which partially revealed his torso as he hurled himself around the stage. Wherrett recalled that the production was a “seminal one” for the Nimrod, that “it very much typified Nimrod’s appeal to the classic repertoire” (Wherrett 1995), and revealed the possibilities in creating a production of Shakespeare which was infused with what were seen as Australian qualities without any foregrounded local references in the setting or the performances. A further consequence of the production, which was brought back at the end of 1973 for a repeat season and toured to Canberra and Melbourne (the first time that Bell’s acting had been seen in either city), was that it cemented Bell’s reputation as possibly the greatest Australian interpreter of Shakespeare, even though at this stage of his career he had played only three Shakespeare characters professionally in Australia. The production, though innovative in some ways, was nevertheless conventional enough that it could enhance his reputation as a great classical actor. This reputation is something that he has been able to use to his advantage, often producing quite radical treatments of Shakespeare’s plays while at the same time promoting them as faithful treatments of the script so that they attract a wide and often quite conservative audience.

Nimrod expanding By this stage, the company had proved so successful that they had outgrown the tiny space in Nimrod Street. The proper functioning of the theatre was limited by its audience capacity – a ninety-seat auditorium is not adequate to sustain a full-time professional company. With additional concerns that the building would be demolished, the company moved in the middle of 1974 into the new Nimrod, a building which they converted from a former tomato sauce and salt factory in Surry Hills into a theatre. The new premises had a much bigger performance space – there was no raised stage – and much more audience capacity. This major turning point in the Nimrod story was in large part enabled by John Mostyn, a well-connected Sydney businessman who was later to be chair of the Nimrod Board. Two features that the new venue retained from the Nimrod Street stables were the name and a welcoming clutter that made it feel busy and lived in. Few people ever dressed formally for a Nimrod show, and the foyer was an exciting, enclosed and often crowded place – 68 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre personal space was all but eliminated. At Belvoir Street, the process of turning separate individuals into an audience starts well before the play begins, as audience members often literally rub shoulders in the foyer. Inside the auditorium, the deliberately rough quality continued. The conversion of the factory into a theatre was based on designs by the architect Vivian Fraser, who had supervised the design of the first Nimrod space, and who would later design the conversion of the Wharf theatres used by the Sydney Theatre Company. Fraser had become involved with the first Nimrod Theatre because he lived next door to the very persuasive Ken and Lilian Horler. One of the few requests that he had from Bell about the conversion was that the seats should not be too comfortable (Fraser 1992).

Richard III and the Dismissal After directing the first production in the new theatre in mid-1974, The Bacchoi, Bell acted in the second, Chekhov’s The Seagull (AS 6037, 1974). It was not until the end of 1975 that he was again to take on a major Shakespeare role in the new space, playing the lead in Wherrett’s Richard III (AS 6054). Typically, Bell took on this demanding role while at the same time directing his own production of Much Ado About Nothing (AS 6053). The two plays used the same set and were performed in alternation every four nights over a thirteen-week season. While reviews for Bell’s innovative and energetic Much Ado were enthusiastic, for Richard III they were uncharacteristically mixed. Nevertheless there was considerable praise for Bell’s overall approach to the role of one of Shakespeare’s arch- villains, a complicated and even contradictory character who combines ruthlessness with insecurity, brutality with charm, and deadly ambition with self-deprecating humour. Bell’s performance also contrasts the character’s ability to disguise his intentions from other characters with his disarming openness towards the audience. While twisted in his shape and brutal in his actions, Bell as Richard is witty, energetic, and clearly the most intelligent character in the play. He can manipulate his allies and neutralise his opponents at will until he achieves his goals. He is a man of action, the opposite of Hamlet in some ways, though Richard too has a tendency to think too precisely on the event, especially towards the end of the play. Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 69

Playing the deformity of the role with dishevelled blond hair, a club foot and disfigured face, Bell took advantage of what the part has to offer. According to David Marr in the Bulletin, he avoided the temptation to play the role as a simplistic villain and made the most of the protean qualities of the character:

John Bell’s Richard is a figure of concentrated evil, but Bell refuses to be caught by the grand guignol temptations of the part. His Richard is not an impassioned freak, but a ruthless plotter – intelligent, abrasive and mocking. He projects that most frightening element of real evil – its facelessness. Evil never lets its victims know its limits, when it’s spent or where it will bite […] [T]his Richard is never the same man long enough to give his enemies a chance. He baffles them. To one prince he is a clownish uncle, to the other, a father, to the mob a reluctant noble. His charades are nasty and dangerous but he trades on a frightened people’s wish to believe again and again that he could not be as bad as he obviously is. It’s a tremendous performance. (Marr 1975: 23)

Other critics noted the intelligence and fierce humour of Bell’s portrayal, but it was not to everyone’s taste, and the production itself came in for some severe criticism. Kevon Kemp in the National Times suggested that Bell as an actor required and did not get strong direction, and that the production itself was a “failure”, an “unskilled and impoverished” lapse from the high standard of Much Ado, and a “genuine setback” for the Nimrod, which was “hard to understand or forgive” (Kemp 1975b: 38). Guest critic John Tasker in the Sydney Morning Herald registered the disappointment that he clearly felt with both the production and some aspects of Bell’s performance. He criticised the production decision to make Richard’s opponents into “roistering” robber barons and “larrikins”, effectively depoliticising the play and reducing the strength of opposition to Richard’s rise to power. Making Richard’s move towards the throne easier to achieve had the effect of giving Bell less to do as an actor. While acknowledging that Bell had all the components of a great performance, Tasker felt that it had not yet coalesced, and that on opening night Bell “lacked the strength and charm to captivate his audience, transforming them into horrified but willing fellow- conspirators” (Tasker 1975: 7). Many of the reviews stress the impressive qualities of Bell’s Richard in the early part of the play, when he is actively conspiring to 70 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre achieve the throne, but suggest an anti-climax after that. The most frequently praised aspect of the second half of the play is Wherrett’s staging of the battle, but this comes a long time after Richard achieves his goal of becoming the King. There is a suggestion that the production and Bell’s performance did not find a way to deal with the problematic structure of the script, where the latter part of the play can be anti-climactic and much too long. An important ingredient in Bell’s earlier triumphs as an actor had been a sure sense of dramatic structure and climax, building from a slow start to spectacular pyrotechnics towards the end of the play, and, in the case of his Hamlet, finding a fascinating transformation in the character to sustain the audience’s interest after the most obviously dramatic and energetic scenes were over. In Richard III, this climactic shape is not as easy to find, and the danger is always that the actor will peak too early and leave the audience feeling disengaged for too long towards the end. Another reason for the sense of disappointment is that the production was competing with one of the biggest real-life political dramas of Australian history. The production opened on the night of 11 November 1975, the day of the historic dismissal of the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government by the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, and Kerr’s appointment of the (conservative) Liberal Party’s leader, Malcolm Fraser, as Prime Minister in Whitlam’s place. Drew Forsythe has described how the actors would rush off the stage at the end of their scenes and huddle over a transistor radio in the dressing room to follow the developments in Canberra as they happened (Forsythe 1992). There was a lot at stake for both the country and the company: Whitlam had been a strong supporter of the Nimrod, often attending performances – indeed he was booked to see the opening of Richard III on the night of the Dismissal – and he had been instrumental in increasing the amount of Federal Government subsidy for the arts. John Tasker’s review noted the similarities between the play and the politics (Tasker 1975: 7). He suggested that the costumes for Richard III, which he thought a “total disaster”, should be thrown away and replaced by the “pin-stripe suits and sensible tweeds” of the parallel story of intrigue and ambition which was taking place in Canberra. For once, a Nimrod show with Bell was criticised for not being sufficiently attuned to current events outside the theatre, and for not addressing the concerns of the audience. The audience were not Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 71 slow in making connections between the play and the political storm raging outside the theatre, as did Bell who found that his performance of Richard would subtly change according to events in the news. According to Bell, the audience were fiercely divided, applauding and hissing at moments where the action of the play corresponded to the political situation. Liberal Party supporters saw Richmond (the future King Henry VII) as a Fraser-like hero coming to make a fresh start, while Labor supporters saw him as the villain (Bell 1992a). Bell’s next role, early in 1976, was again an anti-hero with a physical impairment, Lord Byron in Ron Blair’s one-man show Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (AS 6067). This was again directed by Wherrett, and once more the reviews were mixed. Bell was praised by some for his solo performance as the Romantic poet, but the general sense was that the script and production were flawed, with nothing much to say to an Australian audience, and that the evening was a disappointment. It was premiered as the Nimrod’s contribution to the Adelaide Festival and then, reworked, it played back in Sydney. Bell himself has acknowledged that the role was not one of his greatest (Bell 2002: 135–6). The end of the 1970s saw Bell perform as Prince Hal in a conflated version of the two parts of Henry IV (AS 5958, 1978) and, in a departure from his normal practice, a more modern character in a new English play: he played an emotionally repressed English shopkeeper, Hatch, in Edward Bond’s The Sea (AS 6173, 1979, E. Bond 1973), both directed by Wherrett. These were well received; Bell in The Sea was ominously tense in a way that suggested the likelihood of an imminent explosion. Katharine Brisbane found his performance elegant and executed “with riveting under-statement” (Brisbane 1979: 8). To the critic Romola Constantino, this role was an extension of his portrayal of Arturo Ui: “Bell’s grey weaselly Hatch is a figure of obsession, another facet of the Adolph Hitler figure which Bell played unforgettably in Brecht’s Arturo Ui a few years back” (Constantino 1979a: 8). It was a chilling performance of a stereotypical English form of emotional repression, something which Bell would rework some years later with a performance as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, his characterisation based on the mannerisms of the British politician Enoch Powell. It is arguable that Bell, as an Australian outside observer, could play the dangerous savagery of 72 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre these stereotypical characters more cleanly and clinically than some more polite British theatre practitioners.

Two great roles and an Australian ‘‘Theatre of Panache’’ In 1980, Bell created two of the most virtuosic, memorable and consummate performances of his career. The first was the title role in ’s Cyrano de Bergerac (AS 29710) for the newly formed Sydney Theatre Company (STC), which had been established after the collapse of the Old Tote. The second production was the title role in Volpone (AS 6201) for the Nimrod. Bell’s Cyrano was achieved despite his disappointment at not being chosen as artistic director of the new state company – a position for which he had been the clear favourite, and which was given instead to his long-time friend, collaborator and fellow director of the Nimrod, Richard Wherrett. Yet despite having very publicly missed out on what might be seen as the top theatre job in Sydney, Bell was by now one of the most influential figures in Australian theatre – he was simultaneously the co-artistic director of the Nimrod and the undisputed leading actor of the STC. Playing Cyrano, directed by Wherrett, Bell returned to the dazzlingly exuberant form of his best performances, but this time bringing a greater depth of experience to the role. The production was mounted as a vehicle for Bell, giving him the opportunity to play one of the most flamboyant roles of the European repertoire. The result was a triumph which had audiences ecstatic and critics overwhelmed. For Kippax in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bell’s performance was masterly, “touching greatness at the end”, and “utterly captivating”. He described the final moments of the play when, in the “rapt silence of the whole theatre, there came from the audience, audibly, something like a sigh of regret-filled release. Then they cheered” (Kippax 1980: 23). Katharine Brisbane called it a “homage to John Bell […] the doyen of our classical actors” (Brisbane 1980: 8). The season was extended and still audiences were turned away. It was brought back for a return season at the end of 1981. Bell’s Cyrano was extravagant, with a huge prosthetic nose to match the exaggeration of the role. Bell said in an interview, “It’s a part I’ve always liked. The size and the flamboyance suit me. I don’t like mundane or life-size characters and Cyrano is very, very big […] Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 73

I’m attracted to fairly violent roles – aggressive, megalomaniac types” (Bell quoted in O’Grady 1980: n.p.). The play, in Louis Nowra’s translation, gave him the opportunity to use a range of different styles, and the character he created was described by Kippax as being both eccentric and stylish, “with a titanic sense of humour, shrugging off exhibitionism, tempering the egotism with self-mockery, steering the character through comedy towards nobility” (Kippax 1980: 23). Kippax also wrote that for the first time he observed a level of pathos, in Cyrano’s final scene, that he had not previously detected in Bell’s work (ibid.). It was about this time that many English-speaking theatre practitioners, most prominently Peter Brook, began to pay attention to Artaud’s writings on the theatre of cruelty, especially the concept of affective athleticism – the idea that actors should be athletes of the emotions in the way that sportspeople are athletes of the body (Artaud 1964). These two types of athleticism could be seen as being independent of each other, even oppositional, but in practice the two have tended to operate together, as Artaud seemed to have intended – he wrote about the emotions as involving the muscles and the breath, and having the same points of origin as physical effort, though differently directed. Actors who can approach what Artaud called for, taking a character on a wild ride of the emotions with agility and endurance, often express the emotional trajectory through extreme bodily movements. Bell achieved something like the experience of affective athleticism in this play, which drew from him one of his best performances ever. He relished the opportunity to respond to the wide range of challenges, stylistic and emotional, that the role offered him. He pointed out in an interview:

Cyrano is so well constructed that every scene has its own little tour de force built into it and it’s an actor’s gift to be given a change from light comedy to romance to swashbuckling to parody and so on in the one play […] A part is very gruelling if it’s on one particular obsession. In Cyrano you skip from mode to mode and that makes it a lot easier. (Bell quoted in Coleman 1980: 8)

Because of its success, the production was brought back the next year, which gave Bell the chance to extend his performance even further. The revival was redesigned and redirected for the Sydney Opera House’s 1,500-seat Opera Theatre, rather than the smaller 74 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Drama Theatre where it had been performed the year before. The new venue provoked comments about how operatic the production, the design, and Bell’s performance were – the set and costume designs were by John Stoddart and Luciana Arrighi, who were noted for their work in opera. Bell’s playing of the part had matured and developed. Brisbane noted that Bell now gave “not only grace and crusty, self- effacing wit to the character, but a new heart-breaking warmth” (Brisbane 1981: 47). The word that crops up several times in reference to Bell’s performance, prompted by its use in the script, is panache. Katharine Brisbane wrote a feature article in the National Times entitled ‘Theatre of Panache’ (Brisbane 1981: 47), in which she discussed two STC productions playing simultaneously in the Sydney Opera House venues: the return season of Bell’s performance of Cyrano in the Opera Theatre, and Peter Carroll’s portrayal of Sergei Diaghilev in Rodney Fisher’s production of Robert David MacDonald’s Chinchilla in the Drama Theatre (ibid.). She noted that both productions were “exquisite”, and affirmed the STC as the most accomplished in the country, partly because it was focusing on the work of the actor rather than the director or the playwright. At the same time, she noted that the work of the STC under Wherrett was inclined to elevate style over content, and that this had led to a series of disappointments alongside the triumphs (ibid.). Nevertheless, she listed a series of theatre practitioners whose careers had been enhanced by the STC, including the playwright Louis Nowra and the actors Robyn Nevin, Mel Gibson and Peter Carroll. The careers of all of these had also been closely associated with the Nimrod and John Bell. Brisbane’s overall point, however, was that what she called the “theatre of panache” was a distinctively Australian style of playing, perhaps more specifically a Sydney style, and that Bell’s performance as Cyrano was an example of the approach at its best (ibid.). Kippax concurred with this assessment: “His Cyrano was a very Australian character. The whole approach to the play was Australian” (Kippax 1992). Kippax noted that this involved losses as well as gains. He regretted that “one of the things that went was the Romantic sentiment”, which was downplayed in favour of a lighter, less solemn touch: “John played it for comedy, for laughs” (ibid.). Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 75

The emergence of a “theatre of panache” was not just a localised Sydney phenomenon but a development with national significance; something of consequence had shifted the centre of gravity in Australian theatre and its treatment of Australian types. It was an approach to performance that drew on the talents of playwrights, directors and designers, but above all gave space for performance and celebrated the centrality of the actor. The wealth of acting talent in Sydney at the time made such a movement possible, and John Bell was its most prominent and accomplished exponent (Brisbane 1981: 47). Perhaps the most important point in terms of Bell’s achievements is that this performance was seen as a coming-of-age of Australian acting. Like Katharine Brisbane, Kippax felt that this production revealed that something of national significance had happened. While noting that there was nothing obviously Ocker about Wherrett’s “graceful, well-spoken production”, he called it “a very Australian Cyrano”. For Kippax, this Australian quality had nothing to do with exaggerated Australian accents or local references. He defined the Australianness as consisting in the production’s “wary pragmatism, rejecting the extravagance, the ‘lairiness’ of Rostand” (Kippax 1980: 23). Bell had already commented on this.

I found it difficult to really believe in and accept the romanticism of the play […] I think I’m basically anti-romantic anyway. I don’t like that sort of pining after the unattainable. Perhaps I’m a bit too pragmatic for that. (Bell quoted in Coleman 1980: 8)

What attracted him to the play, he said, was “its liberal thinking – individual freedom, and anti-clerical, anti-establishment, anti- monarchical feeling” – all typical aspects of one familiar version of Australian values (Bell quoted in O’Grady 1980: n.p.). Kippax found further Australian qualities in the mood of the production, which was “level-headed, even cool, about what is fantastic in the play, and suspicious of its rhetoric and sentimentality”. He said that the production avoided these nineteenth-century European qualities and instead settled “for comedy […] and for real life” (Kippax 1980: 23). The features that Kippax applauded in the production and in the portrayal of Cyrano were those which Bell had already made his own in many previous roles: humour, exuberance, glee, honesty, amusement and complexity. In this play, they came 76 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre together. If Kippax was reflecting the feelings of the wider theatre audience in Sydney, then Bell had come to exemplify the defining qualities of the new Australian acting.

Volpone at the Nimrod While performing in the extended 1980 season of Cyrano, Bell was simultaneously in rehearsal for Ben Jonson’s cynically satirical comedy Volpone for the Nimrod (AS 6201). He was co-directing, with the emerging director Neil Armfield, and playing the title role. Here Bell’s “handsome youthfulness” (‘Ben Jonson Transported’ 1980: n.p.) was again disguised under heavy, fox-like makeup – a spiky red wig, short, wispy beard and permanently raised eyebrows. Perhaps because of the constraints of time, some critics felt that this production was not quite ready on opening night, but predicted that it would settle in to be an entertaining and richly comic, indeed farcical, account of the play. Bell seemed to agree that this might be the case:

With any role […] it takes five weeks of rehearsal just to get the words, moves and business right. Then comes the experiment of trying it on the preview audiences. On the first night, it’s “flying blind and hoping it all sticks together”. Only after that can the actor start to grow into the role and relate it to himself. (Bell quoted in Coleman 1980: 7)

Bell attracted much of the attention, partly because he was by now a theatrical event in his own right – for Keith Thomas, Bell “glitter[ed] with formidable star quality” – and both he and Paul Bertram, as his servant and offsider Mosca, played their roles “with tremendous spirit and energy, an amoral sense of mockery, various tones of devilry and high spirits” (Thomas 1980: 6). However, what made this play unusual is that Bell this time was not playing the most eccentric or distinctive character on the stage. Unlike Ui, Petruchio, Hamlet, Richard III and Cyrano, Volpone is one of the more normal characters in a play where the supporting characters are the most grotesque: he is surrounded by attendants and victims who are all even more corrupt or distorted than he. The list of Volpone’s victims includes a grasping lawyer, a greedy old dotard and a corrupt merchant; and his household includes not only the servant Mosca (the name means ‘fleshfly’) but also a hermaphrodite, a eunuch and a dwarf. In this overtly theatricalised world, Bell was praised by one Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 77 critic for his restraint, declining to steal the show, and allowing the plot to come through more strongly as a result (Le Moignan 1980: 42). The production of Volpone demonstrated that Sydney theatre was riding high, full of justified self-confidence. In this context, the directors felt free to take risks, making the theatre itself the playful reference point of the show. The set, designed by Kim Carpenter, was based on an old-fashioned cabaret theatre – red velvet and brocade with plaster statuary – where the characters were, by implication, themselves theatrical. In what was to become a trademark of co- director Neil Armfield’s work, the actors were all costumed individually without any coherent, unifying historical period or style. This overt theatricality allowed the supporting cast to play with the kind of verve that had typified much of Bell’s own work. Tim Eliott played the lawyer Voltore as a kind of Count Dracula with a scarlet- lined cloak; as the merchant Corvino performed with a piratical hook instead of a hand; and John McTernan as the memorably decrepit dotard Corbaccio had an ear trumpet, thick spectacles, and a walking stick with a working claw at the end which he used to clutch at the world. The often outrageous performances of the other actors indicated that Bell’s high-risk, flamboyant physicality was having a significant influence on other practitioners of theatre. While the production was criticised by some for playing the politics and the satire too much for laughs, the performances were exuberant and flamboyant, and the play was praised for its inventiveness, gusto and sheer fun, which attracted audiences and still allowed the more serious aspect of the script to come through for those who wanted to find it.

Playing on regardless Despite the Nimrod’s administrative and financial problems, which from 1980 were becoming more intense and more obvious (see Chapter Four), Bell’s performances continued to impress audiences and critics. His next role, in March 1981, was the army officer Vershinin in Aubrey Mellor’s acclaimed production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (AS 6239) at the Nimrod, which required a quieter, more naturalistic and ensemble approach, and the following year he played the lead in Macbeth (AS 22940, 1982, SoS 1327) for the STC, again directed by Wherrett. Bell was at one of the pinnacles of his career, performing a mature, major role in one of Shakespeare’s greatest 78 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre tragedies. Kippax declared Bell to be the best Macbeth he had seen in Australia and “among the better ones – there are not many, it is terribly difficult – anywhere” (Kippax 1982: 8). Not disguised by heavy makeup for once, Bell was partnered with Robyn Nevin in an impressive and powerful performance, and together they made a young, attractive and ambitious couple. They were not obviously fiends or villains, but were the more dangerous because of their plausibility. Kippax ticked off the qualities of Bell’s characterisation: initially exultant after the first battle, then showing ambition as the weird sisters predict his coming good fortune, and vanity when he is applauded by the Scottish soldiers. His frequent smiling suggested hypocrisy, and in the first scene with his wife he showed an insecure, boyish vulnerability. In what Kippax described as a “black portrait”, he would add calculation and cowardice to the role. Typically, Bell kept something in reserve for the end: Kippax praised Bell’s riveting acting in the final battle scenes where, without stoicism or dignity, he played the doomed King as “a boar, amok”. Video footage of the production survives, showing Bell in two scenes with Nevin. He is first seen as energetic, running eagerly down a long ramp in battle dress with a long cloak, and embracing his wife with real affection and care. He seems genuinely happy to see her again, smiles almost constantly, and is perhaps a little childlike as he allows her to set the tone of their encounter and to develop the idea of regicide – though his hesitant and meaningful delivery of the line “Tomorrow, as he purposes” suggests that the idea has already occurred to him that something might happen to disrupt Duncan’s plans. A later scene, immediately before the coronation banquet, shows the character already beginning to break up under the pressure of guilt, subject to fits of something like depression or anguish. Despite the professionalism of the performance, however, and the success of the production, there was a sense that the role did not challenge Bell as much as some of the more bizarre and grotesque characters that had made his reputation. The role for most of the play is perhaps too normal, too plausible and publicly heroic to provide the interest that had fuelled Bell’s greatest performances. Furthermore, the recordings show little that looks like a distinctively Australian way of acting. Bell’s performance is alive and energetic, but it could be a very smart professional production of the play from almost anywhere in the English-speaking world. Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 79

Bell played the role of Astrov in Aubrey Mellor’s 1983 production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (AS 11907), with critics referring again to Bell’s technical mastery. According to Kippax, the performance had “sustained wit, control and balance” (Kippax 1983a: 8), and John Moses noted that Bell played Astrov “with meticulous precision and control, the calm, cool centre of the minor storms his presence brings with him” (Moses 1983: 10). In 1984, for financial reasons (see Chapter Four and Meyrick 2002), the Nimrod sold the Belvoir Street building and moved to the . Initially the move looked promising. The inaugural production in September 1984 was King Lear (AS 11922) with Bell as Lear, directed by Aubrey Mellor, with an impressive cast including Judy Davis doubling as the Fool and Cordelia. Bell’s portrayal of the ageing King drew mixed reviews, partly because he was seen as being too young (he was in his early forties) to do the role justice. But Kippax’s extensive account of the performance talks about the role as quintessential Bell, relying above all on a long crescendo to bring excitement to the stage. Kippax perceptively noted that the slow start was part of the production’s design.

For two acts Mr Bell underacts, letting the story carry him […] In these early acts there is hardly a sign of badness, let alone madness. But be patient. With the storm, Mr Bell begins to build his climax – and it is a climax, most beautifully judged, which embraces the entire remaining action until, at the very end, his stoicism at last breaks. Over Cordelia’s body he weeps. Pathos has always seemed to me to elude Mr Bell. At this moment he is heartbreaking. (Kippax 1984: 10)

In 1985, he starred in a revival of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (AS 11953) but while this, like many of the Seymour Centre productions, received good reviews, a clear-headed quest to find new approaches to a recognisable Australian theatre was being overwhelmed by uncertainty, conflict, financial concerns and questions about the very survival of the company. Reviving successful productions from the past may also have looked like desperation. There was nothing to stop the downhill slide, and in 1985 Bell resigned as artistic director.

80 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Intermission Bell had been working almost non-stop for the Nimrod, the Old Tote and the STC for over ten years. Added to this were bruising internal pressures as the democratic structure of the Nimrod degenerated into bitter wrangling over the theatre’s direction, and ominous threats by the Australia Council to cease funding the company. Bell left the Nimrod in mid-1985, together with Aubrey Mellor. He made the toll on himself and others very clear:

The original Nimrod spirit had evaporated some four or five years earlier but I had ploughed doggedly on in an attempt to keep the company alive, even though I was sometimes programming works I had no faith in. (Bell 2002: 147)

In other words, the Nimrod’s long-term experiment with the notion of a specifically Australian theatre, driven by opposition to the Old Tote- style “museum theatre”, had run out of energy. The goal of breaking Australian theatre away from conventional practice had been for the most part achieved, and there were urgent and ominous offstage factors: behind-the-scenes hostilities around and after the departure of both Wherrett and Horler (one to run the competition, the other forced to resign); Bell’s increasing workload as the only member of the original triumvirate who remained; the increased work for the administrative staff as the company tried to crash through by expanding and touring; and the struggle with funding bodies, especially the Australia Council and its Theatre Board. Dealing with these things left little time for quiet reflection on how the company might continue into the future. What plays would best allow the Nimrod to open a dialogue with its audiences about issues of importance? Should it have been the role of the Nimrod to do anything more than merely survive at any cost? These questions seem not to have been discussed. After resigning as artistic director, Bell continued to work with the company. His place as artistic director was taken by Richard Cottrell, but by this time the situation was hopeless, and at the end of 1987 the Seymour Centre Nimrod closed down. From 1985 to 1990, Bell worked freelance. This was the first time in his career that he did not have his own company to run. He no longer had the freedom, as he had had with Nimrod, to explore, promote and deliver a coherent, big-picture vision of the nature of Australian theatre. There were Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 81 major professional accomplishments in the eclectic work that he did after his resignation, but there is little sign that Bell was able to pursue the kind of overarching strategy that had led to the success of the Nimrod in its early days, except for Manning Clark’s History of Australia – The Musical (AS 417, 1988). One departure from the past was acting in a modern STC production of the English playwright Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing at the Opera House (AS 67082, 1985, Stoppard 1983), where he co- starred with . Another important event in this freelance period was his casting in 1987 in the role of Colin in David Williamson’s Emerald City (AS 227, 1987, SoS 1575, Williamson 1987). Bell had had a long association with Williamson, and was in part responsible for Williamson’s breakthrough into the Sydney scene with his memorable production of The Removalists. Strangely though, despite his constant exploration of an Australian performance style, he had not played an Australian character or even acted in a play by an Australian playwright since he was a student. Williamson had tried to persuade him to take on the lead role in the Old Tote production of his What If You Died Tomorrow? (AS 5654, 1973, Williamson 1986), but without success (Williamson 1992). The production of Emerald City was mounted by the STC, directed by Wherrett, and again Bell was playing opposite Robyn Nevin. The reviews were very positive, though some critics observed that Bell made the role look too easy. Relatively naturalistic and everyday modern theatre is popular with audiences, especially when written with Williamson’s sharp, satirical observation and wit, but such roles do not often provide actors like Bell with the challenges and rewards of great theatrical characterisations. They are easier roles because they do not demand the extra intellectual, imaginative and physical effort needed to take a play from elsewhere in time and place, and stage it so as to make it accessible to audiences here and now. The effort of translating meanings and images based in a European past into an Australian present had always been part of Bell’s strength. In this case, there was no need for such a transformation and, while Bell’s performance was highly praised, he had little opportunity to explore anything new about an Australian acting style. A brief glimpse of the production in an interview with David Williamson shows Bell wandering casually across the stage, looking very relaxed, 82 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre with none of the heightened energy that would suggest panache (SoS 1575). Williamson says that during the late rehearsals and previews, Bell urged him to sit in the auditorium on the opening night so that he could be called up on stage at the end. The audience response was huge, and when Williamson took a bow, the audience gave him a standing ovation – Williamson calls that occasion “one of the best nights of my theatrical career” (Williamson 1992). A new venture for Bell in 1989 was acting in the musical Big River (AS 1613, 1989, SoS 1665; 1666; 1701; 1716; 1721; 1741; 3087), based on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, playing the Duke, an old ham actor. Even though he had directed a great deal of musical theatre, this was the first time that Bell had acted in anything like this show which required him to sing and dance – which he did with gusto – as well as provide some of the comic relief alongside Drew Forsythe. The theatricality of both the genre and the role suited him, even though the part was only a supporting role in a production filled with big-name talent from the world of television and popular music – Cameron Daddo played Huck, and Jon English played his father. Again, there was not much in the show that enabled an exploration of Australia, except that the high-profile actors were Australian. More familiar success was to come again in May 1990 when Neil Armfield directed him at the Belvoir Street theatre, now occupied by the new Company B with Armfield as artistic director, in the role of Prospero in The Tempest (AS 12063). In this imaginative production which emphasised the magic of the island and the supernatural powers of the great magician, Bell once again had the opportunity to do something extraordinary. The set was a circle of sand strewn with flotsam and jetsam. With a stubbly beard, long, greyish wig and tattered robes incorporating animal skins, Bell created a Prospero who had the look of a shaman. The production emphasised his supernatural power by creating links between microcosmic and macrocosmic features. The freak storm which opens the play was created by Prospero as he stirred water with his staff in a cut-down 44- gallon drum in which a tiny boat was floating. Publicity for the production emphasised the familiar but perhaps fanciful notion that the figure of the magician in this late play is partly autobiographical, and that Shakespeare intended it as his Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 83 personal farewell to the stage. There was speculation that Bell himself was planning retirement, but nearly fifteen years later he is still acting and directing. Curiously, the austerity of the production was reminiscent of the simplified Shakespeare-for-Australians that Robert Quentin, Tom Brown and Robin Lovejoy were exploring at the Old Tote in the 1960s, though it is hard to imagine how they would have evaluated it in terms of their understanding of standards and excellence. There were few overt references to Australia, though as Caliban wore what looked like the tattered remains of a British soldier’s red tunic from the end of the eighteenth century – perhaps shortly after 26 January 1788. The Nimrod’s seventeen-year life span ended in 1987, but its achievements remained an influence on what was yet to come for theatre in Australia. It had sustained the existing theatre by offering ongoing work and new opportunities to professional theatre practitioners, allowing many of them to pursue theatre full-time. It had created new possibilities for staging theatre with genuinely experimental productions of classic plays. Above all, it had taken seriously the search for distinctively Australian forms of theatre that might reflect the shifting diversity of the nation, making use of performance traditions from the past and concepts from the present. By the mid-1980s, Australian scripts, Australian characters and Australian stories were no longer rarities, and no longer guaranteed box-office disaster. The Nimrod had played its part in the boisterous exuberance of the 1970s, and it was to create a precedent for the combination of rough slapstick physicality and highly polished technique that contributes much to what is so distinctive and impressive about Australian acting today. Twenty years after the founding of the Nimrod, Bell continued to explore new possibilities by creating his own Shakespeare company.

The Bell Shakespeare Company The BSC was founded in 1990 (see Chapter Four), and its first productions were Hamlet, directed by Bell (AS 13373, 1991), and The Merchant of Venice (AS 13374, 1991), directed by Carol Woodrow with Bell as Shylock. This, his first major acting role with the company, involved a total transformation of his normal appearance. Playing Shylock for the first time, Bell wanted to avoid any 84 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre suggestion of anti-Semitism, and he spent six months researching Jewish history, culture and customs, especially in an Australian context, and talking with Jewish friends and contacts. Nevertheless, in Carol Woodrow’s production, which had an international look in its haute couture world of wealth and privilege, Bell’s characterisation of Shylock still seemed very much a remote, sinister outsider – strange, exotic and European, dressed in a black suit and overcoat, with a black hat. As Richard III in the second season (AS 15271, 1992), Bell was even more heavily disguised, with a long, lank wig and extreme makeup. However, the design and concept of the production worked to integrate this grotesque figure into the wider social order, which was shown as a nightmarish environment of corruption and distortion. In a darkly coloured, cartoonish world with some futuristic references reminiscent of the Mad Max movies – the armour was constructed out of old computer parts – the actors modelled their characters on animals, and stalked, prowled and snarled around the stage. Bell’s Richard suggested elements of the wild boar which was the historical Richard’s personal emblem, but had hints of other feral creatures – a rat, a stray dog. Other characters were modelled on a panther and “a rooster who thinks he’s a peacock” (Bell 2002: 227–8). The result was entertaining, especially in the first half of the play. However, against this background, while Bell gave a vibrant, energetic and detailed performance, it was harder to see him as being in real opposition to the society around him. When Richard fits so naturally into the world that he inhabits, he does not easily register as a monster who can totally dominate the stage and achieve the terrifying quality that the part promises and audiences expect. In addition, the impact of the nightmarish world was striking at first, but left little room for development or any build to the kind of dramatic climax which had served Bell so well in the past. A brief anecdote indicates how small details of performance can be affected by the world outside. At the end of the play, after Richard’s death, the victory of the Tudor army is celebrated by Richard’s opponents, Lord Stanley and the victorious Richmond. In this short scene, Stanley enters carrying the crown, which has been taken from Richard’s dead body (or, according to legend, found on a thorn bush). He passes it to Richmond – the future Henry VII – who normally (presumably) accepts it and wears it during his stirring Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 85 speech that ends the play. In productions like this where Richmond is sympathetic, this image of the heroic soldier-king who has rescued the kingdom from a usurping monster risks looking like a homage to the monarchy, as if the world of the play can be cleansed and healed only by a new King. This production came at a time when Australians were beginning a debate prior to a referendum on the issue of an Australian republic in 1999. In this case, when the crown was offered to him, the heroic Richmond politely pushed it aside – as if there would be plenty of time to enjoy the fruits of victory later – and spoke the final speech bare-headed and humble. Running the fledgling company imposed on Bell an enormous workload – directing Richard III and Hamlet as well as playing Shylock and Richard, and, in between the first and second seasons of the BSC, playing C.S. Lewis at the STC in a hugely popular production of the biographical play Shadowlands (AS 15414, 1991, SoS 1910, Nicholson 1991). Yet there can be little doubt that Bell provided an inspiring, or perhaps daunting, role model for the generally young company in terms of professionalism, unstinting energy, collegiality and determination.

Irreverent Shakespeares The demands on Bell in the first few years of the BSC were enormous, as he built the new company. In the first three seasons, the company toured the three productions which had inaugurated it. Bell played the ghost in Hamlet, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the title role in Richard III. In 1993 they added Romeo and Juliet (AS 17739) to the repertoire, with Bell both directing and playing the Prince. In their fourth year, 1994, he once again tackled the role of Macbeth, this time playing opposite Anna Volska, in a production by a promising young director, David Fenton (AS 24517, 1994). In what turned out to be an unsuccessful quest for novelty, the play was set in a futuristic world, and the emphasis of the production was on technical gimmickry rather than the work of the actors. One of the modernising features in the production was reference to Bill and Hilary Clinton as a glamorous couple invested with extraordinary power. Many reviewers were scathing about the production and the performances. While Bell and Volska were made an exception by some critics, the production came in for considerable criticism for a performance which was thought by some to be flat and unemotional, 86 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre and overwhelmed by distracting visual effects. However, the more damaging criticism of the production, even when Bell’s work was praised, was that the young supporting cast – those actors who were supposed to be developing their talents in performing Shakespeare through the work of the company – were almost universally condemned as disappointingly deficient in vocal and verse-speaking skills. Since allowing these actors to develop was an explicit aim of the company, it looked as if, after four years of solid work, the whole BSC project had gone terribly wrong and might even be written off as a folly. The problems were offset to some extent by the success of Bell’s own production of The Taming of the Shrew (AS 24173, 1994) in the same season, which by contrast was welcomed for the success of its modern Australian references. It was set in an ostentatiously wealthy and materialistic milieu on the Queensland Gold Coast, and in this case the ability of the actors to play the comedy with clarity and sense was praised. Even so, the production of Macbeth provoked muttered speculation about the future, and indeed the value, of the company. However, the next season redeemed Bell Shakespeare’s reputation. Bell traded on his experience as the greatest classical actor in Australia to play an outrageously unexpected Malvolio in Twelfth Night (AS 24731, 1995, SoS 2384), again directed by David Fenton. This was a much more successful collaboration. Bell used the ultra- conservative British politician Enoch Powell as a model for an upright and humourless butler with a stiff upper lip and plastered-down hair, dressed in Edwardian morning dress with a black tailcoat, grey tie and starched collar. The idea was generated by a series of British sex scandals involving members of the political establishment, one of whom had accidentally hanged himself in a botched attempt at erotic asphyxiation, and it implied that underneath the formality and proper comportment of these strictly upright figures there were rather more disorderly forces at work. Bell’s Malvolio was outwardly proper and emotionally stifled, but the stern, puritanical exterior masked a lurid, carnivalesque fantasy life which was unleashed when he mistakenly came to believe that his employer, Olivia, was in love with him. Where the script calls for the character to appear in Olivia’s presence in yellow stockings, Bell came on stage not only cross-gartered but cross-dressed from the waist down – beneath the tailcoat he had Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 87 removed his pinstriped trousers to reveal boxer shorts with lacy suspenders, yellow tights and black, high-heeled shoes. The sight of the veteran Australian actor appearing so flamboyantly and ridiculously dressed provoked shocked gasps of delighted astonishment from the audience. Had Bell’s reputation as a serious, classical actor of Shakespeare not been so firmly established, the shock effect would have been much less. This season began to convince sceptics that the company was indeed beginning to work, that it was starting to find an identity, and that it was developing something like a recognisable house style – confident, irreverent, fresh and innovative. Bell’s own qualities as an actor were starting to inform the work of the company as a whole. The next major event in Bell’s acting career took this daring irreverence and self-confidence much further – he played the title role in a production of King Lear (AS 24021, 1998, SoS 2828; 2840), for which he engaged the radical Australian director Barrie Kosky. This was a co-production between the Bell Company and the Queensland Theatre Company (QTC) which, at the time, was directed by Bell’s long-term collaborator Robyn Nevin. It was a thorough reworking of the play, with large sections of text cut. By the end, the world was neither resolving happily nor expiring tragically, but rather just falling apart. The effect was to portray the barren desolation and nihilistic futility in the script more starkly than most other conventional productions of the play could hope to achieve. At the beginning of the play, Bell was portrayed as a parody of an arch-patriarch with a white beard, dressed in a version of a scarlet Santa Claus suit with white fur and a crown reminiscent of Christmas tree decorations. He was irascible and choleric, short-sighted and unaware of the unfairness of his actions or the consequences that they would have for himself, his family and associates, or the country over which he ruled. He degenerated visibly during the course of the action, reaching a low point in the scenes on the heath, which in Kosky’s production were set on a stage that looked something like a hospital Accident and Emergency waiting room or an all-night bus station – with rows of cheap blue plastic chairs where a bizarre assortment of apparently traumatised figures, some with huge fairground full-head masks, sat dejectedly or wandered about aimlessly. In this setting, Bell appeared in a pink nightie carrying a large, battered carpet bag from which he distributed rubber dildos to the other characters. 88 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

By the end of the play, he had degenerated completely. Where Olivier in his film version played the ending as if the old man had finally been transfigured and redeemed, Bell in this production was a wreck as he carried Cordelia’s body on stage in the final scene. She was wearing only a petticoat, and was visibly pregnant – the implication of the production being that Lear was the father of the baby. Again, part of the shock of the production was the fact that this was John Bell playing this decline from nobility to degeneracy and abjection. The sight of the classical actor displaying such an unclassic body was deeply disturbing (Kiernander 2000). The production was enormously controversial, and there were so many walkouts during the Brisbane season that the ushers were provided by the management of the Performing Arts Centre with special printed instruction sheets telling outraged patrons how they could register their complaints with the QTC. It was certainly the most radical production that the company or Bell himself had been associated with, but along with the outrage there was a great deal of admiration for the staging of such a powerful, original and convincing vision of the play’s desolation.

Settling in and branching out Despite the name, the BSC has not entirely restricted itself to Shakespeare and there is often no overt reference to Australia in the productions. The compelling fascination with earlier versions of nationhood no longer has the same hold over theatre-makers and their audiences. It now looks as if the company’s concern with Australian culture is not so much a question of content as perceived innovation, freshness of approach, talent and quality. Bell has said that he now sees one of his functions within the company as creating opportunities for younger actors and directors and “little by little, settling into the role of mentor and guide” (Bell 2002: 275). It may be with this in mind that he again took on, in 2006, the part of Prospero in The Tempest (AS 69380). Playing the old magician who promises at the end of the play to break his staff and drown his book, who passes on the cares of command to a younger generation, and who declares that “Euery third thought shall be my graue” (Act 5 scene 1, TLN 2309), might seem like type-casting for an actor now more interested in handing on his experience to a new generation of theatre-makers, but there was nothing in Bell’s Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 89 performance that suggested that the time had come for him to hang up his magic garment. The down-played interpretation of Prospero in this production, without makeup and wearing a modern, blue lounge suit, was more benign than Miranda’s comments on his moods suggest, but as an actor he was nevertheless at the centre of the production, his energy and attention guiding the action and monitoring developments with interest. The set featured a huge photographic image of a rainforest, which worked like a life-size Advent calendar with hidden doors providing entrances and cupboards to reveal special effects – like the banquet which Ariel makes appear by magic. Bell had a camouflaged balcony where he could stand unseen above the stage and observe the unfolding action – especially the courtship of Miranda and Ferdinand – rather like a theatre director standing apart from the action and checking the progress of his cast. This production was a good example of how the company can work in its mainstream mode, neither too conservative nor particularly radical in its concept, fresh and unconstrained by any historical convention but not ostentatiously Australian in performance. It provided a competent and clear production, even if lacking perhaps some excitement. One of the features of the production was the evenness of the cast, with none of the actors obviously standing out in any way. All handled the language well and gave memorable performances in a play which offers potential rewards to the actors in the characters of Miranda, Ariel, Caliban and Ferdinand. Even more successful in what can be awkward roles were Tony Taylor and James Wardlaw (who has appeared with the company from time to time since its beginning) as the comic characters Stephano and Trinculo; using visual references to circus clowns, their double act made good sense of their often very unfunny antics. One especially rewarding feature of the casting was the chance to see Bell on stage again with Ron Haddrick, older than Bell by ten years, who played the old counsellor Gonzalo. In 2008, the company took an important risk by mounting a co- production, together with the QTC, of Heiner Müller’s Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary (AS 75052, 2008, Müller 2013), which premiered in the Cremorne Theatre in the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, and toured to Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. It was directed by Michael Gow, and the all-male cast 90 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre were mostly young. The buckets of blood that they hurled at each other made the play look like an adolescent paintball game, albeit one that was grim and humourless. There were also two much older actors, Bell and Robert Alexander. When, as part of the action, these two actors were caught up in the bloodfights, the effect was more shocking because it involved not just the characters that they played but the bodies of the actors themselves. The situation was aggravated by having a blood-spattered Bell appear wearing a ridiculous chef’s toque in the final scene. It contributed to a wider pattern of the desecration and humiliation of living national treasures in several high-profile productions. Maltreatment of characters played by the country’s respected, older actors was a trend at the time (Kiernander 2010). Müller’s script is radical, even in the layout on the page. The ‘dialogue’ is written as blocks of prose, all in upper case with no speech rubrics or punctuation, so these lines have to be divided up and attributed to individual actors. But it was the lack of punctuation that showed both Bell’s responsiveness to texts and his ability to take risks. The younger actors, as might be expected, had tried to make logical sense out of their lines, supplying their own punctuation and converting the words that they had been assigned into meaningful sentences. In a more conventional play, this would be an obvious first step in creating characters, but this tends to neutralise the radical nature of the script, making it look and sound much more like a conventional play. Bell, on the other hand, responded to the layout of the text by accepting the challenge of the unusual format, and he spoke his lines as they looked on the page, flatly, without the normal expressive qualities, as if the language of the play were itself anomic, as if the behaviour of Titus, and indeed the whole production, had in themselves no internal grammar or punctuation. The technique rendered the language difficult to follow at first, but as the play progressed Bell’s uninflected speech became increasingly ominous. If Titus had no grammatical framework for his thoughts, words and feelings, then his actions – and indeed his whole fictional world – became dangerously volatile. At the same time, a global preoccupation with terrorism, and the dangerously paranoid response to it by many world leaders – which led to two major wars, the use of rendition, torture and draconian new laws against sedition – made an environment where the irrational worlds depicted in two high-profile productions at the time were all too familiar and frightening. Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 91

The combination on stage of young and energetic actors with some of the enduring veterans of the Australian theatre, nevertheless, suggests a strong sense of continuity for the future, especially when these older actors are prepared to abandon the constraints of dignity and reverence – their own as well as those of the playwrights. In the first decade of the new millennium, Sydney audiences saw Bell enduring ridicule in Kosky’s production of King Lear and the juvenile games of Gow’s production of Titus; at the , Robyn Nevin was nightly suffering humiliation as Hecuba in Kosky’s Abu- Ghraib-influenced production of The Women of Troy (AS 74682, 2008). She and many of the other characters were required to stand on boxes wearing nothing but black slips and rags for most of the performance, sometimes with a black hood over their heads, and at the end Nevin was sealed up in a cardboard carton to be shipped off to confinement in some equivalent of Guantanamo Bay. In his own 2013 production of Henry 4 (AS 104688), Bell began his performance of Falstaff by waking up (or more probably, regaining consciousness), pissing into a paper cup, and then carelessly spraying the contents liberally around the stage and onto the first rows of the audience as he staggered about. Neither The Women of Troy nor Titus was obviously Australian in style, but the successful combination of younger talent working alongside risk-taking actors who are much older and who have refined their skills over five or more decades is new. Bell’s continuing work as an actor still attracts audiences, but perhaps more importantly, he is passing on to the future a body of knowledge, learned from an insider’s point of view, on the history of Australian theatre practice. He provides an opportunity for young actors to work alongside and learn from some of the most experienced Australian actors of our time. It is his acting that most audiences are familiar with, but his work as a director is, while perhaps less noticeable to a lay audience, nevertheless an important part of the contribution he has made. The following chapters will examine his directing of both new Australian and classic European plays.

92 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

John Bell and Jacki Weaver in The Real Thing (Tom Stoppard), Sydney Theatre Company, 1985. Photographer: Branco Gaica. NIDA Archive ©. Reproduced with permission.

Chapter Two: Acting Against Tradition 93

John Bell as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Old Tote Theatre Company, 1972. Photographer: unknown. NIDA Archive ©. Reproduced with permission.

94 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Louise Fox as the Fool, Matthew Whittet as Edgar and John Bell as King Lear, Bell Shakespeare Company and Queensland Theatre Company, 1998. Photographer: Jeff Busby. Reproduced with permission.

Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays

Australian history and The Legend of King O’Malley Directors in the European tradition have more influence than actors over the social and political issues that their productions can allude to, and over the attitude that these productions have towards the outside world. This chapter and the next deal with Bell’s achievements as a director of new Australian scripts, and of scripts from the (mainly European) past. These histories run parallel to the previous chapter on Bell’s acting roles, and it means revisiting some of the same materials, especially in the not infrequent cases where he was both lead actor and director. There is a danger of repetition in this approach, but the acting roles and the directing achievements are here examined from very different points of view. They tell the story in different ways; a tactic used to analyse a modern comedy will often be inappropriate for analysing features of a seventeenth-century tragedy, even though at a deeper level they might be trying to do the same work in the world. One alternative that might avoid repetition – treating the plays simply chronologically – would run a greater risk of comparing events that are not comparable. The fact that Bell has been the artistic director of his own company for much of his career makes it easier for him to organise seasons that combine diversity with an overarching coherent concern. It is important to trace both strands of his work as director, to see how different scripts, productions, interpretations and actors, as well as outside events, have been involved in shaping it. Bell’s career as a director has one thing in common with his acting career: success came almost immediately. The 1970 production of The Legend of King O’Malley (AS 28133) was his first public experience as a director, and only the second full-length play he had directed. Despite this, his production of King O’Malley not only dealt with Australian history, it became Australian history. When Bell returned to Australia, John Clark, the director of NIDA, asked him to select and direct one of the productions in that year’s season of the Jane Street Company (comprising a group of 96 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre recent graduates and current second-year students), but Bell could find nothing suitable. He discussed the problem with his teaching colleague, Michael Boddy. Boddy suggested writing something new, and mentioned the possibility of a play based on the life of King O’Malley, a significant but largely forgotten figure in Australian politics at the turn of the twentieth century who had been, among other things, an opponent of Prime Minister Billy Hughes’s policy to introduce conscription during the First World War. Boddy co-wrote the script with Bob Ellis, then an ABC scriptwriter, with considerable input from Bell and the cast as they rehearsed, improvised and experimented with it. The play premiered in the Jane Street Theatre, a tiny converted church holding fewer than one hundred people. From 1966 it was the Old Tote’s venue for new Australian plays, culminating in a controversial Australian Plays Season in 1968. Denis O’Brien, writing about the Jane Street Theatre in 1970, described the previous offerings as having been “programmed for failure – stiff-upper-lip failure, but failure nevertheless […], uncomfortable boredom in a good cause. Of the 15 plays staged there, O’Malley is the only bell-ringer in four years of gallant experiment […] O’Malley was an unusual play in any circumstances’ (O’Brien 1970: 44). The brazen Australianness of King O’Malley has to be seen in the context of what was happening more widely in Australian culture at the time, especially in theatre and film. Even the mainstream commercial theatre was behaving with an exuberant lack of propriety which was unprecedented; the theatre impresario Harry M. Miller had just made a huge financial success with the first Australian production of Hair (AS 14903, 1969), directed by the iconoclastic young showman Jim Sharman. Sharman would soon make an indelible mark with his premiere production in 1973 of The Rocky Horror Show at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It was the era in which Barry Humphries created the grotesque Australian figures of Barry McKenzie and his associates who appeared in both a popular cartoon strip in the satirical London magazine Private Eye, and two films. Similar characters, sometimes described as larrikins (a stereotypically comic, ill-mannered Australian character who flouts authority and decorum in both speech and behaviour), appeared in plays and films by David Williamson. This stereotype was very different from Bell’s public image as a person or as an actor. Bell was much more Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 97 classically oriented and in person was nothing like the crass Australian characters who were increasingly popular, but he obviously saw in the script’s loose structure, its defiant theatricality, its freshness and irreverence, a path that a distinctively Australian theatre might take, making it excitingly (not to mention offensively) local, with little deference to the conventions that had been used as yardsticks for quality in Australia hitherto. The Legend of King O’Malley was immediately recognised as not only an irreverent and entertaining look at Australian history but also an important contribution to theatre, even by some who found fault with parts of the production. Katharine Brisbane captured the sense of unexpected freshness and difference, as well as the significance of the event for the future, in the opening of her review of the premiere:

When a second-year National Institute of Dramatic Art student volunteers to do a fire-eating act, and another allows a six-foot carpet snake to crawl up and down her net stockings, one begins to recognise that our theatrical horizons are extending way beyond what Mrs Worthington’s daughter ever imagined. (Brisbane 1970a: 133)

She went on to point out that these two performances were not even in the play itself but were part of the interval entertainment, where the current NIDA students performed four sideshow acts to maintain the mood and excitement through into the second half. This was not a well-made play with a unified plot and realist characters but a collage of episodes, images and styles that deliberately mocked the constraints of conventional middle-class theatre. Michael Boddy explained in an interview:

What we’re doing is creating the story in an epic way, in a rather comic strip manner, with very simple characters, simple conflicts, using song, dance, any form that suits what we want to say, like melodrama, vaudeville and so forth. (SoS 649)

The result was certainly a break from the recent traditions of Australian playwriting which had been seen as earnest and not particularly entertaining. Boddy said in an interview that

most Australians feel going to the theatre is a religious duty – they come along with a furrowed brow and are fully prepared to be bored 98 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

stiff for three hours. I think we astonished them by entertaining them. (Boddy, quoted in Nicklin 1970: 4)

Barbara Hall called it a “living, jumping, bumping, grinding theatre, written today for today” and noted that “the relevance comes as a bit of a shock” (Hall 1970: n.p.). Bell made the point, when the production was on tour later that year, that you couldn’t really even call it a play. “We call it an entertainment, a fireworks display” (Bell quoted in van Hattem 1970: n.p.). There was an eager audience for this material, confirming that this was a theatre not only by but also for younger people than the Old Tote. The creative team were mainly in their twenties or early thirties, and were tapping into the younger generation’s enthusiasm for live performance which reflected their values, especially when the scripts were narrowly partisan and might deliberately offend older generations. Bell was explicit about his willingness to “provoke and even antagonise” some members of the audience. “We’ve taken a very didactic stand and we don’t claim to be open-minded” (ibid.). Added to this was the sense of a recognisable Australianness, which was most evident in the content of the play. Even though the main character was an American by birth and not widely remembered in the late 1960s – he died in Melbourne, almost forgotten, in 1953 at the age of ninety-nine – he had been an important and colourful figure in Australian political history, and was a crucial force at the time of Federation and up to the First World War. The play, even if only loosely based on the facts of O’Malley’s life, was a way of remembering, celebrating and critiquing aspects of Australia itself. And despite his American origins, O’Malley was recognised as an Australian type, “the first genuine larrikin-hero in our drama that I can put my finger on since our colonial theatre” (Brisbane 1970a: 135). In Bob Ellis’s words, O’Malley was a figure of nostalgia for an Australia of the past:

There’s a strong sort of scallywag part of him, a type of […] stirrer, mixer, nuisance, general mischief-maker, which is very appealing and also very theatrical. There are less of that kind of person here today but during the gold rush period and during early Australian history, the place was full of them. (SoS 649)

Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 99

The critique was most powerfully and polemically evident in the second half of the play, which dealt with the first year of Australian Federation in 1901 and portrayed the national Parliament up to the time of the First World War as a circus full of clownish politicians, dominated by a crude and bitter caricature of the wartime Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, played by Terry O’Brien. Ellis justified this disrespectful portrait by claiming, “We’ve re-created dreams of these people, like Sid Nolan’s , rather than Ned Kelly himself. It’s our Billy Hughes, or it’s Billy Hughes seen through the eyes of O’Malley’ (SoS 649). The eclectic aspect of the piece was a feature of the new Australian approach. The script’s frequent shifts of style were part of the defiance of established convention, and leapt from gospel performance to revival meeting to music hall to vaudeville to sideshow to circus. Kippax called it “a swaggering rhapsody on the Australian raspberry with overtures of undiluted Utopianism as indigenous as the Hill on a Saturday afternoon or the Yarra Bank on a Sunday” (Kippax 1970: 12). Much of the play was carnivalesque, deliberately eliminating the gulf between audience and actors. From the very first scenes, the audience were fully involved in the action. They were cast in the role of the congregation in a revivalist church service, and asked to contribute money to the collection; some people did. Bell made the point that these were old-fashioned forms of theatre, but that what made them different and new were the unexpected juxtapositions and transitions from one to another. In fact, the subject matter and the loose, opportunistic and flashy style of the production came together for Bell:

The whole thing grew out of the character of O’Malley himself. He was a showman in everything he did and the only way to present him was through the vaudeville and music hall forms of his time. (Bell quoted in van Hattem 1970: n.p.)

If the play focused on Australian political history, it was also a way of remembering and celebrating a vital period of popular Australian theatre. Brian Hoad in the Bulletin (Hoad 1970a: 48) elaborated on the Australian heritage of the piece. He talked about nineteenth-century music hall as a theatre of the masses, “pointing up the stupidities and horrors of social existence”, and argued that it was 100 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

“the only theatrical tradition which Australia developed indigenously”. He lamented that the form had all but died out sometime between the wars, and enthused that “almost miraculously it seems” the NIDA graduates and student performers in O’Malley had “rediscovered the spirit of the Halls”. This rediscovery and revival of an old and almost lost popular performance tradition was a large part of the success of the play in a world where much theatre had become remote, refined and elitist (ibid.). In the theatre world of Sydney, where the accusation of selling out to commercial interests was less damaging than in, for example, Melbourne, it did the production and its creators no harm that it was popular in the more everyday sense as well – so popular, in fact, that what started out as a radical experiment in the Jane Street Theatre (a former church) transferred after a short break, where some reworking was done to tighten the structure, to the larger Parade Theatre. A national tour which finished with a commercial season back in Sydney prolonged the life of the production into 1971. It was the play’s popularity and relative longevity that allowed the performers and the writers to hone their craft and learn the lessons that come from a long run – something that Bell still tries to encourage. In the process of adaptation from the Jane Street Theatre to the Parade, something happened to the play which made it, in Katharine Brisbane’s view, even better: “new and more distinguished”, more seriously focused, and deserving of “a new critical attention”. She saw a transformation from simple knockabout fun and something “rather tasteless, pointless – or rather undeveloped” into a picture of “an abundant life stifled by the dominant Australian attitudes” (Brisbane 1970b: 16). It made a dramatic attack on the low level of sophistication in Australian politics “which is dangerously near the truth”. She also drew attention to the play’s comic side, claiming that it was “the most involving, rumbustious, jolly piece of entertainment probably available just now” (ibid.). The underlying seriousness of the play, evident from the first Jane Street season but clearer after the move to the Parade Theatre, lay not only in a satirical attack on Australian politics but also in its confrontation with the question of conscription. This was the issue that had brought O’Malley’s political career to an end, when he opposed Prime Minister Billy Hughes’s drive to conscript young men Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 101 for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War. It was again a very hot topic in 1970 when young Australian men were being conscripted for the Vietnam War. National service had been reintroduced in the mid- 1960s, and conscripts were now being sent to fight in a conflict which many of them opposed. This provoked fierce debate, and was a defining issue in the struggle of the younger generation against the values and policies of a conservative government which, after more than twenty years, was coming to the end of its time in office. The issue was raised overtly in the play, with the characters of Hughes and O’Malley performing verbatim the text of speeches that the politicians had made during the First World War. For Katharine Brisbane, this was what lifted the production onto a different level, and gave substance to the frivolity:

What saves the day are the genuine speeches of Hughes and O’Malley over the conscription question which gives a startling picture of Hughes’s short-sightedness and our first real insight into the humanity of O’Malley’s liberalism. These speeches are the only moving moments in the play and show how, finally, the spoken word prevails. (Brisbane 1970b: 16)

A hint of what was at stake in Australia, and of the strongly partisan appeal of O’Malley for many of the younger and more radicalised members of the audience, is evident in a sternly disapproving review by critic John F. Power in the suburban Wentworth Courier (Power 1970: 13), which called the production “perverted history at its worst” and saw it as a “thinly disguised anti- Vietnam [War] rally” about the “old ones send[ing] the youngest to their death, and all that”. He complained that “the twisted story is too savage and so obviously slanted to bring out the anti-conscriptionist angle, to the delight, of course, of the multitude of long-hairs in the audience. This was obviously their kind of entertainment” (ibid.). Even some of the more important critics found a problem with this aspect of the production, especially in the first run. Kippax questioned the wisdom of the play’s move, toward the end, from comic satire to a more solemn “big broadside by the authors at conscription”, which he felt overbalanced the “cockle-shell entertainment” and left it stranded “on a sand bank called solemnity”. However, he conceded that by transferring to the larger Parade Theatre the play had found “a more consistent focus, especially at the end which now makes its anti- 102 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre conscriptionist point without labouring the message” (Kippax 1970: 12). Both the general critique of Australian politics and the importance of the conscription issue are made explicit in interviews with Bell and the two playwrights for an ABC Television broadcast at the time of the first season in the Jane Street Theatre (SoS 649). Bell explained in the interview that the company travelled to Canberra during the rehearsals and spent a day watching the Federal Parliament in action, which he suggested had helped them to perform the second half of the play as an assembly of clowns. He said that Australians “treat so much of politics as a joke, and this is why we present the whole of Federal Parliament as one big vaudeville show with the politicians as knockabout clowns”. The conscription issue and its relevance to the political situation in 1970 was, according to Boddy in the same interview, the real reason for creating the production.

The idea came first to write about King O’Malley, and then as we got further into reading about the conscription issue which destroyed his political career – and this is the only reason we’re doing this, because of that – certain parallels [with contemporary politics] naturally did come up, which make it much more cogent. (SoS 649)

Archival film footage in the Stage on Screen Collection (SoS 648) shows lengthy sequences from the production in the tiny Jane Street Theatre. The gothic windows of the converted church building are appropriately visible in a section from early in the play where O’Malley is dressed in extraordinary religious regalia, with a horned helmet and flowing robes decorated with symbols. He holds a staff like a crozier topped with a dollar sign. The rest of the cast huddle around him as he preaches, singing in accompaniment and punctuating the text with percussive sounds made on the stage floor, their own bodies, and tambourines. The simplicity of the staging is evident when O’Malley processes triumphantly around the space on a ladder carried by the rest of the cast. In the second half of the play, set in the Federal Parliament, the actors are huddled in a tableau around a collection of wooden cubes on which a few of them sit or stand. They tell a series of blatantly corny jokes and, with the exception of John Paramor’s level-headed O’Malley, they are all extreme caricatures. Terry O’Brien plays Billy Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 103

Hughes in an army jacket with cardboard medals, a pair of baggy shorts with boots and a slouch hat over his long hair, childishly repeating the phrase “I want to pass a motion”. One of the politicians is dressed as a stereotypical Harry Lauder-style Scotsman with an oversized Tam O’Shanter, a kilt and a knobbled walking stick; another, a Tweedledee figure in a grey top-hat and a huge starched collar which obscures part of his face; and yet another, an overstuffed businessman with a bowler hat and spotted tie. They act with grotesquely distorted facial expressions, and general approval or disapproval is signalled by choruses of the words, “Galah, galah, galah”. The change in mood when the conscription issue arises is clear in the performances. Terry O’Brien as Prime Minister Hughes slows down his delivery of the lines as he interrogates a member of his own party (played by Robyn Nevin) with a clear fixity of purpose, his eyes screwed up and lips drawn back to reveal threatening teeth. When not speaking, his mouth contracts into a twisted sneer. The confrontation between Hughes and O’Malley, where the dissident cabinet minister is threatened with hanging for sedition, is the more chilling by contrast with the broadly comical vaudeville jokes which precede it. The unexpected success of the production had a significant influence on subsequent Australian theatre, as John Osborne’s gritty, realist Look Back in Anger had done in London in 1956. The two plays popularised new styles and new character types: the angry young man and the larrikin. The Legend of King O’Malley proved to be what Australian audiences and critics had been waiting for. Overt crudity and disrespect for authority, rough and vigorous acting, eclectic production styles and a general lack of decorum were shown to work, freeing playwrights, actors and directors from many of the constraints which had inhibited earlier performance. Suddenly things that had been hallmarks of incompetence were now hailed as evidence of a different and more energised form of excellence. The significance of The Legend of King O’Malley in June 1970 is easier to appreciate if it is compared with a production by Tyrone Guthrie which premiered two months later. Guthrie, who had written the unflattering report on Australian theatre in 1949, was invited back to Australia by the Old Tote to direct a production of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (AS 83318) in 1970. There are two 45-minute episodes of the ABC documentary program Checkerboard in the 104 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Stage on Screen Collection. These contain a series of interviews with a surprisingly disarming and self-deprecating Guthrie, interviews with some of the actors, and a few short and tantalising clips of rehearsal and performance (SoS 668 and SoS 669). The Old Tote’s invitation to Guthrie to direct the production is usually dismissed as an egregious example of the cultural cringe (Meyrick 2002: 44–5). The production is nevertheless important in Australian theatre history. It boasted a cast of some of the best Australian actors of the time, including Ron Haddrick in the title role, as Jocasta, Ronald Falk as a strange, twisted, bird-like Teiresias, and John Gaden as the Chorus Leader. Using huge masks, a sizeable chorus, and grotesque, distorted bodies, it has a strongly non-naturalistic, ritual quality. Shots of rehearsal show Guthrie coaching the actors on the clear delivery of the words, but highlighting their emotional force rather than explicating their literal meanings. They also show him directing the chorus, demanding extreme physical extension and distortion as they react to the unfolding events of the play. The chorus sing some of their odes, and move as groups in what are clearly choreographed patterns and tableaux. There are clues in the group movement and mask-work that the production was conceptualised and realised with an awareness of the most up-to-date, innovative physical theatre training, especially the teaching of Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Katharine Brisbane wrote of Oedipus with admiration, but made the point that the production was radically different from what the Sydney audience expected – a euphemistic way of saying that audiences were not enthused. “Accustomed as we are to having our theatre in battles and games reflect the assaults and divisions of our modern life, we were unprepared for the healing and unifying process the director was preoccupied with unfolding” (Brisbane 2005: 143). According to Kippax, Guthrie even inserted a little local reference into the production: the Corinthian messenger (John Wood) and the Shepherd (Barry Lovett), who enter towards the end, were both costumed in a way that suggested Australian types and irritated Kippax (2004: 171) – though it is important to note that these are the two low-status characters in a cast that is otherwise made up of the ruling house of Thebes. Brian Hoad’s review in the Bulletin (Hoad 1970b: 47), which is compatible with the memories of many people who saw the production, described it as being “closer to ‘Goodbye, Mr Chips’ than Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 105 the dreadful fall of the House of Cadmus’. He ridiculed the ritual elements with reference to “hordes of extras bearing smoking Japanese frypans” and drew attention to a mismatch between the “gilded” appearance of Ron Haddrick as the King and his “clipped” and “mundane” vocal delivery. The Australian references are likewise mocked, with a description of Barry Lovett as “an ancient shepherd disguised as a merino ram with a ‘Blue Hills’ accent” (a reference to a long-running Australian radio serial), and Ronald Falk as a “geriatric Bondi seagull”. He does, however, concede the possibility that the actors were not sufficiently familiar with the mask work and physical theatre that Guthrie’s approach required. It may be that this production was ahead of its time. It may have been an exercise in what Peter Brook called “holy theatre” at a point when Australia was fixated on Brook’s other category, “rough theatre” (Brook 1968). In the arenas of both popular and scholarly reception, the outsider’s production was up against tough competition. In the 1970 battle of the two kings, Oedipus was trounced by O’Malley.

An Australian venue: Nimrod and Biggles It was the success of O’Malley that gave Bell and Ken Horler the confidence to found the Nimrod Street Theatre in Kings Cross. The first production, launching the new space with a kind of Christmas pantomime production at the end of the year, was Biggles, again directed by Bell and written by Boddy in collaboration with Marcus Cooney and Ron Blair, with some material provided by Bob Ellis. The production was generally well received by the critics and proved popular at the box-office, though King O’Malley was a hard act to follow. As a consequence, Biggles has not been given the credit that it deserves, and even Bell has dismissed it, with some embarrassment, as something trivial. In fact, it was an interesting successor to O’Malley and had many things in common with it, including a significant two- part structure. The first half was much more light-hearted, a ribald spoof of the popular boys’-own stories by Captain W.E. Johns about the British hero James Bigglesworth and his comrades Bertie and Ginger, and their battles against the non-English world. The main adversaries are Arabs and Germans, and Biggles is always ultimately victorious, despite improbable vicissitudes. It was successful entertainment, poking fun at the old-fashioned English values which 106 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre were associated with parts of the Australian political establishment – Katharine Brisbane referred to it as a lampoon of “those desiccated remnants of the 40s which still hold sway in Australia” (Brisbane 1970d: 151). It was the second half, considered less successful in performance by many critics, which was in fact the more interesting part of the play from the point of view of Australian theatre. This sequence was set in the present day [i.e. 1970] in a Returned and Services League (RSL) Club and provided a reality check on the legend of the early twentieth-century heroes. The three main characters were now portrayed as geriatric Cold Warriors, representatives of a set of outdated imperial English values, on a speaking tour of the former Empire. Their mission was to spread a xenophobic message about the dangers of the Yellow Peril while struggling to keep alive the myths of their own greatness in the face of their increasing decrepitude, dementia and, in the new Australian context, irrelevance. In an article on the Nimrod the next year, Bob Ellis neatly encapsulated the question raised in the play: “Was Biggles […] a jolly little pommy-ho-ho Blackpool vaudeville pier show, or was it a theatrical psalm to the sad truth that no one’s British anymore, and therefore apocalyptically significant?” (Ellis 1971: n.p.). To extend the play’s exploration of Australia’s role in the world, Michael Boddy, who had played Biggles’ German opponent, the arch-villain von Stahlein, in the first half, now reappeared as the Australian MC at the RSL Club in a performance of embarrassingly brash and self-confident vulgarity, full of awful sexual innuendoes, crude jokes and tasteless practical stunts. Underneath the rude comedy was a stinging attack on the old Anglophile attitudes which were still apparent in parts of Australian society, while at the same time the representative of more modern local customs, the MC, was also subjected to a partly affectionate, partly disapproving critique. It was a glimpse of two familiar sides of society at a time of rapid change, and an implicit call for a new way of being Australian that questioned both the past and the more unattractive aspects of the present. Regardless of the disappointment of some critics, the show proved popular, extending the initial three-week season to five. Despite a brief disagreement with the City Council about fire-safety and facilities, the Nimrod Street Theatre was up and running, and it would prove a source of new Australian theatrical energy for some Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 107 time: Julian Meyrick observes, “For a company that set out to stage Australian plays, Nimrod became somehow Australian in itself” (Meyrick 2002: 72).

Two new Australian playwrights: Ron Blair and David Williamson Bell’s next directing tasks in 1971 were two new Australian plays, both more conventional than O’Malley and Biggles, but they were to provide significant career boosts for both the new theatre and the emerging but not yet famous playwrights, Ron Blair and David Williamson. Flash Jim Vaux (AS 5996, 1971, Blair 1989), Ron Blair’s first full-length musical with songs by Charles Colman and Terence Clarke, was the result of a suggestion made by Bell. He wanted something that would follow on from the local and historical focus of O’Malley, and he asked Blair to think about an Australian version of John Gay’s eighteenth-century musical play The Beggar’s Opera. What emerged was a script, enlivened with popular folk ballads, about an early nineteenth-century Australian convict, another proto-larrikin adventurer. It was written with the tiny stage of the Nimrod in mind, and in the knowledge that there would be a cast of six actors who would have to double, treble and more. It ran for six weeks, quickly received many subsequent productions and toured widely. Bell’s directing style was by now beginning to become clearer; the special features were flexibility, imagination and a focus on the talents of the actors. According to Ellis, this combination “returned the [Nimrod Street] theatre’s atmosphere to its first fine careless gung ho” (Ellis 1971: n.p.). The set consisted of little more than a couple of large packing crates which served as moveable platforms for the actors, and “a rude word or two burnt on a rough timber wall” (Kemp 1971b: n.p.). The play was dubbed ‘Son of King O’Malley’ and it confirmed that Australian “rough theatre” musicals were a successful genre. Bell’s role in the success of both productions was acknowledged by critic Robin Ingram: “In both instances it has been Mr Bell’s happy knack of blending tragedy, melodrama and vaudeville that has given us the magic extra dimension” (Ingram 1971: n.p.). Norman Kessell wrote, “[Bell’s] meticulous direction achieves a fluidity of action in a work admirably tailored to the special needs of the Nimrod” (Kessell 1971: 108 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre n.p.). The cast under Bell’s direction were praised for their ensemble work, while at the same time creating vivid individual characters. Bell himself was said by Brian Hoad to have demonstrated “once again” the “seemingly infinite subtlety of his fertile mind as a stage director” (Hoad 1971: 46). He noted that “the evening passes like a trip on a well-tooled and well-oiled merry-go-round, enveloping its passengers in an immaculate illusion of the period, a perfect and magical theatrical bubble”. If Flash Jim Vaux was an attempt to extend the tradition of the larrikin hero, Bell’s second major production as director in 1971 was an almost completely new challenge: a small-scale, bleak, violent, contemporary and apparently naturalistic play, without music or dance and with no doubling of roles, by a young Melbourne playwright whose previous work had been produced at the tiny but influential La Mama Theatre. Bell’s Nimrod Street production of David Williamson’s The Removalists (AS 5993, 1971, Williamson 1972) was ultimately to prove a turning point and career boost for those involved, not only the playwright but also Bell and the Nimrod, whose reputations seemed in any case to be rising rapidly. On the page, it looks like an abandonment of the exuberant and richly imaginative performances that had been a hallmark of Bell’s directing, and perhaps a rejection of the comically brazen and rude productions that were shaping up as an identifiably Australian form of theatrical entertainment. But it can also be seen as a broadening of the stylistic possibilities for a new Australian theatre, and it demonstrated that a recognisable larrikin character could exist in a mode closer to realism and without the trappings of high-energy song and dance routines or the flights of fantasy that had made O’Malley, Biggles and Flash Jim Vaux so popular. Williamson has described the play as “satirising the worst aspects of Australian male mores” (Williamson 1992). He disputes the idea that The Removalists is really naturalistic. The premiere production in Melbourne (AS 69878, 1971, SoS 799) was staged as if it were, but Williamson has said that when he saw it for the first time at the Nimrod – he had not travelled to Sydney for the rehearsals or the opening night – he was “completely knocked out by the production that [Bell] had done”, which he thought was an overtly theatrical production that “emphasised the nightmarish, larger-than- life, black-satirical qualities” of the script (Williamson 1992). On the Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 109 other hand, Bell has claimed that his approach was starkly naturalistic (Bell 1972: 124). What the play did have in common with Bell’s earlier productions was a focus on the body and on physical performance. The play deals above all with violence. In the course of the action, a man who has been accused of hitting his wife is handcuffed to a door by policemen and savagely beaten. The beating is especially drawn- out and brutal because the man, Kenny, refuses to be silenced, and keeps coming back at his tormentors with well-placed verbal barbs. When the violence goes too far and the victim dies, the two policemen have to concoct a story that they were acting in self-defence, and they finish the play punching each other savagely but in cold blood, bashing each other so that they can argue plausibly that they have been defending themselves against Kenny. The extreme physical violence was especially disturbing on the tiny Nimrod stage, where the actors were all but treading on the toes of the front row of the audience. Williamson recalls the ending of the play where the two policemen were in a narrow spotlight, pummelling each other while a police siren built to a loud crescendo in the background (Williamson 1992). It was enormously popular, selling out at the box-office, and making a much bigger impression than the La Mama production in Melbourne earlier that year. Bell’s directing style in The Removalists was necessarily a contrast with the exuberance and celebration of much of what he had done previously. Williamson’s writing has a great deal of comedy, but the production sought to combine this with a realistic quality that was literally hard-hitting. The production was again seen as effective teamwork by the whole cast, and the directing was admired, though one critic who objected to the relentlessness of the play felt that “Mr John Bell’s direction faltered at the task of making the same thing seem new so many times” (Kemp 1971a: 22). As an appendix to the published script of the play, Bell wrote a short account of the Nimrod production which is informative about his rehearsal practices and his anti-hierarchical, workshop-based approach as a director. It was a departure from an earlier system where a director would typically arrive at the first rehearsal with a complete, annotated script of the production, including all moves, which he would proceed to teach the actors in a truncated rehearsal period. Bell’s approach was quite different, based on the now familiar 110 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre practice of lengthier workshopping, improvisation and experi- mentation, seeing the rehearsals as a way to explore, discover and develop the play rather than having the action predetermined. This democratic approach was not totally new – the renowned director Peter Brook, in The Empty Space, describes how, as a novice director about to embark on a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, he prepared himself prior to the first rehearsal by compiling a production plan in this way using cardboard cut-out figures representing the actors. He then threw away his annotations when he saw the inhibiting effect that it was having on the imaginations and creativity of the actors, and himself (Brook 1968: 106–7). Bell wrote of his own work:

We decided on stark naturalism, exploiting the play’s comedy only where it seemed absolutely appropriate and spontaneous. As director I tried to be vigilant about expelling comic business which seemed in any way forced or conventional, and in steering the actors away from the various well-known personal tricks and mannerisms which the audience were probably counting on them to exhibit, but which couldn’t really help the meaning of The Removalists […]

In rehearsal we improvised a lot of the actual on-stage action, and also worked our way into the plays by fabricating background situations not present in the text. For the first couple of weeks I encouraged the actors not to use the text at all, but simply to state the objective in each line, then pursue it using their own words and/or actions. Up to the last week I encouraged constant adlibbing. Finally we had to establish firmly the pace of Williamson’s taut, spare dialogue.

We worked hard to make the violence as convincing as possible, and found we did better by concentrating on physical reactions and sudden eruptions, than by relying on choreography and bags of blood. (Bell 1972: 124–6)

The success of the production exceeded all expectations. According to Williamson, it was where his career really took off (Williamson 1992). After a sell-out season, it was taken up by the commercial entrepreneur Harry M. Miller, who toured it to Melbourne and elsewhere for five months. In 1972, Williamson and the Nimrod Theatre were named as co-winners (together with three British playwrights) of the prestigious George Devine Award, the first time that the award had gone to a playwright outside Britain. The next year, the play was given a successful production, directed by Jim Sharman, at the innovative and high-profile Royal Court Theatre in London. In a Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 111 remarkably short time since its opening in December 1970, the Nimrod Street Theatre and Bell had achieved major international recognition. With this celebrity came a renewed confidence in the exuberant, sometimes aggressive and even abrasive new Australian theatre that Bell had set out to develop. Bell chose not to take up the opportunity to direct Williamson’s next play, Don’s Party (Williamson 1973). It had had a reasonably successful premiere production in Melbourne (AS 65989, 1971) but was very dialogue-based, much more middle-class in its setting and did not have many of the qualities that were consistent with Bell’s developing directing style. The Sydney production (AS 14443, 1972) was picked up by NIDA’s director, John Clark, who engaged in a substantial rewrite of the script and directed it to huge popular acclaim in the 1972 Jane Street Theatre Season of Australian Plays. (For a detailed account of Clark’s contribution to the revised script, see Jeremy Gadd’s study of the collaboration between Clark and Williamson (Gadd 1998)). It transferred to the Parade Theatre and then toured extensively. It reinforced Williamson’s reputation, based on the success of Bell’s production of The Removalists, as an observer of incisive social comedy. Bell directed two more plays by Ron Blair in 1973, President Wilson in Paris for the Nimrod in February (AS 6027) and Kabul (AS 5643) at the Old Tote in May. These were rather different plays for Blair and, like Don’s Party, they were less in tune with Bell’s talents as a director. The first was (despite its title) set in Australia, but was a much more cerebral and domestic script than Blair’s previous work. It had an impressive cast – John Krummel, Anna Volska and Max Cullen – who worked together as a close-knit team, and while Bell was praised for his assured direction of the complicated action and the quick pace of the production, the quality of the script was the target of most criticism. It was likened more to commercial British plays from the West End, especially to Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, than to anything in the developing new Australian repertoire, and was not seen as contributing in any meaningful way to an Australian style. Kabul was a more epic production, dealing with a failed British military and diplomatic incursion into Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, and alluding metaphorically to the American and Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. It was widely considered to be unsuccessful and attracted some of the worst reviews that Bell had 112 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre received, though much of the blame was attributed by critics to the script rather than the production. Fortunately, Bell and Blair’s next collaboration, two years in the future, would be more successful. Bell was by now becoming recognised as a director who made emerging playwrights and actors look good, and who could usually be relied on to give audiences a good time, especially because he thought carefully about plays that could make, or be directed to make, a specific appeal to Australian spectators. His work was versatile, characterised overall by a sure sense of theatrical imagination and willingness to re-invent not only older traditions of performance but also his own practice. Having started as a director of boisterous and deliberately vulgar theatre productions using music and dance, he had demonstrated a willingness to experiment with a broader range of styles. These included more naturalistic plays and plays that were not exclusively new.

Reclaiming the past: Peter Kenna In August 1973, Bell directed A Hard God, a play by an older and more established Australian playwright, Peter Kenna, who at the age of forty-three was seen as a figure from the theatrical past. Kenna’s career as an actor dated back to the early 1950s and he had had success as a playwright with The Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day (AS 69951), which, in 1959, had won the General Motors-Holden National Playwrights’ Competition. It was premiered by the Trust Players at the Elizabethan Theatre under the direction of Robin Lovejoy, but apart from a production of Listen Closely at the Sydney in 1972 (AS 13932), Kenna had achieved little of note as a playwright since then (McCallum 1995: 313–14). A Hard God was set in the suburbs of Sydney soon after the Second World War. In retrospect, this play, dealing as it does with an old-fashioned world in an old-fashioned way, looks like a very strange choice of script for Bell and the Nimrod at the time, especially amid the general devil-may-care optimism of the first year of the Whitlam Labor Government, which had been elected in December 1972. Nevertheless, there are strange complexities and paradoxes in the production which help to explain the success and importance of this work, and its continuities with Bell’s earlier achievements as a director. Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 113

Where Bell’s previous work had shown an interest in new and brightly entertaining theatre, this script looked like a throwback to the 1950s and the style of grimly realistic kitchen-sink drama. Where Bell had favoured a theatre of colour, song and dance, the world of this play was drab, dialogue-based and wearily static. Bell’s normal interest in a new, young theatre was here replaced by a vehicle for some of Australia’s older actors, with most of the characters looking as if they were in their fifties or sixties. And whereas most of the previous successes had provided a secular critique of conservative, religious values, this script was permeated with deeply felt questions of spirituality and faith within the context of the struggles of a working-class and (more or less) staunchly Roman Catholic family – all of them Australian from an Irish background. The play, though, is not exactly what it seems at first glance, and Bell’s remarkable achievement was to find and make full use of the contradictions in the script. It was to a considerable extent Bell’s handling of the complexities of the script which made it work and ensured that, despite some ambivalent reviews, it has remained as one of the milestones of Australian theatre. Bell’s production for the Nimrod was broadcast by ABC Television in an adaptation which is very close to the stage production, and which provides a permanent record of the subtleties and power of the performances, especially the justly celebrated portrayal of the mother, Aggie, by Gloria Dawn, a former star of musical theatre. The apparently old-fashioned style of the script is misleading. Seen in another way, it is a very radical piece of theatre construction, intertwining two tellingly separate but parallel stories. One narrative strand of the play certainly looks old-fashioned, dealing with the failed lives and memories of three ageing brothers – Dan, Martin and Paddy Cassidy – who, because of drought, have left an idyllic childhood on the land to experience the financial and moral turbulence of life in the big city. This strand of the play is relentlessly backward- looking as the old men reminisce and quarrel about their family history and the sequence of events that has led them all to their current difficulties. It is the past which preoccupies them and allows for the most rhapsodic flights of dialogue, as diversion from the problems of the present which they are forced to acknowledge from time to time but prefer to avoid mentioning – Martin’s problems with his obsessively devout wife; Paddy’s problems with a wife who is an 114 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre abusive and adulterous alcoholic gambler; and Dan’s illness which is making him go blind. The family is precariously held together by Dan’s stoical wife, Aggie. If this strand of the narrative were all the play had to offer, it would be a sentimental lament for the past which might jerk a few tears but would hardly be memorable. However, in a daring piece of dramaturgy, which was seen as problematic at the time by some critics because it was so radical – Kippax (1973a: 7) thought it a dramatic mistake that should be cut – this backward-looking story line is paralleled by one which looks to the future. The second story deals with Joe, the son of the two older characters, Aggie and Dan. Joe Cassidy is a confused sixteen-year-old member of a Catholic youth organisation who befriends and ultimately falls in love with Jack, another boy in the group whose mother has recently died, who is even more confused. Their relationship develops over a period of several months, during which they go on holiday together. Their friendship turns more serious and then falls apart because of religious guilt and anxiety after an incident involving some kind of sexual intimacy. These sections of the play deal with the present head-on, and look anxiously forward to the uncertain future that these two boys might face, especially if it turns out that they are gay rather than just “going through a phase”. One of the daring features of the filmed production that discourages reading the script as mere nostalgia is the frankness of the same-sex intimacy between the boys, as they hug each other and express their complicated and ambiguous affection. This very unfamiliar and confronting story of physical and emotional frankness between two adolescent boys on the stage, as Bruce Parr has pointed out, seems to have made some critics squirm, and this may be part of the reason that Kippax wanted it removed (Parr 1996: 7). The unusual feature of the play’s structure is that the two stories are almost completely separate from each other until the final scene. The two narratives are presented in alternating sequences. The old characters never discuss their children individually, and even Aggie, in other ways the epitome of the loving wife and mother, has no knowledge of her young son Joe’s torment as his first sexual relationship falls horribly apart. Joe never discusses his parents or their problems with his friend Jack, even though we learn quite a lot about Jack’s family in the conversations that the two boys have with each other. Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 115

It would have been easy for Kenna to slip a few connecting references into the script, linking the worlds of the Cassidy parents and their son together. However, the script keeps the two strands independent of each other until the very end, when Joe has irrevocably lost Jack and when Aggie has just been told that her husband’s illness is incurable cancer. Aggie and Joe have one brief encounter where they are connected by the need to find strength without their former faith in the Hard God who has failed both of them. The effect is disturbing, and Brian Hoad – in a very perceptive review – described it as

a profoundly experimental play. Mr Kenna keeps the older and younger generations completely separated until the final moments of the play. It seems for a start like two plays running in parallel. But in the end it serves to mingle together past, present and future – the nostalgic reminiscences of the older generation somehow link up with the present circumstances of the two young boys; the hopes for the future of the boys connect with the present lot of the older generation. A sense of cycles and seasons pervades the piece. (Hoad 1973: 64)

He points out that the script “might sound terribly corny and terribly boring” but that in fact it was “profoundly contemporary […] As an allegory of our times that moment [at the end where Aggie is left alone] can claim to be one of the most deeply moving moments in contemporary art” (ibid.). But when the play was performed in Melbourne the next year, some new dialogue was added at the beginning which linked the two stories from the start (Kippax 2004: 213–15), making it more conventional, and it is this version which is republished in the Currency Press Plays of the 70s series (Kenna 1999). Another feature which links this play firmly to Bell’s earlier productions is a concern for Australian cultural, social and political history, and the gap which had opened up between the urgent needs of a rapidly changing present and a past which was being forgotten. The structure of the play stages that disconnection between the two time periods. Bell’s reinvention of a new Australian theatre had often been concerned to bridge that historical gap, to maintain an awareness of the past, and to rediscover Australian theatre traditions from earlier eras. By choosing to direct this unlikely script, he gave himself the opportunity to link the familiar Australia of his own childhood – Bell had been brought up as a Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s – with the 116 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre more modern and cosmopolitan world of the 1970s, and at the same time to honour the talents of the actors of the earlier period. Above all, the production was a personal tribute to Gloria Dawn as Aggie. She was a variety and musical comedy actor from a long theatrical dynasty who had made a career in musicals and had recently crossed over into straight theatre, acting in Brecht’s Mother Courage with the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) (AS 14431, 1973). Her performance as a drab but resilient wife and mother is a long way from the glitz of the musicals, but it nevertheless shows a great performer’s ability to turn a line, to extract wry comedy out of a grim situation, and to engage with an audience. She and the other veteran actors in A Hard God – Graham Rouse, Gerry Duggan, Frank Gallacher and Kay Eckland – helped Bell to extend the range of the new Australian theatre into an earlier era that might otherwise have been outside its territory. Brian Hoad, in his extended review of A Hard God in September 1973, noted what he thought was a deterioration in the quality of new playscripts since the early successes of the Nimrod and the Australian Performing Group (APG) in Melbourne. He discussed the proposition that there was a problem with the new Australian drama, and wrote that for the past year “most of the playwrights have been writing plays which were pale and often soured imitations of that original burst of fresh enthusiasm two or three years ago”. He said that the APG in Melbourne had encountered an obstacle in finding a “cohesive and complementary relationship between style and content”. In Sydney, he noted a return to plays from the past, including A Hard God, and criticised the recent work of the younger playwrights by contrast:

What happened to Ron Blair between the tangible human warmth of Flash Jim Vaux and the detestable commercial exploitation of trendiness in President Wilson in Paris or that wax-works charade Kabul? In O’Malley Michael Boddy once celebrated the lovable vitality behind local vulgarity and crassness and in The Last Supper Show ended up by sneering at it. Behind the verbal fireworks of David Williamson’s Don’s Party there once seemed to be friendliness and understanding, and behind Jugglers Three merely a vacuum smelling of very stale beer. (Hoad 1973: 64–5)

While this was written in the context of high praise for Bell’s production of A Hard God, and while Bell’s productions of O’Malley Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 117 and Flash Jim Vaux are cited as examples of the good old days, there was implied criticism here of some of Bell’s more recent work as a director. Theatre is always a precarious occupation, and finding what will succeed means constantly having to be alert, flexible and making the occasional mistake. Nevertheless, there was a growing sense that there was a systemic problem. The Nimrod formula was no longer working as it had done, and the new Australian theatre would need to be reinvented yet again. This was a process that would take some experimentation with different approaches over the next few years.

A bigger theatre for Australian plays The Nimrod Theatre’s move to a new building in Surry Hills (see Chapter Four), which took place in the middle of 1974, was contentious and suggested to some audiences who loved the intimacy of the original Nimrod Street building that the company had sold out for purely commercial reasons. It opened with Bell’s production of The Bacchoi, an adaptation by Bryan Nason and Ralph Tyrell of Euripides’ Greek tragedy The Bakkhai into a rock opera (AS 6035, 1974, SoS 898). Brian Hoad’s fears about the direction of Australian theatre at the Nimrod were not allayed. The format loosely referred to as rock opera or rock musical had been a great commercial success in Australia at the time, with the Jim Sharman and Harry M. Miller production of Hair being followed by Godspell (AS 14410, 1971) and Jesus Christ Superstar (AS 16687, 1972). The Nimrod may have wanted to tap into the huge popularity of the form, though in an ancient Greek rather than a biblical setting. There were nobler reasons as well. Bell was aware that they were moving into a new neighbourhood which, while still close to downtown Sydney, was much more residential than the King’s Cross location that they had occupied before. Surry Hills had its own culture, and it was important to Bell that the Nimrod should not be a cultural foreign body in this environment. The area had many young people living in both old terrace houses and new high-density apartments, and just around the corner from the theatre was an experimental public housing project, a fifteen-story “vertical suburb” – the John Northcott Estate, built in 1961 – which accommodated about a thousand people in conditions which were often alienating. The Bacchoi was an experiment in creating an event intended as an invitation for the new neighbours. Bell wanted to launch the theatre 118 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre with something entertaining and up-to-date which might make the locals feel that the Nimrod belonged, in some sense, to them. The production, parts of which were videoed in rehearsal, was loud, brightly coloured and shiny, with a silver, oval ramp tilting down from the back wall toward the audience. The lead performers used hand-held microphones, often from the ramp, while the chorus backed them with singing and movement from the floor around it. It was not well received by the critics and was not the most auspicious start to the new home for the company, but that did not prevent the building from proving a very successful theatre space for the Nimrod for the next ten years. It has been influential on theatre throughout Australia and (now known as the Belvoir Street Theatre and the home of Company B) continues to be one of the main venues for inventive Sydney theatre to this day.

Contentious realisms: Jim McNeil At this time there emerged a quite different new theatrical voice with the prison plays of Jim McNeil. If Bell had been called the Australian Olivier, McNeil could be its Genet. He was an inmate of Parramatta Gaol when he began writing scripts which were performed first in the prison and then by professional companies. The Chocolate Frog at the Q Theatre in 1971 was the first professional production of his plays (AS 19615, 1971, McNeil 1974), and it was followed by productions at the MTC (AS 14414, 1972) and the Nimrod (AS 6025, 1973) in a double bill with The Old Familiar Juice (AS 6026, 1973), directed by Ken Horler in 1973. By 1974, McNeil had been transferred to Bathurst Gaol and there wrote How Does Your Garden Grow?, which Bell directed in November (AS 6029, 1974, SoS 1331, McNeil 1974). There was probably an element of radical chic in the fascination with a gifted but violent working-class boy turned convicted criminal turned playwright, but McNeil was undoubtedly an original and important writer and Bell seems to have found in his script a new voice to add to the growing diversity of Australian theatre styles. McNeil’s play was distinctively Australian in its characters and their language, but at the same time the confined setting largely cut its characters off from the current concerns of mainstream society. Those critics who liked the play commented on both its Australian qualities and its similarities to some of the most admired contemporary European writers, especially Beckett. David Marr in the Bulletin Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 119 quoted the prominent British theatre scholar and critic Martin Esslin’s opinion that McNeil was “a playwright of the first rank, not only in Australia but probably internationally as well” (Marr 1974: 23). The prison settings for McNeil’s plays provided an unfamiliar point of view for looking at Australia. The view is a partial one, and the characters’ understanding of social change on the outside is limited and confused, but the confusion is important. The way they interpret what they hear serves as a neat Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (the distancing or alienation effect), showing audiences their familiar world from an outside (or in this case, inside) perspective – through the eyes of characters whom the changes have bypassed. They have, for example, heard something about “women’s lib”, but fail to understand how it will affect them after their release. Their out-of-date views and behaviour served to remind the audience how much Australia had changed while the characters were inside. Some critics seemed to be squeamish about the explicit treatment of same-sex behaviour in Bell’s production of How Does Your Garden Grow? The National Times critic (‘How Does Your Garden’ 1974: 38) referred to “so difficult a subject as a hand-me- down homosexual love affair inside a prison”, and conceded that “inverted as it may be, Mr Bell has wrung great truth and effect from this strange love story”. The same critic was relieved that Bell’s directing treated the issue with discretion – “I am especially glad that the production of this play fell to Mr John Bell, who has resisted every attempt to go for the dishonest ‘fag’ laughs which a shallow view of the script would have allowed” (ibid.). A few critics, notably Geraldine Pascall in The Australian, found the languorous pace of prison life occasionally tedious (Pascall 1974: n.p.). Certainly, Bell’s production emphasised the slow rhythms of incarceration. Nevertheless, the production was widely praised for its sensitivity and the light it shone onto a hidden aspect of society which was beginning to attract attention. Videos of the performance (SoS 1331) show a stark, grey concrete, institutionally rectilinear set, against which Max Cullen’s portrayal of one of the prisoners, the loner Sam, is strangely moving. He talks about his childhood memories – hiding underneath the upturned hulls of small boats on the beach, lying in the dark and staring out of the tiny bung-hole at the blue of the sky. His delivery of the lines is unusually slow and halting, with little sign of any 120 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre conventional theatricality, but his performance suggests deep, suppressed emotion to the point that he looks and sounds as if he is about to burst into tears. The technique is initially undramatic but becomes hypnotic as it draws the audience into the lives and rhythms of prison existence. One of the things that singled this play out as Australian was its perceived wry humour and detached observation of life, without wearing its passion on its sleeve. These were not qualities associated with Bell’s early productions, but he was extending his range as a director, and this production was seen by one critic as a welcome return to the “stamp and style of the productions at their old locale which marked them out as genuinely exciting […]” (‘How Does Your Garden’ 1974: 38). Another feature of particular interest to Australians in the mid- 1970s, according to Katharine Brisbane, was the focus on criminality and the figure of the convict. In a television interview at the time of McNeil’s early death in 1982, she noted:

He emerged into the theatre at a time which was exactly right for his sort of character. It was that nationalist period when we were all trying to discover who we were, and someone who could trace our convict beginnings, as the works of McNeil did in an imaginative way, made us understand quite a lot about ourselves and our working class origins and tastes. (SoS 1332)

Sexuality and celibacy: Mates and Brothers Bell’s choices of Australian scripts to direct were a search for the innovative and unusual rather than the exploitation of a successful formula. In 1975, he directed a double bill of short plays at the Nimrod by Peter Kenna and Ron Blair, both of them new and unusual scripts by playwrights whose work he had directed previously, and both of them providing insights into relatively unusual places: a gay bar and a Catholic school classroom. Kenna’s play Mates (AS 6056, 1975, Kenna 1977) was the more apparently conventional in its structure, with four actors playing naturalistic characters in a single set. Nevertheless its content was provocative, dealing with a turbulent love affair between a male drag performer and a well-known professional football player. It is a tightly constructed script written with great compassion, and has scope for all four actors to give memorable performances. Above all though, it is a vehicle for the Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 121 drag queen, Sylvia, and Jon Ewing made a considerable impact with the role. Hoad in the Bulletin thought that it tapped into a pervasive Australian preoccupation with drag shows and described the play as “a short, shrewd look at Australian sexual mores in general”. He went on to describe it as “a complex vignette of the sex-life of a nation, a male-dominated structure with the women, as usual, left bewildered and disgruntled on the outside”. He thought the world of the play, also featuring an ageing former shearer and a retired prostitute now working as a cleaner at the club, probably provided an accurate microcosm of Australian society (Hoad 1975: 48). The play’s setting highlights the recent changes in Australian public attitudes at the time towards sexuality. The location is a former heterosexual brothel that has, significantly, closed down and been converted into a gay club. The play provides a more inclusive look at the changing perceptions of masculinity, and demonstrates the increasing visibility in Sydney of gay men and gay cultures. One of the surprises in the play is when the old shearer is shown to be not the homophobe that the stereotype might suggest. He is quite relaxed in the presence of Sylvia – who is still half in drag at the start of the play – and he expresses his continued admiration for her footballer lover, Gary, even after he has understood that Gary and Sylvia are, however tenuously, lovers. Above all, though, it is the complex representations of masculinity and mateship which show the importance of this play as part of the ongoing re-evaluation of an increasingly diverse Australian society. The traditional historical significance of the term mates as an important and distinctively Australian phenomenon – where two or more (but two, as in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, is the purest form) heterosexual men form a non-sexual but deeply emotional, loyal and long-lasting bond which is at least as powerful as a marriage – is outlined in the frank reminiscences of the old shearer. In the more modern, urban Australia of the mid-1970s, the term has been redefined as something weaker; the members of Gary’s football team who have visited the gay venue as a prank display a new, more casual form of mateship: a group of men who work, play and socialise together in what are often sexualised activities (Fotheringham 2009: 7–8). Less conventional, and more immediately successful, was Ron Blair’s new play, The Christian Brothers (AS 6075, 1975, Blair 122 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

1976), which took the increasingly popular form of the one-actor show. Blair’s script is a seventy-minute monologue for an actor playing an engagingly idiosyncratic and at best semi-competent teacher in a Catholic school – a character who is part-comic, part- pathetic, rambling and easily side-tracked, myopic, chalk-dusted and strap-wielding. The Australian monodrama was still something of a novelty, but had been successfully pioneered by Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination, which was premiered at the APG in Melbourne in 1972 (AS 12311, 1972, Hibberd 1973). As a form, it was to reach the height of its popularity a year after The Christian Brothers in ’s performance of The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin by Steve J. Spears, directed by Wherrett for the Nimrod (AS 6046, 1972, Spears 1977). The script of The Christian Brothers highlighted a feature of Bell’s work which had been previously kept in the background: his Catholic upbringing. Bell had this in common with several of his co- workers – including Blair, Peter Kenna, and Peter Carroll who played the Brother in this production – but, apart from the Catholic background of the family in A Hard God, it had never been an overt factor in the plays that he had directed. This play, as Carroll pointed out (SoS 254), was a picture of a teacher in the Catholic school system from a schoolboy’s point of view. Some of its interest for audiences was that so many of them were brought up in that system. They recognised immediately the kind of teacher that the play depicted, and the impact on their lives of this kind of schooling. If it was an in-joke, it played to a very large in- audience. Although the Brother presents Catholics as an endangered and persecuted minority, Catholic upbringing and education was a lived experience for a great many Australians. Margaret Jones’s review of the 1976 return season in the Sydney Morning Herald began with a long, autobiographical tirade about her vicious persecution at the hands of a nun who taught her mathematics at school (Jones 1976: 7). Although the play had quite personal and autobiographical elements for the playwright, the director and the actor, it seemed to say something much more generally about Australian experience. Its re-creation revealed a previously neglected component within the wider investigation of Australian national identity that Bell’s productions were engaged in. It was hugely popular and Carroll took Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 123 it on an extensive tour around the country, playing to 40,000 people in 160 performances over the course of ten months in 1975 and 1976 (Marr 1976: 60). It was revived again in 1978, touring to Melbourne, country New South Wales, Queensland and throughout New Zealand. Then in 1979 it achieved the ultimate accolade – from the traditionalist point of view – of a season in London at the Riverside Theatre, where it attracted rave reviews. For the critic of The Australian, Geraldine Pascall, who lamented that the company’s new theatre at Belvoir Street was a place “where so little has seemed to go well for them”, it was “a pleasure […] to see the Nimrod back in business – back in the business of producing good new Australian plays with a bite. Plays that say something and say it well” (Pascall 1975a: 10). This small-scale drama was to be one of the Nimrod’s greatest successes. The production itself was very simple and put the main focus onto Peter Carroll’s virtuoso performance – there was just a huge blackboard and small desk on a narrow raised dais, an empty chair which was used, at times, to represent one of the pupils, and an authentic school leather punishment strap, provided, according to the program, “courtesy of Paul Sark & Sons, devotional supplies, of Enfield, NSW”. The performance succeeded above all through Carroll’s vocal skill in reproducing the instantly recognisable cadences of a particular type of pedantic and domineering teacher with flattened vowels drawn out, and characterised by “pitch breaks and swoops and nasal delivery” (Peter Carroll quoted in Marr 1976: 60). The play also had a powerful effect because of Bell’s compassion as a director, so that his and Carroll’s presentation of the character was far from unsympathetic. A more savage and parodic portrait would have been possible, and it might have generated an immediate comic response, but the sensitivity of Bell’s approach helped audiences to take the whole question more seriously and think about its significance. Bell said in an interview that that generation of teachers were not inhumane tyrants but

people who went into the order very young, without many qualifications generally, and who were worn down by it – just the strain of coping with the workload they had. I think we see the Brother in this play as a man who is frustrated and worn out by the harsh life he had to experience. (Bell in SoS 254) 124 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

The new space at Belvoir Street had given Bell and his colleagues a challenge, but they quickly adapted and found new ways of performing that were both entertaining and more influential because they could reach larger audiences. On the other hand, new Australian scripts were now starting to look a bit stale. Large-scale productions bursting with rough life were being crowded out by monodramas; The Christian Brothers had been followed by Bell’s one-man performance as Byron in Ron Blair’s Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know and then in 1976 by Gordon Chater in Steve J. Spears’ The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, which outdid the considerable popularity of all the others combined, touring extensively within Australia and subsequently having seasons in London, Los Angeles and New York, playing to a total of 200,000 people (Brisbane 1995a: 202–3). Despite its phenomenal and well-deserved success, this play was an anomaly and perhaps even a distraction for the company, providing a star vehicle for Gordon Chater, a veteran actor who had never been a member of the Nimrod ensemble. While the box-office income was a welcome boost, the play did not provide the new direction that they needed. A preponderance of monodramas would hardly be healthy for any company.

Playing away and at home: Nowra’s Inner Voices and Williamson’s The Club and Travelling North The solution was, surprisingly, a previously unperformed script by an emerging young writer, Louis Nowra’s enigmatic Inner Voices (AS 6082, 1977, Nowra 1977). This playscript, which has been described by John McCallum as “one of the great plays of the 1970s” (McCallum 2009: 224–5), was to inject a new and very different kind of carnivalesque energy into the Nimrod and the Australian theatre scene. The production, staged inexpensively in the small downstairs theatre, was unexpectedly successful. It filled the auditorium for the whole season and “drew national attention” (V. Kelly 1998: 15). Far from dealing with contemporary Sydney society or aspects of Australian popular culture, it was set in eighteenth-century Russia at the time of Catherine II. The two main characters are Ivan, a potential heir to the throne, who has been imprisoned and deprived of language since childhood, and his keeper Mirovich. In her study of Nowra’s plays, Veronica Kelly describes it as “a tightly-constructed semi-expressionist play about a young prince imprisoned without Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 125 access to speech, [which] appeared to wilfully renounce exploration of the ‘Australian identity’” (ibid.: 16). It had not been seen as having great potential in Nowra’s home city of Melbourne. John Sumner, the director of the MTC, had at first scheduled and then rejected the script, telling Nowra, “Young man, why should I put on your play Inner Voices when for the same number of actors I could put on Othello?” (Nowra 1984: 110). Sumner’s version of this reads, “We had scheduled a Louis Nowra play, Inner Voices, but unfortunately this had to be discarded owing to its large cast” (Sumner 1993: 277). By contrast, when it was submitted to the Nimrod, Bell, Horler and Wherrett all immediately expressed a strong desire to direct it. Bell got the gig. An emphasis on the body and displays of physical distortion are prominent features of the script. One Rabelaisian character, Mirovich, begins the play fat and grows to gigantic proportions. He ultimately dies, claiming in a fit of paranoia to have been poisoned but more probably just collapsing under his own weight. He has some similarities to the Australian Ocker: Lisa Jacobson has described this stereotype as:

a monster beside whom anything or anyone else faded to a pale shade of eucalyptus. He was loud, he was big, and he was strong […] His habits included a preoccupation with the orifices used for drinking and vomiting, belching and farting, defecating and ejaculating. (Jacobson 1990: 138)

The grotesque world of Nowra’s script owes a debt to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, especially its violent and dark side (Bakhtin 1984). The carnivalesque includes features which are usually seen as joyous and celebratory, but the other face, sometimes called the charivari, is a form of ritualistic, violent and public punishment for perceived social transgressions, often carried out by the transgressor’s peers (Davis 1975). The action of the play unfolds within a cruelly carnivalesque world-upside-down, based around the notion of the King for a day. A potential heir to the Russian throne, Ivan, has grown up in captivity, in solitary confinement and without hearing speech – his guards are not permitted to talk in his presence. His mental state, his identity, and his entire consciousness, are radically affected by his lack of language. He is briefly installed on the throne of Russia, and then deposed. 126 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

During the course of the play, Ivan does learn to speak, after a fashion, with an obscene crudity that Bakhtin’s translators have called “billingsgate”, and he comes to appreciate singing and dance, but he never becomes literate. For Ivan, language remains predominantly a somatic activity: noise, music or a form of howling, rather than rational discourse. Several critics of the production felt the need to comment on the fact that, unusually, a new Australian play made no explicit reference to Australia, revealing the extent to which this had become the norm. Norman Kessell noted with approval that it broke away from “a national to a wider horizon” (Kessell 1977: n.p.). Margaret Jones felt that Nowra’s work, along with that of Steve J. Spears, seemed “international rather than national in flavour, far less intoxicated with the Australian image than the school which started the Great Australian Revival seven or eight years ago” (Jones 1977: n.p.). One of the interesting concerns of Nowra’s script is the role of language in a world where writing and reading are becoming less important. During the period when Inner Voices was being performed, there was what looks like a Zeitgeist at work: a proliferation of plays, films and books around the world which similarly focused on these questions and consequences of linguistic deprivation. These included the German playwright Peter Handke’s 1968 play Kaspar, which was published in an English translation in 1972 (Handke 1972). The play, directed by Richard Wherrett in the original Nimrod Street Theatre in late 1973 (AS 6022), is based on the life of Kaspar Hauser, a German boy who was discovered, about sixteen years old, in Nuremberg in 1828, with a mind apparently completely blank. There was a 1974 film by based on the same character, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle). François Truffaut’s 1970 film L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) about Victor, the French wolf boy who had been discovered in 1798 in the French forest of Aveyron is another. Coincidentally in 1977, the same year as the production of Nowra’s play at the Nimrod, came the publication of Susan Curtiss’s study of Genie, an American girl of thirteen who had been kept isolated from human society and all language acquisition by her deranged father (Curtiss 1977). The effects of both oral and literate uses of language were being explored widely. In 1982, Walter Ong published his Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 127 ground-breaking study of some of the world’s few remaining pre- literate societies, which explained how different a purely oral society is from one that can communicate and record information in writing (Ong 1982). Ong’s point is that the nature of the human mind changes significantly once people have become familiar with writing. Nowra’s play is an experiment in exploring a range of dysfunctions which are the consequence of having grown up without learning to speak. In staging Inner Voices, the Nimrod operated as a good theatre company should, responding to hints and intuitions picked up by some of the most sensitive cultural antennae operating within a society – those of playwrights and performers. The Nimrod at this point in its history had, for the moment, successfully reinvented itself. It had moved beyond its initial rough, comic oppositional energy and the later drift towards successful commercial operation, to become a site of more obviously serious social interrogation. The sense of purpose that this provided helped the company to survive for another decade despite the internal disruptions and upheavals which were to grow during the 1980s. The discovery of a talented writer in Nowra, who went on to become one of the most prolific Australian playwrights of the late twentieth century, revealed a potential new path for Australian theatre more generally, but it would not be possible to continue the momentum of innovative plays like Inner Voices immediately; the next Nowra play to be produced at the Nimrod, Inside the Island, was not staged until mid-1980. In December 1977, there was a successful return to business-as- usual with a new, distinctively Australian comedy by David Williamson. The Club had already had a successful premiere in May at the MTC under the direction of Rodney Fisher (AS 5885, 1977, Williamson 1978). John Bell’s Sydney production was likewise a commercial and popular triumph (AS 6102), with a return season at the Theatre Royal in 1978 (AS 5937). Williamson was by now widely considered Australia’s most popular and box-office-friendly playwright; his new plays were eagerly awaited by companies, directors, actors and, most importantly, audiences, in both Melbourne and Sydney. The Club showed him once again as an incisive satirist of Australian society, manipulating clever and deeply satisfying plots. The play was set in the world of a uniquely Australian form of professional football – the Victorian Football League (VFL), which non-Australian audience members might well find baffling – but 128 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre rather than dealing with the on-field game, it focused on the behind- the-scenes political manoeuvrings of the club’s management. As many critics pointed out, the play was at a deeper level not really about football at all but about petty politics and power struggles. “The club could be any club, any committee, any company” (F. Kelly 1978: 11). The Nimrod Theatre’s theatrical triumphs of the 1970s had resulted in an increased self-confidence among both practitioners and audiences, and a sense that Australian plays could both look outward to an international context and continue the introspection that had characterised much of the previous decade. Williamson’s plays were an appropriate medium to approach these tasks. They provide an introspective commentary on changes to behaviours and values within Australian society, employing satire that is both funny and sharp, combined with the fact that many of the plays have been performed internationally. He has famously been described as the “storyteller to his tribe” (Fitzpatrick 1987: 10). Bell’s next major directing challenge with an Australian play was again by Williamson, Travelling North (AS 6153, 1979, Williamson 1980), which proved a huge success, prompting some critics to declare it Williamson’s best play to date. It was indeed about Australia, but instead of interrogating a fixed idea of Australian identity, it concentrated on highlighting diversity and change, making use of some commonplace binary contrasts: the city versus the bush; metropolitan Melbourne versus regional New South Wales; pre- Whitlam and post-Whitlam. Critics seemed to give the impression that while the world of the play was Australian, it was only incidentally so; it referred to recognisably Australian locations, issues and ways of life (and death) but had little need to demonstrate the aggressive Australianism of previous plays, such as Don’s Party, set in the same pre-Whitlam period. In these plays, the Australian setting can be taken for granted rather than being foregrounded. Familiar Australian values are located in the seventy-five-year-old main character, Frank, who dies during the course of the play, taking with him to the grave the “stubborn streak of chauvinism which he shares with other members of the old Australian left” (Radic 1979: 23). By 1980, the struggle to establish a self-assured Australian theatre that could stand on its own in an international context without special pleading had apparently won a victory. Bell would direct several new Australian dramas after this – David Williamson’s Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 129

Celluloid Heroes (AS 6204, 1980, unpublished), Ron Blair’s Last Day in Woolloomooloo (AS 6232, 1981, Blair 1983) and Variations by Nick Enright and Terence Clarke (AS 6264, 1982, Enright 1982) – but some of the urgency to prove a point had gone, and with it some of the original raison d’être of the Nimrod. In only a decade, new Australian plays had moved from the extreme periphery of theatre practice to a place where a successful Australian play was no longer, in itself, anything unusual. The box-office disaster scenario of the Jane Street Australian Theatre Season in 1968 had been succeeded in less than ten years by sell-out productions and tours, both nationally and internationally, of hugely popular plays by Australian playwrights, many of them associated with the Nimrod. Wherrett talked about the Nimrod’s initial aim, the creation of a theatre company that would be committed to Australian theatre. He acknowledged the difficulty of the task, claiming that new Australian plays all through the 1970s were a constant battle at the box-office, but noted the Nimrod’s success at encouraging Sydney audiences to embrace new Australian work.

That was by and large won [by the time the Nimrod disbanded]. By the time that I was into programming at the Sydney Theatre Company in the early 1980s we could see a turn-around. [Subscribers] would happily embrace new and untried Australian work by an author they had never heard of, because they were interested in seeing themselves and hearing themselves on stage […] It’s only by seeing yourself on stage, especially in a contemporary setting with contemporary issues being explored in contemporary language with contemporary characters that you begin to understand who you are in the world. (Wherrett 1995)

The Sydney Opera House and The Venetian Twins In 1979, after the demise of the Old Tote and before the official beginning of the STC the next year, it was decided that the Drama Theatre in the Opera House would host guest productions from six existing Sydney theatre companies so that they could showcase their talents. The six productions were ’s A Cheery Soul, with Robyn Nevin as Miss Docker, directed by Jim Sharman for the Paris Theatre Company (AS 30466, 1979, SoS 3266); The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils, directed by Rex Cramphorn for the ; Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, directed by Doreen Warburton from the Penrith-based Q Theatre (AS 21279, 130 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

1979); Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, directed by John Clark from NIDA, who was also the artistic director for the whole season (AS 21288, 1979); and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night by the , directed by an American, Robert Lewis (AS 13114, 1979). The Nimrod was given the last spot, and with typical audacity they decided on a new musical which was not only Australian written but also a world premiere (Brisbane 1995b: 572–3; Milne 2004: 179). The Venetian Twins (AS 6172, 1979, SoS 1265, Enright and Clarke 1996), an Australian-tinged musical adapted by Nick Enright and Terence Clarke from Carlo Goldoni’s I due gemelli veneziani, was a demonstration of the high quality of the Nimrod and a superb victory lap for the people who had worked with Bell in exploring the idea of a distinctive Australian theatre. It was an idea of Nick Enright’s, and was designed from the start as a star vehicle for the talents of Drew Forsythe. Enright adapted the text, while the music was composed and performed by Terence Clarke, with choreography by Keith Bain. The setting was eclectic – a mélange of Australian and Italian references and accents. Clarke’s music, equally eclectic, included passing references to Australia as well as to other musical traditions – “opera recitative and a coloratura mad scene, through hot gospel, harmonising round a microphone, backwoods ballads, Spanish rhythms, to a Brecht–Weill take-off, The Ballad of Middle-Class Impropriety” (Constantino 1979b: 8). The Australian qualities were just a part of the mix, and Zanetto, the shy country-boy twin, could sing about Goondiwindi and Jindyworobak without jarring anything else in the Italianesque world of the show. The farcical theatrical possibilities of mistaken identity brought about by identical twins date back at least to Plautus’s Menaechmi and were later used by Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night and by Goldoni in The Servant of Two Masters. These plays build towards the climactic moment when the twins meet for the first time since their birth, which normally means that two different actors have to take the roles of the twins. In The Venetian Twins, the twins never meet, so they can be played by the same actor. This was a gift to Forsythe. He wore a kind of matador costume, and in a television interview (SoS 1265) he demonstrated how he could instantly change from one twin to the other not only with modifications to his posture, movement and voice, but also by simply adjusting the angle of his hat. Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 131

The transformation worked so convincingly that it was clear which character he was playing the moment that he appeared on stage. In one impressive moment in an accomplished performance, Forsythe exited as one character and immediately re-entered as the other. The Venetian Twins fulfils many of the national theatre aims: it is a hybrid of classic European and new Australian theatre tradition and it presents the world of the play as a blend of a commedia dell’arte Italy and vaudeville Australia. It is physical, irreverent and rough, relying on music and dance more than dialogue. It is vulgar and colourful, and it features a late manifestation of the larrikin in John McTernan’s performance as the servant Arlecchino. After this, the Australian orientation in Bell’s work as a director was less prominent for a period of six years, as if The Venetian Twins in 1979 had exhausted everyone’s interest in the debate about a distinctive local theatre. For the moment, there was no need to explore that further, and Bell and his colleagues were becoming distracted by increasingly intense internal conflicts which would see the Nimrod seriously weakened, displaced from its home at Belvoir Street, and ultimately killed off (see Chapter Four). Bell resigned in 1985, and the company struggled on until 1987.

Staging the history of Australia In 1987, during the period between Bell’s resignation from Nimrod in 1985 and the foundation of the BSC in 1990, a seemingly wild idea arose, pitched to Bell by Melbourne writer and actor Tim Robertson, to exploit and celebrate the success of Australian theatre and start a fresh kind of theatrical exploration. This was to be an epic musical which dealt with two hundred years of Australian history, based around the work of Australia’s best known academic historian, Manning Clark. The timing seemed propitious: 1988 was the bicentenary of white settlement in New South Wales and Manning Clark’s History of Australia – The Musical (AS 417, 1988, SoS 1492) dealt precisely with the period that the country was commemorating. Bell has written extensively about this heroic and ultimately doomed undertaking in his autobiography, which includes a transcript of a journal that he kept at the time (Bell 2002: 157–80). The aim of the show was to create a monumental production on a topic which relatively few people in Australia really knew – the history of the nation over the past two hundred years. It had to be a 132 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre musical, because they wanted it to attract mass audiences – those who do not normally go to the non-musical theatre. This requirement was not just for financial reasons but because the whole project had the potential to redefine the place and style of Australian-written theatre. It might have revealed a genuine demand for more large-scale, documentary-style plays bringing the history of Australia into present- day awareness. It could have given Australia something like what Shakespeare’s history plays have given England, making important past national events and people familiar to a wide audience. Audacious as it sounds, the attempt to make a huge popular stage musical out of the entirety of Clark’s multi-volume academic history must have seemed, just possibly, like an idea whose time had come. The Bicentennial was an occasion to look back and evaluate how Australia had got to where it was. Snippets of Australian history had already been successfully presented in productions that Bell had directed – notably King O’Malley and Flash Jim Vaux. Other companies, such as the APG in Melbourne, had made similar successes out of dramatising the lives of historical figures, including opera singer Nellie Melba, Ned Kelly and boxer Les Darcy. This big musical was designed to bring these ideas and experiments together in an overarching view of the birth and growth of a nation. Despite some unfortunate gaps in the story – for example, the script was written largely from a male point of view and there was little reference to Indigenous histories – it was nevertheless intended to be a culmination of two decades of theatrical experiment and achievement, giving Australian audiences an entertaining look at themselves and their own background on a scale never attempted before. Bell’s journal records a fraught development and rehearsal process – though probably not exceptionally so for a new theatrical event of that size. When it opened at the 1,500-seat Princess Theatre in Melbourne, it provoked extreme responses and reviews that cannot be separated from the political allegiances of the reviewers. Bell quotes one review which called the show “left-wing cant spewing over the footlights”. Another characterised the creators as “left wing intelligentsia” and hoped that the production would fail (Bell 2002: 177). A few reviews were very positive, but most were, in Bell’s own description, devastating, and audiences were small. The actors and crew, very unusually, offered to work for a week without pay to keep the show alive, in the hope that word of mouth would bring back Chapter Three: Directing New Australian Plays 133 audiences who had been put off by the reviews. They told Bell that they wanted make this gesture because the play was Australian and they wanted it to work. For a few performances, the theatre was fuller and audiences very enthusiastic. But this was, in Bell’s account, “just a flourish of interest from a minority audience”. The show closed in Melbourne before it could transfer to Sydney. Bell concedes that financially it failed, but says that “working on the show was one of the most important and satisfying things I’ve experienced in theatre […] If History was a failure, it was worth a dozen ordinary successes” (ibid.: 176–80). There are many contributing factors that might account for the failure. One is that the mass audience was not yet ready to accept a large-scale, locally written musical about history. This implies that the demonstrated audience enthusiasm for previous Australian plays, starting with The Legend of King O’Malley, had been restricted to a smallish group, numerous enough to fill intimate theatres like the Stables and Belvoir Street but not the huge theatres that host big musicals. Another is that by 1988, the appetite for self-consciously Australian work had been satisfied and the audience had moved on. Or it may be that the production simply sounded more like duty than pleasure. This was the last major new play by an Australian playwright that Bell has directed. In the last three years of freelancing between 1988 and 1990, he worked mainly as an actor, and since the formation of the BSC he has, naturally, directed mainly plays by Shakespeare, with a few Shakespeare-related plays such as Long Day’s Journey into Night (AS 79460, 1999). But, as the next chapter shows, his influence has been one of the most important factors in the widespread development of Australian playwriting and performance.

134 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

John Bell as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Bell Shakespeare Company, 1995. Photographer: Branco Gaica ©. Reproduced with permission.

Chapter Four: Entrepreneur and Teacher

Eighteen years separate The Legend of King O’Malley and Manning Clark’s History of Australia. This period saw the emergence for the first time of full-time professional Australian playwrights, and Bell’s contribution to this development was crucial. Williamson has said that the Nimrod

wasn’t the only theatre dedicated to finding new Australian work, but it was the only theatre that could pull the sort of theatrical expertise together that John could. Because of his stature as an actor, and increasingly as a director, John could attract, on low salaries, the very best actors in the country to work for him, and that makes an enormous difference to new scripts. [With] the level of expertise John invested on new Australian works […] I don’t think the burgeoning Australian theatre could have done without him (Williamson 1992).

Bell’s directing of plays by Australian writers is in itself a major contribution to the history and development of local theatre. The consequence of this achievement is a higher profile for Australian performance and a canon of Australian plays written by playwrights who could earn from the proceeds of their writing, who have been able to learn more about their craft over time, and who could count on the possibility that their plays might be staged with experienced directors and actors, in some cases more than just once. Taken together with the Currency Press publication of many of the scripts, this has allowed Australian playwriting to develop in such a way that both the content and the form of the plays are to some extent preserved, and that the quality of the talent is acknowledged.

Australian venues, companies, styles and identities Bell and his close colleagues, most notably Ken Horler, have made important gifts to Sydney theatre; in addition to his acting and directing, these include the conversion of two derelict buildings into important theatre venues which are still in use, and two theatre 136 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre companies. The tiny Nimrod Street venue in King’s Cross has been renamed the SBW Stables and hosts the Griffin Theatre Company. The second Nimrod in Surry Hills is now called the Belvoir Street Theatre and is the home of Company B, directed for many years by one of Australia’s most accomplished directors, Neil Armfield. Both venues work well and have been the starting point for many lasting innovations in Australian theatre. The founding of the first Nimrod Street Theatre and its resident company was made possible by energy and optimism, based on luck, talent and hope, with little thought about the future. There was an opportunity to be seized, and Horler and Bell seized it. The company thrived for over ten years and struggled on for a further five – much longer than many people predicted. Its demise was not unusual for theatre organisations which depend on the energies of a small, close- knit group or a single charismatic individual whose enthusiasm wanes. Under these conditions, fifteen years is a good run. In 1980, Bell contributed an article on the Nimrod Theatre, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, to Theatre Australia. He wrote that the original aim of the founders of Nimrod was “to provide an Australian ‘way’ of doing theatre, using broad slapstick humour, the [popular performance] traditions and times of the Tivoli or Sorlies’ tent show” (Bell 1980: 1). He pointed out that in the second year of the Nimrod’s existence, “with scripts submitted by [New Wave playwrights] David Williamson, Alex Buzo, John Romeril and Jack Hibberd, our attention swung more on to the Australian writer, who was busy reproducing the Australian sound and dishing out a bit of social criticism” (ibid.). He went on to note the later emergence at the Nimrod of plays with larger, more international settings, by writers like Louis Nowra and Stephen Sewell – plays that explored issues which were broader than the more familiar “domestic snapshots” (ibid.). He also claimed that the Nimrod’s irreverent way with European classics had been, “despite heaps of criticism and controversy, a large part of our success” (ibid.).

In my own approach to the classic plays, one of the things I have deliberately set out to do is replace the “English” way of doing them with a way that is our own. I have grown used to the howls of those critics and academics who loathe this approach and want their Shakespeare “straight”. What they mean is they want it done as in London in the 1940s […] [W]hat they really want is their classics, and Chapter Four: Entrepreneur and Teacher 137

by inference all their “cultural experiences” at a safe distance, handled reverently like bone china and displayed on a shelf next to the Bible. (Ibid.: 1–2)

This cautious reverence is precisely what Bell was never going to provide. Productions of the classics at the Nimrod were to be as fully engaged as possible in exploring the messiness of the world, through the messiness of theatre. Establishing the first Nimrod Street Theatre was a good short- term idea at the time, but it was unsustainable, with no room for expansion. The only way to survive was to move to a larger venue to consolidate the company and pay professional rates by increasing the audience capacity. This major turning point in the Nimrod story was in large part enabled by John Mostyn, a well-connected Sydney businessman who was later to be chair of the Nimrod Board. He arranged for the Nimrod to take out a fifteen-year lease on a derelict salt and tomato sauce factory in Surry Hills. This building was situated on a parcel of land owned by a developer who wanted to build housing on the rest of the site. Mostyn persuaded him to donate the building to the Nimrod to placate the Sydney City Council’s planners, and organised a fund-raising operation to pay for the conversion into a theatre (Meyrick 2002: 92–4). The new building opened on 1 June 1974, with Bell’s production of The Bacchoi (see Chapter Three). Two features that the new venue retained from the Nimrod Street stables were the name (shortened to the Nimrod Theatre) and a welcoming clutter in the public spaces that made it feel busy and lived in. In 1975, five years after the founding of the Nimrod, there was a sense of achievement, of substance, but also some disappointment that the achievements had not been greater and perhaps more consistent. With three artistic directors and a diverse repertoire of productions and styles, it was hard to pin down what was distinctive about the Nimrod. Toward the end of 1976, on the eve of the premiere of Bell’s production of David Williamson’s A Handful of Friends, a Sydney Morning Herald article on the state of the company quoted Bell as warily conceding that the idea of the Nimrod Theatre “seems to have worked” but cited his admission that 1976 had not been a good year (‘A Williamson at the Nimrod’ 1976: 12). In this article, Bell outlined in retrospect the achievements of the previous six years:

138 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

When we started, there was no permanent representation of new Australian playwrights in Sydney. So our main consideration was to do basically new Australian works. The standard of the scripts wasn’t always as important as the way we did them. We weren’t there to represent new classic Australian scripts – it was more a sort of attack on the more respectable and conventional theatre-going. We were trying to provide a rough-and-ready makeshift theatre – an alternative to what I’d call the more conventional museum-type theatre that was dominating the scene. We also felt we should do the occasional classic, again in an unconventional way, just to remind people that it wasn’t necessarily an expensive, dressed-up ornate occasion to see a classic play. We’ve stuck mainly to those two things over the years. (Bell quoted in ‘A Williamson at the Nimrod’ 1976: 12)

Australia had been through major social and political upheavals since the founding of the Nimrod, and was a quite different place by 1976. The Whitlam Federal Government, elected in 1972, had transformed the nation. After twenty-three years of conservative rule by Prime Minister and his successors, many Australians had had no experience of living in a country with a Labor Federal Government, especially a government with an urgent interest in modernising national and global perceptions of Australia. Arts practitioners relished the unprecedented attention that they received from Whitlam, and the funding that the new government was according them. The Australian Council for the Arts (now the Australia Council) had been set up in 1968 under the Liberal Governments of Harold Holt and John Gorton, but the Labor Government under Whitlam provided much more funding. Precise statistics are contradictory: according to Justin Macdonnell, the federal government’s budget for the arts in 1973 rose overall by about 40 per cent, representing a significant increase (Macdonnell 1992: 103–5). David Throsby argues that there was an even larger increase: “[The Australia Council’s] financial allocation in the first Labor budget in 1973 was, at about $15m, roughly twice the Common- wealth’s aggregate expenditure on the arts in the previous year” (Throsby 2001). The higher figure was more than true for the Nimrod. According to Meyrick, the company’s funding from the Australia Council and its predecessor rose from about $14,000 in 1972 to $33,000 in 1973, and in 1975 it reached almost $130,000 (Meyrick 2002: 226). The Nimrod no longer had to practise extreme forms of Grotowskian poor theatre unless it wanted to. Chapter Four: Entrepreneur and Teacher 139

Along with the ability to fund more expensive production values and pay professional wages, the attraction of the working-class larrikin hero was fading. Williamson’s Don’s Party, with the character of the defiantly disreputable Cooley, can be seen as a moment where the label of larrikin was appropriated by the no-longer-young middle class. The larrikin was shown to be neither a serious rebel nor a dynamic source of social energy, but an ageing, immature Peter Pan figure who had grown up, leaving the Neverland of social rebellion to settle down and face the realities of middle age in a brick veneer house in the outer suburbs. In his three years as Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam was never an Ocker but he occasionally displayed a larrikin, playful, irreverent and self-parodic attitude towards the solemnity of the office – witness his appearance in Bruce Beresford’s 1974 film Barry McKenzie Holds His Own. Towards the end of the film when Edna Everage (Barry Humphries) and her family arrive back home from London, Whitlam and his wife Margaret are at Sydney Airport to welcome them, and the Prime Minister famously bestows an imperial honour on the housewife superstar, dubbing her “Dame Edna”. Barry Humphries as Edna has used the title ever since (Pender 2010: 198). It was only after the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975 by the Governor General that some theatre practitioners realised how they had squandered an all-too-brief opportunity. Barry Humphries was to satirise this aspect of the Whitlam years by creating the grotesque, corrupt character of Les Patterson, a fictional Minister for the Arts in Whitlam’s government, who would boast about asking “Gough” for money to support arts and cultural development projects, all the while intending to “piss it up against a wall” (ibid.: 350). “By the middle of the decade […] a spoof of cultural nationalism was no longer enough, especially in view of the dark clouds on the horizon for the Labor government” (ibid.: 204). Australian theatre seemed no longer to feel so comfortable about celebrating larrikin flippancy. Bell and his co-workers were in search of something which would crack the mould so that they could start afresh, while not completely breaking faith with the achievements of the past. They needed a new carnival which would still be in some way anti-traditional and Australian, but which was more aware of its social responsibilities. One answer to the question, in the short term at least, was the discovery of the young Melbourne playwright Louis Nowra and his 140 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre play Inner Voices (see Chapter Three). This play and Stephen Sewell’s work provoked an important discussion about the status of plays by Australian writers but not set in Australia. This was still unusual enough to be remarked upon in the context of the Nimrod’s practice. There was always some uncertainty about what would constitute a consistent artistic mission for the Nimrod. In her review of Bell’s production of Williamson’s A Handful of Friends (AS 6041, 1976, Williamson 1976), Romola Constantino commented that “if there is such a thing as a Nimrod style, it comes through here in the highly strung, sparkling pace, characteristic of Sydney itself, making the most of the wit and sophistication with which this play is written” (Constantino 1976: 7). The idea that, after just over five years since its founding, the Nimrod would show off its Australian credentials with a “highly strung, sparkling pace” and “wit and sophistication” would have sounded very strange in 1970 to the audiences and actors in The Legend of King O’Malley and Biggles. Some at the Nimrod also seemed to be consciously positioning the company to take a more mainstream role in the cultural life of the nation. An indication of the Nimrod’s shift in approach was evident in another of Bell’s public statements. In 1973, he had been invited to give the Kathleen Robinson Lecture at Sydney University, where he linked the work of alternative theatres in Australia with contemporary avant-garde theatre events in Europe, Britain and America. Bell advocated a vital role in Australia for the non-mainstream theatre as the “real alternative [to] the Established Theatre” (Bell 1975: 435). He also argued for more generous financial support for such work, to encourage new and experimental theatre. “Alternative Theatre needs to be brave, to defy the box-office and the critics and to employ the best actors and directors available” (ibid.). However, by the time his 1973 lecture was published in 1975, the situation had changed: the Old Tote, where Bell had first achieved success as an actor, was in trouble financially, even though it now occupied the Drama Theatre, one of the smaller venues in the newly opened and highly prestigious Sydney Opera House. This was not a happy move. It is an awkward, inflexible space with a wide, shallow stage, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the stables where the Nimrod had started. Bell performed there for the first time as Berowne in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in late 1974 (AS 5668, 1974), Chapter Four: Entrepreneur and Teacher 141 in a production by the innovative English director William Gaskill (Bell 2002: 146). Bell’s 1973 identification of the Nimrod with alternative theatre was no longer so strategically important. Indeed there seems to have been an assumption that if the Old Tote failed, as it did in 1978 after a long malaise, it would leave a niche that the Nimrod could move into, establishing itself as the major state-funded company in New South Wales and potentially even becoming a national flagship company. However, according to Lilian Horler, some Nimrod members were unhappy about this idea because it would necessarily turn the company into something that it didn’t want to be (L. Horler 1992). Bell added a postscript to the published lecture in which he suggested that if he “were to lecture on the same subject today”, he would no longer define alternative theatre as a “branch of the ‘established’ theatre balancing the policy of its neighbours” (Bell 1975: 437). Bell now asserted instead that “theatres such as Nimrod cannot be called ‘alternative’ simply because we produce some of the plays you’d be unlikely to see at the Old Tote” (ibid.). He argued that the Nimrod was now “doing the same job as the Tote – producing a professional repertory of entertainment for a paying audience” (ibid.). The Nimrod was no longer a theatrical laboratory for innovative and untested local writers and directors – it was going mainstream but, as it turned out, without a clear sense of purpose or direction to differentiate itself from the competition. If this was staking a claim to replace the Old Tote, it was unsuccessful. When the Old Tote collapsed in 1978, the State Government instead set up a brand new organisation, the Sydney Theatre Company, and appointed Richard Wherrett as its first artistic director.

The decline of the Nimrod In the early 1980s, internal problems at the Nimrod, and the damage they were doing to company morale, started to affect the quality of the productions. Despite its success and influence for ten years, it was following the Old Tote into decline. The departure of Wherrett in 1979 to head the competition, the newly created STC, had a destabilising effect, not helped by the fact that both Bell and Horler had also applied for the position and Bell had been widely tipped to be the front runner. In addition, there were moves by some of the Nimrod staff against Horler. This led to Horler’s forced resignation as artistic 142 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre director of the company (but not as a member of the Board) in 1979 and initiated a growing split between the Board’s view of future directions and the aspirations of the staff. There was also a major breakdown in relations between Nimrod and the Australia Council – the federal arts funding agency. Bell was now the last of the three early co-directors remaining, and the company was out of kilter. Two new directors, Kim Carpenter and Neil Armfield, were brought in to replace Wherrett and Horler though they did not stay for long: Carpenter resigned in 1980 and was replaced by Aubrey Mellor, and Armfield left the company in 1981. The Nimrod which had started out as an alternative to the mainstream theatre was now itself part of the establishment. What is more, Bell’s own agenda to develop a recognisable Australian theatre, which had been in harmony with a wider Australian desire for self- definition, was also proving less exciting than before. It may have been a consequence of the success of Cyrano and Volpone, which were hard acts to follow. Bell and his fellow actors had achieved their goal of creating a distinctive, high-quality Australian performance style with both new local plays and classics and now had to look for some new challenge to tackle. After the intense fascination with nationalism and self-definition in the 1960s and 1970s, Australian audiences were for the moment no longer finding satisfaction with the constant quest for a distinctive identity. From the late 1970s, Nimrod had over-extended itself at a time when contraction and consolidation might have been the better option, and there were serious debts. In desperation, in 1984, Nimrod sold the Belvoir Street building, which they had bought for a token one dollar in 1982, and leased the Seymour Centre at Sydney University for a new start (Thorne 1995: 85). There they hoped to increase their income by working in a theatre with a much larger capacity. They knew the venue because they had used it for extended seasons of very popular productions, but the Seymour Centre is a sterile, institutional building; inside, it lacks the raffish, lived-in, down-at-heel quality that the Belvoir Street foyer had, and the audience–actor relationship in the two larger auditoria is more distant. The nature of theatre architecture affects the way an audience receives a production. British theatre scholar Michael Patterson writes about the special role that live performance in a working theatre space has in enhancing the audience’s social and political experience. Chapter Four: Entrepreneur and Teacher 143

The performing arts enjoy the unique distinction of bringing people together in a public place to respond communally to an artistic experience, whether to watch dance, listen to a symphony or to attend a play. And because theatre uses words, its communication can be particularly specific and challenging. In the theatre, live actors speak out loud in front of, and sometimes even directly to, an audience, and so ideas and feelings are expressed at the same instant to a community of onlookers. (Patterson 2003: 2)

For live theatre to create such a “community of onlookers”, a particular kind of space is required – one which makes the onlookers aware of each other as well as the stage. Vivian Fraser clearly understands it and his understanding is demonstrated by his designs for the Nimrod Street stables, the Belvoir Street theatre and the STC’s Wharf theatres. The Seymour Centre is different. Its huge, carpeted foyer space on two levels extends far away from the doors to the auditorium and disperses the energy instead of focusing it. True to form, the venue proved a box-office disappointment. The hoped-for audiences did not arrive in sufficient numbers, and the finances of the company continued to decline. Bell resigned, and worked freelance as an actor and director for five years, performing in revivals of some of his great roles at the Nimrod, including Arturo Ui and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. It was during this time that he devoted much energy to the development and staging of Manning Clark’s History of Australia: The Musical (see Chapter Three).

A new start Playing Prospero in Neil Armfield’s 1990 Tempest (AS 12063) back at Belvoir Street, which had been bought by a syndicate of theatre practitioners and supporters in 1984, was Bell’s first Shakespeare role in six years. It was the precursor to the establishment of the Bell Shakespeare Company later that year. Despite the fact that this was one of a large number of stagings of the play around Australia at the time – in 1989 and 1990 there were other major productions of The Tempest in Perth, Adelaide, Wagga Wagga, Brisbane and Melbourne – Bell lamented publicly that there was not more Shakespeare in Sydney, compared with what was available in Britain.

England has such a wealth of companies putting on Shakespeare all the time and there’s the current massive West End revival of Shakespeare. But over the past few years in Sydney, there’s been so 144 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

little of it done. The problem is that unless they are done frequently, you don’t get the necessary kind of abrasive, competitive striving to do Shakespeare well. (Bell quoted in ‘Shakespeare – For the First Time’ 1990: n.p.)

In response to this perceived neglect, Bell accepted an offer made by a long-term friend and benefactor, Tony Gilbert, to do something to promote Shakespeare. Bell persuaded Gilbert to create a national company to interpret Shakespeare’s plays explicitly for Australian audiences. By national, Bell meant not merely a company that would perform all around the nation, but one which reflected the nation itself. This did not mean a “parochial outlook that seeks to play up anachronisms and force local references” (though some of the productions have certainly done this), but an approach that wanted to “find ways to rescue Shakespeare from the deadly perception that it is a British appendage to Australian culture” (Bell 2002: 189). Despite a near disaster in the first year, the BSC has survived and thrived for over twenty years – much longer than the Nimrod – and, according to AusStage, it has produced nearly 500 different events, though it is important to note that this number is inflated by the listing of touring performances. (In AusStage, each stop on a tour is counted as a new event.) It has provided Bell with a platform to both direct and act – at times in the same production. The company has given him as an actor the chance to revisit many of the roles that he had previously played, including Prospero, Richard III, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Lear and Malvolio, and also to take on new ones, like the title role in the German playwright Heiner Müller’s Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus) in 2008 (AS 75052) and Falstaff in Henry 4 in 2013 (AS 104685). Even more important, the work of the company can be seen as an ongoing project, picking up where the Nimrod left off, designed to extend and disseminate the notion of an Australian version of classical acting, and to counter what Bell sees as an endemic difficulty for actors. He says that because of the influence of naturalistic acting on film and television, they have a particular problem “with scale of expression, with the art of rhetoric, with colourful, emotive and sensual speech, and appreciation for the musicality of language”. In a context where low-key, naturalistic acting is the norm, these qualities can feel “hammy” (Bell 2002: 191). Chapter Four: Entrepreneur and Teacher 145

The first BSC production was Hamlet, and the Australian aspect of the production was noticed – critic Jeremy Eccles, writing three years later, recalled Bell’s production with John Polson as a “hot, Aussie, summer Hamlet”. He compared it with the “cool, stateless, winter Hamlet’ directed by Neil Armfield at Belvoir Street in 1994 with Richard Roxburgh as the Prince of Denmark (Eccles 1994: 2). Acting style is not the only manifestation of Australianness in the company’s productions. An acknowledgement of the wide range of different nationalities within the Australian population led to a deliberate policy in the early years to include actors from a range of linguistic, national and theatrical backgrounds, and the company was one of the first of the major companies to instigate a practice of colour-blind (and occasionally accent-deaf) casting. Since the idea of Australia is itself a construct which is constantly undergoing change, so is Bell’s goal of finding Australian approaches to Shakespeare in his roles as actor and director. His continuing personal need to reinvigorate his craft has encouraged him to bring in directors from outside the company and, indeed, outside Australia. Where he feels that it is appropriate, he takes acting roles in the plays which they direct. In 1996, he played the title role in Coriolanus (AS 28877), with guest director Stephen Berkoff, for the first time since he was a twenty-year-old university student, and he took on the role of Ulysses in Michael Bogdanov’s 2000 production of the seldom-performed Troilus and Cressida (AS 24292). One of Bell’s missions is to continue to explore new ways of playing the characters and telling the stories so that they will connect with Australian audiences, but beyond this, he wants to help younger actors to develop, and extend to them the benefits of what he has learned in a professional career spanning half a century. Since early in his career, Bell has had an ongoing commitment to the training of younger actors, not just in technical skills but in their whole approach to theatre. He saw the company as a de facto graduate school for actors to help them learn by exploring the challenges of Shakespeare. While teaching at NIDA, he said that he wanted the students to develop their own philosophies of theatre, and to go out after graduating to implement these philosophies and bring about changes in the institution of theatre itself (SoS 650). In order to let the company work as a training ground, its first seasons kept productions 146 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre in the repertoire so that the cast would have the chance to revisit and refine their characterisations from year to year.

There is a need for the classics. I want this company to go on and spawn a whole new generation of actors […] I want people to start thinking about an Australian tradition of Shakespeare so that it is really incorporated into our culture and not seen as something grafted on by the Brits. (Bell quoted in Gosman 1992: 99)

Part of Bell’s own responsibility as an actor in this context, as he sees it, is to lead and teach by example. In practice, this has involved structuring the company from time to time as an ensemble where less experienced actors can concentrate on developing their craft rather than focusing on how to get the next job as soon as the run is over. This can be a difficult and sometimes costly practice, riskier, more challenging and more time-consuming than hiring better known actors, whose names will be selling points in themselves, on a play- by-play basis. Indeed, it proved too difficult to sustain after a few years, so the company went back to a more usual practice of casting each production individually. Nevertheless, a number of the younger BSC actors have tended to stay with or return to the company and have had the valuable experience of performing longer-than-usual runs of classic plays, often on extensive tours, in the company of some of the most experienced professionals in the country. In addition, Bell’s name and talents as an actor have been a box-office draw for decades. He has continued to attract audiences who might not otherwise come to Shakespeare, and he has brought entertaining and innovative productions of the plays to many people who might think of watching Shakespeare and other playwrights from the past as a kind of dreary duty to be avoided wherever possible. As an extension of this, the company has established a touring education program which has brought the excitement of live performance to school children whose parents, and teachers, may have been alienated from Shakespeare by boring experiences in the classroom unsupported by imaginative performance. The existence of a company bearing his name has consolidated Bell’s reputation as the pre-eminent actor of Shakespeare in the country. While his public statements about Shakespeare sometimes sound reassuringly traditionalist, in practice Bell has taken advantage of his reputation as a classical actor to surprise audiences with some Chapter Four: Entrepreneur and Teacher 147 unexpected, outrageous and radical stagings which depend for part of their impact on violating the conventions of theatrical seemliness. Permitting younger actors to be unconventional and challenging them to find meaningful ways of breaking restrictive traditions parallels his more concrete achievements in, for example, founding the theatre buildings. This is also the less tangible result of Bell’s important work and influence.

148 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

John Bell as Titus Andronicus, Bell Shakespeare Company and Queensland Theatre Company, 2008. Photographer: Rob Maccoll ©. Reproduced with permission.

Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares

Local Shakespeare The nomination of William Shakespeare as British Personality of the Millennium in 1999 is a frivolous but telling example of the enormous cultural power that Shakespeare’s name holds over much of the English-speaking world’s collective imagination, so it is hardly surprising that his plays have occasionally become a battleground on which cultural skirmishes between traditionalist and anti-colonialist forces have taken place throughout the former empire. The staging of Shakespeare in and for Australia has been problematic since before Bell started his professional career in the 1960s. At times, the focus has been on technical questions, such as the speaking of verse, and as late as 1972 more traditionalist critics were still complaining about “the persistent inability of too many of our players to speak Shakespeare’s verse with clarity and meaning”, praising the few actors whose vocal delivery was “rich and rounded” (Kessell 1972: 21). At other times, the politics of Shakespeare has extended beyond these narrow technical questions to become a particularly significant forum for the articulation of conflicting ideas about Australian national identity. Helen Gilbert’s Sightlines makes a helpful contribution towards understanding the various ways in which theatre practitioners have localised Shakespeare’s plays, differentiating those who use a recognisable version of the script (and often a modified form of the play’s title) from those that are significantly adapted and often use a new script based on or referring to Shakespeare’s plots, situations, relationships and dialogue. She writes, “The staging of the ‘intact’ Shakespeare play offers one kind of counterdiscourse that might, through a revisionist performance, articulate tensions between the Anglo script and its localised enunciation” (Gilbert 1998: 28 n3). This is not a model of analysis that Gilbert uses herself, but it is helpful in exploring Bell’s directing of Shakespeare. It provides a method for analysing how some of Bell’s Shakespeare productions, such as the 150 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

1998 and 1999 productions of Henry 4 and Henry 5, have made a conscious intervention into local political issues, taking into account both the details of the political agendas and the theatrical techniques used to enact them. Productions which use Shakespeare’s texts more or less as published, but with a modern spin, can comment on important current topics. They can put or keep issues high on the public agenda, inform or bear witness, incite debate and dissent, intensify outrage, highlight and clarify events, and encourage action aimed to effect social change. This approach is by no means new. Katharine Brisbane in 1972 wrote about

the same problem which grabs the critic by the throat, each time with increasing vigour. How up-to-date is your Shakespeare? The tasks set range from artless attempts to update Shakespeare in the Kiss Me Kate style to heroic endeavours to encapsulate the Elizabethan world picture into a three-hour think-in. There are those critics – and they have a convincing argument to put – who believe that the performer is simply a piece of plumbing which connects the composer’s mind with that of the audience […] [E]very Shakespeare production today is as much a reflection of and reflection on the mind of the director and his company as it is of the remote little man who once wrote the words. (Brisbane 1972: 12)

She suggested that the task of modern staging was to “find a setting a little less remote from the audience’s experience than the original and help shorten that plumbing between author and audience” (ibid.). There have been a number of different approaches to the task of “shortening the plumbing”. At the most superficial level, it has simply been a question of designing and dressing a play in a place or period which is familiar and local, as in the case of the 1972 ockerised Old Tote production of The Taming of the Shrew (AS 5629). The production was set in rural New South Wales in the early twentieth century, with appropriate costumes, sets and accents, but did not consciously engage with the concerns of local audiences beyond allowing them to see and hear local images and voices on stage. Many productions have sought to find in Shakespeare’s scripts a more immediate relation to the world outside the theatre and rework them as part of an intervention in national issues, so that the “plumbing” connects the issues of the play more directly with modern social concerns. Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 151

In much of his work, Bell has provided his audiences with images of demotic Australia relocated alongside the highest of high art. After Nimrod, this aim has been continued by the BSC, which has created to date major productions of most of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as a number of school productions and other related activities. Bell has not been working in isolation to achieve the goal of an Australian Shakespeare; other directors and companies also experimented with new approaches to Shakespeare that would speak more directly to local audiences. Within a year or two of the founding of the Nimrod Street Theatre, there were several defiantly non- traditional productions of As You Like It for the Old Tote (AS 5610, 1971) and King Lear at the Melbourne Theatre Company (AS 14211, 1971), directed by Jim Sharman; The Tempest by the Performance Syndicate (AS 14598, 1973), directed by Rex Cramphorn; and the 1971 Nimrod Theatre Christmas show burlesquing Shakespeare, Hamlet on Ice (AS 5997), directed by Ken Horler and Aarne Neeme. In 1983, Bell co-directed, with Anna Volska, a production of As You Like It (AS 11910) in which Volska played Rosalind. This production revived the localising technique used in the 1972 Robin Lovejoy Taming of the Shrew, setting the play in a recognisable Australia, but this time in a gentler, more nostalgic version. The chosen period was the 1920s or 1930s, with references to Australian national icons like Arnott’s biscuits, Robur tea, sound effects of magpies, kookaburras, and a transistor radio playing the ABC Radio news fanfare. Here the outcasts from the court sat around campfires singing folk songs while boiling the billy. But this was not only an exercise in nostalgia; the production succeeded because it explored still-powerful myths about white Australia. It focused above all on the traditional Australian tension between city and bush, a familiar trope which found early expression in poet Banjo Paterson’s 1889 poem, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, in which Paterson contrasts the natural delights of the countryside, the “vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended”, with “the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city” (Paterson 1987). In this production, the court was presented as a corrupt and violent urban world of gangsters and flappers, while the depiction of the countryside looked back to a long-established utopian image of rural life. This was a potentially idyllic location, populated by a mixture of old hands and new chums, but where the beneficent qualities of the outdoor life were balanced by harder realities of 152 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre economic and even physical survival. It was a production very much about Australia. The production was highly praised, even by critics who had for years been uncomfortable with the localising of Shakespeare. Kippax’s assessment of this production (Kippax 1983b: n.p.) is worth examining in detail because his review located it within a broader narrative about Australian Shakespeare, and shows how much times had changed. He starts by listing some of the unconventional aspects of the production, such as the 1920s setting, references to English seaside vaudeville traditions, and the replacement of the Forest of Arden with the outback. He then posed a question to his imagined reader: “Nimrod up to its tricks again, you may assume”, as if his and his reader’s default assumption is that a Nimrod Shakespeare is likely to be both gimmicky and tiresome, and that localising is old hat (ibid.). But, he continued,

not so. This is one of Nimrod’s most deeply considered productions, with Shakespeare’s tough-minded examination of romantic lifestyles and philosophies translated with little strain or fuss from the Renaissance to a nearer time. (Ibid.)

He noted the parallels between the two worlds: the “degeneracy” of the court and the corruption of “Big City gangland”, the “romantic pastorale of Arden” and the “Australian Utopian myth of the new country, fresh fields and untainted opportunity” (ibid.). Kippax criticises a few features of the production, but the bulk of the review is in praise of Anna Volska’s portrayal of Rosalind, especially her transformation from “a child of impulse and uncertainty” to “a woman of high and ardent spirit and noble mind”. He described this performance as being the best that Volska had given, and concluded that the play was “a revelation, not to be missed” (ibid.). This praise from Kippax can be read in different ways, either indicating that Nimrod had somehow used the localised setting more successfully in this production than ever before, or else suggesting that Kippax had mellowed – that he and his readers had become familiar enough with the approach that they could see its advantages. Whichever way, it indicated that, according to Kippax, an overtly Australian approach was indeed capable of illuminating the plays, Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 153 even though it was no longer in itself at the cutting edge of theatre practice.

Ritual and supernatural Shakespeare Bell’s first work as a director was with Shakespeare: on his return to Australia in March 1970, he directed second-year students at NIDA in a three-night season of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (AS 22964, 1970, SoS 650), an exercise which prefigured much of the work he was to undertake in the future. It is significant that the play was chosen because it was less hierarchically structured than most plays, offering a wide range of substantial parts to a relatively large number of actors. Bell also wanted to give the students something which, because of the supernatural elements in the play, made unusual demands on them in terms of movement and voice. The concept for the production was influenced by Polish scholar Jan Kott’s ground- breaking book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Kott saw the play as a much more savage and cruel text than the Edwardian, prettified, fairy-like tradition that had held the stage for more than fifty years (Kott 1964: 213–36). In this spare, actor-focused production, using simple lighting effects to create the forest, Bell saw the fairies as natural forces and “timeless pagan deities of potency and fertility”, and his rehearsal techniques included workshopping insect-like physicality and characterisations using movement and masks (SoS 650). The “timeless” quality is perhaps a little misleading. The young men, Lysander and Demetrius ( and Mervyn Drake), when enchanted by the magic flower, were played as if under the influence of hallucinatory drugs – something identified in the 1960s and 1970s as a distinctive feature of youth culture at the time, and presumably more familiar to the younger members of the cast and audience. The “rude mechanicals” were portrayed as belonging more specifically to a time and place familiar to the audience, as tradesmen from suburban Sydney, or, in Bell’s words, “Bankstown brickies staging a Bi- centenary pageant” (Bell 1970: 3). Bell was eager to stress that this was designed to make a direct appeal to audiences in Australia at that time, and to present the play as a “re-consideration of Shakespeare’s thought in the light of our own common experience” (ibid.). It is significant though that the characters who were most obviously Australian in manner and speech were the comical workmen rather 154 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre than the nobility or the supernatural characters. Playing Theseus or Titania with a strong Australian accent at that time would have been a more dangerous path. A 1967 ABC Television report about the Old Tote, only three years before Bell directed the Dream, shows NIDA- trained actors rehearsing two Continental European plays – the French playwright Jean Anouilh’s Point of Departure and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler – using the obviously upper-middle- class received pronunciation (RP) interpretation of an English accent, which in conventional theatre was thought to be the unmarked term – the default accent that was used as if it were neutral in terms of class and nationality. Now it seems every bit as incongruous in its theatrical representations of French and Norwegian characters as Australian accents would have been (SoS 46). Bell’s next encounter with Shakespeare, in the tiny King’s Cross Nimrod space, was Macbeth (AS 6006) in early 1971, which was radical but not specifically Australian. There are times when a Shakespeare play is suitable for localising, but Macbeth in Sydney in 1971 was not one of them. It was modernised to the extent that it was influenced by the killing of the American actress Sharon Tate and the revelations about the English moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, but specific time and place were irrelevant. Despite that, it was not a retreat to conventional practices; Bell directed it ritualistically as a Black Mass, with a cast of only seven actors in a space decorated with satanic paraphernalia including an altar, a goat’s head, candles, a silver chalice and, of course, a knife. Doubling of roles was overt, with the Third Witch transforming into Duncan, who was then blindfolded and led in a formal procession to his murder, with the rest of the cast chanting in animalistic, choric fashion. Despite its popularity, the production was criticised by some – not for breaking the established rules of Shakespeare production, but rather for not going far enough. Its contemporary reference points were international, and had no immediate relevance to the world of the Australian audience. Even so, Kippax thought that the ultimate optimism of the production, especially the final resolution, was a very Australian feature (Kippax 1992).

Carnivalesque Shakespeare Bell’s 1972 production of Measure for Measure (AS 6007) was a further attempt to find a performance style for Shakespeare which Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 155 would communicate more directly with Australian audiences. Its radicalism was limited to its mid-nineteenth-century setting, in order to highlight the play’s focus on sexual and moral hypocrisy. However, this production sowed a seed which would grow into something more distinctively Australian. For H.G. Kippax, the Victorian setting stood “Shakespeare’s uneven play on its head with a vengeance”, and inverted the audience’s normal sympathies. The Duke became “a pedant, a moral fusspot, as vain as he is censorious” and Isabella had “aggressive and intrusive moral drives” (Kippax 1972: 10). On the other hand, the characters who displayed real humanity and generosity were Claudio, Lucio, Pompey and even Angelo. It was this inverted, antipodean, carnivalesque sensibility which was to provide an opportunity for Bell to transfer the successful approach of the Nimrod’s new Australian playwriting to the staging of Shakespeare. Bell directed the play again for the BSC in 2005 (AS 66074), where the production used the idea of the carnival to set up the spirit of place. The designer, Robert Kemp, created a set that looked like part of the classical facade of some grand official building, but its fluted columns had been plastered over with tattered, sleazy posters and graffiti. The costuming did much of the real narrative work. Most of the “underworld” characters – dressed in gaudy pink, red and orange – were present in the opening scenes, adding vibrant colour to the world of Shakespeare’s Vienna, but as the play progressed and the outward morality of Angelo began to take effect, this visual energy disappeared from the stage, and the audience were left largely with Angelo and Isabella dressed in almost monochrome dark. Only at the end did some of the multi-coloured liveliness of the opening begin to return to the stage. Ideas that linked the southern hemisphere with the carnivalesque date back to the Renaissance. Richard Brome’s play The Antipodes, first published in 1640, provides a range of impressions, in comic and satiric mode, of how Europeans at that time might have imagined what we now call Australia – the southern lands on the opposite side of the globe. There is an assumption by one of the less well-informed characters in Brome’s play that the inhabitants of the Antipodes walked about in their topsy-turvy world upside down, with their legs in the air – “with their heels upwards? Bless us! How scape they breaking o’ their necks?” (Brome 1966, Act 1 scene 6). This misapprehension is corrected by another character posing as a 156 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre traveller who has returned from the underside of the earth, but when the “traveller” goes on to present, on a stage, theatrical vignettes of the Antipodes (seemingly the 1630s equivalent of a holiday slideshow night), the impressions that he creates are less literal but nevertheless clear inversions of aspects of England. This idea of southern misrule appears in the flyting – a formal speech of insult, based on a series of extreme opposites – spoken by the Duke of York to his enemy Queen Margaret in the third part of Henry VI. In this speech, the morally inverted southern hemisphere is associated with the Queen, and is referred to as the direct antithesis of the “Septentrion”, the civilised northern hemisphere. York says to Margaret,

’Tis Beautie that doth oft make Women prowd, But God he knowes, thy share thereof is small. ’Tis Vertue, that doth make them most admir’d, The contrary, doth make thee wondred at. ’Tis Gouernment that makes them seeme Diuine, The want thereof, makes thee abhominable. Thou art as opposite to euery good, As the Antipodes are vnto vs, Or as the South to the Septentrion. Oh Tygres Heart, wrapt in a Womans Hide. (3 Henry VI, Act 1 scene 4, TLN 594–603)

The Antipodes, a geographical equivalent of Margaret herself, thus becomes a disorderly, uncontrollable, upside-down place of deception, disguise, immorality and vice, the “opposite to every good” and the inverse of European values. There is some evidence that, even though educated Europeans after 1788 understood, more accurately than Brome’s naive characters in the 1630s, the physics of life in the southern hemisphere, in the years following the British appropriation of New South Wales the underlying traces of this stigmatising discourse about the Antipodes continued. The idea of the Southern Lands as an abominable, oxymoronic and grotesque inversion of northern-hemisphere civilisation, even in jest, was still a sore point for the new settlement, which was already anxious enough about its self-image as a dumping ground for the rejects of society from the north. The pseudonymous colonial poet Barron Field (probably the first person to rhyme Australia with failure), in his paean to the Kangaroo, described the Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 157 new land as a non-place, not even a part of the Creation proper but merely its afterbirth, which “emerg’d at the first sinning, When the ground was therefore curst” (Field 1974: 7–8). One response to this stigmatising has been to accept, embrace, celebrate and joke about the status of Australia as a place of carnivalesque inversion, in some way comparable to Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the term – irreverent, populist, democratic, anti-authoritarian, defiantly vulgar and crude, a world turned upside down (Bakhtin 1968, 1984). There are signs that, from the nineteenth century, performers in Australia enacted these qualities in some unexpected ways. Theatre historian Bill Dunstone has drawn attention to performances in 1869 by Harry Bartine, “an American acrobat who had […] come to Western Australia from Adelaide […] with Stebbings Intercolonial Circus” (Dunstone 2000: 35). As part of his performance, he walked upside down and backwards in the Oddfellows Hall in Fremantle by means of a series of rings attached to the ceiling. The act itself was not new; what is interesting is that he referred to it as his “Antipodean act” (Dunstone 2000: 35–6). It is no coincidence that two very popular late twentieth-century performance companies, Circus Oz and Tapdogs, have successfully recycled the idea of upside-down acts as part of their overtly Australian performances for both local and overseas audiences. This trick was used in Boy’s Own McBeth [sic] (AS 64420), written and directed by Grahame Bond and Jim Burnett in 1979, which included a scene with a drummer suspended high above the audience, playing upside down (G. Bond and Burnett 1980). The current BSC logo features the word Bell the right way up and the word Shakespeare upside down. This popular performance practice may seem a long way from Shakespeare, and Australia has developed a distinctive theatre tradition that looks back to more popular forms of entertainment from the nineteenth century: the circus, vaudeville, pantomime, puppetry, revue, and melodrama. Yet a brashly carnivalesque approach to Shakespeare has found a receptive environment in Australia (Waterhouse 2001: 17–39). It is not unique to Australia but is a visible and recognisable aspect of an Australian way of performing Shakespeare and other classic plays that might normally be thought of as high art. The carnivalesque, and specifically the circus, has been used by theatre practitioners and critics, supported by audiences, as 158 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre part of a move to refashion Shakespeare for self-consciously antipodean consumption. In the so-called New Wave of theatre in Sydney and Melbourne from the 1960s, which was in large part a conscious refashioning of older performance traditions, there were significant crossovers between the worlds of popular entertainment and high art. One of the trailblazers in the field was Jim Sharman. He came from a show- business family, and his father was a famous tent-boxing entrepreneur. After a confronting critique of Australia in a show titled Terror Australis in 1968 (AS 23152), Sharman had made his name nationally by directing the first Australian production of Hair for Harry M. Miller in 1969 (AS 14903), and he burst onto the international scene four years later with the 1973 world premiere production of The Rocky Horror Show at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Both of these were sensational popular successes. In between, he directed productions of As You Like It (AS 5610, 1971) for the Old Tote in Sydney and, at the age of twenty-six, King Lear (AS 14211, 1971) for the Melbourne Theatre Company. Both productions enhanced Sharman’s reputation as an enfant terrible through their exuberant treatment of the scripts, and Sharman commented in an interview on King Lear in a way that is consistent with his focus on theatricality and the carnivalesque: “Lear strikes me as a set of images that only take place in performance. There is the extraordinary image of vision – the concept of a topsy-turvy world where people only see when they are blind and behave rationally when they have gone mad” (Sharman 1971: 15). It is as if Sharman in 1971 is reading King Lear through the lens of Brome’s The Antipodes. One of the most obvious current manifestations of the carnivalesque in performance is the circus. Bell himself has commented on the importance of the circus in his imagination:

[F]rom my earliest years, circus tents were a key part of my life. Among my earliest memories are these: sawdust, tinsel, the bright lights and brassy band of a circus tent; the excitement, the racket, the precarious bleacher seating, the thrill and horror of it all. (Bell 2002: 8)

In 1964, Bell, as a young actor, had been given the chance to take part in an important experiment, incorporating some characteristics of circus into Shakespeare, playing the title role in Tom Brown’s high- Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 159 profile production of Henry V in a tent (AS 31423). The use of the tent brought Shakespeare closer to the circus, but there is no evidence that the actors’ posture, movement or voices were in any obvious way influenced by circus. On his return to Australia, however, Bell appropriated circus-like performances into a number of productions, starting with his 1970 Legend of King O’Malley (AS 28133, Boddy and Ellis 1979). In 1972, Bell directed an adaptation for the Old Tote of Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters, titled How Could You Believe Me When I Said I’d Be Your Valet When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life (AS 5631, SoS 761). He wanted to use a high-energy performance style like the commedia dell’arte, but typically, he wanted to use not the Italian tradition but an equivalent Australian style, the vaudeville. The embodied knowledge of how to perform an authentic-seeming vaudeville style was under threat as the performers who had trained in and practised the style grew older, so Bell engaged Gloria Dawn and another veteran performer, Johnny Lockwood, to train the cast in vaudeville techniques. Video of a rehearsal where the actors, including Ron Haddrick, one of Australia’s most recognised classically trained actors, were practising very demanding gymnastics is in the Stage on Screen collection (SoS 817). A more important intersection of Shakespeare and the circus came in 1975, with Much Ado About Nothing (AS 6053) by the Nimrod Theatre at Belvoir Street. Bell now explicitly sought out a fresher, more energetic and physical acting style, using his own fascination with the circus as a starting point. Not only was this a gaudy, brassy, noisy production performed in mock Italian accents, but it was deliberately circus-like in its design and aesthetic, with the set resembling a big top. This production was in a number of ways a watershed for Australian theatre, using circus references to combine a classic text with popular entertainment. The stage was configured in the round with brightly coloured canvas surrounding the stage and audience. Many critics agreed that something important was happening, and applauded the innovative visual use of circus imagery:

The usual acting space has been filled with seats set high on the scaffolding, the acting area has been set to the centre of the theatre floor, the whole upper circumference of the theatre’s walls supports a circular frame hung with circus-style curtains, and entries for the 160 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

actors are provided in innumerable spots scattered through the audience. (Kemp 1975a: 27)

[Bell] has set the whole thing as a circus and it’s played in circus-style […] echoing all the crowd-pleasing, the boisterousness, the participation, the exaggeration and vigour of what you imagined the true commedia dell’arte was like […] Larry Eastwood’s set […] has transformed the Nimrod into a yellow, red-white-and-green (Italy’s colours, in case you didn’t know) ribboned tent […] It was enough to bring back your faith in Sydney theatre: there were actors in a Shakespeare play, of all things, actually acting […] not just standing or awkwardly moving around reciting poetry in as close a modulation as possible to Larry Olivier doing Hamlet. (Pascall 1975b: 26)

Katharine Brisbane, in a review of the revival in 1977, added that,

enveloped in bunting and Sandra McKenzie’s circus music, [the audience] find themselves in jolly, outgoing company at a family party […] John Bell’s productions of Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing make him arguably the best director of Shakespeare we have in the 1970s. (Brisbane 1977: 31)

Together with the circus, Bell used the relatively new image of the Italian immigrant to Australia. This began as a rehearsal technique in an attempt to loosen up the actors. Bell asked them to explore their delivery of the dialogue using mock-Italian accents. In response, the actors abandoned any (Royal) Shakespearean formality, and instead of standing and intoning they gesticulated wildly, ran, laughed and cried, speaking the words of the Bard of Avon in the accents of Leichhardt fruiterers (many Italian immigrants after the Second World War lived and worked in Leichhardt, a suburb of Sydney). The actors freely inserted standard Italian interjections into the text: “Mamma mia”, “Viva Italia”, “buona sera”. According to Bell, this rehearsal device became a permanent feature of the production: the actors found it impossible to go back to standard accents while still maintaining the manic energy of the rehearsals, so the decision was taken to perform the play in Australian Italian, celebrating the comic stereotype as a new, lively and demonstrative feature of a multicultural Australia, rather than deferring to monocultural English traditions. The response of some reviewers showed that they recognised an emergent Australian discourse. One newspaper article began “Royal Shakespeare Company and Old Vic, eat your heart out” (Veitch 1975: Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 161

95), and thirty years later Katharine Brisbane looked back on it as an event that “has remained in popular memory as a defining moment in our interpretation of Shakespeare and the genesis of the approach that became a trademark of Bell Shakespeare Company” (Brisbane 2005: 265). Geraldine Pascall’s review in The Australian drew attention to the successful use of popular forms:

Damn the purists, damn the pedants, damn the conservatives […] and damn George Bernard Shaw. Ignore what the Prospect did, and the Royal Shakespeare Company didn’t. Forget all the reverent nonsense you learned about Shakespeare at school; forget all those productions that are faithful only to tired traditions and timidly believe the verse should stand by itself. For the spirit of Will Shakespeare – all the guts and wit, the comedy, the bawdiness, the biting intellect and the basic desire to entertain – is indeed alive and well at Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre. (Pascall 1975b: 26)

Pascall went on to describe Bell’s directing as being “witty and intelligent, exuberant, emotional […] sensual [and] robust” (ibid.). She made her reasons for the choice of these adjectives very clear: “It is, I suppose, a very Australian interpretation […] a very Australian production, accessible to people who love Shakespeare and those who’ve never seen a play” (ibid.). Today most Australians take for granted much of this effusive celebration of multicultural identity, but in late 1975 there was a real- life political struggle taking place between the supporters of the Labor Government’s aim to create a modern, progressive nation and those wishing to preserve conservative values. The intensity of this larger struggle became obvious less than three weeks after the opening of Much Ado, when the government of Prime Minister Whitlam was dismissed by the Governor General. For the moment at least, the conservative forces were triumphant, and their success encouraged a more overt expression of traditionalist, English-based values. The shift in the nation’s mood is perhaps indicated by H.G. Kippax’s review of a revival of the production of Much Ado About Nothing in mid-1977, where he appears to reject the popular performance traditions that had become one of the hallmarks of the new Australian theatre. While acknowledging the delight that the production gave to “many young faces” in the audience, he proceeded to carp about the Italian setting. He objected that it sacrificed the conventional 162 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre attributes of the characters Benedick and Dogberry, who are “as English as Hotspur and Bottom”, and despite the general consensus that the emphatic, extroverted Italian accents aided the comprehensibility of the text, Kippax criticised what he saw as an “organ-grinder accentuation” that “mangles the words of the greatest of all masters of English” (Kippax 1977: 15). Katharine Brisbane found the transformation of the play into Australo-Italian to be more convincing:

The problems involved in trying to find something in common between Shakespeare and the modern Australian are, of course, legion. Aristocracy, in particular, is something that makes us uneasy. We have no sense of natural hierarchy and the intrigues of the nobility would seem pretty remote to our experience of life. That is why the study of Shakespeare so often becomes a duty, an effort of will, instead of an enlightening experience. John Bell’s production of Much Ado About Nothing knocks the stuffing out of such uncomprehending reverence. (Brisbane 1977: 31–2)

The circus in this context is not a euphemism for lightweight or superficial entertainment, but is something that encompasses features like light and darkness, chaos and order. Kevon Kemp’s review of Much Ado observed the use of circus-like cruelty and darkness in the 1975 production:

All Shakespeare’s comedies are touched with a dark edge or so, which is right, for the classic thing of comedy is that it proceeds from chaos to order (just as tragedy proceeds from order to chaos), and lightness has to have some weight of darkness so that the definition of the two poles is clear. (Kemp 1975a: 27)

Bell’s own recollections emphasise the terror underlying the circus that he felt as a child:

I hated the lion tamer and shuddered whenever they started to erect the lion cage inside the ring. I hated the crack of the whip and the heavy thud as the giant cats jumped up on tubs, snarling and swiping their paws and kicking up dust. I trembled again as those manic trapeze artists shimmied up the poles to the highwire […] I even trembled for the jugglers, praying they wouldn’t drop anything. But most of all I feared and hated the clowns – terrifying anarchists with crazy hair and faces, who might at any moment dart out of the ring, haul you into the mayhem and have everyone laugh at you! I always Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 163

hoped for a seat up the back. Still, the word “circus” thrilled me like no other and I couldn’t wait for my next fix of terror. (Bell 2002: 8)

Though the 1975 Much Ado was a turning point which has had an ongoing influence on much Australian direction of Shakespeare and other classic scripts, the use of Italian stereotypes was not the only available technique. A production of Twelfth Night in 1977 (AS 6098), directed by Bell, showed some signs of a maturing Australian style of playing Shakespeare – still anti-traditional, eclectic, emphasising the physical, but with no self-conscious reference to Australia in the look of the production. Again, the setting was Italian, this time an evocation of Venice in a set by Kim Carpenter which suggested a fashionable bathing resort, with a slatted, jetty-like stage. The most unusual feature, described as being “typically Sydney” by playwright Dorothy Hewett, was the casting of a male actor, Russell Kiefel, as Viola, even though Olivia and Maria were played by women (Hewett 1977: 57). Bell’s 1978 production of The Comedy of Errors (AS 6143) maintained, successfully, the technique of carnivalising Shakespeare for Australian audiences. The sleazy and corrupt qualities of Ephesus, where “a man under sentence of death can get a reprieve only if he has the right price on him”, was realised with visual reference to the red- light district of King’s Cross. The set was another gaudy merry-go- round, “with flashing lights and blaring music and barkers and shysters and tarts” (Kippax 1978). The use of references to circus performance is just one of the ways that Bell and others have found to bring Shakespeare out of the cultural china cabinet into a world of knockabout and vulgar life. It allows actors to find a more engaged way of performing highly emotional scripts without the fear of overacting. It gives directors and designers a pre-existing aesthetic to work from which enables a wide spectrum of moods, and it signals to the audience that the experience of watching the play will be not a duty but a pleasure. It works well for comedy, but Bell was interested in seeing how it would work with the tragedies.

Merry and tragical: inverting genres Bell confronted a new challenge toward the end of the 1970s. He had succeeded in using boisterous, irreverent and even outrageous performance techniques in the comedies; but could that exuberance 164 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre work in the tragedies without destroying their impact? There was no problem in introducing elements of seriousness and potential tragedy into the comedies, but would audience laughter destroy a necessary mood of solemnity in tragedy? Could the dangerous extremes of the more serious plays be staged by actors using energised corporeal techniques that corresponded to the wildness of the characters’ emotions? Bell’s 1979 production of Romeo and Juliet (AS 6168) was an attempt to explore the possibilities. The soon-to-be-famous Mel Gibson was cast as Romeo opposite Angela Punch as Juliet, and pre- publicity emphasised “colour, sex and violence, rather than something too lyrical” (Bell quoted in Harris 1979). The first half, up until the death of Mercutio, had the familiar Bell exuberance, taking it in the direction of ribald comedy (Kiernander 2009). The casting of Gibson as Romeo was a significant production choice; the first Lethal Weapon film was still nine years in the future but as an actor he already had many of the qualities that would make him an action hero: rugged good looks and a physical masculinity which reflected a common Australian fantasy of ideal manhood. At the time, Gibson was just a year out of NIDA, and he had finished filming the first Mad Max movie, although it was not released until a month and a half after the opening night of Romeo and Juliet. Indeed the Sydney season of Romeo and Juliet was extended and transferred from the Nimrod’s home base at Belvoir Street to the larger York Theatre at Sydney University’s Seymour Centre a week after Mad Max opened, taking advantage of the sudden popularity of the lead actor. Bell has confirmed that Gibson’s qualities as an aggressive and overtly masculine actor were a factor in casting him in the role of Romeo: “Gibson’s Romeo had his feet on the ground […] he was never effete, daydreamy or off the planet” (Bell 1992b). As late as the 1980s, homophobia was a standard feature of the accepted image of Australian masculinity; this production premiered only a year after the first Sydney Mardi Gras, which at that time was a protest march rather than the celebration it has become, and five years before homosexual acts were decriminalised in New South Wales. Bell and the Nimrod had featured overtly gay characters and issues sympathetically in Jim McNeil’s and Peter Kenna’s plays – A Hard God, Mates and How Does Your Garden Grow? – but in Romeo and Juliet the company backed away from this more sympathetic approach. On the contrary, they sought to dispel any taint of arty Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 165 effeminacy in the male characters in the play. To achieve this, the on- stage action displayed a vigorous, expressive masculinity in all of the male characters, especially in the characterisation of Romeo himself, who can easily come across as too suspiciously sensitive to be reliably masculine. The apparent anxiety about homosexuality was displayed by repeated sex- and gender-based taunts and jokes among the young men, including a moment of mock-sexual rough and tumble between Mercutio (Drew Forsythe) and Benvolio (Michael Smith). Part of Bell’s overall approach was influenced by Zeffirelli’s successful stage production with John Stride and Judi Dench at the Old Vic in 1960. By contrast, it is clear that Zeffirelli’s film in 1968 was not such an influence on Bell’s direction, given its beautiful but extremely daydreamy Romeo, Leonard Whiting, who makes his first appearance holding a flower in his hand. Choosing between a Leonard Whiting and a Mel Gibson to play Romeo obviously has important consequences for the rest of the production. Bell has said that he recalls hearing the observation that in the 1960 stage production Zeffirelli took the English theatre world by surprise by doing the one thing that was most obvious: setting the play in Italy (Bell 1992b). Conventional mainstream productions in Britain paid lip-service to the location in Verona, but the performances, in Bell’s opinion, had remained thoroughly English, with English voices and English physical reserve. They relied on the play’s poetic language rather than its physically exuberant situations. What Bell found exciting in Zeffirelli’s production was a willingness to take the Italian setting into the performances themselves, into the relationships between characters and the presentation of street life, so that the actors did not look and sound like English men and women in fancy-dress but found a more open, extroverted quality in both their speaking of the language and their movement and gesture. Evidence that the conventional British approach was current in Australia is to be found in a full-length (though heavily cut) ABC Television version (SoS 575) directed by Oscar Whitbread. It was broadcast in 1967, the year before Zeffirelli’s film. This is a thoroughly competent but largely unsurprising production featuring Sean Scully as Romeo and Helmut Bakaitis as Paris, which provides Italianate architecture in the sets and traditionally Italian Renaissance costumes; however, despite a promisingly energised street brawl in the opening sequences, the performances quickly settle down into 166 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre something that looks conventionally poetical, reserved and English. The most unexpected feature of the staging comes at the start of the final scene, where Romeo lingers longer than necessary over the body of Paris, with surprising reverence and tenderness, suggesting the homoeroticism that Bell and Gibson wanted to avoid. Zeffirelli’s break with the tradition of combining Italianate sets and English performances is very similar to what Bell carried over into his production at the Nimrod. Bell aimed to make the young males in the play not aristocrats but street kids, bovver boys, using violent and aggressive body language. He went all out to make them a “butch bunch of guys” (Bell 1992b). There was a potential problem here, an ambivalence about the gender status of Italian immigrant men in Australia at the time; on the one hand, they performed a convincing heterosexual masculinity that was ostentatious, assertive and obviously muscular, but at the same time, the new southern-European Australians could be seen as being suspiciously feminised compared with their Anglo equivalents: too emotional, volatile, tactile, flamboyant and conscious of their own physical appearance. In the character of Romeo, Bell wanted to emphasise the masculine aspects of the Italian stereotype while avoiding anything suggestive of femininity or homosexuality as they were seen at the time. Male actors in general were often already dangerously associated with stereotypes of effeminacy, hence the need for a Romeo whose masculinity and heterosexuality were beyond question. Nevertheless, there were aspects of the production that now look potentially homoerotic. The costumes had a flamboyant Italian feel, with the young men wearing leather trousers and open shirts showing well- developed bare chests. The physicality of the production was so marked that Kippax was moved to ask querulously,

Why, among the young men, can nobody speak to anybody without slapping or punching or hugging him? Why is almost every cue to speak a cue to jump about? Why does social life in Verona look like a romp on Bondi beach? (Kippax 1979: 21)

Reviews of the time confirm that the masculine physical energy of Bell’s production was evidence of a new way of performing this Shakespearean tragedy in an Australian context: one review praised the foregrounded Australian vitality of the production which was “certainly not typical of London or New York”, and highlighted the Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 167

“impetuosity and physical agility” of Mel Gibson. The reviewer described the minor roles as having been played with “an exuberance not always polished, but which is never emasculated as many of Shakespeare’s characters seem unfortunately to be in other productions” (T.S. 1979: 11). One influence on this production was a scholarly commentary written by Bell’s former contemporary at Sydney University, Germaine Greer. In an article entitled “Juliet’s Wedding”, Greer had written that the extraordinary feature of this play is that it is, in its structure, not a tragedy.

I believe that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a play written by a master poet, who had very little to learn about the medium of poetry, but who had not yet become a master dramatist. It is not a real tragedy, but it contains true tragic characters. (Greer 1979 quoted in the program to the Nimrod production)

This reading of the play, which gives scholarly credibility to messing around with genre, clearly impressed itself on Bell in his thinking about the production. Greer’s insight that the play does not have a conventional tragic structure allowed Bell to think of the plot not as a doom-laden, star- crossed tragedy, as Zeffirelli had done in his film, but rather as a riotous and ribald, Italian-style comedy right up to the point where Mercutio is accidentally killed – an event which should ideally, according to Bell, come as a shock not only to the characters but also to the audience. It created an opportunity for Gibson, who, as well as resisting any suggestion of the traditionally effete characterisation, has a good comic sense as an actor and was able, according to Bell, to perform some of Romeo’s scenes in the first half as a “dopey teenager”, which was one aspect of the production’s general comic horseplay (Bell 1992b). The interval was delayed until Mercutio’s death, well over halfway through the script, and after that the mood took a more serious turn. This structure opened up a new way of finding and understanding the possibilities for high-energy and often funny entertainment within the tragedies. It may have influenced the NIDA-trained Australian director Baz Luhrmann in his film Romeo + Juliet, which uses almost exactly the same structure. In the turmoil from 1980 to 1985, Bell as a director had very little to do with Shakespeare, though he revived some of the Nimrod’s 168 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre former successes. During the next five years, beginning with his resignation from the Nimrod and ending with the establishment of the BSC in 1990, he directed no Shakespeare at all. The Shakespeare plays that the BSC performed during the first few years were polished and professional but had few Australian references. The BSC’s first attempt, in its fourth season, at something specifically and identifiably Australian was a deliberately brash and vulgar new production of The Taming of the Shrew (AS 24173), directed by Bell in 1994 as if at a Returned and Services League Club, where Kate was presented as an intelligent misfit in a world of materialistic Queensland Gold Coast property developers and their social hangers-on. This was followed by a revival in 1996 of the famous carnivalesque Nimrod production of Much Ado About Nothing (AS 23251), using Australian-Italian accents. These were both well enough received, but the audiences had changed. Confirming the response to the 1983 revival of As You Like It, the local references no longer seemed as striking, original or outrageously exciting as they had in the 1970s.

Kingdoms and republics: the Henriad and the referendum By the late 1990s, the BSC had established itself as financially secure, artistically adventurous, and a significant part of the theatre profession. It was based in Sydney but the productions toured widely around the country. While occasionally alienating the more conservative sections of the audience with their innovations, they had attracted a large and receptive following. One of the Company’s most successful productions, both with critics and in the complexity and sophistication of its intervention in Australian national consciousness, was Henry 4 (AS 24012), Bell’s 1998 conflation of both parts of Henry IV. These plays have a special historical significance in Australia: according to a playbill surviving in the Mitchell Library, Henry IV was played in Australia’s first purpose- built theatre in 1800, and was possibly the first formal production of Shakespeare in the colony. Novelist and playwright David Malouf has commented on what this play, with its not unsympathetic depiction of a criminal underworld, might have meant to an audience made up in large part of current and former convicts (Malouf 1998: 23–4 and 115–16). To the extent that white Australian society is still conscious of, and celebrates, its founding as a convict settlement, this play might Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 169 prove particularly attractive for its theatricalisation of misrule and the anti-establishment behaviour of Falstaff and his associates. The fat knight might be seen as a precursor of the Ocker. Two historical events, important in terms of a national identity, frame Bell’s Henriad. On one side was the 1988 bicentennial of the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia. On the other was the centenary of the Australian Federation in 2001, again potentially prompting interest in the nation’s history. More immediate was an intense public debate leading up to a referendum in late 1999 on the establishment of an Australian republic and the end of formal links with the British monarchy. The pairing of Henry 4 and Henry 5 (AS 24103) can be seen as an intervention in this set of national introspections. Bell points out that he “wanted to bring the plays sharply into focus as a comment on contemporary Britain and examine Australian attitudes to monarchy, war and family” (Bell 2011: 137). Bell’s production turned the usual practices of localising Shakespeare upside down. It paradoxically performed an Australian interpretation of a Shakespeare play for Australian audiences by leaving Australia out of the picture. Instead it presented a picture of Britain as a provincial, tribal, heteroglossic and internally riven collection of disparate parochial societies, exhibiting many of the negative qualities of crudity, boorishness and lack of polish which some English people habitually attribute to Australians (see Kiernander 2001). The set for Bell’s production was old, battered, rough and shabby, but with glimpses of decayed gentility. The central section of the stage was covered in an uneven flagstone pattern. The side areas were scaffolding structures, fenced off with wire netting, forming irregular levels strewn with scrap metal and rusty oil drums. The most prominent piece of furniture was a red leather chesterfield, suggesting places of traditional privilege and influence like gentlemen’s clubs, but in obvious disrepair. In Part One, various theatrical devices were mobilised to peel away the veneer of English superiority. The stiff formality of the first scene, where King Henry IV attempts to impose a sense of responsibility and purpose onto the public face of the realm, was immediately followed by a riotous vision of the Boar’s Head Tavern as a modern London disco, with pulsing, bright red and blue lights, 170 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre raucous music, and people dancing, singing, and drinking ritual- istically. The most immediately identifiable figures were Prince Hal (played by ) and Poins, looking like drunken young London foreign exchange dealers out on a wild Friday night. They wore dishevelled dark suits, ties pulled askew with the top shirt button undone, and shirt-tails hanging out of their trousers. Both the geographical spread of accents used by the actors and the costumes they wore reinforced a view of the British Isles as a chaotically disparate place, making the most of the regional differences which are a strong feature of Shakespeare’s text. The overriding impression of the United Kingdom was of a far-from- united, wrangling gathering of football hooligans. The armies were portrayed as gangs of rioters, wearing football scarves and dressed menacingly in black with knitted beanies. This image was at its most explicit in the battle scenes at the end of Part One: these began with the cast charging onto the stage singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, the theme song of the Liverpool Football Club. They then ritualistically chanted “Percy, Harry Percy” and “You’re goin’ ’ome in a fuckin’ ambulance”, while beating time on the wire fencing and oil drums. They hurled mimed projectiles out in the direction of the audience, and then beat a quick retreat as the opponents fired back. Part Two was much more heavily cut than Part One, in a way that de-emphasised the issue of political insurrection in favour of peacetime riot, corruption, petty criminality and civil disturbance. Almost everything to do with the rebellion of the Archbishop of York and Mowbray was cut, and the sense of an impending civil war became merely a remote backdrop to the action. Instead the production contrasted the two worlds of Westminster and Eastcheap, and their respective leaders, the King and Falstaff, as rival models for the future behaviour of Prince Hal. Structurally, as with Bell’s 1979 Romeo and Juliet, the second part of Henry 4 was played as an exuberant, iconoclastic comedy that suddenly turns serious. It began not with the scripted Prologue by the figure of Rumour, which leads into the armed rebellion, but instead with an energetic music hall-style introduction involving the whole cast, led by Richard Piper, the actor who played King Henry. This was a comic routine where he gave a mock commentary on Shakespeare’s characters as if they were horses running in a race, the Heroes of the Shakespeare Handicap, full of deliberately tasteless and corny gags – Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 171 the commentator’s brother was called Orson Cart, and among the horses supposed to be racing, Gloucester’s Eye was scratched, Othello was a dark horse, Shylock had recently won by a nose, and Damn’d Spot was out. This tampering with the opening transformed the play into popular comedy, to begin with at least, and was followed by a scene (using passages of text from Act 1 scene 2 and Act 2 scene 1) set in holiday mood at a racetrack, where Falstaff was beset by various accusers, including both Mistress Quickly and the Lord Chief Justice. Hal’s move from Eastcheap to Westminster in Part Two carried the image of misrule into the world of the court, when he appeared at his father’s sick-bed wearing his dishevelled suit and holding a half- empty whisky bottle. However, Hal’s realisation that his father was dying and the imminence of the responsibilities of kingship had a literally sobering effect on the character, and his transformation into a coldly rational political strongman was ominous. At the end of the play, with Falstaff and his associates in prison, the production staged the triumph of the court: the Lord Chief Justice and Prince John stood side by side on a blue satin carpet already embroidered with the new royal inscription “HV”, facing directly forward, and spoke about their plans for the new realm and the likelihood of a war against France, to the muffled accompaniment of a rowdy song in the distance. These two stiff, grim and ruthless characters, concluding the play after Hal’s cold rejection of Falstaff, foreshadowed a new kind of brutality to come. The production challenged the perceived superiority of British culture over Australian. Exposing the “volatile, unstable text that is Shakespeare’s ‘Britain’”, the respected scholar Terence Hawkes (Hawkes 1998: 136) writes that it depicted polite British culture during the early Tudor period as a facade, the English ruling class as privileged, inhumane and autocratic, and the people as conflicted and antagonistic groups of brawling, drunkenly violent hooligans and thugs. By focusing on the less attractive aspects of English culture, it worked as an attempt from inside a part of the former empire to provincialise the centre. Hawkes reads the Henry plays as an Elizabethan-era attempt to imagine a new sense of a shared British national unity, both between powerful factions in a divided England, and even more urgently between the English and the often discordant elements within its early imperial expansions – the Welsh, the Irish and later the Scots. Bell’s 172 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

1998 production of Henry 4 put this process into reverse: it was a challenge to the official political rhetoric in Australia at the end of the twentieth century, expressed in the opinions of John Howard, the conservative Prime Minister who had been elected in 1996, who wanted Australians under his leadership to be, above all, “relaxed and comfortable”. The Howard official line was nostalgically anglophile and actively anti-republican. Bell’s production was designed to confront the idea that Britain was, in the late 1990s, a harmonious example of monocultural and monarchist social perfection which was to be emulated by Australia. The sequel to this production, in 1999, was Henry 5 (AS 24103). The two plays formed a matching pair, staged in consecutive seasons and with many of the same actors playing those roles that continue through the first two plays into the third. However, there were major differences in period and style; rather than the decrepit industrial setting of Henry 4, the sequel was situated around 1915 in the midst of a European war, similar to the First World War but with the French as enemies. Where Henry 4 depicted a close tie between British politeness and British hooliganism, Henry 5 used more complex theatrical tactics, based in nostalgia. Bell’s treatment of the issues took the audience back to the most frequently commemorated event in Australian history of the past two hundred years: the First World War, in which white Australia habitually presents itself more as victim than aggressor. It was from this very familiar and emotionally powerful platform that Bell began a confrontation with some powerful forces within our current society. One newspaper article summed it up:

With the Republic high on the political agenda, Bell wanted the play to resonate with Australian audiences by harking back to a time when Australia, as a young post-colonial nation, was asked to round up its sons and fathers to fight the war of another country. (Coslovich 1999: n.p.)

The production achieved this through a complex layering of signification. On the most obvious level the production, like the script, was about a conflict between the English and the French. But as the play progressed, Henry gradually acquired some positive charac- teristics popularly associated with Australians, becoming plain speaking, honest, egalitarian and unpretentious. In contrast, the French Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 173 characters were stigmatised as being stuck in the Old World: pompous, supercilious, ridiculously traditionalist, conservative, and inept in the face of technological innovation. The self-important French characters began to look like a common stereotype of the English, while the English characters morphed into something more like down-to-earth Australians. The association of Henry with a newer and less confident Australia was helped by Joel Edgerton’s nervy, hesitant and tentative portrayal of the young King, without the assured self-satisfaction of Olivier’s performance. The production also chose to underplay any use of the trappings of royalty that might have linked the mythically glorious reign of Henry V with the Australian monarchist cause. There was no throne like that which ends Olivier’s film and begins Kenneth Branagh’s, nor a crown, and Henry was almost always dressed in a plain military uniform. The Australian qualities of the production became more explicit at the start of Act 4. The three disgruntled soldiers whom Henry encounters in the night before the battle were portrayed as diggers, speaking with Australian accents and wearing the immediately recognisable slouch hats of the Australian troops. This was a crucial scene for both the production and the characterisation of Harry, undermining any heroic glamorisation of war. Listening to the sceptical, blunt complaints from the Australian soldiers, he seemed to come under their influence, and to understand for the first time the real human implications of what he was involved in. From this moment, and through the intense soliloquy that immediately follows, he grew in confidence and resolve. The soliloquy gained greatly added significance and dramatic power in this production. As an unromanticised and demystifying meditation on the nature of kingship, and a debunking of the traditionalist ceremony associated with it, it was particularly timely while the bitterly fought debate around the referendum was taking place throughout much of Australian society. It is hard to see the speech as anything other than an emotional contribution to that debate, and one more likely to unsettle monarchist values. In the final scenes of the play, the production turned to confront another area of concern for white Australia: its history of institutionalised racism. This shows up in both its relationship with the Indigenous population and its attitude towards other non-European 174 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre parts of the world. The White Australia policy was legislated in December 1901 with the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act. This blatantly racist policy restricted immigration to people of European ancestry until well after the middle of the twentieth century. The production foregrounded the issue of race by the casting of a dark-skinned actor, Paula Arundell, doubling in the two sympathetic and symbolically important roles of the Boy and Princess Katherine. So-called colour-blind casting has been a feature of many Bell Company productions: Arundell as Hero in Much Ado About Nothing (AS 23251, 1996), Ariel in The Tempest (AS 23290, 1997) and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (AS 7060, 2001); Rachael Maza Long in The Tempest (AS 23290), Leah Purcell as Regan in King Lear (AS 82895, 2010); and as Cordelia in King Lear (AS 24021, 1998). In most mainstream Australian theatre, this is still sufficiently unusual that the mere fact of the casting can become significant even if the production does not draw attention to it. But Henry 5 highlighted it as a meaningful feature of the production. Katherine was not being played by an actor who just happened to be black; with braided hair, a dress made of colourful Kente-influenced fabric, and a gele (head wrap), this Princess of France was a black woman. Paula Arundell is a popular and accomplished actor, and there are many reasons apart from skin colour to warrant her casting. As the Boy, she used her skill as a performer to establish a strong rapport with the audience, whom she addressed directly on several occasions. The character was casually and callously murdered on stage by the French forces at the beginning of Act 4 scene 5, with the body remaining on the stage until after the end of Act 4 scene 6, thus providing a rationale, if not a justification, for Henry’s notorious order to kill the enemy prisoners. Arundell carried over the same rapport with the audience into her portrayal of Princess Katherine as a strong, humorous and intelligent woman. Her first scene, Act 3 scene 4, despite being performed in French, had the audience responding with enthusiastic and sympathetic laughter. Her second scene, the wooing by Henry in Act 5 scene 2, took the form of a complex game for willing participants, where both players came to realise that, surprisingly, their duties and their desires might actually coincide. The marriage was a political necessity whether they liked it or not, and their Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 175 acceptance of the inevitable developed into mutual respect and the prospect of pleasure. Their kiss was the resolution, in the world of the play, of a complex set of asymmetrical relationships evoked by a white Australian actor playing a king of England and a dark-skinned Australian actor playing an African-French princess. It was the image used in newspaper advertisements for the production, and it highlighted a widespread, but as yet unfulfilled, desire for racial harmony, the rejection of a racist past, and a desire to move towards a meaningful reconciliation between white and non-white Australia. It would be possible to read this scene more negatively, seeing the political marriage of Henry and Katherine as a thinly disguised rape. This is how the Olivier version looks, with Renee Asherson as a petrified Katherine being forced into submission by an all-conquering Henry (Olivier 1944). Such a reading might dismiss Bell’s production as naive or even duplicitous in the positive gloss that it put on this moment. Unsympathetic dominance by European Australians, after all, is a fair summary of the relationship between white and non-white Australia over the past two hundred years, and one onstage kiss does not go very far towards achieving reconciliation. But the sight of these two characters kissing, and then dancing together romantically to soft music, does not have to be seen as a naive suggestion that resolution is easy, nor that it has already been achieved. Australia does not yet have a coherent national response to institutionalised racism, and many politicians refuse to acknowledge that such pervasive racism exists. Nor are there many credible solutions to the effects of dispossession on Indigenous peoples. Rather, Bell’s production needs to be understood as a hopeful premonition of a possible future which Australia has so far come nowhere near achieving, whose final form cannot yet even be imagined, but towards which we must continue to aspire. This more positive reading was reinforced by the mise-en- scène; as Henry and Katherine embraced and started dancing, the rest of the cast joined in the dance, but gently, quietly, far upstage, each actor dancing by him- or herself alone, holding an imaginary, absent partner. There is no way of measuring how much influence one or two productions of plays by Shakespeare, or even a full-time Shakespeare company, might have in such situations. One hopeful possibility is that these works, performed in the extensive public forum that the Bell Company has built up through tours of major cities and many smaller 176 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre towns, will play their part in a better-informed social discussion that identifies, explores, disseminates and analyses important issues. Henry 5 was created in the heat of the national debate about whether Australia should sever ties with the monarchy, leading up to a national referendum in November 1999, and the production finished its national tour only a week before the referendum took place. Bell was a high-profile advocate in favour of an end to the Australian monarchy. He was quoted publicly linking features of the production of Henry 5 to “Australia’s position as a post-colonial nation on the exciting verge of becoming a republic” (‘Bell Enlists King Henry’ 1999: n.p.). His name is widely known and respected, and his values and beliefs are influential. However, it could be argued that the productions did damage to the republican cause, at least in the short term. The referendum was decisively lost, and the scale of the defeat was partly attributable to a negative campaign that counter-intuitively but convincingly stigmatised the republican side as elitist and represented monarchists as ordinary people. In this context, having Shakespeare used to promote the republican cause might have reinforced some perceptions that the opponents of the monarchy were indeed an intellectual and cultural elite. There might be some truth in this reading, but even so, it is unlikely. The BSC has worked to popularise Shakespeare’s plays and tries to overcome the taint of elitism by the use of old forms of popular entertainment as well as innovative approaches to performance. It has brought a demonstration of Shakespeare’s popular appeal to both adults and school children across most of Australia.

Chapter Five: Australian Shakespeares 177

John Bell as Falstaff in Henry 4, Sydney Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare Company, 2013. Photographer: Lisa Tomasetti ©. Reproduced with permission.

178 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Andrew Tighe as the farmhand, Cate Blanchett as Sonya, Richard Roxburgh as Vanya and John Bell as Serebryakov, in Uncle Vanya, Bell Shakespeare Company and Sydney Theatre Company, 2010. Photographer: Lisa Tomasetti ©. Reproduced with permission.

Epilogue

Australian Shakespeare in the new millennium Barrie Kosky, who directed the BSC’s radical production of King Lear in 1998 (AS 24021), commented in an address to a Shakespeare Youth Festival in Sydney on the need for the plays of Shakespeare to connect with the audiences for whom they are performed. He claimed in his typically provocative manner that “most – virtually every – Australian production of Shakespeare is a failure […] because the connection between the audience and the performers is simply not strong enough […] You cannot separate a Shakespeare play in performance from the cultural and historical world of the audience” (Kosky cited in Burke 1999: 11). But according to these criteria, many Australian productions of Shakespeare (especially by the Bell Company, including Kosky’s own King Lear) should be regarded as successful because they have made very direct links with the changing cultural and historical worlds of their audiences, and have in some way connected recognisably with the lives and concerns of people living in Australia. In the same speech, Kosky deplored the lack of a Shakespearean tradition in Australia, “along with an unwillingness or timidness to stand up and ‘own’ the Shakespearean text”. This observation overlooks the substantial number of productions of the plays, both in conventional theatres, unusual venues, and out-of-doors in parks and by the sea, often staged in ways that successfully make the texts more familiar to modern Australian audiences. Beyond the Bell Company, many prominent directors working in the mainstream in the last decades of the twentieth century have tried to give Shakespeare a local habitation, most prolifically Simon Phillips, who has directed a number of the plays in strikingly original productions for most of the companies. These include a dark As You Like It with the ambience of a jazz club, for the Melbourne Theatre Company (AS 572, 1988); Julius Caesar set in the world of modern corporate high finance, performed in Melbourne (AS 27900, 1996) 180 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre and Brisbane (AS 31722, 1997); and a witty Comedy of Errors for the MTC (AS 11773, 1997) with a design inspired by the paintings of René Magritte, to highlight the illogical, surreal and disorienting qualities of the script. Phillips also directed a production of The Tempest (AS 22973, 1999) for the Queensland Theatre Company, with late eighteenth-century costumes which made visual reference to the arrival of Europeans in New South Wales in 1788. The quest for an identifiably Australian theatre has been to a large extent achieved. New Australian playwrights no longer seem like strange prodigies, and any traces of a cultural cringe in theatre should have been erased by the spectacular international success of Australian actors in cinema, television and on stage, especially in the United States – something that would have been considered highly improbable when Bell was starting his career – and by the enthusiastic reception given to Australian productions when they tour to venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the United States, or to London’s West End. Bell’s own work is part of this success. In 2004, he directed a clever and colourful production of The Comedy of Errors (AS 62766), set in a carnivalesque Middle Eastern marketplace with bright lights, brash music and gaudy costumes. It featured a stage conjuror who set the tone of showmanship, confusion, deception and trickery with an extended magic routine on stage at the start of the show as the audience entered. This production toured to England in 2006, performing to acclaim at the Bath Festival and the Grand Theatre in Blackpool. Bell still creates productions which suggest new takes on Australian national identity. In 2009, he directed a production of Pericles (AS 81219) with the participation of TaikOz, a popular Australian percussion ensemble who have trained in Japan and developed their version of taiko drumming. For the first half of this adventurous production, the TaikOz drummers sat on the stage and accompanied the action throughout. This is not revolutionary – many other directors including Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine routinely put musicians on the stage alongside the actors – but it strongly emphasised a developing Australian interest in Asia and in Asian cultural performance forms. TaikOz have their own devoted local audience, and the performances generated enthusiastic reactions from packed houses. The music harmonised with a Japanese-tinged Epilogue 181 aesthetic to the overall design of sets and costumes, and also elicited a slightly stylised form of movement from the actors. There were, perhaps correctly, criticisms that the result was an Orientalist appropriation of Asian cultural forms. This charge is impossible to rebut, except to point out that the dedication of the TaikOz drummers to understanding the foundations of their music should free them from any accusation of cultural insensitivity. Rather than mimicking the cultural property of Japan, they have developed their own version of taiko drumming which respects the Japanese origin.

Our aim is not to simply transplant one culture’s music into another’s, but to allow a new form of music to grow upon a sure foundation of understanding and application of Wadaiko technique and spirit. From this basis TaikOz has developed its own sound by drawing upon the input of its members, whose musical backgrounds range from years of study and performance in Japanese traditional music, [to] symphonic music, jazz and pop […] Through the collective power of these diverse, but sympathetic, creative spirits, TaikOz has been able to forge a style all its own. (TaikOz website)

In the same way, it can be argued that the actors were developing their own adaptation of a Japanese-influenced acting style in order to suggest a fictitious and exotic world in which a very strange sequence of events – the life of Pericles – can plausibly play out. There was no obvious disrespect for Japanese cultural traditions on the stage, but rather a tentative and curiosity-driven exploration of the performance styles of another civilisation in order to produce something new, with elements of both cultures combining to create a fictitious world, unfamiliar but appropriate to the performance of a fantasy play. The fact that the TaikOz accompaniment faded out after the interval suggested that it might take a longer rehearsal period to make the fusion work thoroughly. Despite this, the experiment to integrate Asian-influenced music and Australian Shakespeare was encouraging, and worthy of further experiment. A significant production in 2010 of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (AS 84133) – a Bell Shakespeare co-production with the STC – forms a neat coda to these theatrical depictions of Australia. In this case the playwright was Russian, and the play is one of his most difficult. The director, Tamás Ascher, is Hungarian, as are the set and costume designers, Zsolt Khell and Gyorgyi Szakacs. It was premiered in 182 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Sydney, to great acclaim from critics, and tickets were sold out weeks before the play opened. One review in particular gives evidence of the persistence, even in the production of a Chekhov play, of the desire for theatre to be in some way local: Jason Blake, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, describes the beginning of the play as if the rural Russia that is nominally the setting could be Australia:

The persistent buzz of blowflies. Clothes clinging to your skin. Sweat continually raked back through your hair. The Hungarian director Tamás Ascher’s staging of Chekhov’s tragicomedy conjures up an oppressive stickiness that Sydneysiders will instantly appreciate. (Blake 2010)

But the more important Australian features of the production were subtler. The actors, all Australian, created characters who were as physically clumsy as they were emotionally inept. It was as if the search for a high-risk Australian approach to acting, led by Bell and others, blended with the ongoing legacy of Keith Bain’s movement teaching, had helped the actors to discover an almost clownish, physical way of acting Chekhov. The production toured to Washington DC in 2011 at the Kennedy Center, and to New York in 2012 at the Lincoln Center, with astonished critics heaping praise on it. In a stunned review of the Washington season in the New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote, “I consider the three hours I spent on Saturday night watching [the characters in Uncle Vanya] complain about how bored they are among the happiest of my theatergoing life” (Brantley 2011). When he saw it again the next year in New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, he said that it “delivered what may be the most profoundly physical, and physically profound, interpretation ever of this 1897 play, which Chekhov disarmingly subtitled ‘scenes from provincial life’” (Brantley 2012). Had he been aware of the discourses around the work of these actors from the 1960s onward, Brantley might well have added that the physically articulate performances which took him so much by surprise were very Australian. Many of the actors in Uncle Vanya have achieved international fame: they include Cate Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh, Jacki Weaver, Hugo Weaving and John Bell. It would be hard to find another live theatre production in the world with so many actors of their experience, talent and international stature – and their willingness to Epilogue 183 take risks. It is a happy culmination to more than fifty years’ search for discernable Australian approaches to acting. The Australian qualities in Uncle Vanya were part of a tradition of physical performance, at times bordering on clowning, that is associated with NIDA, the Nimrod Theatre and the BSC. Otherwise, though, there was little that overtly identified the play as being specifically Australian. Except one tiny touch: Bell, playing the cantankerous Professor Serebryakov, appeared in several scenes wearing a beret which was not part of his original costume design. He chose to wear it as a reference, or a tribute, or perhaps a wink, to Australia’s most celebrated theatrical curmudgeon, the playwright and novelist Patrick White. In May 2013, Bell performed, for the first time in his career, the role of Falstaff in a new conflation of both parts of Henry IV which he co-directed with Damien Ryan. John McCallum’s review in The Australian calls this “one of the best performances of his long and distinguished career” (McCallum 2013: 12). This production was very different from the version that he had directed in 1998: this new production highlighted not just the familiar story of Prince Hal (Matthew Moore) growing from thug to king, but also the opposite journey for Falstaff, from entertaining companion to corrupt, self-interested and dangerous liar and cheat. Playing both parts of Henry IV together gives the characters of Prince Hal, Falstaff and – to a lesser extent – King Henry (David Whitney) a clear and logical set of through-lines and end-points. In the case of Falstaff, Bell began as the familiar jovial braggart when he defended his lying account of the Gadd’s Hill robbery. The production was in modern dress, and one of the wittiest moments was the hilarity of the denizens of the Eastcheap tavern as they huddled over Hal’s smartphone to see video of what really happened during the robbery, while Falstaff tried desperately to lie his way out of the situation in the face of photographic evidence. Bell’s big moments as an actor changed from this more-or-less harmless bravado to obvious disloyalty to Hal when he takes public credit for the killing of Hotspur; believing Falstaff’s version of events, King Henry angrily stripped Hal of a medal for valour that he had just awarded and slapped it on Falstaff’s chest instead. The father–son relationship that had been improving through much of the first half went back to square one. 184 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

In the second half, Falstaff demonstrated increasingly blatant – and decreasingly amusing – corruption in both his recruiting of potential soldiers for a war in which most of them are likely to be killed, and in the fraudulent promises that he makes to his associates and creditors about the rewards that will flow his way, and then trickle down to them, when Hal becomes King. The trajectory and end-point of Falstaff’s journey are clear in Bell’s performance, and the character ultimately evokes little sympathy. The legend becomes human – and ordinary. Bell’s portrayal could not have been more timely. While the production was performing in Sydney and then touring around Australia, a New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) inquiry was hearing in public the evidence of massive corruption by high-profile politicians and lobbyists in and around the State Parliament. The parallels between Falstaff’s increasingly overt corrupt behaviour and that of some of the influential power brokers in and around the New South Wales Government made his corruption more significant, more immediate and more distasteful. During the course of his career, Bell has explored both how Australian theatre can intervene in ongoing debates about the nature of the nation, and reciprocally how the influence of ever-changing Australian life and culture can reinvigorate the practice of theatre. He has championed the work of new Australian playwrights, and has performed in and directed plays from distant times and places in such a way as to highlight parallels and intersections with the experience of their audiences. At times, this concern has resulted in a relatively superficial updating and localising of settings for classic plays, which allow audiences in Australia to see and hear themselves on the stage, up there with Shakespeare, and consequently to feel a connectedness with a long history of European civilisation using the most respected works of world theatre as a vehicle. Sometimes the local references have been more complex, using classic plays to reveal new insights into the changing nature of Australia, as in the use in Much Ado About Nothing of Leichhardt-type or grocer-style Italian accents to highlight the changes that post-war migration was making to the faces, voices and bodies of Australian society. This unleashed a much more energised and physical approach to characterisation, and allowed the Epilogue 185 actors to behave in a more volatile and emotionally expressive way than was customary when performing high-art classic drama. In some cases, the Australianness was less visible – located more in the style of the production, or, as in Bell’s performance as Cyrano, conveyed in the panache of the characterisation. Bell’s high energy and flamboyance while downplaying the Romantic aspects of the play were both features singled out as being Australian. As the Australian fascination with the anti-establishment larrikin stereotype waned, Bell refocused, looking at plays that were much more obviously international in their outlook but which nevertheless had some features that might appeal especially to Australians. Other approaches used by Bell to forge a new Shakespeare directly relevant to Australian politics include the 1998 Henry 4 season where Shakespeare was used to provide a familiar but unfavourable portrayal of the British ‘Old World’ at a time when Australia was positioning itself for a possible break with that world by cutting links with the British monarchy. Here any focus on Australia itself was only implied. The 1999 Henry 5 took a more conciliatory approach, humanising the young King by giving him some familiar Australian qualities as the play developed. Productions of Shakespeare’s plays on Australian stages have varied in their approach and their quality, but theatre history bears witness to the numbers of Australian theatre practitioners – amateur and professional; school-age, university student and adult; imported and home-grown – who during the past two hundred years have, with enthusiasm and tenacity, claimed and appropriated Shakespeare for themselves and their audiences; who have not treated the plays as sacred symbols of imperial prestige and power to be handled with reverence and anxiety, but have created out of them familiar stories using their own, often knockabout, performance traditions, many dating back to the nineteenth century. They have become an important reference point in Australia’s culture wars. They have contributed to the successful careers of Australian actors, directors and designers, both at home and overseas, dating back to George Rignold, Oscar Asche, Allan Wilkie, John Alden, Leo McKern, Judith Anderson and Robert Helpmann. It is from them that productions and performances as richly diverse as the Kosky–Bell King Lear, Mel Gibson’s Hamlet and Simon Phillips’ Comedy of Errors have arisen and achieved national and sometimes international acclaim. 186 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

For the moment at least, the aggressive exploration of nationalism has retreated and is a lesser part of what Australian playwrights create and audiences want. The nationalist obsession will revive, but it will be different. It has already become blurred. Australian theatre has changed radically in ways that few people would have predicted, with a surprisingly large number of Australian actors playing leading roles in Hollywood films and in American television series. The presence of these actors in a live theatre production no longer signals that their characters will automatically be seen in any way to represent or critique Australianness – a particularly interesting phenomenon in the case of Geoffrey Rush, who in 2012 was Australian of the Year. We may, and do, celebrate the international success of Australian actors, and we bask in their reflected glory, but it is doubtful that much of their work at home or abroad is informed by any conscious overarching concern about Australia. The Nimrod Theatre and the Bell Shakespeare Company have used the preoccupation with national identity as an important criterion for selecting plays to perform, for deciding on how each play is to look and sound, for structuring them into meaningful seasons, and for exploring their ways of intersecting with the lives of audience members. In the past, this has provided a sense of coherence, a feeling that individual plays have their own contributions to make to a larger issue, and a sense that innovation in the theatre is driven by the need to see ourselves from a variety of unfamiliar points of view. When individual productions link together to provide something that is greater than the sum of its parts, each play should find its role and seem, somehow, to fit. The challenge for Australian theatre practitioners is to keep finding fresh and appropriate ways to respond to and transform theatre traditions. It is to identify, debate and explore issues that are important, and to forge meaningful connections between the plays in performance, the theatre practitioners who stage them, the critics and scholars, their political and social contexts, and of course the extensive audience in the third century of Western theatre in Australia.

Appendix: Table of Productions

Title AusStage ID Year Stage on Screen ID All the World’s a 1964 Stage Anatomy Titus Fall 75052 2008 of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary Antony and 7060 2001 Cleopatra As You Like It 5610 1971 As You Like It 11910 1983 As You Like It 572 1988 Bacchoi, The 6035 1974 898 Big River 1613 1989 1665; 1666; 1701; 1716; 1721; 1741; 3087 Biggles 5995 1970 Boiling Frog, The 93522 1984 Boy’s Own McBeth 66473 1979 By Royal 1964 Command Caucasian Chalk 21288 1979 Circle, The Celluloid Heroes 6204 1980 Cheery Soul, A 30466 1979 3266 Cherry Orchard, 5512 1963 The Chocolate Frog, 19615 1971 The 188 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Chocolate Frog, 14414 1972 The Chocolate Frog, 6025 1973 The Christian Brothers, 6075 1975 981, 1006, The 3384, 3395 Club, The 5885 1977 Club, The 6102 1977 Club, The 5937 1978 Comedy of Errors, 6143 1978 The Comedy of Errors, 11966 1990 The Comedy of Errors, 11773 1997 The Comedy of Errors, 62766 2004 The Coriolanus 1961 Coriolanus 28877 1996 Cyrano de 29710 1980 Bergerac Devil’s Disciple, 21279 1979 The Dinkum Assorted 603 1988 Don’s Party 65989 1971 Don’s Party 14443 1972 Elocution of 6046 1976 Benjamin Franklin, The Emerald City 227 1987 1575 Flash Jim Vaux 5996 1971 Godspell 14410 1971 Government 5619 1971 1867 Inspector, The Hair 14903 1969 Hamlet 5501 1963 Hamlet 6024 1973 924

Appendix: Table of Productions 189

Hamlet [ABC TV 1974 924 broadcast] Hamlet 13373 1991 Hamlet 15279 1992 Hamlet 18844 1993 Hamlet on Ice 5997 1971 Handful of 6041 1976 Friends, A Hard God, A 66499 1973 Henry IV 5958 1978 Henry 4 24012 1998 Henry 4 104685 2013 Henry V 31423 1964 323 Henry 5 24103 1999 How Could You 5631 1972 761; 817 Believe Me When I Said I’d Be Your Valet When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life How Does Your 6029 1974 1331 Garden Grow? Inner Voices 6082 1977 Jesus Christ 16687 1972 Superstar Julius Caesar 14328 1991 Julius Caesar 27900 1996 Julius Caesar 31722 1997 Kabul 5643 1973 Kaspar 6022 1973 King Lear 14211 1971 King Lear 11922 1984 King Lear 24021 1998 2828; 2840; 2866 King Lear 82895 2010 Lady of the 1979 Camellias, The

190 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Last Day in 6232 1981 Woolloomooloo Last Supper Show, 6019 1972 The Legend of King 28133 1970 648; 649; 720; O’Malley, The 1516; 2964 Listen Closely 13932 1972 Long Day’s 13114 1979 Journey into Night Long Day’s 79460 1999 Journey into Night Lost Echo, Part 1, 68260 2006 The Lost Echo Part 2, 68261 2006 The Loves Labour’s 19252 1972 Lost Loves Labour’s 5668 1974 Lost Macbeth 6006 1971 Macbeth 29940 1982 1327 Macbeth 24517 1994 Mad, Bad and 6067 1976 Dangerous to Know Manning Clark’s 417 1988 1492 History of Australia – The Musical Mates 6056 1975 Measure for 6007 1972 Measure Measure for 66074 2005 Measure Merchant of 13374 1991 Venice, The Merchant of 15276 1992 Venice, The Appendix: Table of Productions 191

Midsummer 22964 1970 650 Night’s Dream, A Much Ado About 6053 1975 Nothing Much Ado About 23251 1996 Nothing Oedipus the King 83318 1970 668; 669 Pericles 89219 2009 President Wilson 6027 1973 in Paris Real Thing, The 67082 1985 Removalists, The 69878 1971 799 Removalists, The 5993 1971 Resistible Rise of 18414 1971 711; 807 Arturo Ui, The Resistible Rise of [ABC TV 1972 807 Arturo Ui, The broadcast] Resistible Rise of 11953 1985 Arturo Ui, The Richard III 6054 1975 Richard III 15271 1992 Richard III 22148 2002 Romeo and Juliet [ABC TV 1967 575 broadcast] Romeo and Juliet 6168 1979 Romeo and Juliet 6169 1979 Scepter’d Isle, This 32434 1962 Sea, The 6173 1979 Seagull, The 6037 1974 Shadowlands 15414 1991 1910 Slaughter of St 69951 1959 Teresa’s Day Soldier’s Tale, The 1964 Stretch of the 12311 1972 Imagination, A Taming of the [ABC TV 1962 248 Shrew, The broadcast]

192 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Taming of the 5629 1972 806 Shrew, The Taming of the [ABC TV 1973 806 Shrew, The broadcast] Taming of the 92396 1986 Shrew, The Taming of the 24173 1994 Shrew, The Tempest, The 14598 1973 Tempest, The 12063 1990 Tempest, The 27534 1995 Tempest, The 23290 1997 Tempest, The 69380 2006 Terror Australis 23152 1968 Three Sisters 6239 1981 Tis a Pity She’s a 71580 1961 Whore Travelling North 6153 1979 Troilus and 24292 2000 Cressida Twelfth Night 71500 1960 Twelfth Night 24731 1995 2384 Twelfth Night 6098 1977 Uncle Vanya 11907 1983 Uncle Vanya 84133 2010 Variations 6264 1982 Venetian Twins, 6172 1979 1265 The Volpone 6201 1980 What If You Died 5654 1973 Tomorrow? White with Wire 88957 1970 Wheels Winter’s Tale, The 87166 1924 Women of Troy, 74682 2008 The

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—— 1983. Last Day in Woolloomooloo. Sydney: Alternative Publishing Co-operative in association with Nimrod Theatre Press. —— 1989. Flash Jim Vaux. Montmorency, Vic.: Yackandanda. —— 1992. ‘Interview with Adrian Kiernander’ (13 November 1992). Blake, Jason. 2010. ‘From Russia with Love: Cast Brings Chekhov Home’ in Sydney Morning Herald (15 November 2010): n.p. On line at: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/from-russia-with-love--cast- brings-chekhov-home-20101114-17sls.html. Boddy, Michael and Robert Ellis. 1979. The Legend of King O’Malley. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Boddy, Michael, Ron Blair and Marcus Cooney. [1970]. Biggles. Unpublished photocopy in Australian Defence Force Academy Library. Bollen, Jonathan, Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr. 2008. Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bond, Edward. 1973. The Sea: A Comedy. London: Eyre Methuen. Bond, Grahame and Jim Burnett. 1980. Boy’s Own McBeth. Sydney: Currency Press. Brantley, Ben. 2011. ‘Chekhov’s Slugfest, with Pratfalls’ [review on performance of Uncle Vanya] in New York Times (7 August 2011): n.p. On line at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/theater/reviews/chekhovs-slugfest-with- pratfalls.html. —— 2012. ‘Love Loses Its Balance at This Dacha’ [review on performance of Uncle Vanya] in New York Times (22 July 2012): n.p. On line at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/theater/reviews/uncle-vanya-with-cate- blanchett-at-city-center.html?_r=0. Brek [H.G. Kippax]. 1963. ‘Hamlet Without Tears’ in Nation (15 June 1963): 16. Brisbane, Katharine. 1970a. ‘O’Malley, the Larrikin Hero’ in The Australian (20 June 1970). Republished in Brisbane (2005): 133–6. —— 1970b. ‘A Sharper O’Malley’ in The Australian (15 August 1970): 16. —— 1970c. ‘Guthrie’s Oedipus: Shedding the Temporal’ in The Australian (29 August 1970). Republished in Brisbane (2005): 143–5. —— 1970d. ‘The Invincibility of Major Biggles’ in The Australian (12 December 1970). Republished in Brisbane (2005): 149–51. —— 1971. ‘John Bell’s Arturo Ui: Today America, Tomorrow the World’ in The Australian (15 May 1971). Republished in Brisbane (2005): 171–3. —— 1972. ‘Was Shakespeare a Male Chauvinist Pig?’ in The Australian (1 April 1972): 12. —— 1977. ‘[Review on performance of Much Ado About Nothing]’ in Theatre Australia (August): 31–2. —— 1979. ‘Venture into the Deep’ in The Australian (11 May 1979): 8. —— 1980. ‘Cyrano Lives Up to the Occasion’ in The Australian (28 July 1980): 8. —— 1981. ‘Theatre of Panache’ [review on performance of Cyrano de Bergerac] in National Times (29 November – 5 December 1981): 47. —— 1995a. ‘The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin’ in Parsons and Chance (1995): 202–3. —— 1995b. ‘Sydney Theatre Company’, in Parsons and Chance (1995): 572–3. —— 2005. Not Wrong – Just Different. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press. Brisbane, Katharine (ed.). 1999. Plays of the 70s, Volume 2. Sydney: Currency Press. Bibliography 195

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Index

Page numbers given in italic refer to image captions.

ABC (Australian Broadcasting Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust Corporation) 17, 19, 28, 41, 50, (AETT) 27, 37, 46, 47, 48, 50 55, 58, 61, 65, 96, 102, 103, 113, Australian Performing Group (APG) 151, 154, 165 116, 122, 132 Abu Ghraib 91 Adelaide Festival 47, 71 Bacchoi, The 68, 117, 137 Afghanistan 111 Bain, Keith 23, 130, 182 Alden, John 19, 185 Bakaitis, Helmut 165 Alexander, Robert 90 Bakhtin, Mikhail 125, 126, 157 All the World’s a Stage 50 Banvard, Fifi 37 alternative theatre 21, 53, 138, 140, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (film) 141, 142 96, 139 Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome: A Bartine, Harry 157 Shakespeare Commentary 89, 90; Bastard Country, The 37 Bell as 90, 91, 144, 148 Bath Festival 180 Anderson, Judith 185 Baxter, Philip 37 Andrews, John 34 Beckett, Samuel 42, 118 Anouilh, Jean 154 Beggar’s Opera, The 107 Antipodes, The 19, 155, 156, 158 Bell, Hilary 51 ANZAC 39 Bell, Lucy 51 Arden, John 21 Belvoir Street Theatre 54, 55, 68, 79, Armfield, Neil 76, 77, 82, 136, 142, 82, 118, 123–4, 131, 133, 136, 142, 143, 145 143, 145, 159, 164 Aronson, Linda 38 Beresford, Bruce 43, 139 Arrighi, Luciana 74 Berkoff, Stephen 145 Artaud, Antonin 73 Bertram, Paul 76 Arundell, Paula 174 Big River 82 As You Like It 151, 158, 168, 179 Biggles 23, 105, 106, 107, 108, 140 Asche, Oscar 185 Blair, Ron 37, 42, 71, 105, 107, 111, Ascher, Tamás 181, 182 112, 116, 120, 121, 122, 124, 129 Asherson, Renee 175 Blake, Jason 182 Australia Council 80, 138, 142 Blanchett, Cate 23, 178, 182 Australian accents and classic theatre Bobby Le Brun Circus 50 24, 25, 26, 34, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, Boddy, Michael 23, 37, 53, 96, 97, 98, 75, 105, 130, 145, 150, 154, 159, 102, 105, 106, 116, 159 160, 162, 168, 170, 173, 184 Bogdanov, Michael 145 204 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Boiling Frog, The 38 circus 30, 48, 49, 50, 89, 99, 157, 158, Bond, Edward 21, 71 159, 160, 162, 163 Bond, Grahame 157 Circus Oz 157 Boy’s Own McBeth 157 Clark, John 51, 95, 111, 130 Brady, Ian 154 Clark, Manning 81, 131, 132 Brantley, Ben 182 Clarke, Terence 107, 129, 130 Brecht, Berthold 28, 42, 55, 56, 57, 58, Clinton, Bill and Hilary 85 71, 116, 119, 130 Club, The 124, 127, 128 Brek see Kippax, H.G. Coburn, Anthony J. 37 Brisbane, Katharine 35, 38, 57–8, 71, Coleman, Richard 73, 75, 76 72, 74, 75, 97, 98, 100, 101, 104, Collins, Marnie 60 106, 120, 124, 130, 150, 160, 161, Colman, Charles 107 162 colour-blind casting 145, 174 Brissenden, Alan 20 Comédie Française 21 Bristol Old Vic Drama School 50 Comedy of Errors, The 130, 163, 180, British Council 50 185 Brome, Richard 155, 156, 158 Company B 82, 118, 136 Brook, Peter 21, 25, 27, 73, 105, 110, Congreve, William 50 180 Constantino, Romola 71, 130, 140 Brown, Tom 27, 32, 37, 45, 46, 47, 83, Coombs, H.C. (Nugget) 37 158 Coriolanus, Bell as 42, 43, 144, 145 Brumby Innes 36 Coslovich, Gabriella 172 Bullen’s Circus 48 Cottrell, Richard 80 Bulletin, The (news magazine) 69, 99, Covell, Roger 43, 45, 46, 48, 49 104, 118, 121 Cramphorn, Rex 58, 60, 129, 151 Burke, Kelly 179 Cremorne Theatre, Queensland Burnett, Jim 157 Performing Arts Centre 89 Burns, Mona 50 Cronulla riot 39 Burstall, Betty 37 Cullen, Max 83, 111, 119 Burton, Richard 45 Currency Lass, The, or My Native Girl Buzo, Alex 136 36, 40 By Royal Command 50 Currency Press 38, 115, 135 Byron, Lord George 71, 124 Curtiss, Susan 126 Cyrano de Bergerac, Bell as 72–6, Carpenter, Kim 77, 142, 163 142, 185 Carroll, Peter 74, 122, 123 Caucasian Chalk Circle, The 130 Daddo, Cameron 82 Celluloid Heroes 129 Daily Mirror (newspaper) 46 Chapel Perilous, The 36 Davis, Judy 23, 79 Chater, Gordon 122, 124 Davis, Natalie Zemon 125 Cheery Soul, A 129 Dawn, Gloria 38, 113, 116, 159 Chekhov, Anton 26, 44, 68, 77, 79, Dench, Judi 165 178, 181, 182 Devil’s Disciple, The 129 Cherry Orchard, The 44, 50 Diamond, Dick 36 Chinchilla 74 Digby, Desmond 32, 46 Chkhikvadze, Ramaz 20 Dignam, Arthur 43, 59, 61 Chocolate Frog, The 118 Dinkum Assorted 38 Christian Brothers, The 121, 122, 124 dismissal 68, 70, 139 Index 205

Don’s Party 37, 111, 116, 128, 139 Ford, John 43 Drake, Mervyn 153 Forsythe, Drew 24, 61, 70, 82, 130, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House 131, 165 50, 74, 129, 140 Fotheringham, Richard 22, 121 Duggan, Gerry 116 Fox, Louise 94 Dumas (fils), Alexandre 129 Fraser, Malcolm 70, 71 Dunstone, Bill 157 Fraser, Vivian 54, 68, 143 Dutton, Geoffrey 49 Gadd, Jeremy 111 Eastwood, Larry 54, 160 Gaden, John 43, 61, 104 Eccles, Jeremy 145 Gallacher, Frank 116 Eckland, Kay 116 Gaskill, William 141 École Jacques Lecoq 104 Gay, John 107 Edgerton, Joel 170, 173 General Motors-Holden National Edgley, Eric 48 Playwrights’ Competition 112 Eliott, Tim 77 Genesian Theatre 43 Elizabethan Theatre 112 Genet, Jean 118 Ellis, Bob 23, 37, 53, 96, 98, 99, 105, Genie 126 106, 107, 159 Geoghegan, Edward 36, 40 Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, The George Devine Award 110 122, 124 Gibson, Mel 23, 74, 164, 165, 166, Emerald City 81 167, 185 Empty Space, The 25, 110 Gielgud, John 21, 26, 66 English Stage Company 21 Gilbert, Helen 149 English, Jon 82 Gilbert, Tony 144 Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, The (Jeder Godspell 117 für sich und Gott gegen alle) 126 Gogol, Nikolai 55, 58 Enright, Nick 24, 129, 130 Goldoni, Carlo 24, 130, 159 Esslin, Martin 119 Gorton, John 138 Euripides 117 Gosman, Keith 146 Evans, Edith 21 Government Inspector, The 55, 58 Everage, Edna 41, 139 Governor of Harfleur in Henry V 50 Ewing, Jon 121 Gow, Michael 18, 89, 91 Grand Theatre, Blackpool 180 Falk, Ronald 104, 105 Greer, Germaine 43, 167 Falstaff 169, 170, 171; Bell as 91, Grotowski, Jerzy 25, 138 144, 177, 183, 184 Guantanamo Bay 91 Felgate, Rhoda 37 Guthrie, Tyrone 21, 33, 34, 41, 42, 48, Fenton, David 85, 86 103, 104, 105 Field, Barron 156–7 Fire on the Wind see The Bastard Hackett, Patricia 37 Country Haddrick, Ron 55, 59, 61, 89, 104, Fisher, Rodney 74, 127 105, 159 Fitton, Doris 37 Hair 96, 117, 158 Fitzpatrick, Peter 128 Hal, Prince see Henry IV; Bell as Flash Jim Vaux 37, 107, 108, 116, (1978) 71; Joel Edgerton as 170 117, 132 Hall, Barbara 98 206 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Hall, Peter 27, 50 Honi Soit (student newspaper) 43 Hamlet 27, 42, 50, 68, 76, 160; Horler, Ken 21, 38, 42, 43, 53, 54, 68, Australian attributes 46–7, 58, 66, 80, 105, 118, 125, 135, 136, 141, 68, 70, 145; Bell as (Old Tote, 142, 151 1963) 32, 43–9, 54, 58, 60; Horler, Lilian 38, 68, 141 (Nimrod, 1973) 28, 54–5, 58, 62– How Could You Believe Me When I 8, 70, 76; Bell directs (BSC, 1991) Said I’d Be Your Valet When You 27, 54, 83, 85, 145; Mel Gibson as Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life 185; Peter O’Toole as 45; David 159 Warner as 50 How Does Your Garden Grow? 118, Hamlet on Ice (1971) 151 119, 120, 164 Handful of Friends, A 137, 140 Howard, John 172 Handke, Peter 126 Hughes, Billy 96, 99, 100, 101, 102–3 Hanson, Pauline 39 Hughes, Robert 43 Hard God, A 38, 112–16, 122, 164 Humphries, Barry 41, 96, 139 Hargreaves, John 153 Harris, Frank 44, 45, 48, 60, 164 Ibsen, Henrick 154 Hauser, Kaspar 126 Independent Theatre, Sydney 112 Hawkes, Terence 171 Ingram, Robin 107 Hedda Gabler 154 Inner Voices 124, 125, 126, 127, 140 Hedley, Phillip 51, 58 Inside the Island 127 Helpmann Award 18 Helpmann, Robert 50, 185 J.C. Williamson Award 18 Henriad, The 171 Jacobson, Lisa 125 Henry 4 (1998, Parts 1 and 2 James, Clive 43 conflated) 91, 144, 150, 169, 170, Jane Street Company 95, 129 172, 183, 185 Jane Street Theatre 96, 100, 102, 111 Henry 4 (2013, Parts 1 and 2 Jellicoe, Ann 21 conflated) 177, 183 Jesus Christ Superstar 117 Henry 5 (1999) 150, 169, 172–6, 185 Johns, Captain W.E. 105 Henry IV (excerpts, c. 1958) 42 Jones, Margaret 122, 126 Henry IV (1978, Parts 1 and 2 Jonson, Ben 76 conflated) 71 Jugglers Three 116 Henry IV (c. 1800) 168 Julius Caesar 57, 179 Henry V (film 1944, Olivier as) 175 Henry V (Old Tote, 1964), Bell as 44, Kabul 111, 116 47–50, 60, 159 Kaspar 126 Henry V (character) 173, 174 Kathleen Robinson Lecture 140 Henry VI Part 3 156 Kelly, Ned 99, 132 Henry VII (historical figure) 71, 84 Kelly, Frances 128 Herzog, Werner 126 Kelly, Veronica 124 Hewett, Dorothy 36, 163 Kemp, Kevon 69, 107, 109, 160, 162 Hibberd, Jack 35, 122, 136 Kemp, Robert 155 Hindley, Myra 154 Kenna, Peter 38, 112, 115, 120, 122, Hitler, Adolph 56–8, 71 164 Hoad, Brian 62, 99, 104, 108, 115, Kennedy Center, Washington DC 182 116, 117, 121 Kerr, Sir John 70 Holt, Harold 138 Kessell, Norman 45, 107, 126, 149 Index 207

Khell, Zsolt 181 Macbeth 17, 58, 86, 154; Bell as 77, Khlestakov (in The Government 78, 85, 144 Inspector), Bell as 55, 58 MacDonald, Robert David 74 Kiefel, Russell 163 Macdonnell, Justin 138 King Lear 25, 151, 158, 174, 179, Macready, Carol 59 185; Bell as 79, 87, 88, 91, 94, Mad Max (films) 84, 164 144 Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know 71, Kippax, H.G. 26, 39, 47, 58, 62, 63, 124 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 99, 101, Magritte, René 180 102, 104, 114, 115, 152, 154, 155, Mailman, Deborah 174 161, 162, 163, 166 Malouf, David 168 Kosky, Barrie 87, 91, 179, 185 Malvolio (in Twelfth Night). Bell as Kott, Jan 153 43, 71, 86, 134, 144 Krummel, John 111 Manning Clark’s History of Australia, the Musical 81, 131, 135, 143 L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, Marian Street Theatre 129 film) 126 Marist Brothers’ School, Maitland 42 La Mama Theatre, Melbourne 37, 108, Marr, David 69, 118, 119, 123 109 Mates 120, 121, 164 Lady of the Camellias 129 Maza Long, Rachael 174 larrikin 37, 69, 96, 98, 103, 107, 108, Maza, Bob 40 131, 139, 185 McCallum, John 40, 112, 124, 183 Last Day in Woolloomooloo 129 McGrath, John 24 Last Supper Show, The 116 McKenzie, Barry 96, 139 Le Moignan, Michael 77 McKenzie, Sandra 160 Legend of King O’Malley, The 23, 37, McKern, Leo 185 53, 95–103, 105, 107, 108, 116, McLennan, Andrew 43 132, 133, 135, 140, 159 McNeil, Jim 118–20, 164 Lethal Weapon 164 McTernan, John 77, 131 Lewis, C.S. 85 Measure for Measure 58, 154 Lewis, Robert 130 Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) Lincoln Center, New York 182 116, 118, 125, 127, 151, 158, 179, Listen Closely 112 180 Littlewood, Joan 21, 25 Mellor, Aubrey 77, 79, 80, 142 Liverpool Football Club 170 Menaechmi 130 Locke Elliott, Sumner 36–7 Merchant of Venice, The 27, 83, 85 Lockwood, Johnny 159 Meyrick, Julian 22, 23, 34, 47, 79, Long Day’s Journey into Night 130, 104, 107, 137, 138 133 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 23, 25, Look Back in Anger 103 53, 153 Love’s Labour’s Lost 58, 110, 141 Miller, Harry M. 96, 110, 117, 158 Lovejoy, Robin 27, 53, 55, 58, 59, 83, Miller, Jonathan 21 93, 112, 151 Milne, Geoffrey 35, 130 Lovett, Barry 104, 105 Mnouchkine, Ariane 180 Luhrmann, Baz 23, 167 monodrama 122, 124 Lyssa, Alison 38 Moore, Matthew 183 Moscow Arts Theatre 21 208 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Moscow State Circus 48 Nimrod Theatre, Surry Hills see Moses, John 79 Belvoir Street Theatre Mostyn, John 67, 137 Nolan, Kirrily 59 Mother Courage 116 Nolan, Sidney 99 Much Ado About Nothing 23, 26, 50, Not Wrong – Just Different 38 62, 68, 69, 159–63, 168, 174, 184 Nowra, Louis 73, 74, 124, 125, 126, Müller, Heiner 89, 90, 144 127, 136, 140

Nason, Bryan 117 O’Brien, Denis 96 Nation (periodical) 47 O’Brien, Richard 21 National Theatre (United Kingdom) O’Brien, Terry 99, 102, 103 21, 33 O’Grady, Suellen 66, 73, 75 National Theatre and Fine Arts Society, O’Malley, King (historical figure see Hobart 34 also The Legend of King National Theatre Company, Western O’Malley) 96, 98, 99, 100, 102 Australia 34 O’Neill, Eugene 130 National Theatre Movement, O’Toole, Peter 45 Melbourne 34 Ocker 40, 58, 75, 125, 139, 150, 169 National Times, The (newspaper) 69, Oddfellows Hall, Fremantle 157 74, 119 Oedipus the King 42, 103, 104, 105 Neeme, Aarne 151 Oida, Yoshi 66 Nevin, Robyn 23, 38, 74, 78, 81, 87, Old Familiar Juice, The 118 91, 103, 129 Old Tote Theatre Company 27, 28, 37, New South Wales Independent 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, Commission Against Corruption 62, 72, 80, 81, 83, 96, 98, 103, 104, (ICAC) 184 111, 129, 140, 141, 150, 151, 154, New York Times (newspaper) 182 158, 159 Nicholson, William 85 Old Vic Drama School, Bristol 50 NIDA (the Australian National Old Vic Theatre 21, 26, 47, 160, 165 Institute for Dramatic Art) 23, 37, Oldham Repertory Theatre 50 42, 44, 47, 50, 51, 53, 95, 97, 100, Olivier, Laurence 21, 26, 27, 43, 44, 111, 130, 145, 153, 154, 164, 167, 45, 47, 48, 49, 66, 88, 118, 160, 183 173, 175 Nimrod Street Theatre (now the SBW One Day of the Year, The 36 Stables) 21, 53, 54, 62, 67, 68, 79, One Nation Party 39 105, 106, 107, 109, 117, 136, 137, Ong, Walter 126, 127 140, 154 Osborne, John 21, 103 Nimrod Theatre Company 17, 18, 21, Otto, Barry 77 25, 28, 34, 37, 38, 50, 53, 54, 55, 58, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, Panache, Theatre of 72, 74, 75, 82, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 106, 107, 185 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, Paramor, John 102 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, Paris Theatre Company 129 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, Parr, Bruce 114 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, Parsons, Philip 38 144, 151, 152, 155, 159, 160, 161, Pascall, Geraldine 119, 123, 160, 161 164, 166, 167, 168, 183, 186 Paterson, Banjo 151 Index 209

Patterson, Les 41, 139 Richard III 20, 70, 76; Bell as 18, 27, Patterson, Michael 142, 143 43, 56, 68, 69, 70, 71, 76, 84, 85, Pender, Anne 41, 139 144 Pericles 180, 181 Richardson, Ralph 26 Petruchio, Bell as 55–61, 65, 76, 93, Rignold, George 185 143 Robertson, Malcolm 19 Pfisterer, Susan 37 Robertson, Tim 131 Phillips, Beverley 64 Robinson, Ian 66 Phillips, Simon 179, 180, 185 Rocky Horror Show, The 21, 96, 158 Pickett, Carolyn 37 Roman Catholicism 113, 114, 115, Piper, Richard 170 120, 122 Plautus 130 Romeo + Juliet (film) 167 Point of Departure 154 Romeo and Juliet 62, 85, 164, 165, Polson, John 27, 145 167, 170 Powell, Enoch 71, 86 Romeo 50, 164, 165, 166, 167 Pratt, Tony 44 Romeril, John 136 President Wilson in Paris 111, 116 Rosencrantz 27, 50 Prichard, Katharine Susannah 36 Rostand, Edmond 72, 75 Prince of Wales Theatre 46 Rouse, Graham 116 Princess Theatre, Melbourne 132 Rowe, Lyndell 59, 60 Private Eye (magazine) 96 Roxburgh, Richard 23, 145, 178, 182 Prospect Theatre Company 58, 161 Royal Court Theatre 21, 96, 110, 158 Prospero (in The Tempest), Bell as 23, Royal Queensland Theatre Company 82, 88, 89, 143, 144 see Queensland Theatre Company Punch, Angela 164 38, 87, 180 Purcell, Leah 174 Royal Shakespeare Company 27, 50, Putnam, Robert D. 35 160, 161 Rudd, Kevin 17 Q Theatre 118, 129 Rush, Geoffrey 186 Queensland 86, 123, 168 Rustavelli Company 20 Queensland Performing Arts Centre Rusty Bugles 36 89 Ryan, Damian 183 Queensland Theatre Company 38, 87, 180 Saint-Denis, Michel 27, 50 Quentin, Robert 21, 27, 37, 44, 46, 54, Saw, Ron 48 83 SBW Stables Theatre 133, 136 Schofield, Leo 43 Radic, Len 128 Scully, Sean 165 Real Thing, The 81, 92 Sea, The 71 Reedy River 36 Seagull, The 68 Rees, Leslie 34 Servant of Two Masters, The 130, 159 Removalists, The 37, 81, 108, 109, 7.30 Report (television news) 17 110, 111 Sewell, Stephen 136, 140 Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The, Bell Seymour, Alan 36 as 28, 52, 55, 56–8, 65, 71, 76, 79, Seymour Centre 79, 80, 142, 143, 164 143 Shadowlands 85 Richard II 50 Shaffer, Anthony 111 210 John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre

Shakespeare Our Contemporary 153 Taming of the Shrew, The 76, 86, 150, Sharman, Jim 21, 23, 96, 110, 117, 151, 168; Bell as Petruchio 28, 129, 151, 158 55–62, 65, 93, 143 Shaw, George Bernard 129, 161 Tapdogs 157 Shylock (The Merchant of Venice). Tasker, John 69, 70 Bell as 27, 83–4, 85 Tate, Sharon 154 Sightlines 149 Taylor, Tony 89 Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day, The 112 Tempest, The 23, 82, 88, 91, 143, 151, Sleuth 111 174, 180 (see also Prospero) Smith, Jan 45 Terror Australis 158 Smith, Michael 165 Theatre Australia (magazine) 136 Soldier’s Story, The 50 This Scepter’d Isle 43, 44 Soorlies Circus 50 Thomas, Keith 76 Sophocles 103 Thompson, Peter 19 Spears, Steve J. 122, 124, 126 Three Sisters 26, 77 Stables Theatre see SBW Stables Throsby, David 138 Stebbings Intercolonial Circus 157 Time of My Life, The 19 Stoddart, John 74 Titus Andronicus, Bell as 90, 91, 144, Stollery, Christopher 27 148 (see also Anatomy Titus Fall Stoppard, Tom 81 of Rome) Stravinsky, Igor 50 Towards a Poor Theatre 25 Stretch of the Imagination, A 122 Travelling North 124, 128 Stride, John 165 Trofimov 44 Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 36, Troilus and Cressida 145 121 Truffaut, François 126 Sumner, John 125 Trundle, Jean 37 Sun (newspaper) 45 Tulloch, Peter 66 Sun Herald (newspaper) 43 Turnbull, Malcolm 41 Swift, Clive 20 Twain, Mark 82 Sydney Morning Herald (newspaper) Twelfth Night 43, 47, 71, 86, 130, 134, 26, 39, 43, 45, 48, 58, 69, 72, 122, 160, 163 (see also Malvolio) 137, 182 Tyrell, Ralph 117 Sydney Opera House 73, 74, 129, 140 Sydney Opera House, Drama Theatre Uncle Vanya 79, 178, 181, 182, 183 50, 74, 129, 140 Sydney Opera House, Opera Theatre Van Hattem, Margie 98, 99 73, 74 Variations 129 Sydney University 43, 53, 140, 142, Veitch, Jock 160 164, 167 Venetian Twins, The 24, 50, 129, 130, Sydney University Drama Society 131 (SUDS) 42 Victorian Football League (VFL) 127 Sydney University Players 42, 43 Vietnam War 101, 111 Szakacs, Gyorgyi 181 Volpone 72, 76, 77, 142 Volska, Anna 38, 49, 50, 51, 65, 85, ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore 43 111, 151, 152 TaikOz 180, 181 Tait, Peta 37, 38, 41 Walley, Joan 37 Talking Heads 19 Warburton, Doreen 37, 129 Index 211

Wardlaw, James 89 Whitlam, Margaret 139 Warner, David 50 Whitney, David 183 Warrington, Lisa 19 Whittet, Matthew 94 Waterhouse, Keith 157 Wilkie, Allan 19, 20, 46, 185 Way of the World, The 50 Williamson, David 37, 81, 82, 96, 107, Weaver, Jacki 81, 92, 182 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 124, 127, Weaving, Hugo 23, 182 128, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140 Westwood, Chris 37 Wilton, Olive 37 Wharf Theatres 54, 68, 91, 143 Winter, Gillian 34 What If You Died Tomorrow? 81 Winter’s Tale, The 46 Wherrett, Richard 21, 25–7, 38, 51, 54, Women and Theatre Project 37 55, 57, 67, 68, 70–5, 77, 80, 81, Women of Troy, The 91 122, 125, 126, 129, 141, 142 Wood, John 104 Whitbread, Oscar 165 Woodrow, Carol 27, 83, 84 White with Wire Wheels 35 White, Patrick 129, 183 Zeffirelli, Franco 26, 165, 166, 167 Whiting, Leonard 165 Zuila, Ella 41 Whitlam, Gough 70, 112, 128, 138, 139, 161

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