In February 2008 a book by Gabrielle Wolf titled “Make it Australian: The Australian Performing Group, the Pram Factory and New Wave Theatre” was published. (Currency Press – ISBN10 0868198161). The Australian writer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist Mark Doyle, better known by the name Louis Nowra, wrote the following review of the book, outlining why he thinks it doesn’t tell the full story.
“Inside the collective”
By A NEW BOOK ABOUT A NOTORIOUS MELBOURNE THEATRE TROUPE DOESN’T TELL THE FULL STORY WRITES PLAYWRIGHT LOUIS NOWRA
THE AUSTRALIAN, MAY 24, 2008
“YEARS after the incident, a still astonished Sydney director described his visit to Melbourne in the early 1970s for a meeting with members of the Australian Performing Group, the vanguard of the new wave theatre movement. He attended a gathering of the collective in the morning, where there was a serious discussion about Bertolt Brecht. Afterwards he was invited to an Australian football match. The transformation was incredible. These rational theatre people turned into banshees, screaming abuse at the umpires and opposition supporters. With a resigned tone, similar to the end of Chinatown, where a baffled Jack Nicholson is told, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” I said to the director, “That’s Melbourne for you.”
I should know. I lived in Melbourne during most of the APG era of the late ’60s and ’70s before I hightailed it to Sydney. While I was at university I was aware of exciting things happening at La Mama in Carlton, the theatre that gave birth to the APG. Founded about 40 years ago by the under-appreciated Betty Burstall, La Mama was formerly an old shirt factory.
The space was so intimate that the audience could smell an actor’s bad breath. The location was also serendipitously perfect. Inner-Melbourne Carlton was filled with university students, bohemians, nascent writers, young academics and, most importantly, cheap rents. Within a couple of years a motley group of actors and playwrights left La Mama and relocated nearby to a much larger space, the Pram Factory, where, in January 1970, they formally inaugurated the Australian Performing Group.
I was brought up on a Melbourne housing commission estate. Because of my uncle, Bob Herbert, who worked for the commercial theatre chain J.C. Williamson, I saw many musicals, all American of course. As a teenager I scraped together enough money to see the new wave English playwrights such as Joe Orton, Edward Bond and Harold Pinter at the Melbourne Theatre Company, but I had never seen an Australian play before I went to APG. What fascinated me was how the playwrights used our vernacular. Jack Hibberd transformed the curate’s egg of the Australian language into a Faberge emu egg; John Romeril’s long monologues were like a John Coltrane riff.
My trouble was that I was estranged from the world the APG presented to me. Sometimes I didn’t know if the APG was satirising the ocker or celebrating him. The contemporary male characters seemed from another era. By the time I saw David Williamson’s Don’s Party (1973), a play about a premature celebration of Labor’s federal election victory, I was even further removed from the men and women on stage. The characters were boorish, middle class, their mating behaviour reminiscent of Benny Hill’s.
As I was leaving I overheard an audience member say to his friend, “I’ve been to so many parties like that.” The comment bewildered me. I hadn’t been to a party remotely like that. I was used to sitting in dark rooms listening to music, my brain soaked in hallucinogens.
My reservations put me in the small minority, as did my queasy doubts about APG’s macho heterosexuality, which seemed as gross as a pub bar five minutes before six o’clock closing. I also found its questioning of the cultural cringe, its gaudy Australian nationalism and anti-British, anti-American attitudes very old-fashioned, its lack of interest in sex and love mystifying. Yet, at the same time, the physical energy, the Aussie humour and the vigorous criticism of conservative suburban values were wonderfully refreshing.
Of all the Australian theatre companies of the past four or five decades, the APG has become regarded by many as seminal. This is despite the fact other theatres such as the Melbourne Theatre Company, the Playbox, Sydney’s Nimrod and its later incarnation, Belvoir St, produced more important Australian plays, paid greater attention to acting and production standards, and lasted longer. The APG legend has been burnished by Tim Robertson’s 2001 hagiography The Pram Factory: The Australian Performing Group Recollected, and now by Gabrielle Wolf’s Make it Australian.
Wolf’s study has all the hallmarks of the PhD it once was. It’s earnest, thorough and, even though blandly written, it has a fascinating story to tell. She begins by trying to put the beginnings of the APG into its ’60s context, with its youth rebellion, radical ideas about power and sexuality, and its criticisms of the decrepit Liberal Party that had ruled for 23 years. As Romeril puts it, the APG represented “the social energy, the zeal, the hope and the struggle of that period”.
Its acting style was different from the smooth, Anglo-Australian professionalism of other theatre companies. It was physical and broad. It saw theatre not as producing a factory line of plays but as a left-wing social experiment. Its members were a collective, its ethos raucous, its world an incestuous one, with partner swapping and a ruthless ideological conformism. (Many members of the collective were fans of the tyrant Mao Zedong.) Most important, it was a theatre that rejected what it thought was the Sydney emphasis on directors and professional production values. At times it seemed as if the APG’s political beliefs were justification enough for poor production values. A group-devised show such as the feminist agit-prop Betty Can Jump was appallingly acted and directed. The female characters were cliched and the polemics sentimental, but I have to say the night I saw it the women in the audience, the huge majority, thought it magnificent. If a crudely done show such as that could attract a rapturous response, then I knew APG wasn’t for me.
Wolf quotes many APG stalwarts who retrospectively bemoan the poor standards of some of the productions. It was a place where voices were untrained, designers undervalued, directors despised. In reality, the APG was where the cult of the amateur was well and truly entrenched. It’s no wonder that its best and most popular plays, such as the group-devised Hills Family Show (late 1975) were based on the tradition of vaudeville (always the refuge of the coarse actor). Another legacy of this physical style is, of course, the brilliant Circus Oz, which evolved from the Soapbox Circus. The APG thought its uncouth style would attract the working class, which was part of its ideological mission, but the working class was put off by the shrill left-wing politics and corny production values.
Wolf is wrong to say J.C. Williamson didn’t attract such people. I don’t remember sitting next to a working-class person at the APG but I sat next to many at J.C. Williamson’s musicals, where they had bought cheap tickets in the gods so they could see the best performers and go home happy humming the tunes.
By the late ’70s, the APG had fragmented into various factions. One faction successfully escaped from the constant parochialism and put on international plays. Another faction produced self-absorbed wanks; one self-destructed because of drugs. Some of the best people resigned, including Bruce Spence, Peter Cummins and Hibberd. Williamson fled to Sydney. It wasn’t such a strange decision. His plays didn’t fit into the political ethos of the group, many of whom come across in Wolf’s book as being the sort of people who would have been perfect Stalinist apparatchiks, quite prepared to denounce each other and demand artists keep to the official party line or be eliminated. Hibberd, for example, was considered a case for re-education due to his portrayal of sexually crude and predatory characters who used scatalogical language.
The collective hated the word commercial. It probably saved Williamson’s career to escape from those who hypocritically put up with him because he brought in the money. The multi-talented Graeme Blundell, who combined the roles of actor, director and instigator, also departed. His later biography of Graham Kennedy was a covert salute to a comedian who had a huge but unmentioned influence on the larrikin humour of the APG. Of course a gay Kennedy would have found it difficult to work there. Actor and writer Bill Garner recalls how members “railed against an effete theatre, by which they meant homosexual theatre. The fear of that was quite strong.” It wasn’t a surprise when the APG folded in 1981. It may have been mourned by some people but, really, time had passed it by. Carlton had been gentrified. Gough Whitlam had brought in many left-wing policies and so the APG social revolutionaries were bereft of new ideas and their politics rendered redundant.
Romeril remarks that the theatre of the time was a sexy medium. That changed too. Once, the aim of young writers and directors was to write a play or direct a new Australian work, but the sexy medium became film, where everyone wanted to write a screenplay or direct a movie.
Wolf describes these things, plus the mind-numbing interminable meetings, in forensic detail, but she has another story to tell that is new to me, and that is how the APG viewed itself. Every tiny thing was documented. The collective had a self-conscious sense of its own uniqueness and its connection to the past to such an extent that one participant later criticised what she called “(the) messianic certainty of its appointed role as custodian of Australian drama”. It saw itself as a crucial connection to the past represented by the strident nationalism of Joseph Furphy, Henry Lawson and The Bulletin of the 1890s. With this came a racism not so different from the ugly past. As Wolf says, “some of their plays perpetuated uncomplimentary, and often comical, stereotypes of non-Anglo people”.
In keeping with this nationalist impulse, it put on plays that celebrated Australian figures such as Nellie Melba, Phar Lap and Les Darcy. Sometimes its productions were no different from the ubiquitous theatre form of 19th-century Australia: the panto. In a way the APG became a folk theatre with the exclusivity of a religious cult.
The main weakness with the book is that Wolf did not see the APG in action. She knew nothing about it until 1999 and can judge it only from reviews. The fact was that its energy, zeal and youthful exuberance carried along many a production and, as such, was an antidote to the usual dutiful and uninspiring theatre of the day.
It is also difficult for Wolf to describe how the APG was typical of Melbourne’s intense and passionate commitment to the holy trinity of theatre, radical politics and the southern religion, AFL. Sydney may have lacked a theatre world that was driven and riven by rival political and artistic factions, but it had the good sense to welcome, with open arms, all those refugees fleeing from the insular politics and factions of an increasingly anachronistic APG.
The APG’s position in theatrical history may be more ambiguous than its former members would like us to think, but its narcissistic documentation of its own progress and its self-mythologising have given it a legendary status.
As the newspaper reporter says in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “when in doubt, print the legend”.”
