The Provincial Theatre Movement

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The first to articulate the neglect of the Australian play, and advocate for, ‘a national or municipal theatre’ ¹ was Louis’s university colleague Leon Brodzky. Leon contributed his first articles on dramaturgy (The Bulletin) and Irish nationalist poet and play wright WB Yeats (Table Talk)² when he was only 19. The following year, while still at university, he wrote a clarion call for ‘the local dramatist’ in a major article in The Critic:

Australia is a young country with its resources still undeveloped and hardly any distance beyond the pioneering stage. Yet the arts of music, painting and literature have been established amongst us, and, though patrons are few, receive some sort of encouragements but the art of drama, the art which has been called the acme of all art, does not exist in Australia, and of local dramatists writing for the local stage there is not one. We have no Australian Ibsen, or Maeterlinck, not even an Australian Pinero, HA Jones, or GR Sims.

The Australian stage is held by plays that are written everywhere and anywhere but in Australia. … The only Australian playwright whose name has appeared on the local play bills during the last year or so is GW Elton, whose, Oh! Mr Pennilove was a distinctly original bit of work, which got away from the motive of nocturnal debauchery, which seems to be the only one that ever occurs to the European farce-writer.³

 William Hawtrey’s Comedy Company presented actor GW Elton’s⁴ farce Oh! Mr Pennilove at the Bijou Theatre (Melbourne) from 18 October, 1902. Table Talk responded positively stating that ‘a play by an Australian author produced in an Australian theatre, is a somewhat rare occurrence … an event of more than passing interest.’ ‘He has written a farce in the school of The Magistrate, A Night Out, What Happened to Jones, Facing the Music and The Lady of Ostend,’⁵ the reviewer offered, ‘a farce of bewildering complications and “screaming” situations. And it is a real good farce, too!’ Further, and perhaps provocatively in terms of Brodzky’s article, the article went on to suggest that ‘In Australia there has never yet been any demand for Australian plays or even plays by Australian writers; consequently there is no Australia drama.’ AG Stephens, quoted in the same article dismissed any notion of an Australian drama. The Bulletin⁶ found problems with the ‘amateurish acting’—Gregan MacMahon, who played the man-servant, was one of the few actors positively reviewed—but the reviewer had to ‘admit that Oh! Mr Pennilove has genuine pretensions to newness, originality, and go. … Elton fills has written something of a comedy in which there is promise of future success from the author.’

Brodsky concluded his essay with a survey of the conditions that actively prevented the local dramatic writer from having his work staged in Australia, and proposed a range of solutions, including advocating for a national theatre. But his ultimate conclusion otherwise—an albeit erroneous conclusion—was that we have ‘to face the fact, in all honesty, of there being no dramatic art that can be claimed as Australian either from the fact of it dealing with Australian life, or from the fact of it being written by local dramatists amongst us.’

What did Brodsky mean by ‘a national theatre’? The subject had been topical for a number of years in Australia. A letter reproduced in The Age by Scottish actor Walter Bentley(1849-1927) might best summarise the aspiration as it applied in London:

The politician of today would do well to turn his thoughts to some scheme for the establishment of a national home for dramatic art—such, for instance, as exists in France. … Special education and certification would consolidate and strengthen the influence of the artist and the stage. The playwright would be encouraged to give his supreme efforts; the interpretation would be as perfect as possible; no mercenary restraint would hamper the trained performer in producing the best work, selected without fear or favour, and a standard of incalculable value to dramatic art would be established. …

What I maintain is that the day has come when … some kind of official recognition and encouragement must be given to the stage. Social barriers have long since been broken down, and rapidly growing influence of the institution demands its inclusion within the realms of practical politics.⁷

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The writer concludes by advocating for a ‘national home of dramatic art, where physical fitness, culture and mental capacity should be requisites for admission, and where stage craft would be taught by competent professors.’

In Australia, ‘National Theatre’ moment and‘ National Drama’ were used interchangeably, but we need to be clear that ultimately Brodsky’s primary concern was Australian writers and ‘local content’ as contrasted with the physical structure of a centralised cultural training and production facility for the nation.

Brodsky, meanwhile, also alludes to the paucity of influence on local writing by the European modernist writers then experimenting with both nationalistic themes and new ‘forms’ or ‘styles'(specifically realism, symbolism, and expressionism). Norwegian Henrik Ibsen had been seen in Australian but as a ‘star vehicle’ for the English actress Janet Achurch (1864-1916) (in A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler for Williamson, Garner & Musgrove (1889-91)) and the American tragedienne Nance O’Neil (1874-1965)(in Hedda Gabler and Lady Inger of Ostrat for commercial producer JC Williamson(1900-1901), but none of the plays of Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maurice Maeterlinck, nor WB Yeats had yet been performed locally.

Six months later, Brodzky joined the Australian Literature Society with the intention (in the following year, 1904)to organise an off-shoot Theatre Society with ‘the twofold object of producing some of the more important plays of the time, and also any Australian plays that seemed to be of sufficient merit.’ ‘For our actors it was intended to rely on amateurs, tutored by some professional. For a time there was much enthusiasm. People who had read Ibsen, Maeterlinck, WB Yeats and Bernard Shaw, ’he recalled in 1908, ‘began joining the Society, and we commenced operations with an inaugural lecture by Blamire Young on ‘The Drama as a Fine Art’.

Within weeks, however, Brodzky left Melbourne to join Louis Esson in Paris and London, and consequently resigned the secretaryship. After he had gone, the Society, calling itself The Playgoers’ Club, subordinated the strategic aim of producing plays. As Brodzky explained, The Playgoers’ Club ‘held some interesting meetings, at which plays by Bernard Shaw and, I believe Maeterlinck were read. Then, somehow, the Club went to pieces, and when I returned, six months later, it had ceased to exist.’ The organisation morphed into the Melbourne Stage Society.

In the meantime, Brodzky returned to England where he was sub-editor of The British Australasian. His passion for the development of the Australian national theatre emerged again in 1908 when he penned another provocation—‘Towards and Australian Drama’—from London, published in The Lone Hand⁸ :

Many of us are almost in despair when we see how little relation the theatre in Australia has to the national life of the country. There is no Australian dramatist earning his livelihood by writing for the Australian stage. No one, for that matter, can name any Australian play that has ever had any pretension to being considered seriously as drama. We hear of a great many people writing plays, and after futile efforts to get them produced, throwing them into a drawer. In the June number of The Lone Hand a writer, signing himself ‘Stargazer’, relates experiences which must have befallen many others.

But the case is not so hopeless, after all. If we cannot get our Australian drama in one way, we must try another; and the purpose of this article is to throw out a few practical suggestions. We must begin by making up our minds that nothing can be done through the business men who own and control our theatres. Their business is to make money by importing plays. Often, too, they import the players and the scenery and other requisites for a theatrical performance. These theatre managers are not concerned with art, or national aspirations, or local talent, though, of course, they all pretend to be intensely patriotic. Let us ignore them.

What is strange is that Brodzky appears to give no credence to any of the nineteenth century Australian repertoire. Brodzky’s dedicated intention was to produce modernist, nationalist plays, like the Stage Society in London, the Irish Theatre in Dublin or the Théâtre Libre company of André Antoine. But until he got to the Continent, he had only second hand knowledge of these institutions. Locally, however, his ‘method’ suggested an early form of dramaturgy:

 … a number of those writers who have already written plays, and who believe they have the faculty of depicting life in terms of drama, should come together and determine to produce one or more plays. They would enlist the sympathy and aid of a number of men and women of good education and with a taste for acting. There would be a Reading Committee to select plays, and a good actor to coach the company. Perhaps (and this is not at all improbable) when the directors of the company came to consider a play, it would be found unsuitable. Here, then, would be one of the first benefits of the society. The defects of the play would be discussed and deal with until it was made suitable; and a writer would have the opportunity of working on a play in contact with the players.

When at last all was ready, the play would be produced in some hall, and the performance made an event of artistic importance, not a pretext for getting money out of the charitable for some local ‘deserving object.’
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… Briefly, then, the first step towards an Australian drama should be the establishment in the more likely centres of some kind of organisation for the purpose of producing, as well as possible, short plays depicting phases of Australian life. When once this has been proved successful, the way should be open to more ambitious work.

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While Louis was absent from Melbourne at the time, he corresponded regularly with Brodzky and would have been aware of this article—and another that appeared in The Lone Hand a month earlier detailing the Irish National Theatre, Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory⁹ —it is worth noting that Louis himself published nothing on Brodsky’s National Theatre provocation at this time (nor for the next two years).

The failure of his Australian Literature Society Playgoers’ Club appeared to suggest ‘the impossibility of any movement towards creating an Australia drama,’ and importantly, a production house of an appropriate scale to present new locally written plays. Brodsky despaired that ‘the undeniable result of the movement was the conviction that in Melbourne—and the same thing must surely apply in Sydney and some other leading cities—that there were not quite enough people to support and make a success of any organisation such as I have in mind.’

One of the committee members of the Australian Theatre Society, however, was William Moore, who, in 1904, had just returned to Melbourne after time abroad pursuing a theatre career as an actor. He was prompted to come home to Australia to take up the position of art and drama critic at the Melbourne Herald. He also wrote, initially under the by line ‘WM’, a series of observations of ‘the Queen City, from a Threepenny Doss to a society dialogue at the Princess’s Theatre,’ published in collections in 1905 (City Sketches) and 1906 (Studio Sketches); ‘the young author,’ wrote one critic ‘is strongly imbued with the artistic temperament, and is a keen and appreciative observer of human nature.’¹⁰ Moore began performing his own monologues at meetings of the Australian Literature Society (established in Melbourne in July 1899) from 1907: The Ideal Type (in August) and A False Alarm at the annual Christmas concert (December).¹¹

While the term ‘municipal theatre’ is quoted here by Brodzky, he uses it as a synonym for ‘national’. For clarity, I apply the term ‘Municipal Theatre’ to what we understand to be Government supported—or ‘subsidised’—theatre that began with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (‘supporting the Arts in Australia by Australians and for Australians’ since 1954 ) and later the Australia Council for the Arts.

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