Lisa Milner (editor)
The New Theatre: The People, Plays and Politics behind Australia’s Radical Theatre
Interventions, NSW, 2022

1

I am an egregiously unlikely reviewer for this commemorative volume on the history of New Theatre: I have rarely seen any theatre. Memory is so difficult: as a child of Communist parents, I sort of recall attending with my mother a New Theatre play in Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, in Sydney, down from Kings Cross; also visiting backstage at I think a Waterside Workers Federation hall at the end of a play, my mother wished to say hello to Evelyn Docker, a prominent leftwing actor, and she introduced me to her, I picture a little boy staring at her, mesmerised. As I record in my 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (2001), which has chapters on my family genealogy and histories, my uncles Jock Levy and Lew Levy were, in the 1930s in Sydney, associated with the Jewish Youth Theatre; later, Jock Levy was a member of the Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit (1953–1958) as was Norma Disher, and was also prominent as actor and director in the New Theatre, and he and Norma Disher both became Life Members of New Theatre. With such a family history, on one side Jewish, on another connected to Evelyn Docker, who acted in Three in One (1957), a film consisting of three stories directed by Cecil Holmes, and was once married to Waterside Workers Federation organiser Norm Docker, son of my father’s brother George. When I became a literary and cultural historian, I should have been interested in theatre; but not so; like Jock I became interested in film, but also very interested in popular culture, including television, and its relationship to early modern festive practices of carnival and carnivalesque, hence a lifetime exploring Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings in my Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (1994), and since.

Over the years Ann Curthoys and I have had a tangential relationship to theatrical performance. We went to see a young Hannah Gadsby at the Nimrod, in a tiny basement of the well-known Sydney independent theatre. At various spaces in the Opera House we enjoyed a sparkling performance by Gary Foley, come up from Melbourne, as usual very funny; we laughed with Judith Lucy; listened intently to the remarkable “Pussy Riot” women who had fled Putin’s Russia disguised as food couriers; appreciated chef Yotam Ottolenghi, author with Sami Tamimi of that great book Jerusalem, interacting with a foody audience (“If there is one thing you could not do without, what is it?” He paused for a moment, and said, “lemons”); and attended a memorial service for singer Jimmy Little, father of our dear friend Frances Peters-Little.

But attending theatre apart from occasional visits such as these rarely if ever occurred. So, when I somehow heard that New Theatre was to launch a new book on its long history, I felt maybe I should go along, especially knowing my uncle Jock had been so active in it. The trouble was, I had never been to the New Theatre, which I gathered from looking up its address was in King Street, Newtown. Ann had gone off in another direction, to the Verona cinema in Paddington, to see the premiere of Because We Have Each Other, screening as part of the Antenna Documentary Film Festival. The filmmaker, Sari Braithwaite, was Ann’s former student and research assistant. The date was 18 October 2022.

I took a bus from Glebe where Ann and I live, to Newtown, got off at Newtown train station, and began walking, walking, walking, anxiously peering for street numbers, worried I would never find it. King Street seemed to narrow and darken, am I in a Dickens novel? Where is it? At last, footsore, relieved, I got there, went inside into the light of the foyer, and immediately registered that lots of people were standing around, they knew each other, friends were greeting, smiling, laughing. I didn’t recognise anyone. I felt like an intruder, a stranger. Inside the theatre, I sit near the back. I can see Lisa Milner on the distant stage, Ann and I had met her about six months earlier at the art deco Ritz Cinema in Randwick, where films made by and about the Waterside Workers’ Film Unit in the 1950s were screening, and we had enjoyed a friendly chat. I listen to the commemorative speeches and watch some of the sketches, then drift outside, cross the road, and work out how to find a bus that would go round to Glebe. In Glebe Point Road, with its many cafés, weary.

I enter one, it has a garden out the front with twinkling lights and inside Italian and Turkish food. I choose a tasty meal, order a glass of red wine, even ask for a Turkish coffee, despite the staff protesting, it’s too late, you’ll die. Later, at home, Ann tells me about Sari’s film, a wonderful documentary about a neurodiverse family in a working-class suburb, and I relate the doleful details of my evening.

2

Sometime later I was contacted by a New Theatre person, who said they were trying to arrange for me to write about the book for Overland, would I do it, I surprised myself by immediately saying yes, and soon after found a copy on our doorstep. It was a journey of discovery for me to set to and read The New Theatre, a bulky book of some 600 pages. I became engaged right from the dedication by Lisa Milner to her friend Norma Disher: “Norma has been my inspiration for researching and writing on the Australian left cultural scene for decades.” The Norma Disher whom Lisa Milner so rightly admires has been a political activist, music lover, and “beloved Glebe community member”. I met Norma Disher in Glebe in 2012 when Ann on one occasion gave a talk to the Glebe Society on Glebe radical history, Norma was there and introduced herself to us.

It very quickly became a pleasure to read The New Theatre. Sitting in my favourite café, day after day, sipping my piccolo, underlining, highlighting in yellow, scribbling in the margins, jotting down thoughts on the back inside cover, I pondered how can I structure a narrative. I work out a rough plan. I would recount Lisa Milner’s scene setting introduction, and then evoke in some detail three episodes from different decades.

In her introduction, then, Lisa Milner tells us that New Theatre, sometimes affectionately referred to as The New, was begun in 1932, drawing inspiration from the British Unity Theatre and the American New Theatre and always remaining internationally minded; it was active through the decades, with branches in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Newcastle, though only Sydney New Theatre has continued to this day. Programs, Milner writes, featured classical and experimental theatre, including Shakespeare and Brecht. A distinctive feature also was that members would perform away from the theatre, next to dole queues and from trucks, in workplaces such as railway yards and wharves; there were strong connections between the New Theatre and communist-led trade unions, especially the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF), the theatre flourishing in “port cities” like Sydney. Gender, Milner stresses, was very important right from the start: in an era when women were generally expected to focus on the domestic sphere, and in contrast to mainstream theatre, women participated in the New Theatre in every aspect, as playwrights, actors, musicians, dancers, singers, artists, and administrators; as directors, stage managers, and designers; those who wrote for the theatre such as Oriel Gray, Mona Brand, and Dymphna Cusack are now considered some of Australia’s most important dramatists. Many of the historians writing chapters are women, including Lyn Collingwood, Angela O’Brien, Gabriela Zabala, Laura Ginters, Connie Healy, Cathy Brigden, Susan Bradley-Smith, and not least Lisa Milner herself, who co-wrote many of the contributions; the book is a remarkable feat of scholarship and research.

Milner records that the high point of New Theatre’s popularity with audiences was the 1953 season of the Dick Diamond musical Reedy River, championing Australian folk music. Reedy River has justly received a great deal of historical attention, Milner devoting an Encore to it, “A Musical as Warm as a Handshake”. It’s impossible to give a comprehensive account of a book as large and diverse as this. As a result, I will focus on three plays: Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead, performed by the New Theatre in Perth in 1936, in Sydney in 1937; the staging of a play underground at Glen Davis, west of Sydney, in 1952; and Mona Brand’s Here under Heaven (1961).

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In chapter 18, “A ‘Great Antiwar Play’”, Milner, drawing on archival research and interviews, tells of American playwright Irwin Shaw’s 1936 experimental play Bury the Dead, which presents the story of six soldiers killed on a battlefield refusing to be buried as a protest against war. Shaw humanises the dead soldiers, referring to their lives before they went to war and their reasons for protesting war. Shaw’s dead soldiers do not return to the grave; rather they stride out into the world of the living. The play achieved instant success on the New York stage; for its first commercial run on Broadway there were 97 performances. Later it would be performed by mainstream and radical theatres throughout the world, initially in Canada and then in Australia, Great Britain, India, and South Africa. In contemporary times Bury the Dead remains a celebrated antiwar play, performed in colleges and universities, by amateur and professional groups.

In 1936, in the context of intense antiwar feeling in the period between the world wars, and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, many supporters of the peace movement, including the young Irwin Shaw, just 23 years old, a writer from Brooklyn, moved to an anti-fascist stance. Bury the Dead was hailed as “poetic, expressionist” and “bitterly absurdist”, its innovative structure episodic, consisting of many short scenes in one long act. The left-wing journal New Masses wrote that the play’s “poetry and passion” becomes a “song of hope”. In Hollywood, just after it premiered, a large audience of 1200 people attended a reading of the play by Frederic March and his wife, Florence Eldridge. The pro-communist Hollywood Anti-Nazi League organised an event which attracted high profile pacifists including James Cagney and Groucho Marx. Bury the Dead broadened its reach outside the USA, in Canada in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver. The first theatre to stage Bury the Dead outside North America was in Perth in 1936; one of the Perth New Theatre founders, the famous writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, had corresponded with Irwin Shaw, probably leading to its production there. In 1937, Sydney New Theatre staged the play in the Conservatorium, the cast of 40 being unable to fit into New Theatre’s modest Sydney headquarters. Among its cast was the writer Kylie Tennant and “the witch of King’s Cross”, the Sydney identity Rosaleen Norton. Lyn Collingwood records that “at the end of the play audience members were so moved that they stood on their seats and threw their hats in the air”. Dramatist Oriel Gray reflected that Bury the Dead was “like no drama we had ever seen or imagined”. We can end these notes with Lisa Milner’s insight that because Bury the Dead does not refer to any specific war or battlefield, as do other 1930s antiwar plays, it maintains its relevance for any new historical context and situation across the world. The play has been translated into Hungarian, Yiddish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Hebrew, German, Italian and Turkish; in 1973 the Jana Natya Manch theatre group in New Delhi staged a Bangla version of the play, Mrityur Atit, during the Durga Puja festival, audiences receiving it with great enthusiasm, as, indeed, did audiences everywhere.

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Cathy Brigden and Lisa Milner devote chapter 17 to “The Glen Davis ‘Stay-in’ Strike: ‘Sydney Actors Make History’”, evoking a remarkable event, the staging of a play deep underground at Glen Davis, west of Sydney, to support striking Miners’ Federation members. Because of the federal Menzies government’s decision to close the mine, the ‘stay-in strike’ occurred 1500 feet underground. The miners had been striking for two weeks when on 17 June 1952 the Miners’ Federation invited the Sydney New Theatre to take The Candy Store, an American play, to the mine, making theatre history. When the stay-in strike began, 18 men on the afternoon shift refused to leave. The 32-men morning shift came down to bolster the numbers; for the next 27 days 50 men lived underground; the men were well supplied with food and blankets, with a telephone connected to the surface. The Glen Davis strike created an Australian record for a stay-in mine strike.

Set in Roan’s Candy and Cigar Store, US playwright Barnard Rubin’s play The Candy Story relates how the Roan family’s livelihood is threatened by a nearby franchise. With Pop Roan, the lower-middle-class Bronx candy store owner as its hero, the play had been a great hit in the US, performed almost continuously from March to September 1951 in various New York theatres; a Yiddish version played in Los Angeles. The play travelled internationally, to London and Australia. In Sydney, The Candy Story played to packed houses at the New Theatre, which changed its name to The Candy Store. On 17 June 1952, the New Theatre acting troupe travelled to the mine, where they descended underground to meet the welcoming miners. Yet never, Cathy Brigden and Lisa Milner reflect, had such a performance, staged underground, been attempted. The troupe consisted of Roland Grivas, Alan Sherring, John Armstrong, Leon Sherman, Sid Miller, Marie Armstrong, Pat Lavelle, Miriam Hampson, David Walesby, Evelyn Docker, Harry Ciddor, Mignon Michell, Cecil ‘Cec’ Grivas, Neville Swanson and the stage manager Tom Salisbury. The miners rigged up a makeshift stage at the junction of five mine shafts. Hessian with copper wire hooks strung on to a length of water pipe created the curtain. Stage lighting was arranged with the miners’ lights. The curtain went up before, one of the actors recalled, “the most appreciative audience we ever had”. When the curtain came down on the last act to deafening applause, the miners gave three cheers for the cast and sang “For they are jolly good fellows”. The cast replied in the same manner. A dozen husky miners beefed out a Glen Davis song composed by one of them, ending resoundingly with “Will we let Bob Menzies rule us? No! No! No!”. Using a tape recorder the actors had brought from Sydney, the men recorded messages for their families above ground. When the troupe returned to the surface, they were fed by local families, with catering courtesy of the Women’s Auxiliary; the actors assembled at the town hall for a community performance, where once again the play was well received. Then the recorded messages were played, the voices of husbands, fathers and sons ringing out in the hall. After the strike drew to a close, and the miners came up, the play became the basis for later shared experience for the strikers’ families, with wives, children and other family members able to compare their reactions with that of their men.

Sixty-three years later, two of the actors who had been down the mine related their memories. Marie Armstrong remembered the “little lights, just little lights”, “they all shone their lights on us”. Pat Lavelle recalled the “magical” feeling, the lamps “casting this beautiful glow”, it was “lovely, like entering another world.” I’m irresistibly drawn here to the magical world of The Thousand and One Nights.

In their concluding thoughts, Cathy Brigden and Lisa Milner ask, what is it about “the repeated acts of remembering the Glen Davis performance” over the years that makes us “claim it as notable?” They see the underground performance as a powerful contribution to the New Theatre tradition of reaching out from the city stage to engage in theatre as activism: “Every worksite performance — factory floor, dockside, shopfront or underground — transformed an employer’s work space into a different space, if only temporarily.” In these terms, they suggest, the Glen Davis performance has been remembered so vividly because it was a fairly extreme instance of such activism, “a particularly novel engagement with place”, “hundreds of feet underground”. In the most general terms, they feel, New Theatre’s mobility, the equal involvement of women and men “at a time when women were not permitted to work underground”, keeps Glen Davis poignantly alive in their collective historical memory.

5

Our third thread concerns Mona Brand’s play Here under Heaven (1961), vibrantly discussed by Susan Bradley-Smith in chapter 14, “Brave Red Witches: Communist Women and Identity”. Mona Brand, Bradley-Smith tells us, lived in Melbourne as a young adult before leaving for London at the height of the Cold War; she travelled through Hungary to the Soviet Union. Brand’s association with New Theatre spanned more than three decades, during which twenty of her plays and revues were produced. Bradley-Smith writes that Brand’s Here under Heaven is an “extraordinarily confrontational and powerful play about domestic issues with international ramifications.” The action is set on a Queensland property during World War II, focusing on racism directed against both Aboriginal Australians and migrants, specifically Chinese migrants. Mrs Hamilton, the owner, is determined to “run the Aboriginal people off the property”, because they are “sick and dying” and causing commotion on the riverbanks, some two hundred yards away from her rich homestead. It’s very much worth quoting a passage in the play that Bradley-Smith highlights, a conversation between Mrs Hamilton and Reynolds her station manager, who is defying her wishes.

MRS HAMILTON: They’ve dared to come and settle on my land! … And you say you won’t move them off, but I will!

REYNOLDS: Why do you hate the poor devils like you do? It’s bad.

MRS HAMILTON: (pointing to a painting of a pioneer) They killed that man. They came in the night, the murderers.

REYNOLDS: But don’t forget how he broke up their tribe. He shot them and murdered them too … It was their land before it was his.

MRS HAMILTON: And now it’s my land. These are my acres. We’ve made a home for decent people and I mean to keep it …

REYNOLDS: Well I’m sorry, but I won’t turn them out … it would be murder in a drought.

MRS HAMILTON: Let them die.

When Mrs Hamilton declares that she has made “a home for decent people”, it becomes quickly clear that her notion of “decent people” does not include anyone who is Chinese. To her consternation, her new daughter-in-law, Lola, is a Chinese refugee whom her son married while overseas on service. Lola overhears her mother-in-law complaining to a neighbour about the humiliation she suffers because her son married an Asian woman. A very spirited Lola confronts Mrs Hamilton, who tells her that “no stranger can possibly understand what this country means to be an Australian”. Lola replies:

LOLA: Ah, but I thought I could understand. When I married your son I naturally required a greater knowledge of his country. Therefore I studied carefully the history of Australia. I studied and admired. Here, I said, is a country that even before England gave women the vote, a country that had striven to abolish the great distinction of class, and to give education to the masses of its working people … In Australia, I thought, I shall find culture and broad minds.

In photos of the 1961 New Theatre production of Here under Heaven, a composed and sophisticated Lola is centred, challenging the other characters present. At the end of the play, Lola says:

Perhaps some day when this war is over we might be friends. And I do not only mean this war of arms. I mean a greater war raging inside each nation, between those who desire the death of the world, and those who love mankind.

While Here under Heaven was receiving favourable reviews in Australia, Mona Brand journeyed to London hoping to interest the Unity Theatre in performing it. However, they were discouraging, remarking that “no British audience would have the slightest interest in anything from Australia”.

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It has been a great pleasure to read The New Theatre, though I still can’t see myself attending the New Theatre itself to see a production; I remain a non-theatre person, though I’m intensely interested in theatricality in cultural history. Yet now I ask myself, why was this book such a pleasure to read for a non-theatre person like myself? Perhaps, I think, theatre histories such as the one Lisa Milner and her contributors have put together aren’t only for theatregoers, they can be enjoyed by anyone. Perhaps the reason I so much enjoyed The New Theatre: The People, Plays and Politics behind Australia’s Radical Theatre is that it exemplifies the attraction and strength of what cultural history can do, in calling to mind the dedication and talent of theatre people, the ways radical theatre people try to change the world and sometimes do.