Difference between revisions of "From Club to Theatre"

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and drunks sometimes managed the steep climb to wander into the club.  The main room had a red entry curtain, bare boards, a makeshift stage, an old wood-burning heater, and wooden forms to seat up to 100 people.  Left-wing literature was on sale.  A dressing room contained storage units made from butter boxes and space for socialising and sewing.  Opening the windows provided the only ventilation but this brought in the sounds of dance halls and dustbins being emptied – and the trams which rattled past every few minutes, drowning the actors’ dialogue.  In a packed audience on a summer night the atmosphere was suffocating, especially when the windows were closed and patrons lit up their cigarettes and pipes.  The only escape was up another stair to an unstable outside platform among the iron roofs.
 
and drunks sometimes managed the steep climb to wander into the club.  The main room had a red entry curtain, bare boards, a makeshift stage, an old wood-burning heater, and wooden forms to seat up to 100 people.  Left-wing literature was on sale.  A dressing room contained storage units made from butter boxes and space for socialising and sewing.  Opening the windows provided the only ventilation but this brought in the sounds of dance halls and dustbins being emptied – and the trams which rattled past every few minutes, drowning the actors’ dialogue.  In a packed audience on a summer night the atmosphere was suffocating, especially when the windows were closed and patrons lit up their cigarettes and pipes.  The only escape was up another stair to an unstable outside platform among the iron roofs.
 
Office assistant and artist’s model Joan Bretton (born Johanna Breitenberger) was up there once and fell straight through a skylight, landing bolt upright in a chair in the room below, to the amazement of a man working there.  “Are you all right?” he asked after a few minutes’ shocked silence.  “I will be after a few brandies”, responded Joan as she left for the local pub, probably the Ship Inn at Circular Quay where you could get drunk quickly on a bottle of cheap spirits (“no corkscrew required”) in an area where sailors chatted up painted girls amidst the smell of horses, beer dregs and off prawns.  The WAC’s roof became an improvised kitchen in 1933 when Harry Haddy, playing a toreador in a Carmen burlesque, wanted something more realistic than parsnips for the bull’s horns.  He got hold of a bullock’s head from an abattoir and began boiling it down in a portable copper on the flat roof.  After a week – the smell reaching as far as the GPO and attracting every stray cat in the neighbourhood – the head, with horns still intact, was doused with disinfectant and thrown into the harbour.
 
Office assistant and artist’s model Joan Bretton (born Johanna Breitenberger) was up there once and fell straight through a skylight, landing bolt upright in a chair in the room below, to the amazement of a man working there.  “Are you all right?” he asked after a few minutes’ shocked silence.  “I will be after a few brandies”, responded Joan as she left for the local pub, probably the Ship Inn at Circular Quay where you could get drunk quickly on a bottle of cheap spirits (“no corkscrew required”) in an area where sailors chatted up painted girls amidst the smell of horses, beer dregs and off prawns.  The WAC’s roof became an improvised kitchen in 1933 when Harry Haddy, playing a toreador in a Carmen burlesque, wanted something more realistic than parsnips for the bull’s horns.  He got hold of a bullock’s head from an abattoir and began boiling it down in a portable copper on the flat roof.  After a week – the smell reaching as far as the GPO and attracting every stray cat in the neighbourhood – the head, with horns still intact, was doused with disinfectant and thrown into the harbour.
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At the back of the WAC was a stone courtyard piled high with wine vats.  On the Quay side was Madam Gertrud Bodenwieser’s ballet school and Mischa Burlakov’s studio where WAC members drank rough red wine while watching a floor show. Burlakov dancers in turn staged gipsy and Cossack items at the club. 
 +
On the waterfront was number 7 wharf where during the Depression the unemployed lined up to get their chits which they had to exchange for food at the Benevolent Society near Central.  This took all day for those who couldn’t afford the tram fare.  Carrying their sugar bags, they dropped in at 36 Pitt Street for a free cuppa. 
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Applicants for the dole had to fill in a form with 32 questions, many of which were seen as ridiculous and demeaning, and public bonfires were made of the forms.  The unpopular questionnaire was the subject of Nellie Rickie’s sketch Weights and Measures.  Jean Devanny often interrupted theatrical performances to call for volunteers to help those suddenly faced with evictions. 
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THE CLUB’S ACTIVITIES

Revision as of 16:28, 7 October 2015

Sydney New Theatre began life during the Depression as the Sydney Workers’ Art Club (WAC). Its first known address is 273 Pitt Street where a small clubroom was opened in August 1932. Offered were lectures, music recitals, art classes and exhibitions, plus tuition in Russian, French and German. By October the club had moved to 36 Pitt Street, premises formerly occupied by the Australian Seamen’s Union. In April 1935 the Workers’ Theatre Movement in England became the New Theatre League and a year later the WAC, its dramatic section now the club’s most popular activity, followed suit. (Its parallel in the USA was the New Theatre Movement.) In 1943 the New Theatre League (NTL) shifted to 167 Castlereagh Street, its owner the Grand United Order of Oddfellows. In 1954 what was now New Theatre played at 60 Sussex Street under the auspices of the Cultural Committee of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. In 1963 “The New” moved to St Peters Lane and ten years later into its own building at 542 King Street Newtown. Sydney New Theatre is the sole survivor of similar groups which operated in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Newcastle.

THE WORKER PLAYERS Novelist and Communist Party of Australia (CPA) member Jean Devanny took credit for setting up the WAC, modelling it on clubs she had visited while attending a Workers’ International Relief Conference in Berlin in November 1931. Back in Sydney by February 1932, she lectured widely on her experiences and was in Broken Hill on 23 October 1932 when Sydney WAC was officially opened by Dame Sybil Thorndike, a pacifist and socialist then touring Australasia with St Joan. The Sydney club lagged a few months behind Melbourne WAC which mounted an exhibition of proletarian drawings in April 1932 and a theatrical production of Ernst Toller’s anti-war verse drama Masses and Man in August. At the time of Sydney WAC’s founding there were a number of workers’ amateur players and, like today’s co-ops, actors and directors – such as Nellie Rickie, Cleo Grant, Harry Haddy, Valerie Wilson, Cliff Mossop, and Tim O’Sullivan -- moved among the various groups, as did elocution teachers Myra Leard and Montgomery Stuart. An ALP initiative, the Theatre of the Hammer planned to build a hall in Newtown but the scheme seems to have come to nothing. Its Socialisation Drama and Art Group put on a double bill at the Bridge Theatre (later The Hub): Sean O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman plus a piece about coalminers. The performance suffered from paucity of material resources and actor training. “Despite encouragement from the back rows” two of the four players could not be heard. Carrie Tennant’s Community Playhouse in Forbes Street Darlinghurst premiered new Australian writing such as Leslie Haylen’s anti-war Two Minutes’ Silence. The WAC’s biggest competitor for audiences was the Friends of the Soviet Union Dramatic Society formally established in March 1932. The FOSU and WAC often staged the same Soviet plays, and the latter was resentful of the richer organisation from whom it sometimes had to hire chairs and a piano. Established in 1930, the FOSU was well-heeled with a wide support base, had its own hall, and, until it was banned in 1940, published its own journal Soviets Today generously illustrated with photos from the USSR. Members of its drama group were encouraged to write for weekly agit-prop nights. Longer works were developed from overseas news stories such as the 1931 naval mutiny at Invergordon, and the 1931 Scottsboro case where nine Negro teenagers were convicted on charges of rape (comedian Grouch Marx supported the American Communist Party’s campaign for clemency). Presented by the Roving Reds in Brisbane and several times in Sydney in 1933 was Bert Thompson’s The Moscow Trial of the Metro-Vickers Workers. Stalin’s Five Year Plans needed technical expertise and Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company engineers were brought from England to work on Russian power stations. When some turbines were found to be faulty the engineers were charged with sabotage. Western powers denounced the proceedings as a show trial using despicable tactics. The FOSU piece took the Soviet line, marking the scene changes with actors holding up placards accusing the imperialist Press of churning out slanderous lies.

SOME WAC RADICALS Many of the WAC’s first members had been radicalised years before the Depression put thousands out of work. Nellie Rickie was jailed at least twice under the War Precautions Act which banned the display of the Red Flag in public. Already a symbol of revolutionary protest, the Red Flag aroused stronger passions after November 1917 when it became the background of the Soviet flag. The singing of its anthem at Communist Party functions in the Concordia Hall opposite Mark Foys provoked loyalist crowds gathered outside on the Elizabeth Street footpath. When audiences at Masses and Man drowned out “God Save the King” with “The Red Flag” questions were asked in parliament. In Sydney’s Domain members of the Workers’ Defence Corps lined up to protect Communist speakers and there were bloody fights between carriers of the Red Flag and others waving the Union Jack, especially between those returned soldiers loyal to the British Empire and others disillusioned with their postwar lot. Visiting novelist D H Lawrence recalled such a brawl in Kangaroo: “men fighting madly with fists, claws, pieces of wood – any weapon they could lay hold of. The red flag suddenly flashing like blood, and bellowing rage at the sight of it”. After May Day marches in the 1930s violent clashes occurred behind St Mary’s Cathedral between the New Theatre League and the New Guard armed with bicycle chains. Indoors, tempers flared when some refused to stand for the national anthem. During a prolonged timber workers’ strike in 1929 loyalists and the RSL were outraged on the King’s birthday when a burlesque lampooning the Royal Family was staged in the Communist Hall. A “dishevelled and uncomely person” impersonated the king, and for a penny a shot one could thrash Prime Minister Bruce, ACTU president Billy Duggan and arbitration judge Lukin. Russian confectionery was on sale. Master of Ceremonies was strike leader Jack Kavanagh. Four years later Kavanagh was typecast again, as a revolutionary leader in the Combined Workers’ Art Groups’ The Armoured Train before an audience of 600 in Transport House Central Station, a production marking the 16th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Spence Barden was for decades on New Theatre Front of House duty every Sunday night, the first person the audience met at the top of the stairs and an expert in extracting the 2/- entry “donation”. As a young shearer Spence had been radicalised by meeting the Queensland strikers who had been jailed in 1894. Around a campfire he heard firsthand accounts of the unionists’ burning of the paddle steamer Rodney bringing scabs up the Darling River. Charlie Reeve was one of the 12 anti-conscription Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) jailed in 1916 under the Treason Felony and Unlawful Associations Acts. In prison he taught himself shorthand, read Jack London, and tried to get hold of a copy of Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”. Reeve acted in several NTL shows during the 1930s and members stayed in his Redfern terrace. His companion at the time of his death -- the Soviet flag was draped over his coffin --was Ernest Guthrie, a self-styled “dramatic artist” who also acted with the New and brushed with the law. In 1933 on a charge of not paying for a stained glass window he had ordered, Ernest stated that he had wanted to put it in a church in memory of his wealthy English mother Lady Ward. Letting him off with a good behaviour bond, the magistrate commented that Ernest must have been looking at some of the stuff they put on at the pictures. Merchant seamen and members of the Workers’ Defence Corps, “Shorty” Jones and Tommy Morrison dossed down in the WAC until 1935 after being deported interstate for their involvement in the April 1930 “Darwin rebellion” when 100 unemployed men, demanding to go on sustenance instead of the dole, camped outside Government House, raised the Red Flag and sang its anthem. At the WAC’s entrance Jones and Morrison kept guard against young street fighters from The Rocks. Court-martialled in the First World War, Latvian-born Edward Janshewsky (his surname spelt variously as Janitski, Janisky, Janetsky and Janswesky) was one of many WAC players with no theatrical experience as either viewer or performer. A merchant seaman, Janshewsky in 1915 landed in Sydney where he was persuaded by the Russian consul to enlist. Maintaining that he turned to drink because of his unpopularity as a Russian, his period of service was marked by periods spent in hospitals, base depots and military prison. Despite his heavy accent and imperfect English he was given some big roles, including wordy parts in Shaw plays. Another drifter who frequented 36 Pitt Street was Dick Whateley. After droving in Australia and picking up odd jobs in South America, he found himself stranded broke in France and joined the International Brigade in Spain. Frail, bronchial and shell-shocked, he returned to Sydney where he got some work on the waterfront. Terminally ill, he held on for months in the hope that he’d survive until fascism was defeated but died in 1943. Nettie Palmer referred to him as a deferred casualty of the Spanish Civil War, and prominent CPA member Adam Ogston delivered his eulogy.

	By community standards the private life of WAC and Australian Railways Union member Tim O’Sullivan was unconventional.   As a married man, he had a “Red wedding” with Nellie Rickie, crossing hands over the hammer and sickle flag and pledging sexual equality and duty to the Communist Party.  After his divorce from his legal wife came through he had a regular marriage with Rickie in 1929 but things soon turned sour when he was bound over for punching her while drunk and breaking her glasses.  The couple were divorced in 1938.  By 1940 a disillusioned O’Sullivan wrote that it was hypocrisy that the Communist form of marriage would improve the home life and equality of the sexes. Journalist John Hepworth also had a “Red wedding” with Oriel Gray’s sister Grayce, an exchange of vows in front of CPA General Secretary J B Miles.

36 PITT STREET The WAC at 36 Pitt Street was reached by an external narrow rickety wooden staircase above a wine bar which sold cheap plonk, the drink of choice a “fourpenny dark”. The building’s caretaker lived in a dark hole under the stairs, and drunks sometimes managed the steep climb to wander into the club. The main room had a red entry curtain, bare boards, a makeshift stage, an old wood-burning heater, and wooden forms to seat up to 100 people. Left-wing literature was on sale. A dressing room contained storage units made from butter boxes and space for socialising and sewing. Opening the windows provided the only ventilation but this brought in the sounds of dance halls and dustbins being emptied – and the trams which rattled past every few minutes, drowning the actors’ dialogue. In a packed audience on a summer night the atmosphere was suffocating, especially when the windows were closed and patrons lit up their cigarettes and pipes. The only escape was up another stair to an unstable outside platform among the iron roofs. Office assistant and artist’s model Joan Bretton (born Johanna Breitenberger) was up there once and fell straight through a skylight, landing bolt upright in a chair in the room below, to the amazement of a man working there. “Are you all right?” he asked after a few minutes’ shocked silence. “I will be after a few brandies”, responded Joan as she left for the local pub, probably the Ship Inn at Circular Quay where you could get drunk quickly on a bottle of cheap spirits (“no corkscrew required”) in an area where sailors chatted up painted girls amidst the smell of horses, beer dregs and off prawns. The WAC’s roof became an improvised kitchen in 1933 when Harry Haddy, playing a toreador in a Carmen burlesque, wanted something more realistic than parsnips for the bull’s horns. He got hold of a bullock’s head from an abattoir and began boiling it down in a portable copper on the flat roof. After a week – the smell reaching as far as the GPO and attracting every stray cat in the neighbourhood – the head, with horns still intact, was doused with disinfectant and thrown into the harbour. At the back of the WAC was a stone courtyard piled high with wine vats. On the Quay side was Madam Gertrud Bodenwieser’s ballet school and Mischa Burlakov’s studio where WAC members drank rough red wine while watching a floor show. Burlakov dancers in turn staged gipsy and Cossack items at the club. On the waterfront was number 7 wharf where during the Depression the unemployed lined up to get their chits which they had to exchange for food at the Benevolent Society near Central. This took all day for those who couldn’t afford the tram fare. Carrying their sugar bags, they dropped in at 36 Pitt Street for a free cuppa. Applicants for the dole had to fill in a form with 32 questions, many of which were seen as ridiculous and demeaning, and public bonfires were made of the forms. The unpopular questionnaire was the subject of Nellie Rickie’s sketch Weights and Measures. Jean Devanny often interrupted theatrical performances to call for volunteers to help those suddenly faced with evictions.

THE CLUB’S ACTIVITIES