Difference between revisions of "From Club to Theatre"

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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 Formal activities were spread over four sections: art, drama, writing and music. A planned orchestra didn’t eventuate and the music section soon folded. Art classes were popular under the tuition of WAC President George Finey who organised an exhibition of Soviet posters in October 1932, a showing of his own sardonically bitter cartoons the next month, and an exhibition “Saga” of students’ and tutors’ linocuts at an anti-war rally in April 1933. Finey ‘s wife Nat modelled for the art students and performed occasionally with the WAC drama section. The literature section encouraged writing about proletarian life. Sixty Miler, performed in June 1935, concerned worker safety on dirty colliers carrying coal on the Newcastle-Sydney 60-mile run. These ships sometimes made two trips a day through storms and icy southerly winds. Authors of the one-act play were Sydney University Labour Club law students Jock Smail, TJ W “Wally” Weeks and John C Foster. Eddie Allison played a mutineer. “We want this rattletrap beached and we’ll bloody well see that she is!” he announced and fought with the captain. That actor, aged over 60, was knocked unconscious, striking his head on the stage with a clunk. From the 1930s to the 1960s the New, with strong connections to seamen and waterside workers, staged a number of plays dealing with maritime issues. The Good Hope (1950) concerned “coffin ships” off the Dutch coast; unrest on a tanker followed the murder of the black first mate in Longitude 49 (1951); and Australian-born longshoreman Harry Bridges was celebrated in song in 1942. Speakers at the WAC included Don Finley on Russian stage design; Ted Tripp on “Cultural Progress under the Five Year Plan”, Rosine Guiterman on John Galsworthy; and G W R Southern (proponent of gun control, nudism, and shorts for men in summer) on “Morality to Fit the Times”. V Y Chow explained English grammar; and J O A Bourke (he became UNSW’s first bursar) recited proletarian verse. The FOSU also provided a platform for talks on social and cultural topics. Often behind in the rent, the WAC survived mainly through its Saturday dances (its regular unpaid musicians on drums, saxophone and an old upright piano) and monthly themed fancy dress parties such as “Poets and Plumbers”, “Palettes and Picks”, “A Night with Conan Doyle” and “A Night in Araby”. The last featured murals of desert moons, minarets and palm trees, and a muezzin called the faithful to supper of tea and a biscuit. A great big jungle dance invited guests to come in costume as wild beasts and Tarzans. Fancy dress parties were still popular in the 1950s. The clubroom was a refuge for the unemployed and those with casual jobs. Some went door to door selling “the economical gas saver”, a metal plate for two saucepans which fitted over a single gas burner (but took twice as long to heat up). Others posed as repairmen, declaring a vacuum cleaner faulty, taking it to the WAC where it was cleaned up with Brasso, and returning it to the housewife the next day for a “nominal fee” ~ having performed an agit-prop play the night before on the evils of the exploitative capitalist class. Others became “shit shooters”: illegal street photographers dodging the police. At least two con men were involved with the WAC. In 1933 Ian Monteith Vallentine delivered readings with panache and directed The Importance of Being Earnest for George Finey’s People’s Art Club. He claimed experience with J C Williamson’s but was in fact a solicitor who had spent time in gaol and been struck off the roll of attorneys for embezzlement. In March 1935 Walter Townsend Hunt, twice-divorced and in debt, turned up at the WAC where he delivered stock recital pieces (National Heroes Debunked, or Henry Fifth as Shakespeare Really Saw Him), directed Mrs Warren’s Profession and offered elocution lessons to club members at a shilling an hour. At the time he was facing one charge of perjury and another of false pretences, having persuaded some “bright young people” to part with their money in exchange for roles in The Love Child, a local film for which he had no backing. He said their acting tuition fees would be taken out of their salaries. Hunt, who claimed experience with Vitagraph Pictures in the USA and with Allan Wilkie’s touring Shakespeare Company, was sentenced on 9 April 1935 to twelve months on the false pretences charge and on 18 June 1935 to nine months for perjury. He had a history of exploiting wealthy women, in India as well as Australia. Not long after the WAC opened, its key founders George Finey and Jean Devanny, both New Zealand born pacifists, left after clashing with the CPA’s Central Committee for choosing popular plays such as Pygmalion over Soviet propagandist pieces and granting membership to “artistic freaks”. Finey also drew abuse from the pro-Trotsky Militant which described him as a denizen of the WAC, a Stalinist-inspired outfit that “has degenerated so rapidly that even the degenerates now shun it”. Finey then set up a short-lived People’s Art Club above a speakeasy at 147A King Street in the city. A controversial CPA member, Devanny thought women had as much right to enjoy sex as men and admired the rippling muscles of the Russian man in the wheat fields. A fiery Domain speaker who spent time in Long Bay (her first impressions of Sydney were razor gangs, shootings, bag snatchings, the White Australia Policy, and bohemians), she remained in the Party but switched cultural allegiance to the FOSU. As a Workers’ Weekly reviewer she accepted invitations to film screenings but was scathing of Hollywood’s “immoral, sex-soaked” offerings which she critiqued as anti working class, prophesying that “after the revolution” The Scarlet Pimpernel’s Merle Oberon might find some good work despite having married a capitalist Hollywood director. Hostility to the USA was also evident in the WAC’s advertising for musicians to form an orchestra (“no jazz”) and the Australian Casting Directory’s refusal to accept ads from anyone wanting “to equip themselves for a career in Motion Picture Production, or its allied activities”. Following the departure of Devanny, Finey and the WAC’s first Secretary Honey Sloane, Vic Arnold became Secretary 1933-40 and Jerry Wells President. Both acted in and directed a string of productions, Wells until 1949 after which he had some local professional work. In 1957 “Casting Couch” Wells migrated to England where he shared an Earls Court flat with Reg Lye and got work in film and television, his last roles in The Two Ronnies and The Benny Hill Show (usually as a pincher of female dancers’ bottoms). After the Writers’ League drifted away from the WAC as the Writers’ Association, it was the drama group which became the club’s most successful section although Sydney’s commercial theatres had shrunk from ten to two with the popularity of cinema. Beginning with Tuesday night playreadings, the New had to hire outside venues when casts or audiences grew too big for the clubroom. The normal club performance night was Sunday when most Sydney citizens were expected to be in church, and a “donation” was extracted at the door as it was illegal for the unlicensed venue to charge admission.

RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA Changing slogans proclaimed the New’s working class philosophy (“Art is a Weapon”, “Plays with a Purpose”, “Theatre Belongs to the People”) although the occasional audience survey found that most came from Sydney’s North Shore. In the 1930s, when the CPA was only a teenager, Russia was an unknown far-away place and WAC members were encouraged to get access to radio to hear about events overseas, especially in the USSR (reception was better in winter when there was less static). In the general population, some thought the extravagant worship of Lenin was just a phase and that such a backward country was incapable of moving from feudalism to collectivism in a single leap. In some circles to be unsympathetic to “gallant Russia” was to be out of intellectual fashion, and the social experiment looked as if it was working. Others were suspicious, believing that money raised by left-wing cultural activities was sent to Russia (it sometimes was), at the same time questioning how such activities could exist without Soviet financial support. Among the Left themselves there was ongoing debate about proletarian versus “jazz” visual art, or whether there was room in a proletarian library for the “introspective heart searchings of despairing neurotics” or the playwright who placed the individual before the mass. Within New Theatre such tensions were ongoing, pitting ideologically pure works which preached to the converted against popular plays with no political message. The Crucible (premiered in Australia by the New in 1958) met both criteria, although its hero takes a stand against mass opinion, as does the central character in An Enemy of the People, mounted in 1962 in an atmosphere of bitter controversy. Even Comrade Devanny criticised worker playwrights who hung slabs of propaganda on the barest of dramatic threads; she admitted to the same fault in her own Paradise Flow. Like the FOSU, the New received many of its scripts from the USSR. In July 1933 Nellie Rickie produced Sergei Tretiakov’s mass stage show Roar China, an attack on Western imperialism. Staged to mark the 21st anniversary of the Russian Revolution was Nikolai Pogodin’s Aristocrats in praise of the builders of the Baltic-White Sea Canal, “aristocrats” of crime transformed under socialism into honest workers. Close to midnight the Sydney audience was prepared for the fall of the curtain by a stirring speech beginning: “Why will the White Sea Canal be famous? Because here the forces that have drawn people to participate in socialist work are operating with unheard-of daring, with true Bolshevik austerity, and on the broad scale Comrade Stalin has taught us… “ Another four-act import was Vladimir Belotserkovsky’s Life is Calling produced in 1936, its program note: “In this play the author raises the theme of Production to the heights of Socialist Construction. Life is Calling You to Develop and Build Socialism. Life is Calling You to the Joy of Knowledge and Reconstruction of Society”. Valentin Katayev’s Squaring the Circle, first staged in 1935 by both the WAC and Independent Theatre, was repeated in 1937 and 1938. Publicised as a satirical comedy dealing with young people searching for a new code of love, romance and morality, the play revealed Moscow’s housing shortage and the lightning rapidity of marriage and divorce in Russia. With one of its main characters a long-winded poet of the masses, the Independent’s production was reviewed as “ a museum piece rather than a living play”. Showdown by Tur Brothers and Lev Sheinen concerned the 1936 Moscow trials of fifth-column Nazi spies and wreckers caught by Soviet counter-espionage workers. Promoted as “thrilling Soviet Spy Drama” but reviewed as naïve and dreary propaganda with tedious scene changes, the play seemed an odd choice in 1940 when the German-Soviet peace pact was still operational. By the same authors was The Governor of the Province staged in 1948 with Jack Fegan in the title role. Set in post Second World War Germany, the play maintained that the USSR had rigidly adhered to the terms of the Potsdam Agreement’s tripartite military occupation, while the USA, through the Marshall Aid plan, had rebuilt the monopolies that financed Hitler. Any crisis in Berlin was because the Soviet Union refused to submit to American blustering. Things had soured since a 1944 program note for Edward Chodorov’s Decision forecast “a future vista of world peace, and economic and cultural advancement” for the “great freedom-loving peoples of Britain, America and the USSR”. AGIT-PROP & STREET THEATRE As early as 1932 the WAC was taking its message out of doors to the general public, playing out short sketches on the back of a lorry to late night Friday shoppers. Over the years the quality of both material and performance improved and at the height of McCarthyism there were more requests for outside shows than could be met. Regular Sydney venues in the 1950s included the Eveleigh Railway Workshop, Commonwealth Engineering Granville, Morts Dock, Elliot Street wharf at West Balmain in front of workers waiting to go to Cockatoo Island, Mortlake Gasworks, Australian Forge and Engineering, Randwick tram depot, Leichhardt bus depot, Kirbys, Ducon Condensor and Water Board workshops, Security Electric, Coopers Engineering at Botany, Malleable Castings and the Bunnerong Powerhouse. There were also concert parties for hospital patients, although headset-wearing consumptives at the Waterfall Sanitorium paid more attention to the horse races. No opportunity was lost to distribute leaflets on the New’s shows or the causes it supported. The maritime link was strengthened by performances on wharves and at pay depots during lunch breaks and smokos. Ken Rowsthorne “The Singing Wharfie” moved from outdoors to the stage proper as mug shearer Widges in Reedy River. Most agit-prop scripts concerned workers’ issues and Australian politics. Coal miners traditionally worked long hours for low pay with no social services or sick leave, suffering dust on the lungs and impaired vision from tallow lamps, and risking death or injury from explosions, floods and fire. Their conditions were the subject of the mainstream productions New Way Wins 1940, Men Who Speak For Freedom 1942, Birthday of a Miner 1949, Black Diamonds 1958 and Come All You Valiant Miners 1965. Betty Roland’s The Miners Speak, recited outdoors in 1938, concluded with a call to strike delivered with clenched fists. Youth: I am this old man’s son. Young, strong and vigorous. I only ask the right to work. But I am 21, you see, and there’s the catch. “No work for you, my lad, you’ve had your turn. Nick off! There’s plenty more at 15 who will take your place. They work as well as you and don’t cost near as much.”

During the prolonged 1949 coal miners’ strike ~ when electricity blackouts meant the New’s foyer and stage were lit by kerosene lamps ~ agit-prop shows played up to six times a day. One script was Oriel Gray’s Coal: Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, we are taking our microphone to the swirling cross section of any Australian city. We are testing public opinion by mass observation, and the question before you today is – Coal. (SFX crowd) First voice: Oh, the miners again. First woman: Don’t ask me. I don’t even know what it’s about. Businessman: Trying to run the country – trying to ruin business, that’s what they’re doing … Reds and foreigners, the lot of them. First woman: I don’t know … but they can’t always be the ones at fault. Sometimes they must have a good case. That’s how I feel – but you see I don’t know. (SFX crowd up) Second woman: The coal’s there isn’t it? Why can’t someone get it out? A man: As a candidate for the Liberal Party I can assure you my party pledges itself to see that the coal is produced. …. A doctor: As a doctor, I’ll give you statistics to prove I’m treating more casualties from dust than I was five years ago … and the condition is more chronic. … Narrator: We can give all facts and figures How many tons are mined on the northern fields in any given year. How much profit they made in 1945 – And that’s a figure for you. We can keep it statistical and still let you know The number dead and maimed by the black pit; But no slide rule can measure agony of bitter hours wept dry By women waiting at the pit head. No graph can show the way a man’s life chokes down When his lungs are silting full of dust – The tissues hardening to brittle stone.

In 1952 when the Commonwealth government decided to close the Glen Davis shale oil mine, its miners struck. The New was ready with material critical of Australian and US politicians. Will Glen Davis be a Ghost Town? No! No! No! Will we let the Yanks turn off our oil? No! No! No! Will they run us off Glen Davis oil? No! No! No! Will we let old Truman rule us? No! No! No! Will we let Bob Menzies rule us? No! No! No! Following an approach from the Miners’ Federation during the season of The Candy Store, the play was performed underground at Glen Davis, lit by the stay-put miners’ lamps, on a makeshift stage at the junction of five tunnels. Some of the younger men showed their appreciation of the actresses’ “brief” appearances; other staunch Labor supporters, who preferred local papers to Communist literature, kept their distance. A repeat performance for the miners’ families was given above ground in a local hall. In November 1952 Len Fox’s sketch Stay Down Miner was performed with songs, impersonations and skits on Menzies and Fadden before stay-put strikers in the Great Greta coalmine near Singleton. Other strikers supported by street theatre included Metters employees involved in a wage dispute in 1957 and dance instructors wanting to join a union in 1959 (“Arthur Murray taught me dancing in a hurry”). Building workers were entertained during lunch breaks on sites such as RPA’s nurses’ home in 1954, and David Jones Parramatta in 1961 where reference to the store was woven into the lyrics of one of the players’ most popular songs: I dreamed that I had equal pay And believe me children that ain’t hay When you come to think of what I’m equal to. I dreamed I owned a Cadillac And a modest 25-room shack All paid for from the back pay that came through.

In 1962 the New’s 30th birthday was celebrated with a concert to an audience of 300 in the carpenters’ shop of the Sydney Opera House before any above-ground construction had begun. Two years earlier New members had been present when Paul Robeson sang to building workers on the site. Conservative politicians were a favourite New Theatre target. For over two decades Robert Menzies provided revue material, the first in I’d Rather be Left in 1941: There’ll always be a Menzies While there’s a BHP For they have drawn their dividends Since 1883.

and street theatre during the Suez crisis: I’m the Sheik of BHP Your canal belongs to me!

and in support of CPA candidates: If you want Peace, a Home, a Job To see the last of Pig Iron Bob Make a communist your new MP And face the future with a smile.