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. Menzies’ nickname dated from 1938 when Port Kembla wharf labourers refused to load the Dalfram steamer with pig iron destined for Japan on the grounds that it would be used to make weapons against Manchuria – and come back to Australia as bullets. Attorney-General Menzies invoked the Workers’ Transport Act (dubbed the Dog Collar Act) stipulating that only licensed wharfies could work on certain ports and that an agreement including a no strike clause had to be signed. The BHP product was eventually shipped but for every two bins loaded one fell into the harbour. Betty Roland dashed off War on the Waterfront. Its cast had to learn their lines fast and rehearse in secret. Joe (Port Kembla watersider): I say, Bill, I wonder where this pig iron’s for? Bill: Hanged if I know. Joe: Wonder if it’s going to Japan? Bill: Shouldn’t be surprised. They’re the ones who seem to need it most these days. Joe: Then they don’t get me to load it, by crikey! … BHP (in frock coat and top hat): What business is it of yours where the cargo goes? Your job is to load it and ask no questions. Joe: Oh, yes, Adolf? Since when was I born deaf and dumb? BHP: Will you get on with your work? Joe: Not me, governor. I’m not going to make money from the blood and suffering of helpless men and women. I’ll leave that sort of thing to you. In Sydney’s Domain War on the Waterfront had barely started on 11 December 1938 when it was stopped by police, after which the actors ended up at Watsons Bay where they did it before an audience of bemused bathers. A week later, protected by a cordon of seamen and unionists, they were back in the Domain, defying a ban imposed by NSW Minister for Agriculture Albert David Reid. No appeal for money was made but the crowd, estimated at 300-400, showered the actors with coins. Vic Arnold, Hal Alexander, Bruce Bull, Robert Mitchell and John Woolacott were arrested. Although testifying constables admitted they transcribed some parts of the play wrongly because they couldn’t hear for the applause, the five were fined. Their defence counsel was John Kerr just out of law school. After the Domain incident, Port Kembla wharfies formed a drama group and took War on the Waterfront to towns on the South Coast. Workers, Beware was another Betty Roland script about the Dalfram incident. In it BHP, Shipowner and King Coal are in conflict with a seaman and a waterside worker (addressed by BHP as a bounder, vulgarian, and common low-born thug). The piece finishes with the capitalists linking hands, proclaiming “All for each and each for all!” and exiting in song: For the more we stick together, together, together, The more we stick together the wealthier we’ll be! For your friends are my friends, and my ends suit your ends, So the more we stick together, the wealthier we’ll be.

Another of Betty Roland’s agit-prop scripts was anti-conscription Vote “No!”. In 1938 a national register was proposed with a card index system classifying Australia’s adult population. The NTL was nervous that this would be used for military or industrial conscription. The Commentator, Politician, Capitalist and “Granny Herald” were played by Vic Arnold, Dennis Nash, John Sherman and Jean Blue. Commentator: In 1916 and in 1917 united action won the greatest victory for freedom in the history of Australia. In 1938 the clouds of war hang overhead again. Only united action can prevail today. What do you want? A free Australia or a country under military dictatorship which is only another name for fascism. Men and women of Australia, answer! DO YOU WANT CONSCRIPTION? (Endeavour to get audience to answer “No”. Then the entire group lines up and concludes by singing, to the tune of “Old Black Joe”) All: Conscription! Conscription! Every man must go. I hear Australian voices calling No! No! No! (Again try to get audience to join in, calling on them to do so and repeating verse. If necessary, hold up placard with the words printed on it.) Another Vote “No”! agit-prop script was written in 1951 when the coalition government passed the National Service Act (“Nasho”) whereby males over the age of 18 were called up for military training. Menzies was targeted, as was Country Party leader Artie Fadden who likened Australian communists to a venomous snake which should be killed before it had a chance to strike.

I’m an old cowhand and I understand

Just who should govern this wide brown land Not the Liberal-Country Party, Oh I know that Not one of them blokes is a democrat. ……. We’ll fight against you just like Dave Sands, For you won’t bluff us with your commands, We’ll vote no, no, no, we’ll seal your fate

The New conducted a major “No” campaign before the November 1951 referendum for wider powers to combat communism, the Menzies Government’s second attempt to ban the CPA after the Communist Party Dissolution Act had been declared unconstitutional by the High Court. The referendum was defeated by a narrow margin. In the 1941 State election the NTL supported anti-Lang candidates Clive Evatt and Clarrie Martin and claimed credit for helping their re-election. Stage designer and actor Charles Kitchener wrote Vote Labor, a script later modified by Jock Hector for federal elections: A Skeleton confronts a fat UAP candidate (who’s banging a drum) about issues such as unemployment, rising rents, rising fares, and rising food prices. UAP: Where are all the people who voted for our Party last time? Skeleton: They’ve gone over to New Zealand to get a job. New Zealand’s got a Labour government. Worker: What are you going to vote, boys? Chorus: Labor … the new ALP. Worker: Who’s the man you’re going to put your number one against? Chorus: Evatt… Clive Evatt. Some New Theatre people were Hughes-Evans Labor candidates in 1941: William Hortin (Canterbury), Rupert Lockwood (Concord), Paul Mortier (Kogarah), Sid Conway (Redfern) and Sam Lewis (Randwick), while staunch communist Diana Gould stood as an Independent. None were successful. Politics played outdoors brought hecklers and missiles. Oriel Gray’s sister Grayce Maxwell was one of those who took part in sketches at noisy meetings, the rowdiest at Kings Cross. Gordon Anderson wrote The Nation Speaks: White Collar Worker: A worker’s party must be put in parliament. A Labor Party that is true to Labor’s role. Industrial Worker: You will not find this party with the Mairs, The Beasleys, Curtins and McKells, the Langs – They fool the workers for their votes; Make promises they will not keep. White Collar Worker: The UAP, the UCP, Official ALP – All different labels tied to similar goods. Take off the tinsel wrappings of these groups, Examine close the goods within.

Industrial Worker: They are the same! They have a common policy:

A slogan we will tolerate no more.

Young Man: For there’s a Workers’ Party now, The Labor Party State of New South Wales. The Party led by Hughes – the Party that has stuck To Labor’s principles and fights for Labor’s rights.

By the end of the 1953 State election campaign NT players accompanied by the Unity Singers (Ross Thomas) and Unity Dancers (Mrs Lou Smith) were exhausted after performing at over 30 meetings (outside cinemas and pubs, in parks and on streets competing with traffic noise) in support of Communist candidates. The CPA platform included free hospital care, lower public transport fares, nationalisation of big monopolies, expanded social services, abolition of the NSW Legislative Council (a referendum to do this was defeated in 1961) and unlocking big country holdings for distribution to rural workers, ex-servicemen and farmers on marginal lands. Another policy was smaller class sizes in schools: I heard of one school with one lavatory for fifty With all this green fruit that’ll be nifty.

Street theatre, dormant during the Whitlam period of government, was revived under Malcolm Fraser. “The crazy grazier” was lampooned in song and as The Wizard of Oz; parts of The Pirates of Pal Mal were performed on the Sydney Town Hall steps; and “Which side are you on?” sung on marches organised by the Movement Against Uranium Mining: Oh, people could you stand it To watch your children die From nuclear leukaemia A-fallin’ from the sky? So listen to your conscience And help the cry go ‘round Act while there is still a chance And LEAVE IT IN THE GROUND! The Energy Show investigating alternatives to nuclear ~ including solar and renewables ~ played in streets, pubs, and at country festivals during 1979-80. An Australia Council grant financed another rural tour of skits including The Radio-Active Clown Show. From its inception the New was involved with dozens of organisations promoting peace. Always nervous of Australia’s close defence ties with the USA, in the 1980s it called for the closure of Pine Gap. Opposed to the Vietnam War, its members participated in Moratorium marches and questioned its morality in On Stage Vietnam and several revues. In one street theatre performance actors created a “crime scene” with their body outlines traced with chalk on the footpath. They then held up “No War” and “Get out of Vietnam” signs to passers- by. Other sketches involved a Vietnamese peasant being dragged through city streets and GIs raping Vietnamese women, but Nixon’s aerial mining of Hanoi was called off because of police surveillance. In 1971-2 a street theatre team went into the city nearly every Saturday and played out the plight of refugees, police harassment of Aboriginal people, pollution, censorship, unemployment, homelessness, public transport fares, apartheid, and US dominance of Australian television content and coal mining. Graham Richards, street theatre’s main organiser, was fined for offensive behaviour after pushing a wheelbarrow containing a papier maché phallus at a Women’s Liberation rally. The cost of living was a favourite street theatre topic. In 1946 Ben Chifley was addressed in What About It, Chief? After 1949 Menzies was the target. A Woman Who Knows: We’ve got to get into politics. Politics is just another way of saying how much rent you pay… how much meat, fruit, vegetables your pay packet will buy. How much is left over to buy new shoes. That’s politics. You’ve got to see your local Member of Parliament, your local councillor, and tell them we want prices really controlled…. You can do it through your union, through your Housewives Association. Led by prominent communists Freda Brown, Betty Reilly and Hetty Searle, the New Housewives Association aimed to involve working-class women in agitating for wage rises, price controls, child care and public housing. Later subsumed in the Union of Australian Women, the organisation published The New Housewife and the short-lived The Housewives’ Guide. A 1948 referendum on government control of prices and rents was defeated. Meat monopolies (especially Vesteys which exported meat, leading to high domestic prices) were targeted in Mona Brand’s operetta Butcher’s Hook, a potpourri of lyrics set to popular tunes: Oh, give me a bone I can cook on its own In a pot, with a carrot or two; Potato to swell, and an onion as well, And I’ll give them the old Irish stew.

Land of steak and sirloin Mutton far too dear Why should we export it When we need it here. By the 1970s Australians were getting hooked on fast food other than fish and chips. Graham Richards had a Ronald McDonald outfit made with “Artificial Food Makes Real Profit” written on the back and with street theatre members would go into a Maccas store and find a (plastic) rat in the order. This exercise involved a few close calls with the police. In another “in situ” operation the group would enter a bank, write “Filling in forms panders to the rich” on the deposit and withdrawal slips, and watch customers’ reactions. During the 1980s street theatre died out. One of its last ventures brought it almost full circle when invited by environmentalist Vincent Serventy to restage War on the Waterfront in Sydney’s Domain. The day was cold and rainy and the play, which in 1938 had created a furore and attracted a huge crowd, was performed before the author, Vince plus a couple of friends, and a bunch of bemused Japanese tourists. No police and no hecklers, planted or actual.

THE 1930s ~ PLAYS & ISSUES

Social problems

Most frequently produced published playwright until 1936 was George Bernard Shaw, the major writer in English dealing with social issues and a favourite with communist theatres as he wholeheartedly supported the Russian experiment. His Pygmalion (directed by Valerie Wilson) and Mrs Warren’s Profession (not performed publicly in London until 1925) were popular successes, with Eileen Robinson and Vic Arnold as Eliza and Higgins in the former, and Cleo Grant in the latter’s title role. Although denounced by the CPA Central Committee as non-leftist, Pygmalion was revived in 1936. On the Rocks was mounted in 1934, Major Barbara, Arms and the Man and How he lied to her husband in 1936, reviewers commenting on uneven acting ability and paucity of resources. Shaw continued to be produced sporadically: The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 1948, Androcles and the Lion 1964 and Misalliance in 1996. During the Second World War, Act 1 of Geneva (begun as a Workshop where novice directors tried out their skills) played to army camps. Other Shaw plays which were workshopped: Man of Destiny 1944, Overruled 1947, Augustus Does His Bit 1951, Act 3 Pygmalion 1951 and an adaptation Not Bloody Likely 1991.

In A A Milne’s Michael and Mary, staged in 1935, a young couple choose to marry bigamously instead of living in sin.

War & its consequences

From its inception the New was pacifist, although its early fears were of an imperialist war against the fledgling Soviet Union. Over the years it was affiliated with the League for Peace and Democracy, Women’s Commission of International Peace, Australian Peace Council, NSW Peace Council, Peace & Friendship Group, All India Peace Council, Newcastle Anti-Conscription League, and the Association for International Cooperation and Disarmament. It sent delegates to peace congresses and festivals at home and abroad, and participated in the annual Hiroshima Day march. Set during the 1871 Paris Commune, Lieutenant Pernot’s Word of Honour was staged in October 1933 for an Anti-War Congress. Charles Pernot, rich and an officer in the Versailles army, returns to the poor area where he grew up and encounters André a boyhood friend fighting with the Communards. André: The hungry masses will always be on one side of the barricade and the well-fed on the other. Class against class. Pernot kills André after he discovers that André’s detachment has desecrated his house, smashing his prize aquarium and killing his goldfish. Suzanne, loved by both men, spits in Pernot’s face after his final outburst: “Private property is sacred”.

A A Milne’s one-act “comedy” The Boy Comes Home was staged twice in 1935. Written near the end of the First World War, it concerned a young returned soldier needing a job. His uncle James, a jam manufacturer, proposes that Philip start at the bottom in his factory, an offer his nephew refuses. James: Perhaps you’ve thought of something else. Philip: Well, I had some idea of being an architect – James: You propose to start learning to be an architect at twenty-three? Philip (smiling): Well, I couldn’t start before, could I? James: Exactly. And now you’ll find it’s too late. Philip: Aren’t there going to be any more architects, or doctors, or solicitors, or barristers? Because we’ve all lost four years of our lives, are all the professions going to die out? Do you really think you can treat me like a boy who’s just left school? Do you think four years at the front have made no difference at all? With the growth of the American New Theatre movement, scripts from the USA supplemented those from London’s Unity Theatre. The Face by Arthur Laurents showed the permanent disfigurement many suffered after discharge: A returned soldier (an offstage unseen presence) and his wife are visited by a woman and her young son. The woman goes into the wings then steps back onto the stage: The Woman: I feel sick. I can’t forget that face. There is no face …and yet alive. The Wife: Yes, alive. Remember him the rest of your life! Forget that face if you ever can! Forget those stumps if you ever can! He was like your boy! Take off his khaki uniform! Let every mother know that he was like your boy!

In Muriel Box’s Angels of War, reminiscent of Journey’s End, female ambulance officers behind enemy lines in rural France are reading their mail: Cocky: Remember the Scotties I told you were billeted with Mother? Salome: Jock and Willie? Cocky: Went off week before last and left my sister Grace in family way. Skinny: Phew! Which one? Cocky: She doesn’t know. That’s the trouble. Damn! I can’t read the rest of it. Jo: Why not, Cocky? Cocky: Censored, blast it. Jo: All the best bits are. The play ends with their reflections on conflict: Vic: Don’t you see there can never be another war after this. We’ve proved how futile and hopeless it is. It can never happen again. I feel as though I could look forward ten – 20 years – to 1938 – and I hear people saying “No, that generation gave up everything it held dear in life so that there should never be another war as long as the world lasts. They didn’t let us down and we mustn’t let them down”. Moaner: But if they do? Vic: If they do then we’ve been through it all for nothing. But they won’t will they?

Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead was revived several times after its first production at the Savoy Theatre in April 1937, its cast including Kylie Tennant, Rosaleen Norton and Beresford Conroy. At the end of the play audience members were so moved that they stood on their seats and threw their hats in the air. The play opens in darkness, guns rumble, the big curtain lifts revealing moonlight on a war landscape. Soldiers with shovels are digging graves for six corpses sewn into hessian shrouds. But the corpses, cheated of the lives and loves they should have had, rise up out of the trenches and give their reasons for living. The First Corpse passes his hand over his eyes. The men sigh – horrible, dry sighs. One by one the corpses arise and stand silently in their places. Soldier: What do you want? First Corpse: Don’t bury us. Cheated of the lives and loves they should have had, the corpses give their reasons for living. Other anti-war pieces included Slickers Ltd a London Unity Theatre satire on the arms race and Vickers Armaments, manufacturer of explosives, warships and aircraft; the prologue of German expressionist poet Ernst Toller’s Hoppla! We Live; and Twelve Thousand by Bruno Frank who fled Nazi Germany. John Drinkwater’s X=o a four-hander written in 1917 but set during the Trojan War, was restaged several times, the last in 1948 when Les Tanner designed its set and played a Trojan while his friend David Futcher played a Greek. Capys a Trojan moving to and fro along the wall: Or Greek or Trojan, all is one When snow falls on our summer-time, And when the happy noonday rhyme Because of death is left undone. The bud that breaks must surely pass, Yet is the bud more sure of May Than youth of age, when every day Death is youth’s shadow in the glass. Another verse play was Catherine Duncan’s The Sword Sung (its title taken from William Blake and its abstract style from Ernst Toller) which won a NTL play competition in 1937. A series of First World War episodes moving between France and Australia, it was staged the next year, and reviewed as a didactic harangue. Joan Hardy played the French prostitute and Barrie Braddock the Australian soldier Michael in a scene outside a café behind enemy lines: Harlot: Match? Where are you going, soldier boy? Michael: What does it matter? This café or that café, they’re all the same. Then back tomorrow. I’ve got a home, you know, A slushy dug-out on the front line.

William Kozlenko’s Trumpets of Wrath, staged for Peace Week in 1938, was set in First World War Europe. Standout performer was Kenyon McCarron as a war-crazed old soldier.

The threat of fascism

Nellie Rickie’s The Emissary, staged in 1933 when the New Guard was active, warned against the danger of fascism in Australia. In 1938 Freda Lewis directed The Home of the Brave, a burlesque on American fascism. Who’s Who in the Berlin Zoo, a sketch developed by the English agit-prop group the Red Megaphones, was part of a double bill in 1935. The next year Clifford Odets’ Till the Day I Die, in which Nazi brutality was exposed, brought protest from Dr Asmis the German Consul General as insulting to a friendly foreign power and its second showing at the Savoy Theatre was raided by police. The NSW Chief Secretary then banned the play “for the preservation of good manners and decorum”. Miles Franklin described the production as a gallant and lively effort, and protests from the Australian public and local and international press coverage meant good publicity for the NTL which shifted the venue to its clubrooms for “private” performances. By the time the play’s run was finished an estimated 18 000 people from all political persuasions and professions had seen it, and the theatre was sufficiently solvent to buy a stage pistol instead of the real one borrowed from a NTL member who was a bank teller. The ban was not lifted until August 1941, after Australia had been at war with Germany for nearly two years. “Open the door. Secret police!” became the standard NT door knock greeting. In 1938 Diana Gould, director of The Sword Sung, was arrested for obstruction when delivering a speech from the top of a motor car in George Street against visiting Count von Luckner, seen as a Nazi apologist. During a von Luckner event in Sydney Town Hall regular NTL audience member wharfie Stan Moran threw bent pennies and torn ‘phone books (the gay old sea dog‘s party trick) onto the stage. In the months before the start of the Second World War Frederick Hughes directed German exile Peter Nikl’s Bessie Bosch in which a woman learns that her lover is to be executed by the Nazis, and Paul and Claire Sifton’s Blood on the Moon in which a Jewish family is destroyed. The setting is 1933 Berlin where the idealism of youth is debased and utilised by fascism which invents a philosophy to justify its brutalities: “It isn’t enough that they should kill us. They must drive us to kill each other”. Although “several Nazi officers and stormtroopers bawled their way through the action” the German consul did not protest on this occasion. In a program note Jessie Street urged Australian asylum for “these persecuted and tortured people”. The NTL supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War through fundraising, agit-prop and mainstage productions, and invitations to the Spanish Consul to address audiences. In Ramon Sender’s The Secret prisoners are locked up in the Chief of Police’s office in Barcelona. The year is 1935. First prisoner: I am thirsty. General: Why are you thirsty? Prisoner: I have been kept for three days without water. General: Oh well, the same old story. Neither have you been fed, true? Prisoner: Sardines and raw salt cod. It would have been better if I had not been given anything. Give me water… I am perishing of thirst. I believe I have the right to be examined by a doctor. I demand that the prison doctor be called. General (laughs): The prison doctor. Don’t try to precipitate things.

Michael Blankfort’s The Brave and the Blind concerned the 1936 siege of Alcazar by Spanish government forces, “a particularly searing episode from the grim struggle in Spain”. Although the subject was serious, the cast was undisciplined, making their noisy and leisurely way onstage from the dressing room. Remember Pedrocito was restaged several times and taken to Wollongong. In 1936 in a town near Madrid a civilian sniper, Manuela, is brought into an abandoned house occupied by Juan, Pablo and Francisco, members of the Spanish Regular Army, a paid force. After their captain kills Manuela’s 10-year-old brother Pedrocito, Pablo shoots him and follows Juan as deserters to the Republican cause. Before he leaves Juan addresses the young woman: All the fighting isn’t done with guns, little comrade. If they win, your mother and all the others that are fighting with her, they’ll need you to help them make a new Spain, where people can be happy and have enough to eat without stealing, and where men won’t be shot for trying to help their brothers. And if they lose – this time – they’ll need you to be ready for the next time, and to remember Pedrocito, and tell them how he died… … After Juan leaves the room Pablo fires. The Captain stands rigid for a moment, coughs and falls to the floor where he lies motionless. Pablo and Francisco regard his body silently. Pablo suddenly springs into action, gathering his equipment and firearms. Francisco: Mother of God. Pablo, you must be crazy! What are you going to do now? Pablo: I’m going with Juanito. Francisco: God help you if they find you when they take Madrid. Pablo (pausing at door): Madrid? Hm, yes. We’ll be waiting for you, Cisco! We’ll be waiting for you! Pablo exits. Francisco stares after him, then looks at the Captain’s body and slowly crosses himself. Curtain.

Bertolt Brecht’s Señora Carrar's Rifles, a version of Synge's Riders to the Sea, was relocated to Spain during the height of the Civil War.

Workers & unemployment

WAC regulars Edward Janshewsky, Harry Haddy, Cliff Mossop and Tim O’Sullivan appeared in the Workers’ Art Theatre Group’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which opened to a packed house in the Rationalist Society’s Ingersoll Hall at Easter 1933. Most of the cast were unemployed with no theatrical experience but they did well enough to start promoting themselves as the RTP Players restaging this play plus Roar China (under the auspices of the WAC), Harry L Broderick’s The Sundowner and Upton Sinclair’s The Spy. In 1935 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists had a successful run at 36 Pitt Street. An examination of the life and conditions of building workers in the fictional English town of Mugsborough, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was a dramatisation of the popular novel by Robert Tressall who had worked as a house painter. Promising “Love, Pathos, Humour, and a Message” and written “in lurid, blood-red language of men on the job” with an abundance of “bloodys”, its ironic title refers to labourers who work as slaves for their capitalist masters but vote for them at election time. The gulf between the classes is highlighted when after a worker falls from a ladder his headgear is picked up by the house’s new mistress who comments “What a filthy cap”. The aim of the piece was to exasperate the audience into action and convert them to Socialism. Its first production was reviewed as intelligently done but essentially propaganda for the converted, the puppet-like characters addressing the audience in long speeches. The workmen give their views on the causes of poverty. The artisan Owen is the spokesman for the Socialist message. Crass: The country is being ruined by foreigners. Owen: Hundreds out of employment. Are you going to tell me the waiters down at the Grand Hotel are the cause of that? Sawkins: Cor blimey, now you’ve started him off. Harlow: The cause of poverty is over population. Philpot: That’s right. If a boss wants two men, 20 goes after the job. There’s too many people and not enough work. Slyme: Drink is the cause of poverty. Philpot: ‘Ear, ‘ear. I couldn’t arf do with a pint of poverty right now. Crass: Don’t forget there’s them that’s too lazy to work, when they can get it. Then there’s all this newfangled machinery. Slyme: Early marriage is another thing. No man ought to be allowed to get married unless he’s in a position to keep a family. Owen: Landlordism is one of the causes of poverty. Poverty is not caused by men and women getting married; it’s not caused by machinery, or over-production, or drink, or over-population. I say poverty is caused by private monopoly.

Another adaptation of Tressall’s book was staged by the New in 1987. Very different from the original Manchester Unity script, it contained music and omitted the domestic scenes between Owen and his wife. Socialism was also seen as the answer to society’s problems in The Bruiser’s Election staged in October 1933. Stephen Schofield’s one-act farce shows how three parliamentary candidates who call on Bruiser and his wife to get their votes are outwitted by the couple who trick them into funding a Socialist candidate. Nellie Rickie’s Beyond the Road ~ its cast herself, Harry Haddy and Sid Birchal ~ about a couple tramping to northern Australia looking for work was staged at 36 Pitt Street in April 1933 as part of a program of her one-act plays. Between the pieces the audience was asked for feedback. In Love on the Dole, Ronald Gow’s grim play on the effects of unemployment, the central character becomes a kept woman as her only chance to make money. Before she leaves town in a taxi, to the jeers of the locals, her parents comment: Hardcastle: Haven’t Ah worked all me life, body an’ soul, t’ keep a home for her? Haven’t Ah kept meself respectable for her, when God knows Ah’ve been near driven to drink wi’ things. And now me own daughter tells me she’s a whore – aye, and proud of it too. Mrs Hardcastle: Lad, she’s only young – she’s only young. Where should we ha’ been all these months if it hadn’t been for our Sally? It’s her money we’ve lived on since they knocked you off dole, an’ well you know it. In Carrion Crow, staged several times 1935-6, unemployed Cockney slum dwellers ~ a can man, a cardboard box man and a rag woman ~ rummage through garbage bins at night. Like the scavenging bird they are clever and fearless. In real life, cast member Jerry Wells was then poverty-stricken and near derelict. Rag woman: Yer ain’t got to do nuffink fer a copper ter git yer. They hoccupies their spare time wiv the likes of us. E’n nailed me twice, this ‘un ‘as. In Transit adapted from a novelette by Albert Maltz unemployed workers of different ages and backgrounds spend a wintry New Year’s Eve in a New York doss house: Luke: Is the beds clean? Ah means bugs. Ah sure can’t sleep if they’s bugs. Baldy: Yeah? You’re like me, I guess – partic’lar about the critters you sleep with. No. You find a bug in here, I’ll cat it. Luke: What’s that smell? Coal oil? Baldy: Kerosene. That’s what we use to ride out the bugs. No bugs here without you brung ‘em with you.

In Maltz’s Rehearsal, 1939 City of Sydney eisteddfod winner restaged in 1942, a proletarian theatre troupe is rehearsing a mass chant. An actress recalls her brother’s back being broken by company police during a strike, reminding audiences of “the Ford Massacre” when unemployed marchers in Detroit were shot down in 1932. In Betty Roland’s Are You Ready. Comrade? a dismissed accountant confronts his cigar-smoking boss: Henderson: This firm may go broke. I know that, I’ve been keeping the books. But even that won’t leave you with nothing to face but the dole. You’ve got a house, a motor car, your wife’s got jewellery, you’ve got some money in the bank. (The 5 o’clock whistle blows.) There she goes. I’ve answered that whistle for 30 years. All the best years of my life. Eight hours every day and in return I got enough to feed and clothe my family and a little left over if I saved and did without. And now I’m not as useful as I used to be, the firm can’t get its money’s worth, so it’s not going to feed and clothe me any more nor keep my family. NTL actors (with an hour’s rehearsal) in 1939 performed Betty Roland’s radio play It Isn’t Possible! on 2KY (supported by New people since 1926 when Nellie Rickie delivered humorous monologues during a fundraiser for the trades union station. During the Second World War the NTL had a regular weekly spot.) Roland’s script was based on a series of real-life strikes at the Dunlop Perdriau rubber factory at Birkenhead Point, Drummoyne, beginning in 1937 with shoemakers’ complaints that bonus rates had been reduced. After a new method of sewing uppers is introduced and their pay reduced, the female shoemakers react to the news that a time and motion man has been brought in to speed up production. Seamer: I can’t work any faster. 760 pairs a day I do. They’re asking 924 small pairs or 859 of large. Braider: Three thousand one hundred and ten they want – for lower pay. All girls: It isn’t possible. We’ve given everything we’ve got. In 1939 (when Dunlop Perdriau made a record profit) a three-month strike ended after the Rubber Workers’ Union was threatened with deregistration, Arbitration Court Judge Drake-Brockman stating that the women were a handful of rebels who should realise they owed something to the community. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Forward One, staged in 1937, dealt with the plight of shopgirls afraid of losing their jobs despite difficult customers, unsympathetic management, being on their feet all day, and constantly going up and down ladders to fetch stock. The shop is hot and the new shop assistant faints. Miss Drew (manageress): Take her into the packing room… Supposing a customer should come in. Vera: Let them come. Let them all come and see what you’ve done to this girl and Elsie and me. I’ll tell them that there are scores of girls in the city in other show rooms who are suffering torture with their backs and feet, just because you and your sort won’t let them sit down during business hours, even when there’s no business doing. It’s sheer brutality.

Dismissal for union activity prompts strike action by adolescent workers in a New York candy factory in Ben Bengal’s Plant in the Sun: Peewee: Today I get notice tuh skiddo. It ain’t gonna be slack for two months yet, so why the epidemic? We know why. Some rat in the joint squealed tuh Horseface that Danny and me was talkin’ Union. Right? Mike: Right. Peewee: Now tell me, don’t we need a union on this job like a cripple needs a crutch? (Silence.) Well, Skinny, Tubbo and me says we do loud enough to sit down.

Factory girls in So It Didn’t Work face their first test as unionists. Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, an exposé of capitalist exploitation and corruption outside and within the trade union movement, after a successful opening in January 1936 added some mid-week performances before settling into a monthly event in 1937. Its crew and cast were a roll call people who had a long association with the New: Vic Arnold, Jerry Wells, Jean Blue, Hughla Hurley, Des Rowan, Edgar Yardley, Jack Fegan, Frank Callanan, Kenyon McCarron, Eddie Allison, Frank Swonnell, Harry Howlett, Hugh Carlsson, Jack Maclean, Peter Harding, Tim McGill, Sylvia Arnold. A 1938 sesquicentenary event, Miles Malleson’s Six Men of Dorset was propaganda for the trade union movement. The “Vivid, authentic Drama of the Tolpuddle Martyrs” told the story of the six farm labourers sentenced to transportation in 1834 for establishing a trade union, the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers. Its cast of 40 included six-year-old Moira, daughter of NTL actor and pioneer nudist Kleber Claux.

Persecution & injustice

The capital punishment of Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti in 1927 raised as much controversy as that of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953. Both US executions were denounced by the New. Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted in 1921 of the murder of a paymaster and his guard, despite the fact that another person confessed to the killings. The execution was delayed for years because of an international outcry that they were being tried for their beliefs rather than the crime. Jack Kavanagh was one of those fined for organising a protest march from Sydney’s Belmore Park to the Domain via the US consulate, although he defended it as a funeral procession. The monologue Vanzetti in the Death House was repeated several times 1934-5, and the men’s legal case examined in The Advocate in 1965: Act 1 September 1923, members of Sacco and Vanzetti’s Defense Committee visit a lawyer Warren Curtis to sound him out over taking over the defence. Curtis: For three years now – ever since the case began – it’s been impossible to express a view without being slotted into a pigeonhole. Say they’re innocent, and you’re siding with the anarchists. Call them guilty, and you’re prejudiced. There’s been nothing but hysteria from every side.

In 1951 as part of an anti-Truman event Charles Sriber read Vanzetti’s last speech: Not only am I innocent of these two crimes, not only in all my life I have never stole, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.

The Rosenbergs were Jewish communists accused of passing atomic secrets to the USSR. The New’s solicitor Harold Rich was on the Save the Rosenbergs Committee and theatre members maintained a vigil outside the US consulate, huddled around fires in bins on a bitterly cold night in June 1953. Peter Leyden’s script Testament recalled their trial and execution. Ethel Rosenberg was a character in Angels in America produced by the New in 2008. Injustice resulting from the double standards of the Press was the subject of Leslie Clarke Rees’ Sub-Editor’s Room staged in 1937 and 1939. After he is fined for selling adulterated milk a shopkeeper asks that the story not be published or, if it is, his name be misspelt to save him from ruin. In contrast the story of the divorce of a socialite, the niece of one of the paper’s directors, is “killed”. News then comes that the shopkeeper has died, probably by suicide. Frequently revived was London Unity’s pantomimic satire Where’s That Bomb? Its unemployed hero writes propaganda on toilet rolls telling workers of their duty to their bosses and country. He finally tells a patriots’ organisation to go to Fleet Street:they’ve been printing the workers’ toilet paper for years. Part of the WAC 1933 Saga exhibition was John Harvey’s linocut “The Daily Dope” depicting capitalists with a giant newspaper obscuring a factory and its workers. Press censorship, ethics and manipulation of the truth has been an ongoing topic for street theatre, revue and mainstage plays such as John Upton’s Waiting for Rupert Murdoch. A musical satire on the evils of colonialism, Cannibal Carnival was a popular show in 1939. A buccaneer, a policeman and a clergyman are shipwrecked on an island where they impose their code of progress, private property and morality. After banning dancing and erecting a Union Jack, a fence and advertising hoardings, they annex the breadfruit and hot dog trees and set the island’s inhabitants to work. The natives develop a concept of unemployment, establish a socialist government, address each other as “Comrade” and in the last scene bundle the bishop and the capitalist into a gigantic cooking pot. Soon after landing, the trio meet Egbert, a native, and humbug him into giving them most of his food. Bumpus: The heathen in his blindness! He doesn’t even know the difference between religion and robbery. Egbert: But I do, white man. When you take bread it is patriotism and religion. When I take bread it is robbery and violence. Crabbe: He couldn’t have put it better if he’d been to Oxford.

The cannibals, including Grayce and Oriel Bennett and Marcia Guerney, wore full body make-up. A later version where the bishop was replaced by evangelist Amee McPherson and the capitalist by Marshall Aid, a tall lean Yank (“Where there’s footprints there’s folks and where there’s folks there’s food … and where there’s folks and food, there’s business”) appears not to have been produced. Geoffrey Trease’s Colony was set in 1936 West Indies where there was economic recession and unrest among indentured labourers working for the minority planter class. The Moyne Report, not published in full until 1945, found appalling economic and social conditions amongst sugar workers: poverty, child mortality, malnutrition, venereal disease and general ill health. In the play trouble with the sugar workers expands to a strike of taxi drivers, then to power station workers. Governor Munro was played by Edward Pate (his later stage name Michael Pate), with Frank Callanan and John Reed in black make-up. The governor is visited by two British MPS, one a Tory, the other a left-wing firebrand Jane. Lady Munro: I’m so sorry my husband wasn’t here. He’s … he’s at some sort of conference. Jane: What sort of conference? Lady Munro: Oh…something to do with the…welfare of the sugar workers. Jane: So that’s what all the trouble’s about. (SFX: Four shots in the distance.) Rabbit for supper?

Censorship

Over the decades the New was opposed to all kinds of covert and overt censorship. The New York Times carried a story on the banning of Till the Day I Die in 1936: “Australia Versus Odets. Protecting the people is quite an industry here where there are more books banned than anywhere else in the world save possibly the Irish Free State”. At that time over 5000 books were officially listed in Australia as prohibited publications. A supporter of the Book Censorship Abolition League, the NTL in 1937 staged the Writers’ Association’s winning sketches The Deputation Waits ~ and Nellie Rickie’s The Censor: Miss Chizzlewitt (turning pages of Bible): I’ll find you a snappy story. Here. Read the one about Lot’s wife. Censor (takes Bible): Where is my magnifying glass? Miss Chizzlewitt: You had it with you when you went to view the statue of Apollo at the Fountain. Oh, here it is. Censor (reads Bible): Oh. Oh. Oh. (Faints) Miss Chizzlewitt: Help! Help! The Censor has fainted. Here is your smelling salts. Censor (shrieks): Salt. Salts. Take it away. I never want to hear of salt again. We must censor that book. Miss Chizzlewitt: Censor the Bible? Censor: It can’t go out with stuff like that in it.

THE 1940s ~ PLAYS AND ISSUES

Premises

When conditions became cramped at 36 Pitt Street the League exchanged premises with the International Seamen’s Club, and in 1943 took out a three-year lease in Angus House 167 Castlereagh Street, a three-storey building owned by the Grand United Order of Oddfellows (GUOOF). Opposite was a telegraph office and next door a chemist at street level where “Mark” helped actresses find the right shade of lipstick. In the same building was the headquarters of the Masonic Club whose male members sang loudly in competition with those rehearsing in the theatre. The local watering hole was the Castlereagh Hotel where, at a time when women were not allowed in public bars, both sexes drank together at a big round table in an upstairs back room: “Ask the waitress – they know us”. The Sydney committees were egalitarian in contrast to Melbourne New Theatre where men and women had to drink in separate areas in their pub. The theatre was on the first floor, reached by wide concrete steps. The space felt vast in comparison to the old premises, and echoing wooden floorboards added to the familiar noise of trams rattling past. Below was Phillips Café with its smelly garbage bins. Above was a clothing factory run by two Austrians who had escaped from Vienna the day Hitler marched in. They and their children sat in the front row every opening night. The New managed to stay on at 167 Castlereagh Street for over a decade although the City Council, Fire Brigade and the building’s owners regularly tried to close it down as breaching the Theatres and Public Halls Act. Finally, served with an eviction notice and deciding not to fight a court case, a special meeting voted to find other premises. This was in November 1953 when the theatre’s finances and committee were both exhausted. A month later the smash hit Reedy River turned everything around, In preparation for the first show in 1943 members pitched in to transform the big, empty rooms, and Jack Bickerdike and his team built a Louis X1V style stage, painted cream with gold decoration with a plush red curtain. But Council workers forced their way in, wrecked the stage, pulled down the lights and curtain and ripped out the switchboard. A new stage, covered in hessian, was hastily built and Let’s Be Offensive‘s opening was delayed, but only by one night. In the audience was newly married Peter Finch who drank with NTL people and who was cast as the lead in the 1943 repeat of Golden Boy. He pulled out, perhaps warned by Security, and the part was taken by Rosaleen Norton’s husband. (In 1948 NT members ~ Jock Levy, Edgar Yardley, Catherine Duncan, Alan Herbert and Ken McCarron ~ acted with Finch’s Mercury Theatre Club. Finch went to England after Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh saw him in a Mercury lunchtime performance at O’Brien’s Glass Factory at Waterloo. In November 1943 the City Council again dismantled the Castlereagh Street lighting board and stage, claiming it was erected without Council approval, that the building was being used as a theatre despite having only one fire exit, and that the GUOOF forbade any fixtures on the premises. The next weekend’s Counter Attack was lit by torches and lanterns. League members erected a non-fixture stage, and scenery from then on was provided by flats leaned against the walls like a pack of cards.

War

War became a reality on 3 September 1939. That night Miles Franklin and Leslie Rees were overwhelmed by “sadness and despair” after leaving a reading of his Lalor of Eureka to hear newsboys crying “Britain declares war on Germany!” This was a month after the USSR had signed a non-aggression pact with the Communists’ arch enemy Nazi Germany. Its allegiances tested, the NTL settled mostly for a program of repeats, guest productions, plays on workers’ issues and pacifism. In Miles Malleson’s Black Hell, set during the First World War, a Sassoon-like character comes back from the front a hero but denounces the conflict as madness and says he won’t go back to the grinding degradation of trench warfare. In June 1940 the NTL office was raided after the Menzies government banned the CPA under the National Security Act and scripts and Boer War rifles were confiscated. Oriel and John Gray burned their copies of The Communist Review, and Len Fox put his left-wing books in an outside lavatory. In the city with a case full of typed material for the CPA printer, Fox saw two big plainclothes police running towards him. “Grab him!” one yelled. “This is it”, he thought but they rushed past to hop into a taxi. One CPA member convinced police that a portrait of Karl Marx was his grandfather, but another was arrested when her picture of Beethoven was mistaken for Mussolini.

	The 1941 revue I’d Rather be Left contained a lot of material focusing on the home front, including the “ARP lecture”: 

Our lecture tonight in our series of talks on Air Raid Precautions deals with Bombs. Now Bombs produce a bang and a smell. In the case of high explosive Bombs it is the bang that is to be apprehended and not the smell. The reverse applies in the case of gas bombs where the bang may be ignored but the smell should if possible be avoided.

In 1940 the only Russian play staged was Showdown re the 1936 Moscow trials of Nazi spies and wreckers caught by Soviet counter-espionage workers. Billed as a “thrilling Soviet Spy Drama” it was reviewed as a dreary and odd choice considering the German-Soviet pact. Wireless Weekly also commented that the NTL had no trouble finding men players, implying that they had not enlisted. Staunchly anti-conscription, the League in April 1940 staged The Patriot and the Fool a short piece by Sydney writer Cecil S Watts: A patriot Richard Hander tries to talk a simple farmhand into joining up. Hander: Young man, you should not be here, wasting your time whittling at a stick. Don’t you realise where you should be? Jimmy: Yes, I ought to be trampin’ up hill and down dale lookin’ for a cow. But there ain’t much sense in doin’ that when the flamin’ beast might be somewhere else where you aint. Hander: Never mind about the cow. What I want to ask you is this. Wouldn’t you like to be in khaki? Jimmy: Aw, I dunno. What’s wrong with these dungarees? Hander: Good heavens, can’t I make you understand? Hasn’t anyone told you there’s a war being fought? Jimmy: Oh, yes they told me a week ago that a war was comin’ but I aint seen it yet. No I aint seen it yet, so perhaps it aint coming here after all. Nothin’ ever comes here if it can help it.

Australian journalist Rupert Lockwood’s No Conscription was banned after a couple of performances at Transport House and 36 Pitt Street. Set during the heated debates of the First World War, the documentary theatre had actors planted in the audience, newspaper boys running up and down the aisles shouting headlines, and the audience exhorted to fight conscription. Colony was hastily substituted for No Conscription when a CIB officer named Murray and a censor J R Magnusson (who’d asked for exemption from military service) turned up in the audience. The response to a question in parliament from Eddie Ward was that the censor didn’t have to give reasons for the ban. The League’s 1940 May Day float tried to put the anti-conscription message in the historical past. NTL street theatre supported the “No Conscription” campaign. 42A And All That (named for part of the National Security Act which made punishable disloyal or subversive comments on war policies or administration) was delivered from the back of a truck in places like Petersham, Newtown and Paddington. Sketches included the high price of beer ~ and Regulation 42A: Boss: Why aren’t you men in uniform? In the Army? Loafing around the streets…the pubs… Stick a gun in your hands, that’s what we ought to do! Conscription! What do you do, anyway? Man 1: I’m a steel worker. Man 2: I make munitions. Both: We do more than fight for our country … we make what Australians need. And you? You take the profits. The government taxes our pay. Boss: Fifth columnists! Reds! Traitors! We’ll have 42A down on you!

The NTL also opposed the wartime push for increased productivity. Its 1941 May Day float carried a top-hatted monopolist, a worker chained to the cogs of industry and the slogans “Resist Speed-Up” and “Misery for Millions – But Millions for Bosses”. Although it was generally seen as unpatriotic to push for better wages and conditions at this time of national emergency, coalminers struck in early 1940 for guaranteed working hours, wages, pensions, annual leave and workers compensation. In support of their stance the NTL staged No Armistice by Queensland writer Leonard Anzac Reason. Things suddenly changed in June 1941 when Germany attacked Russia. The NTL flipped allegiance and supported the war effort, marching at War Loan rallies and staging patriotic agit-prop. Some members worked in munitions factories and many enlisted, including Vic Arnold who put down his age by seven years to join the AIF. An English army officer with riding crop and moustache lectured a bored League audience on how to survive the war, escape to mountains or out west and make Molotov cocktails. With the change of attitude the Attorney-General’s Department did not proceed with some planned prosecutions. The message of No Armistice was reversed in Bill Brown’s Men Who Speak for Freedom: a young miner is injured in a coal fall but the others continue working in the unsafe pit to fill an urgent defence order. The variety show Giggle Suits and Overalls, its cast including Patricia Glasson (step-grandmother of Julian Assange) played at the Ingleburn army camp and Yaralla Hospital. With Germany again the enemy and the ban lifted, Till the Day I Die was restaged. In According to Plan German soldiers, holed up in a barn near Russia’s Smolensk section and cut off from supplies, realise that Hitler’s strategy may not be going “according to plan”:

Lieutenant Klein:  We’ll all be wiped out.  It’s only a matter of time before the whole German army will be nothing but an army scattered over a handful of scorched earth.  The whole world is against us now.  What’s going to happen when the British strike in the west?

… We’ve met our match this time, and I’m glad. We’ve trailed over the whole of Europe bringing death and destruction and now it’s our turn to experience what the bloody business means. According to Plan (its cast including Alan Herbert and John Gray) played at army barracks. At Randwick, American soldiers rigged up stage lights, dressed the set with straw from their bedding and helped make up the actors. Outside performances became fundraising events. The troupe who took According to Plan to Richmond were reimbursed only for their train travel but money was raised for the Russian Medical Aid Fund. The NTL also supported Jessie Street’s Sheepskins for Russia. (After the war there were appeals for British Food Relief and Ted Willis’ royalties were paid with food parcels.)