Not Wrong – Just Different (Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Australian Theatre)

Title: Not Wrong - Just Different (Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Australian Theatre)
Author: Brisbane, Katharine
Price: $24.99

Description: This is a collection of writings and commentary from Australia's foremost theatre writer and Currency Press founder. \"Not Wrong Just Different\" traces the development of theatre in Australia from the time that Katharine Brisbane joined the staff of the fledgling Australian in mid-1967 as its national theatre critic. The book is divided into easily navigable sections, which consist of her columns from the \"Australian\", \"Theatre Australia\" and \"The National Times\". From Brecht to Barry Humphries, from Chekhov to Patrick White, Katharine Brisbane's lucid account of Australian theatre is comprehensively presented in this original collection. A dedicated observer and chronicler of the arts in Australia, Katharine Brisbane is a compelling voice for our times and her book highlights the force of the arts, and especially the theatre, in civil society; demonstrating the capacity of theatre to show us who we are. Equally importantly the book is about journalism and the influence of a larrikin national newspaper in providing a forum for a national conversation at a time of turbulence and change.

Contents: Part I: The Challenges 1967-68; Part II: Seeing Progress 1968-70; Part III: The Tide Turns 1970-71; Part IV: The New Wave Rolls 1971-72; Part V: Into the mainstream 1973-74; Part VI: Consolidation 1976-85; Part VII: Retrospection; Index.

REVIEW:
There have been several historical, scholarly accounts of Australias recent theatre history, but none written with the authority and experience of Katharine Brisbane. From 1967 to 1974 she travelled Australia reviewing theatre productions in every capital city for the Australian newspaper, subsequently writing essays and articles for Theatre Australia and the National Times. In 1972, with her husband Philip Parsons, Brisbane launched Currency Press, initiating the most important publishing venture in the performing arts. For the first time there was a knowledgeable and comprehensive collection and publication of new plays, and subsequently several important contributions to theatre history, particularly the invaluable Companion to Theatre in Australia (1995), edited by Philip Parsons, who tragically died two years before it appeared in print. Australian theatre scholarship, and Australian theatre itself, owes an incalculable debt to Currency Press and its two founders. After her retirement in 2000, Brisbane set up the non-profit association Currency House. The latest publishing venture from Currency House is the Platform Papers, the seventh of which, by David Throsby, is Does Australia Need a Cultural Policy?

Throsbys title signals the intellectual thrust of all Katharine Brisbanes work, its energetic opening of debate at every opportunity. Her position during the years when Australian drama first defined itself in the form of the New Wave, inventing a challenging, larrikin voice in plays that had first airings in Sydney at the Jane Street and Old Tote theatres and at La Mama and the Pram Factory in Melbourne, remains absolutely unique. Never again will it be possible for any individual to comprehensively cover Australian theatre, and never again, I suspect, will there be the kind of creative revolution that we had in drama between 1970 and 1985.

The book consists of a helpful Introduction and a selection of Brisbanes reviews and articles in chronological order, with interpolations that consist of a post hoc commentary that provides a context for the reviews and, sometimes, with the benefit of hindsight, candidly makes different judgements from her original ones. There is a Foreword from Robert Drewe. Her Introduction lists the public roles she played, expanded later 230 JASAL 5 2006 in the book in the descriptions of her participation in the early days of the Australian Council for the Arts. But she was also a participant in the battle to save Sydneys Theatre Royal, was an anti-censorship activist, a founding committee member of the Australian National Playwrights Conference in 1972, and had many other important public roles.

Appropriately, the book begins with an article written for the Australian in 1967 entitled The Role of the Critic, an exemplary, clear-headed analysis that is not only demonstrated in the well-informed pieces that follow, but elaborated upon in subsequent articles such as the 1971 Not Wrong, Just Different and The Critic as Advocate. This is a critic who has thought long and deeply about the critics role, and who, fortunately, had sufficient public space allotted her to open up cultural debate, to record historical moments (sometimes with extraordinary prescience) and to act as advocate for an always struggling cultural genre. She joyfully records theatrical triumphs, as generous in praise as she is fair in condemnation. Ironically but inevitably, her 1971 analysis of the shrinking role of the critic in Australia, the de-professionalising that arose from part-time criticism, was proven by her 1974 replacement as national critic by state writers, inevitable in view of the sheer volume of work, but also a sad diminution of a public intellectuals role. My own career as theatre critic for the Australian, and later for the Age, since 1979, has seen an ever-shrinking proportion of space allotted to theatre criticism by the newspapers.

Another strength of this collection is its immediacy. This is not a recollected historical record, but one that required on-the-spot judgement, and it is a delight to read the first impressions of major productions, plays, acting triumphs (and sometimes catastrophes) from someone better placed than almost anyone else at the time to recognise what was significant. The authority for this comes not only from an extraordinary breadth of reading and knowledge in the field, but also from an invaluable exposure to much overseas theatre work in England, Europe and America as well as the major Arts Festivals in Adelaide and Perth. Furthermore, the establishment of Currency Press also represented a commitment to the development of Australian drama that was unparalleled.

The freshness of a detailed production history is thoroughly enjoyable, without any sense of events being made to fit a pre-conceived intellectual structure. Nevertheless there are certain important themes that run through Brisbanes work. One is the clear sense that amateur/professional demarcations are a waste of time, since they are historically interdependent, REVIEWS 231 and indeed remain so. Another is the opinion that theatre architecture has been a crucial determinant in Australian dramas development. The importance of found spaces to the New Wave, the destruction, particularly in Sydney, of the nineteenth-century grand theatres, and their replacement in every state by state theatre edifices of varying degrees of efficacy, is a sub-textual story of its own. Her final words on David Williamson, describing him as captive of the theatres his work helped build, lament the wedge driven between commercial and high art. There is much shrewd political comment, particularly on the subject of subsidy, but also a history of Australian censorship, of the growth of an arts bureaucracy, and a sense of Brisbanes delighted recognition, along with contemporary audiences, of an Australian national character emerging through larrikin beginnings. The complete lack of snobbery is salutary, (something distinct from the ability to distinguish quality in performance), and is seen in the recognition that such phenomena as theatre restaurants have been extremely important in the whole picture.

The critical judgments are spot-on, from the description of John Romerils The Floating World as an unruly masterpiece in 1974, to the conclusion that Jim Sharmans A Cheery Soul, starring Robyn Nevin as Miss Docker, was a production the like of which we may never see again. The comparison of the Melbourne and Sydney productions of Jack Hibberds A Toast to Melba is a penetrating analysis that goes to the heart of Hibberds weaknesses as a playwright. Richard Wherretts transformation of the Sydney Theatre Company into a theatre of panache initiates a discussion of the risks of putting style before content. Yet she defends the operatic stylishness of the STCs 1981 return season of Cyrano de Bergerac, starring John Bell and Robyn Nevin in superb virtuoso performances demonstrating that style can make a path to the truth through performance.

The books final section, Retrospection, records, along with thoughts on why we need the arts and on the origins of subsidy, the important subject of the rise of Aboriginal theatre that had accompanied the development of a white national culture and some wise and impassioned words on valuing process rather than just product.

Not WrongJust Different is an invaluable addition to our records of cultural history, and its clarity, humanity and intelligence, along with its unique historical specificity, make it as enjoyable as it is accessible to the reader. Helen Thomson, Monash University

Publisher: Currency Press Pty Ltd
Publication date: 01/10/2005
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780868197777