Interviews
-
INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL CATHCART
EXTRACT FROM INTERVIEW:
MC: Now So Many of Them Aren't was a play in which, it was my first experience of group
devised theatre, and it was the kind of theatre that James McCaughey went on making at
Melbourne University and at the Mill Theatre in Geelong of which he was the Artistic Director
I think in the eighties. And all it was a group of students who wrote about their experiences of
Melbourne University and the title came from a supercilious tutor who gave a speech that said
"Well the problem with the student is that he is just not suited to being here, so many of them aren't".
And it just captured, you know, you could do it now, that script, and it would still feel like -
student life essentially doesn't alter you know. You go through the same battles and struggles and
the same mindless bureaucracy of the university running around with a piece of paper trying to get
this idiot to sign this and this idiot to sign that and people who won't let you transfer courses and
things because the bureaucracy can't deal with the fact that you are young and curious and pissed off
with one thing and excited by another. I remember that play with just huge fondness and it is the,
you know, as a young, creative, excited, you know, highly wired young man, it was the play the changed my life.'
-
INTERVIEW WITH ROSE MYERS, Artistic Director, Arena Theatre Company
EXTRACT FROM INTERVIEW: (DRAFT ONLY)
RM: There's a few that I'm particularly fond of and most of the work we did had some kind of relationship
to the university context because, in a way as a creator of work, that's my background -
[is] making new Australian performance that has a dialogue with the world. So its kind of program work
that was surrounded, issues and things that were in the university environment. [S]o we made one piece which
was called The Princess Ida Parlour and it was about the first ever women at Melbourne University, and it was
written by Anita Punton who's gone on to do a lot of writing. She was a student at Melbourne Uni but this was her
first professional commission. That was inspired by a photo I saw of an exhibition that showed some of the first
suffragettes who were the first women at Melbourne Uni. And they were really rowdy and that was quite an inspiring image.
It showed that they kept having to be told to be quiet and they were smoking and like doing hoola hoops and stuff in
this room which is the Princess Ida parlour, so, and it was pretty fascinating [...] And then they opened the Queen
Victoria hospital, some of those women. That was a great story.
-
INTERVIEW WITH SUZANNE INGLETON, Playwright, Actor and Director
[Sue Ingleton, Actor and Director during the 1960’s at the University of Melbourne]
EXTRACT FROM INTERVIEW: (DRAFT ONLY)
SI: The Union Theatre. Every year it was in the Union Theatre. I’ll never for get it. We’d go
into the Union Theatre and I used to love the smell in the back of the Union Theatre. That smell of old stage paint and
that musty, sort of echoey, dampish sort of smell in there, it used to excite me to my very bones you know. And the
dressing rooms in the Union Theatre were so tiny and you can image a cast of 70 cramming in and some people only had
one thing to do, you know, and they’d be in the dressing room all night! [laughter] And we’d all be there
doing our makeup and I can remember doing Joan Sutherland in one Revue. She’d just done Lucia de Lamermoor
out here with all the blood over and we did a spoof on Joan Sutherland, and I can remember getting in and doing
this big, square jaw makeup and this wonderful hair, and I looked so like her. It was awful! [laughter]
This blood stained nightdress...
-
INTERVIEW WITH MALCOLM ROBERTSON, Actor, Director and Dramaturg
[At the University of Melbourne he was Actor at the UTRC in the 1950s, Director of Additional
Activities during the 1960’s and Associate Director for the MTC during the 1970’s]
EXTRACT FROM INTERVIEW: (DRAFT ONLY)
MR: I was actor/stage manager. I was hired by John Sumner at the end of the first season.
In those days there was six months professional season here at the Union Theatre, starting September
going through to February, and to try and keep some sort of continuity for those actors, this is the first
time the CAE, the Council of Adult Education, they used to do country tours with plays, and John negotiated
with them to go out in the country for six weeks. So I came down here I suppose it was July sometime,
no earlier than that - June - but this was after I’d come down to meet him and then he offered me the
job of stage manager/actor with the company. Then I came back and the play that we toured through Victoria
for six weeks was Pygmalion, which had been the first play in the professional season at the Union Theatre
that actually drew an audience in. As you probably know, the first book written about it was that it won’t
last a week and that was the attitude. That was the attitude when I first heard of it. Nancy Stewart
had said, he’s going to set up this professional repertory company within the Melbourne University
and I mean he just said well it just won’t happen.
Were they concerned that they wouldn’t get audiences?
MR: Ehm, yes! [laughter]. They were concerned that they wouldn’t get audiences. I mean the interesting
thing was that without the Jewish audience in Melbourne it wouldn’t have lasted a week. Because we had a
regular Jewish audience coming to see it, it gave the company some sense that it did have a future, and that was
based obviously on the Jewish refugees who had come to Australia before and during the second World War.
|
|