“AUSTRALIA IS A PART OF ASIA. THERE IS NO GOING BACK.”

My first trip to Japan was in 1972 when I was here mainly to study Japanese traditional theater and theatrical ritual. I spent most of my time at the Komparu School of noh in Tokyo and was by no means limiting my activities to the academic realm. I felt that I had to do noh; and, in fact, was a shite (leading character) in Funabenkei .
That stay in Japan, the first of many, taught me a great deal. In the West we start with a situation, with characters, and we build up relationships. This is our standard approach to creating a piece of theater. But in noh the last thing you learn about is these elements. You start with gestures, with the dance, with the practicing and mastering, hopefully, of the skill. After all, the word noh means skill. Then, through this, you come to know what your interpretation of your character means. Meaning comes last.
We in the West are constantly trying to be different, individualistic. But I feel that this is often a frightful waste of energy. An actor must conquer the skill and technique first. For instance, back in ’72, I was rehearsing my noh piece. I was doing a kind of circular gesture with a fan. My teacher, Mr. Honda, was exasperated with me. He said, “Do you know what you’re doing with this fan?” I hadn’t. He then said, after paging through his dictionary, “You’re saying goodbye to your lover. This is infinite yearning.” I thought, “Oh yeah, well, infinite yearning. Sure, I can do infinite yearning.” But it all fell into place for me thanks to Mr. Honda’s explanation and my training. It’s not enough just to feel and interpret. You have to know the mechanics first, like how to use the fan. The character comes out of that. This is one valuable thing I learned from that stay in Japan.
The poles differ, I mean, the poles of Western and Japanese theater. Each approach has its deep merits and can be accessed when necessary. Give an actor a costume at an early stage, for instance, say, a pair of shoes. They might be able to develop a character out of that. Some actors may say, “Hold it. I’m not ready for the shoes yet.” Okay. But for other actors it just might be that one thing that tips them over and gives them that moment of insight.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia. I worked in China in 1979 on Peking opera, and before that had gone to Taiwan, Hong Kong and India. Each trip gave me new tools on which to develop principles, from the traditional theaters of these countries, to give to students, angles from which to see things.
In the mid-‘70s, while teaching at NIDA—that was a time when such actors as Mel Gibson, Judy Davis, Colin Friels and Michele Stayner were studying there—I did some noh plays with the students. I also directed kabuki with them. We even trained students how to be an audience, how to react to different kabuki gestures, for instance. What I mean is, a Japanese audience watching kabuki knows all the steps, for instance, in a stance, say, when an actor is going through a set of gestures for a pose, what is called a mie in Japanese. They are keenly observing the actor’s skill and performance bravado, if you will, and applauding his mastery. A Western audience naturally isn’t aware of these elements, so the audience reaction builds in a different way from what you see in Japan. I felt that we had to train our actors not only in traditional Japanese techniques but also in “how to be an audience,” so that they would learn to appreciate the interflow between stage and spectator and be able to use it from the stage. You know, it’s like being an athlete, or so some students said. It’s like jumping hurdles. Each hurdle, like each gesture on stage, indicates a further step toward the goal. I applied all these things that I learned in Japan, and I dare say that this inspired many of our young actors at NIDA. Far from confusing them, it actually helped them learn and master concentration.
There are two seemingly opposite aspects of Japanese theater, or at least ritualized theater. There is the exaggeration as style that you see in kabuki, the showmanship; and at the same time there is an intensity, a distilling of the emotions, the concentration on what is seen inwardly, not done outwardly. On this trip just now I have encountered this all once again. How can these two streams coexist? Well, they do, and very well. And I think it gives us in the West tremendous insight into the actor’s art: how to distill your emotions and then express and perform them in a truly theatrical manner.
Just a few more words, if I may, about what I did and saw in 1972, because that trip was so important to me as a director. I saw early butoh then, and all kinds of avant-garde theater, from the Red Tent Situation Theater of Juro Kara to the Black Tent, where Makoto Sato and others were working. So, when I started to come back to Japan in the ‘80s, I was very aware of new writing. The trouble was that there were so few translations of contemporary Japanese drama then. And Japanese theater in our era has very much been a writer-led theater. In Japan many playwrights direct their own work in their own groups, like Kara, Terayama, and others. We don’t do this in Australia; in fact, almost no one does it in the West. I guess you would have to look to Tadeusz Kantor or Jerzy Grotowski in Poland to find something similar.
But what I discovered over all those trips was that Japanese theater was characterized by a tremendous variety. I thought then—and I continue to think now—that theater produced in Japan is much more interesting than anything coming out of America or Great Britain.
But let me return to my own roots, that is, Australia. With me, it all started when I was a kid in Queensland. My parents were in vaudeville and I had a keen interest in theater from an early age. I directed plays before I got to NIDA as a student.Now, NIDA is an educational institution attached to the University of New South Wales. But, though it is on campus, it is quite independent. It was set up in 1959, and the original vision was to have both an academic course and a practical training school. In addition, part of the original brief was the all-important production company. From the outset, NIDA has stressed production. Our courses are concentrated on the goal of producing plays, and I think this makes us unique in theatrical education in the world.
Back in ’59 the university gave us land. NIDA then set up the Old Tote Co., where the staff directed the plays and the students ran things. I myself, by the time I got there, did ASMing, lighting design and even acted…third spear carrier from the left, if I recall. This was great, because it gave me a lot of insights which I was able to use as a director. So many of our directors these days don’t have this kind of background and are ignorant, sorry to say, of the ins and outs of lighting, design, etc. I was fortunate to run the gamut of jobs, getting hands-on experience.
Let me jump to the present for a minute. Now, as head of NIDA, I want to re-establish our tie with the professional theater. The Old Tote eventually folded; and then there was the Nimrod and now the Sydney Theatre Co. But we at NIDA have seen our ties with the professional stage become rather tenuous. I am trying to redress this. I have asked the STC for more free tickets for us. I want to do plays with them. I want our students to go on secondment there, as interns or whatever. I’m talking with the unions so that the students can work for free for a term as part of their academic program.
So, what I am trying to do is prioritize the practical aspects of training, so that students will go out there and do what they have been learning. We also need a lot of work on the new technology that the theater is using. We have fallen behind in that; but there are a lot of good people in Sydney who I want to bring in to enlighten us.
The weakest point right now in our program would probably be writing and directing. Next year I am turning the one-year directors’ course into a two-year course, and we will be training directors in acting, lighting, sound, etc. As for our writing course, it now lacks rigor. There’s just too much nurturing of writers’ feelings, coddling, if you will. I want the course to be more demanding and craft-oriented. I think we should force young writers to write in particular styles. For instance, we might say, “Do act one as if Ibsen were writing it, but finish the play like Chekhov.”
In addition, I want to make the writers’ course more practical, so we are going to work with The Australian Film Television and Radio School. We’ll have three courses: creative writing; theater writing; film and TV writing. The writing students can choose from these. But, of course they have to do theater writing. I want to excite students about the potential of the theater itself. In Australia, naturalism reigns supreme. This means that a lot of plays look all too much like television. What I have always been interested in is things that can only be done on the stage, for instance, two different time frames represented simultaneously on stage, or two actors playing the same character at different times of their life. I think it was Japanese theater that opened my eyes most to this potential. When I came here in 1972, I saw a kabuki actor gesturing over his head, moving his arms high in the air. You know, I had never seen an actor gesture above his head before to create an emotion. In Australia, the naturalistic theater dictates—and this is what we see on TV—that acting should look “real.” But what is real? Whatever an audience accepts is real. We have to be more open to all aspects of theatrical expression.
The problem, I suppose, is that many actors prefer their comfort zone, what they know. A lot of acting can feel pretty uncomfortable, particularly at first, I mean, if you do something that you think is “unreal.” When Tadashi Suzuki came to the Playbox in Melbourne with his method, many of the actors got pretty tired at first. They couldn’t sustain the energy level. But after a while they really got into it, and I think it helped their communication skill and lent complexity to their interpretation of roles.People are tired in Australia of theater as TV, I am convinced of that. Why go to the theater when you can see it at home for nothing? Audiences want something different, and that is why they flock to our festivals, where they can see startling and imaginative productions.
Unfortunately, in many ways we have gone back to the days of the old cultural cringe in Australia. I think we are more Anglocentric now in our theater than we have been for a long time. Very conservative. The Sydney Theatre Co. is looking more and more like the Old Tote. In fact, programming in all the state theater companies is looking like late ‘60s programming, when British plays dominated our stages. The state companies are underestimating the aspirations of their audiences. We need new themes, new designs, new theatricality. And what we are getting is a lot of red lights and smoke.
We do have our own non-naturalistic forms. We have a great comedic style in Australia. (This even turns up sometimes on television, as with the hyperbolic antics of the mother-and-daughter team of Kath and Kim.) But this is limited. Big theatricality is rarely seen on our stages. Audiences are hungry for big cast plays, for instance, for plays with imaginative narrative. Audiences, remember, are really part of the performance too. The performance isn’t there without interaction on some level. We do have directors and writers who are aware of this. Many of John Bell’s productions for Bell Shakespeare use asides and direct playing to the audience. Playwrights like Louis Nowra and Steven Sewell have written plays that are highly theatrical, and the plays of our greatest playwrights, now deceased, Patrick White and Dorothy Hewett, have not been seen here. I would love to see productions of them in Japan.
There are also a lot of theater collectives now, groups that are experimenting. We have not seen such activity on this scale since the days of the renaissance in Australian theater that started in the late ‘60s. Groups like the Australian Performing Group (APG) at the Pram Factory in Melbourne, La Mama, also in Melbourne, and the Nimrod in Sydney were rebelling then against what was a staid theatrical establishment in Australia. The small groups working now may not be consciously rebelling like that, but they are defining their own distinct styles. They want to stand out from what came before and also from each other. So, they’ll bring in an Iraqi string instrument player or a Polish actor and do a play. This kind of non-naturalistic input is rare in the established Australian theater.
Australia is not just a bastion of Anglocentric culture but a vibrant multiculture, with a mixture of the indigenous, the Celtic, the Anglo, the American, the European and the Asian. The good news is that now there is more cross-racial casting, and a lot of groups are working with Japanese, Indonesian and Malaysian theater practitioners, to name a few. Whether our present ultra-conservative government wishes to admit it or not, we are in Asia, we are a part of Asia, geographically and now culturally. There is no going back.