The happy corner and the nasty corner

Back in the unreal world, the Pram Factory did another play of mine—Beware of Imitations. They’d had a good year, with Jack Hibberd’s Stretch of the Imagination, the Hannans’ Compulsory Century and Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Brumby Innes. Beware of Imitations kept the good box-office times going.

I’d had to endure two benevolent dictators, and now that Mannix had been mocked it was time for the second: R.G. Menzies. I provided a script, and Bill Hannan (as director), Max Gillies (as Menzies) and Bruce Spence (as the suffering servant) did wonders with it. Max and Bruce got on as if in a dream—and their improvisational romance was creatively chaperoned by Bill Hannan. It was the most exciting improvising I’d ever been involved in, and made the Pram Factory’s tenet about group direction seem right—but the reason wasn’t so much the tenet as the talent.

In a nursing home, Sir Wilfred McLuckie dreams of the past and dictates his memoirs to his servant, with crucial episodes re-enacted, and a finale showing McLuckie’s horror as he sees student demonstrators violating the Shrine of Remembrance. At the end, ‘a giant earthworm with a wide loose mouth sucks him in—he’s engorged, like a frog entering a snake’. (Thirty-seven years later, the symbolism of this escapes me.)

At the Pram Factory, opening nights were dramas in themselves. Anything could go wrong, and usually did. The play featured a Nasty Corner, with red flag and picture of Ben Chifley, and a Happy Corner, with Union Jack and portrait of the Queen. In Act One, Sir Wilfred performs an elaborate sycophantic dance, to music, sinking to his knees and finally his stomach in obeisance to the Queen. Gillies had developed an exotic mix of steps and swayings, but on opening night the music didn’t come on, and he had to do it in silence.

I can still see the death-pale face of John Sumner, the director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, as he watched this heroic performance, grim-faced and unsmiling, while the audience roared and whistled all around him. The overall result, to quote The Perambulator (the Australian Performing Group’s newsletter), was ‘its biggest-ever box-office success—bigger even than Don’s Party!’

Modest financial success made no difference to the take-it-or-leave-it facilities endured by the audience. Bare boards to sit on, bitter proletarian coffee in chipped mugs, third-world toilets: no middle class comforts here. Backstage could be just as demanding. I never felt comfortable at meetings of the Collective. In the eyes of many in this intimidating entity, the idea of individual talent was bourgeois and elitist—no stars, no power-wielding directors, and no self-styled writers either. Since you can’t do plays simply by hating capitalism and all-in-it-together enthusiasm, the result was some total turkeys.

In their zeal to show the working classes what was good for them, the Group once took a play called Money to the canteen of the Rosella soup factory. It was a marriage of Marx and Sesame Street, simplistic and patronising, and the immiserated workers voted with their cutlery, which clacked on indifferently while the lecture-pantomime was being performed.

At one end of the Pram Factory building lived the Tower Children—a group within the Group, family-hating dopesters, communitarians, anarcho-surrealists, insurrectionary feminists, with matching headgear—Afghan knits, Harlem tea-cosies, cowboy hats, Cultural Revolution caps. Their heroes were the three Ms: Marx, Marcuse and Mao. In the words of Tim Robertson, in his effervescent history of the Pram Factory—‘The Great Helmsman was prominent among the household gods of the Tower. The bad news about the Cultural Revolution went unheard. The Red Guards were seen as a bit over the top, but basically okay.’

Robertson, in trying to catch the tone of those on the hard left, exaggerates only a little: ‘In solidarity with the fucking working class, theatre was a fucking means not an end. A fucking weapon in the class war. A fucking waddy to fucking whack your fucking weltschmerz into the fucking weltanschauung that would lead to the dictatorship of the fucking proletariat, mate.’

As a Catholic father of six who’d worked in advertising, living in a tidy, even stylish house (get a look at this!) I sometimes felt I was the Enemy They Had to Have. I couldn’t abide the fulminations of John Romeril and Lindzee Smith about capitalism (faulty yes, evil no). Romeril predicted that by 2000, capitalism would be dead. In the cruellest of ironies, by then the Pram Factory had been demolished and replaced by a shopping mall.

At the end of 1974 I submitted a play called Bedfellows to the Group, which voted that it go to the Programming Committee, to which I was summoned to make my pitch. The committee was dominated by a Gang of Two—Lindzee Smith, who could see nothing wrong with the terrorist bombing of innocent civilians if it furthered the revolution, and Jon Hawkes, a pony-tailed counter-cultural who was also an accountant (could one be both?).

I was treated to an hour’s patronising interrogation about why I thought an institution as obsolete as marriage (and its even quainter concomitant, adultery) was worth writing about. I replied that the justification, if there were one, lay in the script. They’d found it diverting in an antiquated middle-class way. They let it through reluctantly, as if it were infected, and as I was dismissed there were whispers … ‘crock o’shit’.

So Bedfellows was done at the beginning of 1975. Had I been paranoid, a feeling the Collective tended to inspire, I’d have wondered why my plays were always put on in high summer, when the theatre was stifling. Jack Hibberd directed, Max Gillies, Fay Mokotow and Bill Garner performed.

True to the APG’s Opening Night Principle, something went wrong. The play opens with Paul, a middle-aged academic, dozing off in his chair. (‘Enter Carol with milk bottles, which she clinks in his ear.’) Fay clinked too hard and the bottles broke, covering the floor with broken glass. Fay was bare-footed, and what followed was almost a formal dance, as she and Gillies zipped and zapped around the glass. The unhappily married couple and the play survived, and it became a hit, with people being turned away and an extended season, followed by a national tour.

The only one who didn’t like it (apart from the Gang of Two) was Bill Garner, who played the part of Gillies’s cuckolder. He told me he disliked it so much that he had to go to the Albion Hotel to anaesthetise himself before his appearance in Act Two. Garner, a member of the worker-control down-with-directors left, saved his best theatrical performances for Collective meetings. He acted best when not on stage.