The Fifth Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture
Belvoir Street Theatre, 9 November 1998

Australian Culture: Creating It and Losing It

Neil Armfield

Dear Friends

Unlike all of the earlier speakers of the Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, I never worked with Philip though I knew him and admired his work and his diligent commitment to the development of Australian Theatre. I must also say I find the prospect of delivering this speech somewhat daunting — being someone who prefers to explore my own mind in the physical playground of the theatre — behind the mask that someone else’s story provides and through the collaboration of those magical creatures of freedom — the actors. So I will try to speak from my heart and hope that I pop out something that makes sense and doesn’t, at the least, dishonour the memory of Philip Parsons. I am reminded of Philip and his love of the plays of Patrick White, and that he and Katharine Brisbane came to Adelaide in 1987 to see the final performance I think of Patrick’s last play Shepherd on the Rocks which I directed.

It was a tricky show which featured a large cast, including a dwarf, about a priapic Church of England priest played by John Gaden, who falls foul of the conservative Sydney diocese and is kicked out of his parish of Budgiwank by Archbishop Bigge, played by Geoffrey Rush, thereupon turning unsuccessfully to vaudeville, to wandering the NSW coast until he comes to a travelling circus in the holiday town of Jerusalem. On arrival he enters the lions cage and is devoured, but not before delivering a sermon of transcendent beauty. The extraordinary thing was that the play was based on a true story.

I remember bumping into Philip wandering the labyrinth of corridors backstage at the Playhouse after the show looking rather dazed — a condition not uncommon in those corridors especially after that particular one of Patrick’s plays. He took my arm and said simply ‘It’s his Tempest’. Philip saw, typically generously, to the heart of a difficult work and blessed our labour with an absolute clarity of perception. In the inaugural Philip Parsons lecture, Katharine Brisbane said of him: ‘he tried to instil into his students and the playwrights he worked with a desire to bring poetry to the Australian stage and to counter the increasing passivity of audiences submitted to the ready-made imagination of film, television and the commercial theatre’!

It is really the idea contained in this perception that I want to applaud, and to talk about today. Because it seems to me it is under threat. Before going any further I think it is worthwhile to consider for a moment the value of theatre — why we keep doing it, why we keep going to it. Because God knows it can be crook. How many times have we sat there and after a few minutes you know the night’s not going to get any better — and somehow, because you’re actually sharing the space with actors, unlike a film where you can detach, quite easily and just slip away, in theatre it involves a painful and gauche extraction — you feel embarrassed — and you tend to stay on with the slim consoling hope that ‘something might happen’. It is of course that very actuality that makes us keep going — the confidence that sooner or later there will be an experience that is utterly unique, that fills your soul, and sitting there in the dark, breathing the same air as the actors, you will witness it happen, in fact you will participate in it happening.

When you sit with a child and tell a bedtime story that is theatre. As you hold up a book and point to the characters in the pictures and the child’s eyes watch and connect and imaginatively see them at work, playing their roles in the story, that is theatre.

Through story we discover the world, we test our experiences, we look inside ourselves by projection into imagined characters in imagined worlds. A child without imagining stories, is a child with the blank stare of madness. The dressing-up box, doctors and nurses, shopping, any child’s game is a playground in which life is first lived, or tested. The theatre and the ritual form of storytelling inside it are the relics of the oldest form of social connection — perhaps, after eating — people coming together to witness a story being told that somehow will expand their sense of their own lives — if it’s a true story it is their history, if it’s a fantasy it will invariably work from identification and projection and then lead the spectator back inside themselves to a fuller understanding of life and the world.

That’s rather clumsily put but you know where I’m heading. And I’m not saying anything new here but somehow it’s something that is so simple yet so easily overlooked: our theatre is our oldest and purist place of social connection and an absolute index of our civilisation.

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