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  Issue No 113 Official Organ of LaborNet 28 September 2001  

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Performance

Tales from the Shop Floor


Peter Murphy profiles Sydney's New Theatre and the role it has played in fostering working culture.

 
 

The New Theatre

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Half way down King St towards St Peters in Sydney, is the small brick fa�ade of New Theatre, an amateur theatre based on the workers movement with continuous activity since it was founded in 1932.

Katherine Susannah Pritchard, a Western Australian author and founding member of the Communist Party, had just visited Russia and Germany, and witnessed the vigorous, socialist realist street theatre used to educate the public and to support strikes and mass struggles. The Depression had hit hard in Europe, and Nazism was about to triumph in Germany. Pritchard visited Sydney on her return, and there convinced another communist author and firebrand, Jean Devanney, that this kind of theatre could be organised in Australia.

In this period, the Communist Party was trying hard to expand out of the Unemployed Workers Movement, into the trade unions, and into broader cultural circles where it already had strong impact among writers, and people concerned with the horror of mass unemployment and the rise of fascism. However, at the start of New Theatre, a large proportion of CPA members were unemployed, and early performers came from the militant unemployed as well as other parts of the working class.

While communist influence dominated the political direction of New Theatre, the organising group was always based on people dedicated to the performing arts. They too provided scripts for outdoor performance in the agitprop style, on topical issues in Australian politics, as well as performing classics from Shakespeare, Chekov, Ibsen and other 19th century writers, as well Shaw, Yeats, and the newest political plays from the United States and England.

Pretty soon, a pattern of arguments emerged where more 'political' members of New Theatre argued against performance of any 'non-political' plays, while those with a broader sensibility and practical bent, pointed out that to get he funds to put on hard hitting plays, the Theatre needed to put on other plays that were more likely to earn money.

While the CPA leadership never directly intervened in the New Theatre management, they did apply indirect pressure at times. Because the full time officers in the 1930s to the 1960s were inclined to be sectarian and did not display any broad cultural knowledge, they were at times influenced by complaints that New Theatre was too soft, or too bourgeois. This reflected the direct interventions into Soviet cultural work by Joseph Stalin.

Sydney's New Theatre was based on working class artists, and its audiences were the workers and their families, hungry for both entertainment and culture in an era where radio had just taken off, and television was two decades away.

Hundreds of actors and theatre workers got their start at New Theatre, and this has had an abiding influence in the culture of Actors Equity and in the Media Alliance to today.

New Theatre did not have a permanent home, and in the Cold War hysteria at the end of the1940s, it was evicted from its regular venue. It turned to the Waterside Workers Federation, which had a stage in the workers meeting hall in the Sydney Branch office at 60 Sussex St. The WWF Hall became the home of New Theatre for more than two decades, cementing forever its connection to the progressive trade union movement.

New Theatres and Workers Art Theatres were established in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth in the 1930s, along the same lines as in Sydney. The Perth theatre was crushed in the period when the CPA was banned from 1939-43. Brisbane New Theatre continued until 1962. Only Sydney New Theatre has survived until today.

It revived its original forms during the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 1980s and 1990s it has performed an important role for the development of gay theatre and plays exploring gay and lesbian oppression and life in Sydney. However, like all the left, it has struggled in the recent period of uncertainty about ideology and which way society should go.

While staunch socialists and unionists like Marie Armstrong, and Maurie Mulheron, a member of the Teachers Federation, play a key role in developing the politics of new Theatre today, there is also a strong counter current of people who simply see New Theatre as a low cost entry point into the performing arts and care little for its potential to mobilise, and educate as well as entertain the workers of contemporary Sydney.

New Theatre had a major financial heart attack at the start of 2000. Its committee decided to fight, and they found that their community, built up over seven decades, was ready to keep them alive. They raised over $40,000 and now New Theatre is back on its feet. And the winds of war, fascism and racism are roaring again, just like they did in 1932.


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*    Visit the New Theatre

*   View entire issue - print all of the articles!

*   Issue 113 contents

In this issue
Features
*  Interview: The Custodian
Labor's arts spokesman Bob McMullan on the role government can play in nurturing national culture.
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*  Media: Chucking a Wobbly
Veronica Apap meets Dan Buhagiar, the programmer of Labor Council's new online initiative, Wobbly Radio.
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*  E-Change: 3.3 Unleashing a Networked Culture
Politics does not occur in a vacuum - it's is as much a product of its culture as it is an influence on it. In the post-Industrial Age how will this relationship change?
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*  Unions: Are You a Terrorist?
Away from the talkback noise, Mark Hearn reports on how a Sydney workforce is taking up the cause of racial understanding and tolerance.
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*  Organising: STAA Performers
Film industry workers are acting collectively to ensure they don't become Mexicans with Mobiles.
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*  Workplace: Making Art Work
The Workers Cultural Action Committee is a community cultural development provider. What is this? And what does it mean for the union movement?
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*  History: Creative Alliances
Neale Towart wanders through the archives to look at how unions' have worked with artists to promote progressive casuses.
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*  Performance: Tales from the Shop Floor
Peter Murphy profiles Sydney's New Theatre and the role it has played in fostering working culture.
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*  Review: Homegroan
In an extract from her new book, The Money Shot, Jane Mills argues that the local film industry needs more than patriotism to get bums on seats.
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*  Satire: PM Pleads To Nauru: Take Our Aborigines Too
In the wake of Nauru�s acceptance of the Tampa refugees, Australian Prime Minister John Howard has struck a new deal with the small island nation to take our Aborigines as well.
*

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»  Building Inquiry Faces First Test of Integrity
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»  Telstra Guilty Over Union Discrimination
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»  Paint Workers Finish the Job
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»  New Project Agreement A Template
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»  The Workers United, Need a New Slogan!
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»  Activists Notebook
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Columns
»  The Soapbox
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»  The Locker Room
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»  Trades Hall
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»  Tool Shed
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Letters to the editor
»  Hamberger on Stellar
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»  CHOGM Agenda
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»  Ian West on Trades Hall
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