About Rex Cramphorn

Rex Cramphorn is remembered by all who worked with him as one of, if not the most remarkable of Australia's theatre directors.

His life and work are commemorated in the Studio named for him, and in the annual Rex Cramphorn Lecture series.

The essay reproduced here is an unpublished version of a piece by Ian Maxwell, Chair of the Department of Performance Studies, published in Fifty Key Theatre Directors (edited by Shomit Mitter and Maria Shevstova), Routledge, London.

by Ian Maxwell


Towards the end of his life, Rex Cramphorn sought funding for an ensemble company which would work towards the

• establishment of a performance style which arises directly from a close study of classic texts (i.e. a style in conscious reaction to or developed in full awareness of current naturalism) with an aesthetic which is appropriate to an heir of English-speaking tradition with a multicultural future in a Southeast Asian location . . . a classic company, capable of drawing from the best available academic and professional resources and developing a valid Australian contribution to world theatre.

The company did not eventuate. Cramphorn, having spent close to two decades struggling against a tide of theatrical conservatism: a subsidy establishment focussed on project-by-project funding and the institutionalisation of state theatre companies—rather than long-term, ensemble projects—and on producing new dramatic texts—rather than on developing acting; instead enrolled as a student at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, pursuing his love of cinema. His final theatre work involved studio research work on cross-gender casting Molière’s Don Juan and The Tempest in the months before his premature death in late 1991.

Three years later, opening a studio named for Cramphorn at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Performance Studies, David Malouf offered this about his theatrical collaborator (and fellow Queenslander):

• "The fact that Rex came from Brisbane is in some ways quite important. People in Brisbane grew up in a very strange way . . . everybody grew up in their own little world. [Brisbane] produced people who had very idiosyncratic ways of doing and thinking about things . . . Rex was one of those people who came out of Brisbane, already at twenty-one, fixed in the kind of world which was going to be his for the rest of his life, and that was very much a world of things French."

"A withering mistletoe . . ."

Malouf’s well-intended tribute does not, perhaps, do justice to the career-long rigour of Cramphorn’s self-interrogation: his constant questioning of both theatre as an artform, and his own role as a director. Indeed, alone among Australian theatre directors, Cramphorn has bequeathed a more than substantial legacy of written reflections on theatre, directing and acting, in the form of review writings, critical essays, and his periodical, disarmingly frank “professional stock-takings”, appended to grant applications, and which he viewed as “adding another progress report to my Australia Council file”.

Malouf’s evocation of the intellectual and artistic legacy of geographical isolation, however, is an appropriate point of departure for this brief survey of Cramphorn’s work. Cramphorn’s was a career characterised by sustained attempts to establish a vital, new theatre within what he saw as an oppressively conservative, anti-intellectual and institutionally unsupportive milieu. This was to be an indigenous Australian theatrical culture, but one based upon the revolutionary training, practices and ensemble ideas of Grotowski and Copeau, the writings of Artaud, and a repertoire built on a balance of devised work and European classical texts—in particular those of Shakespeare and the French Neo-Classicists (which he translated for himself). It was to this world of “things French”, including Cramphorn’s love for (and scholarly interest in) French cinema (most notably the films of Max Ophuls), that Malouf was referring.

After graduating first from the University of Queensland, where he majored in theatre history and French, Cramphorn completed a one-year diploma in Theatrical Production at the National Institute for Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney—at that time the only professional theatre training institute in the country. Upon leaving NIDA in 1967, he wrote theatre reviews for The Bulletin, a highly regarded national weekly. At the end of 1968, Cramphorn took stock of the state of play in local theatre, writing of

• a particular atmosphere among actors . . . a free-for-all commercial struggle with no security of any kind, no opportunity for learning except by cumulative experience, and, consequently, no chance to develop anything other than a purely egocentric, personal style.

The only counter-model available was that of the Melbourne Theatre Company, where George Ogilvie—a student of Le Coq, and an acting tutor under Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1960s—was able to maintain an ensemble of “20 or so actors”, engaged in daily classes and working in an environment in which “actors can develop and directors experiment . . . The emphasis on ideas, directors and ensemble companies,” Cramphorn continued, “has been the one prevailing trend in theatre in the past decade. None of it has happened in Sydney yet”.

Early the next year, Cramphorn observed that

• in Australia, the “newest” theatre comes from overseas—within days we have read about it, in a few weeks photographs, texts, and evaluations arrive. In this way the theatrical newness is used up at the vicarious, secondary level of printing—it begins and ends with the “Time” review. Like sex-educated children we know it all without experience, and often express a lofty superiority to those who attempt to re-create the theatrical expression here, labelling them “derivative” and deploring the lack of a genuinely Australian theatre.

Still a year later, looking back over a less than impressive year—“Sydney theatre was perfectly intolerable, and would have kept any sane ticket-buyer in the cinema for the next twelve months”—Cramphorn despaired. “No one here” he wrote

• is experimenting with acting . . . [a] nation as politically and socially apathetic as we are is unlikely to have anything serious to say in a theatre. Until theatre has something serious to say, or a distinctive statement to make—that is, until it demands to be taken seriously—it will remain a withering mistletoe on our gum-tree culture.

Rather than yielding to the temptation to simply stop wasting his time writing about such a desolate theatrical culture, Cramphorn instead composed a manifesto for a new Australian theatre:

• I take theatre’s unique asset to be the actor’s physical presence, and I take its major misdirection to be the foisting of psychological realism, what Artaud calls “storytelling psychology” on him.

Alternatives to the sclerotic insularity of the emergent Australian naturalism—the ‘gum-tree culture’—would require

• an elastic training scheme as a basis for arduous research and experiment, resulting in an original stylistic communication of an unforeseeable nature, but relevant to its Australian environment in the way that, say, Grotowski’s is to Poland.

1969-1975: The Performance Syndicate

Towards the end of 1969 Cramphorn and a group of actors recently graduated from NIDA had got hold of a photostatted copy of the just-published English translation of Towards A Poor Theatre. Spurred by their collective distaste for their experiences in the professional and commercial theatre, for three months the group worked systematically through Grotowski’s exercises. In 1970, this core group joined with three other recent NIDA graduates to form a company for a season of productions at the Jane St Theatre, as part of an Australia Council for the Arts funded, post-graduate ‘Advanced Course’ at the Institute.

The generous funding for the season allowed the company of seven actors and three directors to work, as an ensemble, with commissioned writers on new texts. Rehearsals started in March 1970 with eight weeks of full time classes in yoga, movement, mime, singing, voice work and ‘Brechtian’ acting. The classes continued for a further four weeks as the company moved into improvisations with preliminary script ideas. Each of the season’s three productions was then rehearsed full-time for two weeks. Cramphorn directed the season’s second work, a piece titled 10,000 Miles Away, developed from David Malouf’s original treatment, a meditation on themes of exploration (1970 was the bicentenary of Captain Cook’s discovery of the Eastern Australian seaboard). Inspired by Malouf’s title and the images of exploration and voyage from which he had intended to construct a play-script, the company worked with the Grotowskian model, developing from a range of tumbling and falling exercises a physical language of flight, flow and continuous movement, generating in turn a percussive performance rhythm. This was then augmented by a series of texts contributed by Willy Young, reflecting his own particular interests: space travel, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and endurance cycling.

Dressed in white judo suits, the cast sat meditating on a square white mat as the audience entered, taking seats on two sides of the performance space. A narrative developed out of apparently meaningless chanting: four of the performers—the core ‘Grotowski group’—are space travellers in search of distant radio signals, the ‘Siren Song’, and must embark on a voyage, away from ‘Home Base’. Their journey was rendered as a clockwise running around the central mats: the actors ran

• till their feet blistered and bled . . . Their running vibrates the building, giving a constant percussive accompaniment to speech in which the words are often just sounds . . . the performers test the limits of human endurance. They go beyond speed, beyond death, and in [a section titled] ‘Supersex’ in countless bouts of lovemaking, beyond pleasure. The limitations of their flesh are left behind . . . (Spinks 12, 18)

One reviewer suggested that “Grotowski from 10,000 miles away” might have been a more appropriate title—certainly the work contrasted markedly with the talk-heavy, naturalistic Australian-ness dominating local stages.

More importantly, the whole experience suggested a sustainable model for innovative, actor-based work. Cramphorn and the core members of the company applied to the Australian Council for the Arts under the name “Performance Syndicate”, the first of Cramphorn’s four attempts to create ensemble companies which would provide financial and artistic stability for actors, writers and directors. Funding was sought for

• a minimal living allowance for the ten-member company and fees for four tutors over a two-month period . . . the only other expense budgeted is the rent of a suitable space for daily work. If it proves possible for the group to arrange community accommodation this space will be, ideally, in the same location.

The company was to live as well as work together. “The main role I play,” wrote Cramphorn,

• is not having any preconceived ideas. My task is to be a channel for everyone to work through. They’re a set of absurdly different people . . . and so that’s my role . . . just to allow them to bring their separate things together. Working this way I’ve tried to get out of the habit of imposing my will.

Katharine Brisbane has noted that Performance Syndicate’s work was “admired”, but “little understood by a theatrical hierarchy bent upon establishing new mainstream standards in the early years of subsidy”. Applying for funding in 1972, Cramphorn described the company’s work process as being “a slow one”, noting that “Grotowsky [sic] takes two years to do a production”, and complaining that “all my previous work with the group has been compromised by lack of time and money.”

Performance Syndicate is best remembered for the 1972 production of The Tempest, set on a flat stage, surrounded by the audience, with the cast sitting around the edges providing musical accompaniment enjoyed an exhausting, and often exasperating school tour of regional NSW and to Melbourne. “Asian in music, in music, in look . . . the performance astonished utterly” wrote one viewer, moved, apparently, beyond the expressive capacity of their own prose:

• Each gesture of finger, of foot, of body, was mannered . . . Drums reverberated; flutes played; bells and finger cymbals clanged and tinkled; a dulcimer, guitar and harmonium lent plangency. The tempest broke, symbolized by thunder on the drums, and by lightning . . . banners of white cloth—zig-zagging through the air . . . The island [was] marked out by a [chalked] magician’s circle.

In The Bulletin, Brian Hoad wrote of the production as a “spiritually refreshing event”, enveloped in a “mysterious but suggestive atmosphere in which great wisdoms are momentarily evoked and then elusively vanish.” Hoad’s enthusiasm was little short of rapturous: "Performance Syndicate", he continued

• are attempting to adapt themselves in order to serve a universal theatre . . . Their concept of theatre is one in terms of high art; the performers become a sort of priesthood; the audience—an uninitiated congregation—must attempt to cope with the revealed as best they can.

A little more circumspectly, Hoad ended his piece by remarking that

• [H]ere is movement more significant than the Australian Ballet has yet been able to achieve. Here is the sort of music drama which should be the central objective of the Australian Opera. Here is a glimpse of total theatre as art . . . unique in Australia.

Katharine Brisbane’s generally favourable review in The Australian wondered, on the other hand, whether Nick Lathouris’ Prospero “seemed too much under the influence of his magic mushroom to dictate the action”.

In the course of preparing and touring The Tempest, the ensemble discovered “a new unifying interest in the development of musical skills . . . learning to play a new instrument and improvising together were seen as a parallel to the actor’s skill.” At the same time, however, the ensemble-as-commune ideal was fraying: the lack of a secure rehearsal and performance venue, the pressures of touring, the lack of sustained funding, and drug use were taking their toll. A decision to accept a residency at St Martin’s Theatre in Melbourne for six months in 1973 proved disastrous: the Syndicate found itself at loggerheads with a management fearful of losing its conservative subscribers, pressuring the company to deliver commercially viable productions, and unwilling to provide the promised financial resources to sustain class work; by 1975 the experiment was over.

The Actor

One of the artistic pressures within the Performance Syndicate had been the relationship between acting and the creation of improvised music; Cramphorn had noted a

• growing disinclination to labour with the physical effort and intellectual complexity of acting, in favour of sitting back with an instrument has been manifesting itself in some of the actors.

“The actor”, he wrote,

• is charged with the presentation of an agreed-on meaning by physical and vocal techniques which require laborious and specific rehearsal. Even the rehearsal of a score by an orchestra would be an inadequate parallel . . . the actor’s medium embraces meaning on every level from the most concretely literal to the most refinedly abstract, in both a visual and an aural communication.

Cramphorn then moved on to itemise the “specifically actorly qualities”:

• an intellectual and emotional commitment, a desire to discover any and every way of communicating meaning to an audience (especially those physical means, which unlike vocal one [sic], have for so long remained untried), and an exploration of, and performance in, the kind of high-level, trained concentration which enables communication at several levels, including the physical, at once.

The Director

By the late 1970s Cramphorn was increasingly moving towards academic circles, within which, he noted, “I seem to be a raffish experiment”. At the same time, “in practical circles I get branded as an academic”. Another attempt to establish an ensemble company—the Paris Theatre with Jim Sharman—failed, and Cramphorn worked as a freelance director for major subsidised companies. In 1980 he received a major grant to work with a group of actors for six months on Shakespeare. “A Shakespeare Company” was Cramphorn’s experiment with what he called an “anti-interpretational focus” and an “unimposed directorial style”. Salaried for 24 weeks, nine actors were able to “withdraw from the busy routine of normal demands made on them”, and to participate as part of an administrative and artistic “democracy”. In many ways the project was constructed as a critique of the director as auteur: a few years later, Cramphorn quoted Copeau to explain his approach:

• Nothing is more frightening than a director who has ideas. The director’s role is not to have ideas but to understand and communicate those of the author; not to force them or reduce them to nothing but to translate them faithfully into the language of theatre . . . What is for others just a string of words, black on white . . . for the director is straight away a world of forms, sounds, colour and movement. They aren’t invented, they are discovered.

A Shakespeare Company experimented with open rehearsals, cross- and contrary-to-type-casting, a rigorously academic approach to the texts—Two Gentlemen of Verona and Measure for Measure—and various forms of documentation of the process. Subsequently, following a period as Resident Director at the Playbox Company in Melbourne, where, once again, he confronted the limits of experimentation within a major company milieu, Cramphorn further nuanced his understanding of the role of the director, which he now saw as being

• to establish an atmosphere in which the grace of creativity might fall on any member of the group, giving him or her the right to lead the work. This is very different from the idea of creativity by committee or of following every alternative proposal—it implies the existence of a special atmosphere in which the right and only direction is immediately clear to all concerned.

Playbox

At Playbox, Cramphorn developed the Actors’ Development Stream: a core company of actors working on classic texts and structured around nine statements of principle, ranging from an assertion of “each individual’s right to be here” through “ a belief in theatre as a spiritual, political, social microcosm”, to the desire to “build a new aesthetic from our differences”. These ideals were accompanied by “Practical Exercises” which were to form the basis of the ensemble’s day to day practice, and elaborate schematisations of rehearsal processes: a four week block focussed on ‘script analysis’—Cramphorn called this the “Question” phase—followed by a six week rehearsal “Answer” phase. At the core of Cramphorn’s schema is this formulation of the work of theatre:

• Philosophical Frame: A belief in the relevance of the work to the audience . . . to be the meaning not to demonstrate it;
• Practical Aims: To allow the audience to make its own connections; to engage an audience; to endow the audience with the power of discernment, with wit and knowledge; to stimulate the circular nature of the communication;
• Practical Exercises: Each actor has ‘a line’—spine scenario, meaning; Each ‘line’ converges in a unified presentation (with an overall meaning on which all agree);
• We are engaged at every moment—authentic, immediate. Every action is necessary; We are aware of the audience/stage relationship and we develop the performance in relation to the specific demands of the theatre space being used.

Once again, commercial pressures overwhelmed even modest ambition; the Playbox Actors Development Stream was wound up by 1985. Cramphorn returned to Sydney to attend film school, having failed to secure funding for his own company, to be called Performance Syndicate 2. In the course of seeking that funding, Cramphorn again took the opportunity to articulate his thinking about rehearsal:

• I do not see rehearsal as a process in which the meaning, intellectually perceived from reading a difficult or obscure text, is imposed on the material to clarify it (still less do I now see it as a process which attempts to re-animate the text without any attempt to clarify it), but rather as one in which an unformed but actual entity is coaxed into physical materialization using the minds and bodies available with whatever compromises of the original text are needed to make the present manifestation accurately communicable.

It is redundant to note that actors absolutely loved working with Cramphorn, and would take any opportunity to work with him, right up to the weeks preceding his death when he was working, again, on The Tempest. His determination to give actors time, space and creative responsibility, to create conditions within which actors might develop their own craft, and take on roles that otherwise, for reasons of sex, age, race, physical characteristics and so on, they might never play, has had effects still being felt today in Australian theatre; at a time when the dream of an ensemble company is even more remote than ever, Cramphorn’s legacy has, in no small way, been the sowing of the seeds of possibility for what theatre in Australia might, one day, be. The knowledges generated by his work, and that of his fellow-travellers, might best be understood as being embodied in those practitioners still working Australian stages in conditions much less conducive to the explorations to which Cramphorn was committed.

Yet it is also important to note that notwithstanding this characterisation of Cramphorn as an experimentalist, he was more than capable of creating a commercial success when circumstances demanded: his Lady of the Camellias for the Sydney Theatre Company in 1979 and Insignificance for Playbox in 1983, for example, were runaway successes.

In conclusion . . .

David Malouf described Cramphorn’s manner in rehearsal as a “passive attentiveness . . . a waiting on the moment that was a form of negative discipline.” Cramphorn’s “controlled romanticism . . . resisted intervention, interpretation”, instead investing in “a belief that integrity of feeling would shine right through the text.” Cramphorn, Malouf concluded,

• had no belief in the world of the political and not much interest in the strictly social. What he dealt with . . . was the world of the pre-social, the world of psyche rather than polis–though I would be loathe to call it psychological. It was the world of dream stuff, of sacrifice and ritual. What he wanted to do with that sort of theatre was not to raise people’s social conscience but to shake them out of their social consciousness . . . and transform them. And the means to that was always seduction and magic.

Thanks to Kim Spinks, Kate Rossmanith, Anna Broinowski and the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney.


OTHER READING

Rex Cramphorn “L’Illusion Comique to Theatrical Illusion: Textual Changes for Performance” in Gay McAuley (ed) From Page to Stage: “L’Illusion Comique” University of Sydney Theatre Studies Services Unit, 1987: 59-71

Kim Spinks “Notes from the Casebook” in McAuley ed (op cit): 11-32

Gay McAuley Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999


PRODUCTIONS

The Revenger’s Tragedy (Tourneur), 1970
10,000 Miles Away Jane St Theatre, 1970
The Tempest Performance Syndicate, 1972
Measure for Measure State Theatre Company of South Australia, 1973
Shakuntala Performance Syndicate, 1974
The Lady of The Camellias (Dumas fils) Sydney Theatre Company, 1979
Britannicus (Racine), Playbox 1984
Measure for Measure Limited Life Shakespeare Company, 1981
Insignificance (Johnson), Playbox, 1983
The Golden Age (Nowra), Playbox, 1985
Measure for Measure Adelaide Festival, 1990