Australian Noveau -- Brennan's Amphitheatre -- Cremorne Gardens -- Emerald Hill -- Performance Venues -- Prince of Wales -- Melbourne Repertory -- New -- Turnverein -- Others

AUSTRALIAN NOUVEAU THEATRE - also known as ANT - ANTILL THEATRE - GASWORKS

The professional drama company AUSTRALIAN NOUVEAU THEATRE was founded in 1981 by Bruce Keller and Jean-Pierre Mignon. It first used the ANTILL THEATRE, a small venue in South Melbourne and then moved to the GASWORKS in Albert Park, where they played until 1992. The company was known for its innovative and highly stylised productions of contemporary European drama and classic texts. An irreconcilable problem in reconciling the company's avowedly counter-cultural perspective with its popular success led to its demise. 

Sources:

Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Leslie Rees, Australian Drama 1970-1978, rev. and enlarged edn (North Ryde, Angus and Robertson, 1987).

When BRENNAN'S AMPHITHEATRE on Bourke Street opened on Easter Saturday in April 1912 the value of the land and building constructed for James Brennan was estimated at thirty two thousand pounds.  Shortly after, this name was changed to the NATIONAL AMPHITHEATRE, in recognition that the rapidly expanding national Fullers' organisation had subsumed Brennan's company.   

The National Amphitheatre's auditorium was at first a plain, white room, with a single rake of seating and a balcony at the rear. In 1916 it was remodelled into three levels of audience accommodation and decorated in a more ornate style. Fullers then reopened it as the PALACE THEATRE. For nearly twenty years it was their second Melbourne outlet and the home of their melodrama company. In common with many theatres, as a result of economic depression, in March 1936 it was then converted to a cinema, known first as the Apollo then the St. James Theatre, the Metro and again the Palace. In 1978 it was used by a revivalist Church and in the late 1980s converted to a nightclub.  In 1923 the interior had been refurbished in the ornate pseudo-Adam style favoured by Fullers' architect Henry E. White, and this survived all the theatre's later uses.

Sources:

Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788-1914 (Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1985).
Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: the Australian Popular Stage 1788-1914 (Kensington, University of New South Wales Press, 1990).
John West, Theatre in Australia (Stanmore, Cassell, 1978). 

The CREMORNE GARDENS was a Botanical Garden and a small zoo on ten acres of land when, in 1856, James Ellis sold it to entrepreneur George Coppin and his partner, actor and manager G.V. Brooke. In an endeavour to create a pleasure gardens after the London model, Coppin and Brooke made additions, including an open-air theatre, the PANTHEON. A visual feature of this performance area was a Neapolitan panorama, including Mt. Vesuvius, painted by Coppin's theatre scenic artist, William Pitt. It was claimed the panorama covered twenty five thousand square feet.

The Cremorne Gardens were not a commercial success. Attendances were adversely affected by Melbourne's unpredictable weather, the influence of the Sabbatarians on weekend entertainments and the fact the site was too far from the city for the fashionable crowd. Continued operation was then handicapped by the business split between Coppin and Brooke, After a short season of variety from December 1862 to January 1863, which was conducted during a heat wave, the Gardens finally closed on Saturday 7 February 1863 after a series of carnivals and night time masquerades. The site was sold as a private residence.

Source:

Alec Bagot, Coppin the Great (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1965).

The EMERALD HILL THEATRE was a former church in South Melbourne, converted to a theatre by architect Robin Boyd and the members of Wal Cherry's THEATRE WORKSHOP AND ACTOR'S STUDIO. The body of the church was retained for the theatre, which had tiered seating for one hundred and fifty patrons. The audience entered from each side at the rear. The theatre had a thrust stage, with a manually operated revolve, and a black curtain upstage to screen the entrance to dressing rooms behind the stage area.  

The theatre was occupied by a professional company founded in 1961 by artistic director Wal Cherry and actor George Whaley. The Emerald Hill project was an actors' theatre, emphasising ensemble performance, keen to encourage Australian playwrights and influenced by the ideals of Brecht and Stanislavsky. Cherry was uncompromising in his programming and when, after twenty nine major production, the theatre's income, including subsidy, was in his view, insufficient to maintain his standards, he closed the theatre in 1966. 

Sources:

Katharine Brisbane, Entertaining Australia: an illustrated history (Sydney, Currency Press, 1991).
Ross Thorne, Theatre Buildings in Australia to 1905, 2 vols. (Sydney, Architectural Research Foundation, University of Sydney, 1971).
Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).

FLYING TRAPEZE CAFÉ - LAST LAUGH THEATRE RESTAURANT AND ZOO - LE JOKE  

In 1972 entrepreneur John Pinder converted a Melbourne fish shop to a small venue for performers of all kinds. He then sold this and in 1976 opened a larger theatre as the LAST LAUGH THEATRE RESTAURANT AND ZOO in a converted fruit shop in suburban Collingwood.  The room was decorated with circus posters, merry-go-round horses and an eclectic mix of objects hung from the ceiling. It was a venue particularly for stand-up comics and it was closely associated with the Australian Performing Group. This venue also had an upstairs cabaret room called LE JOKE 

Other outlets included the COMEDY CAFE in Fitzroy which operated until 1992 and in the 1980s the PRINCE PATRICK HOTEL in Collingwood.  

TIKKI AND JOHN'S

In 1965 musical comedy performers John Newman and Tikki Taylor began TIKKI AND JOHN'S, a family run coffee house on Exhibition Street adjacent to Her Majesty's Theatre. Victorian licensing laws were not sympathetic to late night entertainment, but the Newman's provided variety entertainment for after-show patrons in a one hundred and twenty seat space. The name of the venue was changed to Tikki and John's Crazyhouse in 1987, when their son Paul Newman took over the venture and changed the entertainment to modern burlesque. DRACULA'S THEATRE RESTAURANT is also a Newman concern.

Sources:

Katharine Brisbane (ed.) Entertaining Australia: an illustrated history (Sydney, Currency Press, 1991).
Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The PRINCE OF WALES THEATRE evolved from the Tattersalls building in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne. This multi-purpose space had in the 1850s served as ballroom, stables, saleroom and vegetable market, and finally in July 1858 had become the AMERICAN HIPPODROME.  This initiative of an American circus company had created a pit, gallery seating about one thousand people and a circus ring. The company did not, however, maintain its audiences.

The space was then reopened on 24 May 1860 as the PRINCE OF WALES THEATRE. The modified area accommodated one thousand five hundred people in dress circle, boxes and a pit. There was a large stage, sixty eight feet by sixty, which had a detachable ring.

The theatre opened with a mixed bill of vaudeville, ballet and equestrian acts. In July the programme was changed to straight drama, but by September the proprietors were in financial trouble and performances, which returned to a combination of opera, drama, circus and promenade concerts, became irregular. Early in 1862 the theatre was renovated and operated briefly as MARSH'S ROYAL LYCEUM but at the end of the year the theatre and its contents were sold by the mortgagees and the Prince of Wales theatre ended. 

Source:

Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788-1914 (Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1985). 
Philip Parsons (general ed.) with V. Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The MELBOURNE REPERTORY THEATRE was an amateur dramatic society founded in Melbourne in 1944 by actor Lorna Forbes and businessman and amateur director Sydney Turnbull. Turnbull leased a cinema in Middle Park, an inner suburb of Melbourne, as their theatre. The auditorium only held two hundred but it had a large stage area.

The aim of the group was to give young people a chance to explore theatre and to give training in performance. A young Ray Lawler was in their first production, Sheridan's  `The School for Scandal', and his first play `Hal's Belles' was performed there in September 1945. Actor and entrepreneur Frank Thring took over the theatre when the Repertory Company's lease expired in 1949 and they chose not to renew it. He renamed it the ARROW THEATRE in 1951.

Source:

Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The Workers' Theatre Group was founded in 1935 in Melbourne by Betty Roland and Frank Huelin under the auspices of the Friends of the Soviet Union. They gave their first public performance in August 1936 in Odet's `Waiting for Lefty'. The group became the NEW THEATRE CLUB in 1937 and established theatres successively in Flanigan Lane 1937, Queen Street 1939 and Flinders Street 1942-9. The New Theatre also operated as a touring company for five years until 1963. Since 1976 it has been at the Organ Factory, an arts centre in Clifton Hill, Melbourne. The theatre has developed and maintained a strong artistic perception as well as its political commitment, mainly through the long-term influence of its directors Hilda Esson and then Dot Thompson. It also has a continuing commitment to the production of Australian plays. 

Source:

Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The TURNVEREIN HALL in Victoria Parade was the site on 5 October 1910 for the second presentation in Melbourne of William George Moore's four `Australian Drama Nights'. The first evening, which had comprised only Moore's own work, had been in the Oddfellows' Hall on 30 March 1909, and the last night (organised in association with Gregan McMahon) was held in the hall in May 1912. 

Moore was a leading art and drama critic and both a writer and supporter of writers of one act plays. The works at the second evening included Katharine Susannah Prichard's `The Burglar', Moore's own `The Tea-room Girl' and Louis Esson's `The Woman Tamer', his first play to be staged.

There was no booking and no division of seats at the presentation. Moore also arranged a long interval, in which the audience could socialise, although in a tongue-in-check reversal of social expectations, Moore promoted that evening dress should not be worn. No account of the presentation seems to have survived but, as Rees describes, a picture of Moore setting up slabs and columns for scenery indicates that staging was attempted for the plays, although possibly in one all-purpose set.

Sources:

Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788-1914 (Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1985).
Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Leslie Rees, Australian Drama 1970-1978, rev. and enlarged edn (North Ryde, Angus and Robertson, 1987). 
Leslie Rees, Towards an Australian Drama (Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1953).
Margaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage 1829-1929 (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1983).

COLOSSEUM

The COLOSSEUM was a Melbourne variety house of the 1880s, which specifically geared its presentations to a working class audience.
Source:
Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: the Australian Popular Stage 1788-1914 (Kensington, University of New South Wales Press, 1990). 

NUGGET THEATRE

The NUGGET THEATRE was a small music hall in a four storey building on Bourke Street Melbourne. The building was later used by the Salvation Army.
Source:
Ross Thorne, Theatre Buildings in Australia to 1905, 2 vols. (Sydney, Architectural Research Foundation, University of Sydney, 1971).

PIONEER PLAYERS 

The PIONEER PLAYERS were founded in 1922 by playwright Louis Esson. They were an amateur company whom Esson saw as providing an outlet for the work of Australian playwrights and, influenced by the role of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, also serving to stimulate the emergence of a national theatre.

Williams describes them as `staging their folk dramas in their makeshift hall in Melbourne for a coterie audience…'

Sources:
Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Margaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage 1829-1929 (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1983).

VICTORIA THEATRE

The Victoria Theatre, Emerald Hill was operating in February 1880.
Source:
Margaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage 1829-1929 (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1983).