A direct relationship with our time and place

So here, within the context of this project, is my greater understanding of what and why it is important for us to either learn for the first time, or remember what it is that we do as actors or performers, writers and, of course, directors.

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The performance of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre actress Birutė Mar as ‘Antigone’ was recognised as the best performance of the One Actor Theatre Festival, which took place in Torun. Image: © Lara Khatchikian Photography.

How did we get to this point in our practice?

What came before us to bring us to this point?

What are we doing theatrically that is significant to our time and place?

Where do we go from here?

Where does my style as a writer, performer or director come from?

How did the style that I work in manifest?

What has been forgotten?

What endures?

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I am not expecting answers to all these questions; I am just posing the question. I suspect very strongly it is also a question that you may have asked yourself. Whatever the outcome of these questions, for the most part they will be subjective, but it is with a collaborative mind and creative energy that I now do not ask them alone.

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There has also recently been lively conversation about the role of the director in Australian theatre.

What I will not spend much time on within this project, is the ongoing war between the Contemporary Australian Theatre Scriptwriter and the politic of directors choosing to work on classic texts rather than new Australian work.

A conversation that has been well documented in blog’s such as Alison Croggon’s Theatre Notes, Platform Papers written by Julian Meyrick, newspaper articles and interviews with Simon Stone, and public declarations of despair by new Australian playwrights.

I choose at this time in my career to indulge myself in classic text. I have, for the first time and after 30 years of theatre practice in Australia, directed in February of this year, a play that is not a new Australian work – Stephen Burkoff’s East. All my work as a director, producer and dramaturge has been focused on new Australian writers and their texts, driven most often to successful funding and production outcomes.

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The Age review of East. Read the full review here.

Because the 'Director' is such a young profession (being only approximately 150 years old), to talk about acting and the change in style over the past 100 years, the director and their role in that change is fundamental. And even younger still, the role of Dramaturgy – again a role most often facilitated by the director in their relationship with the writer and their text.

My question as a director within this project’s context is an historical one, and I see its direct relationship woven into the story being told through Elia Kazan. 

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I would very much enjoy your company on Sunday 31 August at The Sandpit for the first of three readings, Waiting For Lefty by Clifford Odets.

Thank you for coming to play.

—    Peta Hanrahan

Social consciousness

With this project – Elia Kazan: A Theatre Investigation – I hope to ignite in all those that participate, audience included, a new taste for research and focus on the greater world of theatre; its history and that history’s profound and direct influence on what we do today in our world of contemporary Australian theatre.

So why focus on Elia Kazan to tell this story?

Because it was he that gave me the courage to direct my first play. I was, until that time, an actor and sometimes technician. But the world of ‘the play’ was starting to expand in my mind and my appetite for the big picture was becoming overwhelming. I wanted to paint the complete landscape of a piece, not just a corner of the canvas, and I wanted it to mean something. I wanted to saturate myself in an artform that had a direct relationship with its audience and the potential to affect it.

As potent as Kazan was as an ambitious careerist, what he mostly looked for in the work that he delivered was a greater social consciousness. Kazan’s directorial choices looked at the world’s biggest social and inherently political issues of the time, through the microcosm of domestic life.

Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty is a universal call to restore power to the common man during the Great Depression.

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Arthur Miller's All My Sons reflects the corruption of the corporate sector and shows the fallibilities of the American Dream driven by unrealistic ambitions.

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Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy is one of the last plays he directed on Broadway. It is a play that attacks the social doxology of masculinity, has a direct relationship with his views of McCarthyism and exposes the very delicate world of the ‘Hollywood Closet’, that is still alive and well in the film industry today.

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In Elia Kazan is the perfect example of a complete landscape. It was only after studying him – his circumstances and choices – that I realised that the world he was a part of, he changed to such profound effect; and that the impact of such an artist on the history of theatre must never be forgotten.

— Peta Hanrahan