Walking in the Wake of Giants

At the halfway mark of Elia Kazan: A Theatre Investigation at The Sandpit, St Kilda, director Peta Hanrahan shares her passion for ‘making it new’, Elia Kazan, and the theatrical masterworks of the 20^th Century.

“Make it NEW!” they have been screaming at me since I started in this game 30 years ago – “Make It New!”

I am a child of the Theatre. To be exact, a child of the 1980’s Australian funding bodies policy of New Australian Work. I have been funded for years now to deliver, directorially and dramaturgically, new Australian plays for our Independent theatre sector. Happily they have been well received, both critically and artistically, and some really important Australian stories have been told, published and awarded. My love for those works runs deep and eternal, and every lesson they delivered to me was profound and life altering.

But after 30 years of making love to my art form, I needed something else. After years of invention and building, molding and shaping, developing and strengthening, compromising and balancing people, text, story and time, I needed something else. I needed new food for my soul. I wanted to go deeper into my art form. I wanted to excavate so as to find the heart ripping stuff I still do not know … there must be more? This is Art after all. And isn’t Art supposed to be eternal?

I searched desperately for the thing that would inspire me, but nothing was doin’ it for me. I was stuck.

And then, just in the nick of time, a beautiful friend of mine said to me, while we were lazily discussing a comrade’s latest directorial offering, that he didn’t see any value what-so-ever in reproducing a great historical piece of writing, as written. He was completely devoted to the idea of adaptation and in the forward theatrical thinking of Post-dramatisation and the deconstruction of classicism.

I suggested to him that nothing gave me greater joy than to experience great writing from previous centuries delivered as though it was fresh and seen for the first time; to indulge in the intimacy and (if well executed), un-faded delicacies of the writer’s craft, and the timeless enlightenment of humanity’s endless spiraling nature.

And the penny not only dropped, it smashed me across the face (almost in disgust I think), that something so obvious could have taken that long to see.

To unravel the secrets of the ‘Great Plays’ for me, as Director, could be the artistic turn on I had been wet dreaming about. To dive into the intricacies of language, its rhythm and power. To relish the skill-full acumen of the great writers of history, birthing characters driven by turbulent passions, with plot and story woven through their characters’ actions, words and deeds. All intentional, all deliberate, all delivered, for us, as directors, actors and audiences alike, to devour and find our own reflection within the plays’ refined constructs. To study structure that has stood the test of time, and to wallow in the canny perceptions of human behavior that has not changed for a millennium and will not change unless we, as humans, are the plankton of the next species yet to evolve.

From Kazan on Directing: Kazan, Lahr and Scorsese – The Pleasures of Directing (and just whack in the ‘she’ and ‘herself’ where appropriate): 

“How must he educate himself? What skills does his craft require? …

… Literature. Of course. All periods, all languages, all forms …

… The literature of the theatre … classic theatre literature for construction, for exposition of theme, for the means of characterization, for dramatic poetry, for the elements of unity, especially that unity created by pointing to a climax and then for the climax as the essential and final embodiment of a theme … he has not only to guide the rewriting but to eliminate what is unnecessary, cover faults, appreciate non-verbal possibilities, ensure correct structure, have a sense of … time, of how much will elapse, in what places and for what purposes.”

“ … beneath the surface of his … play is a subtext, an undercurrent of intentions and feelings and inner events. What appears to be happening on the surface … is rarely the true substance of the action … this is what he directs”.

So if these are but glimpse’s of the guidelines that every director of theatre must consider, they are really just pointers because what a director should be doing to produce a fine piece of staging, is emotionally and analytically circumnavigating the possibility that they are completely outranked by the writer’s definitive mastery of their craft. The masters are masters for a reason, right?

But whoops! I stumbled on a snag in the fabric of our current theatre collective conscience. The great debate was already raging with so many Directors and Designers investing in interpretations of classic theatre texts as opposed to collaborating with living Australian Writers and the Writers were pissed off! 

The fur was flying everywhere as great chunks of theatre practitioner’s egos were being bitten off in antagonistic newspaper articles and apparently academic and impartial blogs.

I decided to go underground with my thoughts and my study. 

I started my first love affair with Virginia Woolf by sitting down to my computer and transcribing word for word her seminal classic novelette ‘A Room of One’s Own’. I had decided to dramaturgically edit this delicious piece of modern feminist classicism so as to deliver the work as a piece of theatre, and found myself constantly caught out by the divine simplicity of just the way she put two words together on a page, her punctuation and its specific manoeuvring of thought, time and place. Of studying her ability to write fact, fictionally!

Then, I went to school (actually University) for the first time. Uni hadn’t been a life choice for me until now, as I was dragged up through a lower economical sphere where such pursuits were seen as ‘not knowing one’s place’. Going to University was something that toffs did because they were naturally smarter than our kind … so I was taught. But I have found in my short time on the planet, that any peoples who have naturally formed a group or clique become very self-protective and convinced of their own exclusivity and excellence, one could say that about the theatre industry in general really, myself included. 

I found comrades, other creatives that thought with their gut before their pen, and I was blessed with what I can only call the ‘graceful genius’ of some of Australia’s most gifted elders. 

I had a crack at the Woolf and delivered it as theatre in the hermetically sealed environs of the University construct, a Creative Development I called it. Well, that worked, I thought again, with a sigh of relief.

Then I received an invitation to direct Steven Berkoff’s EAST. This can be my next experiment in true contemporary classism and the first play I have ever delivered in the big wide world that was NOT Australian new writing. And even though I had been watching Berkoff for a couple of decades, the gorgeous creamy juice was in the ‘doing’ of him. What a rocket ship of an artist Berkoff is – a rare and intriguing specimen of mankind. The performer as writer, growling and dirty, yet Shakespearean and sensitive. I fell in love with him all over again.

And now, here I am playing in The Sandpit, St Kilda.

We have talked Mr Williams [The Sandpit’s Artistic Director, Geoffrey Williams] and I, about what it may mean for me to venture off into the Australian artistic wilderness in pursuit of a higher classically driven ideal and how, like a pariah, I will be scorned as an anti-progressive element, to be ignored – again. To let go of all the fashionable measurements being formulated right now for current ‘conceptually’ driven theatrical outcomes. Where Post-dramaticism, deconstructionism and anti-psychological realism are the innovative and trailblazing objectives of the enlightened.

Yet I am grateful for these inflicted parameters in truth, because they give me something to rail against. I am not in opposition to the Post-dramatic experience; on the contrary, I adore what has become the New Independent Theatre movement of our time. Neither do I dislike difference – I love it. I also love history and all of the centuries of concentrated intelligence, compressed into the master works of the big kids.

To quote Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “ … masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking by the body of the people so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. For works of art continue each other in spite of our habit of judging them separately”.  

And here we come to my project Elia Kazan: A Theatre Investigation. 

Writers live eternally. The word, language and the paper it is written on exist through time as a physical entity of which we, who live in the present can always reference and those that live in the future can always rediscover. Actors over the past 100 years have had the great fortune of being so completely in the public eye, paintings are made of their likeness and photographs are taken, and they too are not forgotten easily. In America, they even make Presidents out of them. 

What of the Director? There isn’t much written down, perhaps a diary or notebook or perhaps a mention in a memoir. It wasn’t until Stanislavski that much was understood, having said that Directing as a specific art practice was an embryonic idea at best. We still mutate the role of the Director depending on the particular work’s circumstances, especially now.

So why did I become a Director 20 years ago? And why now focus on Elia Kazan? Because it was Kazan that gave me the courage to direct my first play. I was, in the early 90s 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 became 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 art form that had a direct relationship with its audience and also the potential to affect it. 

In Kazan was my perfect example of a complete landscape. It was only after then studying him, his circumstances and choices that I realised that the world he was a part of, he changed so profoundly and that this is where I must start. It seems to others that I am starting at the beginning again, I’m not. After jumping off the mark and delivering ‘Waiting for Lefty’ by Clifford Odets, the political theatrical watershed first performed by The Group Theatre in 1935, the first in this Kazan investigation, I realized that I am only now after 30 years of professional practice, qualified to take the great beasts on.

I’m not really looking for a definitive answer, what I am looking for is the information that drove the decision making of the great creative minds of Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller and Robert Anderson, so as to produce works such as Waiting for Lefty, All My Sons and Tea & Sympathy. 

I am searching for the gentle and subtle literary framing of all the great theatrical works. The microcosm of humanity, the everyday, everywoman and everyman story that reflects the macrocosm of the universe. There have been many times in theatre’s history that have changed the way the world spins on its axis. And I want to see it again, flooding through the veins of new Australian Writers and pouring onto their manuscripts.

Great artists like Kazan and Miller, and extraordinary plays like All My Sons, give testament to the power that dedication to mastering classic forms can do. They change you, and I want to be ready for them.

Elia Kazan: A Theatre Investigation continues with a rehearsed reading of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece All My Sons. Sunday 28 September at 3pm. The Sandpit, 148A Barkly Street, St Kilda. Due to The Sandpit’s limited seating availability, reservations are strongly recommended: thesandpitstkilda@gmail.com
The Sandpit's 'pay what you can afford' policy will be in place for this event.

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All My Sons is produced by arrangement with Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd, on behalf of Dramatists Play Service, Inc., New York.