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Not Wrong - Just Different: Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Theatre

Katherine Brisbane, Not Wrong - Just Different: Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Theatre (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005) Trying to determine what's going on in the world by reading newspapers, writer Ben Hecht once observed, is like trying to tell the time by watching the second-hand of a clock. He had no reason to exclude the arts pages. Theatre reviews suffer the further complication of having no retrospective relationship with their original object of attention. Once the second-hand ticks by, stage productions evaporate. The words designed to reflect the achievement of the moment lie marooned, the moment gone. Collations of past reviews, therefore, need to be distinguished to a rare degree to capture the historical imagination. More than this, they must exemplify the subtle but unmistakable electric charge of their times. Hazlitt, Shaw, Agate, Tynan: we read these critics now not only because they wrote memorable prose but because their writing took fire in capturing the ephemeral. In so doing, their reviews stand as a subtle recovery of the theatre event - not just a reflection or an interpretation of it, but a ghostly after-breath whose qualities communicate the mood, mores and intellectual sub-structure of the past. Katherine Brisbane's timely collection of writing - timely because Australian theatre today has lost much of the cultural punch and forward motion that until recently so distinguished it - is an engaging, useful and honest expression of what in retrospect was a period of finite fluorescence for Australian drama: 1967 to 1985. Largely made up of reviews and commentaries from Brisbane's time as critic for the Attstralian, the National Times and Theatre Australia, the book references material outside these dates. It also contains lengthy glosses that put the original articles in context and supply factual information lost in the historical wash. But this material is expository, not reflective. The book isn't a critical autobiography, with reviews selected to fit an intellectual destination; it is a pick-and-mix of the best and fairest, in an attempt to give voice to what was, by any stretch, a remarkable imaginative voyage. The prose may be serviceable, but there's no mistaking the voltage of the times through which Brisbane has lived. In essence, the book chronicles three journeys. The first is of a woman in the right place at the right time: a critic arriving onto the Australian scene just at the moment when the theatre around her was erupting into confidence and original vision. Why did it go off then and not earlier - or later? Who knows? Certainly not Brisbane, whose blue-stocking starchiness made her no natural ally of 'experimental' theatre and its bead-wearing, drug-taking advocate-practitioners. 'As art it has no special significance but it does make one or two points', she sniffs over an early production of Jim Shannon's The Flower Children (1967), a hippy apologia for LSD using 'two pop groups, dancers, op-art and art nouveau psychedelic images, with excerpts ... from Genesis and Exodus, the poets Coleridge and Blake, and Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception' (31). Ah, those doors; they were permanently ajar back then, weren't they? Gradually, as 'experimental' productions accumulate and lava-lamps and love-ins are replaced by play texts and performance styles, Brisbane's tone changes. This is the arc of the first journey - of an Apollonian critic (values: order, clarity, precedent) won over by wild Dionysian energy (values: chaos, synthesis, novelty). For Brisbane's support for new Australian drama - a support that saw her leave a job as the most prestigious, indeed the only, national critic in the country to found with her husband, Philip Parsons, an uncertain venture publishing plays, Currency Press - was not a given. Erudite and globally travelled, her early belief in the values of an Anglicised theatre culture is seen even in this weeded selection of reviews. …