In memoriam: IAN ROBINSON (1949-2010), theatre and events designer, and friend. Paul's tribute was read by Ken Wilby at Ian's funeral on 25 January at Scott Creek, South Australia.
Ian’s life was one which touched and made its mark on so many theatre people. He worked as designer at the National Theatre of Western Australia, and designed The Guardsman for the Festival of Perth. Trained at NIDA, he was later their lecturer in theatre design for five years. I had the privilege of working with him when I was general manager at the Nimrod Theatre Company in the 1970s, when Ian designed the scenes for several productions, collaborating with Ian was especially practical, as the Nimrod workshop and production staff led by Grahame Murray would attest. He loved discoveries, but he thought through the challenges of theatre space (and budget) in a most organised, imaginative and graceful fashion, bringing all his colleagues to levels of finer insights and richer understandings. I am also certain that Ian’s visualisations were the more evocative because of his long and successful partnership with Peter Holderness, the stage photographer and lighting designer. They both knew so much about visual theatre, indeed about all the arts of the theatre. Ian was also a superb model maker, [as these photographs by Peter testify]: he worked with the leading theatre architects such as Sir Roy Grounds - on the design of the Victorian Arts Centre in Melbourne - and Harry Seidler on the new Theatre Royal in Sydney. He was an accomplished scenic artist, often painting sets for Nimrod productions, such as Makassar Reef, Romeo and Juliet and Upside Down at the Bottom of the World. Photographs of Ian Robinson's models by © Peter Holderness. each artistic director, John Bell, Ken Horler and Richard Wherrett. Ian was a theatre designer whose ideas and attitudes were all-embracing, from operas to plays, from Iolanthe to Going Home to Playboy of the Western World, and music halls - Spring Heeled Terror - to Robyn Archer's song and dance show, Songs from Sideshow Alley. With what care and discussion he selected a veranda chair, properties, materials and the tropical vegetation for David Williamson’s Travelling North in 1979! How the spectator felt they were really in Far North Queensland! Seeing was believing! His designs for the George Darrell musical melodrama The Sunny South at the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre opened the Sydney Theatre Company in 1980, marking a turning point in transforming and resolving successfully what everyone had thought to be an
impossibly distant and difficult stage – Ian made a stirring experience of visual theatre from a thin and disjointed script!
I learned a lot from Ian and from Peter. The three of us often met for dinner, and they came to stay at my house, for a holiday in Adelaide in 1981, when they were investigating a move from Alexandria to South Australia. That move did not occur for many more years; we last met in Sydney just beforehand, in 1998. During an excellent dinner, Ian’s smiling glint that characterised his spirit and zest for life was as bright as ever; but by now his design interests had grown to the whole architecture of the theatre, including nineteenth-century opera houses, witnessed by his model of the huge Opera Garnier in Paris, which conveyed such a human scale. I am looking at several photographs of the model that he sent me a couple of years back; how sad I am that Ian has passed away, but how glad I am to have known him. He was a much valued mentor and friend. He was one of the nicest and most generous people I have ever known. Thank you for a wonderful life, Ian!
In memoriam: SYLVIA, LADY CRATHORNE
In memoriam: RAYMOND STANLEY (1921-2008), Melbourne theatre critic, writer and friend. See his website here.
In memoriam: JOHN MALCOLM (1936-2008), Co-founder of the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and Chipping Norton Theatre, actor and friend.
This obituary appeared in The Stage, 3 July 2008:
John Malcolm, mercurial actor and co-founder of two important theatres, died in Edinburgh on 14th June 2008.
Born in Stirling in 1936, John won a scholarship to RADA in 1958. His first acting roles were at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Then, during the Edinburgh Festival of 1962, when appearing in a Fringe show in the basement of the Paperback Bookshop, he shared discussions with the owner, Jim Haynes, about a permanent ‘fringe centre’ for the counter-culture scene. John Malcolm was determined that this should be a theatre for new plays and thus in January 1963, after also working with Richard Demarco, the first Traverse Theatre opened. The 60-seat former doss house and brothel in the Lawnmarket soon became one of the most important theatres for new writing in Britain.
John left the Traverse to pursue his acting career, working in repertory at Harrogate before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company for three years, including roles in John Barton’s production of The Wars of the Roses. He also played many television and film roles, and leads at Liverpool Playhouse, Bristol Old Vic, Newcastle Playhouse and the Royal Court Theatre. Later, he played Truscott in Kenneth Williams’ production of Loot at the Lyric Hammersmith, 1980.
It was in Chipping Norton that John founded his second, equally enduring organisation. He established The Theatre in 1974 with wife Tamara (who he had met at the RSC), firstly staging trial pantomimes and music halls in the Town Hall with actor friends such as Dudley Sutton. These performances raised money for the purchase and first conversion of the former Salvation Army Citadel. Led by his exceptional hands-on hard work as theatre designer, builder, motivator, fund-raiser, scrounger and artistic director, the theatre changed the social life of Chippy, presenting the best small-scale touring companies, community performance and film in this 200 seat near-perfect replica of an eighteenth-century country playhouse.
John resigned from the management, and his marriage, in 1977, when Tamara continued as sole theatre director until 2001. He was an entrepreneurial, farsighted and charismatic theatre maker. He made things happen. Father of Aimée and Nathaniel, John returned to live in Edinburgh in 1994, (where we met again to discuss the fantastic progress of his prodigy-theatre).
Whilst General Manager of the Watermill Theatre, Paul Iles was in involved with The Chipping Norton Theatre Limited, as Company Secretary. The Council of Management was chaired by Elizabeth Sweeting.
In memoriam: PETER SARAH
Elizabeth Sweeting, theatre manager, wrote a memoir, The Dart of Chance, describing her experiences as first manager of Aldeburgh Festival, administrator of Oxford Playhouse and director of the Arts Council of South Australia. Author of the seminal Theatre Administration (1969), her life and work was celebrated at a special performance produced by Iain Mackintosh at Oxford Playhouse on 15 June 2001. Elizabeth’s friend Beris Hudson subsequently organised an annual scholarship in her name, at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.
View The Dart of Chance: click here (in PDF, 356 KB)
This obituary appeared in The Guardian, 11 December 1999:
The theatre manager Elizabeth Sweeting, who has died aged 85, was one of the most important leaders in the performing arts and a founding mother of a new profession of arts administration.
Born in Kensington, west London, the daughter of a tobacconist's shop manager, she graduated from Oxford and trained in management with Marks and Spencer. She began her career as deputy manager of the English Opera Group, which she joined at Benjamin Britten's invitation after their Glyndebourne season in 1947, dovetailing this with being the first general manager of the Aldeburgh festival from 1948 to 1955. She worked with Britten, Peter Pears, John Piper and Eric Crozier to plan the new festival around community support from Aldeburgh itself, helping to create the blueprint for many future festivals.
From there she went on to be general manager of the Oxford Playhouse for 20 years. This involved re-establishing professional theatre in the city by formulating the policy and management of Meadow Players, Frank Hauser's resident company, and encouraging the purchase of the playhouse itself by Oxford university, which she negotiated in 1961. The two organisations became a thriving educational, social and recreational amalgam of town and gown.
In her role as administrator-impresario, Sweeting brought many directors, writers and actors together in new collaborations. West End managers consistently previewed good plays at the Playhouse, and Meadow Players transferred 15 revivals or serious modern plays to London, with Sweeting organising tours of the company to 10 European theatre festivals.
During many disastrous years for the theatre in general, Oxford acquired an enviable reputation for adventurous international work - Jean Anouilh, Jean Giradoux and Ugo Betti typically, in a programme that attracted theatregoers from London. Sweeting arranged for the last train to London to be held until 11.15pm for long performances.
With no drama or theatre studies department at Oxford university, she guided and stimulated members of the student drama societies to give three-dimensional shape to their study of a play as literature. Academic forebears would have been horrified at a formal link between the university and the stage, which was still regarded as a naughty art.
At that time, the administrative side of the theatre was comparatively neglected in universities. Sweeting wrote a handbook, Theatre Administration, in 1969, which was the first British book on the subject since 1925 and remains an influential text today. She developed an in-service training scheme for theatre managers in subsidised theatre companies and was instrumental in starting the first theoretical training course at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1970.
Her book and teaching emphasised theatre as an art and business. Budgets have to be planned, approved by governing boards and sanctioned by funding bodies; income must be realistically estimated; the choice of productions cannot be made without serious consideration of their likely appeal; wages must be found to retain the best performers; and there needs to be careful and enthusiastic attention to publicity, marketing and politics.
Theatre organisation is a blend of these interests, needing, on the one hand, a visionary expansiveness, but on the other, astute management. Elizabeth Sweeting had a driving motivation and commitment, rooted in sensitivity towards artistic vulnerability and preference for working quietly behind the scenes. She was charming and kind to newcomers. She engaged at a very deep level with the organisation and policy of healthy theatrical experiment and discovery, without the flailing ego prevalent in arts management today.
In 1976, Sweeting was invited by the South Australian prime minister Don Dunstan to be arts adviser to his theatrically pace-setting government. She established the first Australian graduate courses in arts management, was director of the Arts Council of South Australia until 1981, consultant to the Adelaide festival and the state opera, and a member of the Australia Council, the federal arts funding body.
She served tirelessly on many theatre boards: for Toby Robertson, Richard Cottrell and Iain Mackintosh's Prospect Theatre Company, the restoration and reopening of the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, the Wyvern Theatre, Swindon, the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, Chipping Norton Theatre, the Old Fire Station Arts Centre, Oxford, the Association of British Theatre Technicians and as a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain drama panel.
In retirement, Sweeting lived in Ironbridge, continuing to travel the world to see friends and theatre, offering wise counsel to the many managers who were privileged to work with her. She never married.
Paul Iles
Elizabeth Sweeting, MBE, arts administrator. Born 19 November 1914, died 7 December 1999, Sheffield.
For several references to Elizabeth Sweeting's time as administrator of Oxford Playhouse 1956-1976, see Don Chapman, Oxford Playhouse: high and low drama in a university city, Hatfield, University of Hertfordshire Press (with Society for Theatre Research), 2008. See also Oxford Playhouse 1938-2008, anniversary pages here.
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They are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act Two, Scene Two.
- William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act Four, Scene Two.
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