David Holman talks to Murray Bramwell.
In Adelaide in time for Come Out, David Holman might have been forgiven for thinking that his works were the main fare for the Festival. For a start, Magpie were doing two plays which Holman originated in Australia. No Worries, one of the great sleepers from the 1984 Adelaide Festival and The Small Poppies, one of the most keenly anticipated plays from the 1986 Festival. In addition, Frankie, the young people’s opera directed by Neil Armfield, with libretto by Holman, adapted from his earlier play Frankie’s Friend, and music by Alan John, was the major commissioned work for Come Out 87.
I spoke to David Holman several days after Frankie opened and just prior to his departure for Vancouver. Holman had some forthright views about the critical reception for Frankie. “It has been, at least to some extent, slagged off by the critics. The review in The Advertiser was less than satisfactory if you wanted a good review and the one in The News called it a failure and said it would never play again. I don’t take too much notice of either good or bad reviews anymore but what interests me about them is not what they say about being good or bad but the comprehensive failure to understand what we’re doing and what these kids are involved in and that makes me uneasy.
“It also didn’t serve us very well that opening night had to be the night that the ASSITEJ delegates came along. Now we were not doing a youth opera only for a children’s audience but ideally they should be a 50 per cent component at all times. We were criticised for the standard of the kids on stage and told we made mistakes in casting as if there are fully fledged opera singers out there!
“Frankie is a collaboration between Neil, Alan, Peter Deane the Musical Director, and myself with 39 kids from Adelaide and one from Melbourne. We wanted to do things which have a relevance first of all to the cast, something they want to do and feel is worth putting over to the youth of this country. The fact is that amongst the cast the experiences that the play dramatically delineates are ones they know well. Something which was entire fiction to me – the closing off of a playground by a bully – actually happened to the black girl in the cast. Other kids reported similar experiences – so we got something very strong in terms of their emotional participation in this and yet we get statements that it’s a failure. “In writing Frankie I took two major decisions. Firstly, because we were involving 40 children most of whom would be the chorus. I decided that the chorus would be the main character in the play- not because I needed it dramatically but because they needed it as people. If we were going to ask for their time over that period I didn’t want them used, as I’d seen in other youth operas, as a kind of wrap-around window dressing. They needed to feel that they were dramatically incisive in the action – and from everything we see on stage that’s the way they do feel about it. The second thing was that no child would be acting a part which wasn’t their own age. So there is a philosophical relation with children that exists in the work.
“Nobody seems to have noticed the difference between that and The Iron Man which is a play totally devoted to using the mechanical nature of theatre where the children are on the stage but they might as well not be there. It is not in any sense a child-centred experience – certainly not for the cast and eventually not for the audience. I gather that the Riverland Youth Theatre was another one where young people are asked to wear crepe beards and so on. What are these people doing? This is a serious matter – the responsibilities we have here are far greater than is being acknowledged.”
The good news for Holman is that, at last, he is being honoured in the land of his birth. The Young Vic, in London, has recently produced No Worries. Typically self-effacing about the Young Vic decision, Holman nevertheless concedes that he is very chuffed about it all. After all he has slogged away for more than 15 years in TIE in England never to be considered anything but second eleven simply because he was writing for a young audience. The success and regard for his work from theatre audiences and professionals in Australia has given Holman a taste for wider acceptance and fittingly, he is now getting it on his old home ground.
There is even talk about a new play set in London, “in my beloved age range of seven to thirteen.” He notes the irony that he might be approaching the task as he did for No Worries in late 1983. He wrote the play after being in Australia only six weeks. When I reminded him that he’d once told me he had gone through his notes later and discovered that he’d used every skerrick, he laughed it off. “Oh yes, what I knew about Australia – bugger all.” But the fact remains that he worked with an unerring eye for detail and ear for verbal nuance and they continue to be the touchstones of his writing.
Before returning to Adelaide for his residency with Magpie, Holman has been commissioned to do a play, One In A Million, for the Green Thumb Theatre Company in Canada. Holman is quick to note that it is no surprise that he took readily to Australian society and, for that matter, Canada either. “It remains to be seen whether that ‘foreign eye’ – the sharper perception an outsider may have- has done the business or not. But I regret that people over-rate that kind of thing. It’s an accidental quality and besides it’s an ex-colonial country in which one is working, so people with working class roots in England can relate to any ex-colonial experience where people are trying to get away from being British. Basically, I was relating mentally to people who have been doing that for 150 years and the connections are very strong”.
It is the first time that someone other than a Canadian writer has been commissioned for Green Thumb and Holman is blunt about conditions. “The resources are pathetic, in that, financially, they are a lot worse than Magpie. But they’re the best theatre company for young people in English-speaking Canada even though wage rates and other resources are at a low level. Like America, Canada has a very commercialised theatre, and support and subsidy for young people’s theatre is virtually non-existent. But I like the people a lot and they are very serious and very good. They’ve asked me to do a play about poverty among the young which is a massive feature of their society but which is literally invisible. Nobody ever talks about it or writes about it. It’s never on TV that one fifth of their population of young people are living below the poverty line and a very low poverty line too. So they wanted me to do a play about the experience of one or more children who have to live in a rich country being poor.”
“It would be similar in Australia. With unemployment at around eight or nine per cent you could go a whole year unless you were extremely judicious about news and television and you wouldn’t know that that was the case. The unemployed have no voice at all in the media and the poverty that goes with their children is invisible.”
With ASSITEJ going on around our ears it was natural enough to ask Holman what he was making of it all. He had attended Congresses in Lyons and Moscow and while he had been spending most of his time with his own shows I asked him whether he thought the delegates were reacting favourably to the looser, freer approach to young people’s theatre in Australia.
“I don’t think they do like it, nor do they find it threatening because what they’ve been seeing is a lot of schools theatre, youth theatre and TIE you might say, and by and large they are able to dismiss it. A lot of delegates come from highly subsidized companies where they have very full rehearsal and production time. They do maybe two projects a year with very high artistic standards. Over here much of it needs to be contextualised. But it’s a problem in theatre – you see what you see and if you see bad acting it’s very difficult to say ‘I contextualise this because I know these kids and they’re in a high school down the road and actually they’ve done great. They’ve done a terrific job considering where they’re at as fifteen year old non-professionals or whatever.’
“These delegates assume they’re seeing the quality end of the business and I don’t know whether it’s a fault in the way it’s been set up or in the role of the Australian delegation to talk them through that but they are saying ‘I see that – that is bad theatre’. Decontextualised that would be true but in other terms it is wonderful.
“That’s the thing about youth theatre – do you talk about what you see on stage or what it has done for the players in various liberating terms. A theatre audience shouldn’t be required to make that distinction but then the delegates are not your ordinary theatre audience, they are people in the trade and should be able to see what is going on. But I believe their criticism is pretty much wholesale and dismissive of what Australia is trying to do.
“I would have been quite reactionary about it and organised a greatest hits Festival and I would have vetted the youth pieces with the knowledge that that is a deeply unsatisfactory role, but the point of it would have been that for people who do not have young people’s theatre movements in their countries and who might change their minds on the basis of what they had seen, then that possibility should be there. From what I hear that won’t have happened and that is sad.”
So how does David Holman feel about becoming a permanent resident in Australia and what will that mean for his work? “When I arrived in Adelaide last week after ten months in Europe I got off the plane, was driven home by my Japanese-Australian hosts and in that car drive I felt I was corning home. But on the other hand as far as the business of children’s theatre and propagating it is concerned, it won’t just be in Australia. One reason is that other people want me to do things and that interests me. But also if I were to do more than one play a year here and not do other things I can imagine getting to a situation where I put on a play which I think is really terrific and a lot of other theatre pro’s think is terrific and people say ‘Oh not another David Holman piece.’ That’s coming; it may already have started with Frankie and that partially bothers me. Some people who would say that, are not people I have a great deal of respect for but on the other hand it’s something to be guarded against. So for me a mixed diet of working in North America and London as well as here may be the answer.
“I do feel I am corning to an end of a particular phase of things at the moment. For some reason the recent work in Australia has been on a kind of domestic scale where the political statements have not been particularly overt and I used to be quite overt about things. It troubles me that I’ve moved away from that. I would like, for instance, to do plays about youth in South Africa and have a coalescence of the music of that country with the political issues. I’ve become very interested in the use of movement and music so I can reduce the words and orchestrate things in other ways. There are also areas of child experience I want to write about – the effect of parents separating for instance.
“I want to reduce the amount of work I do to take time to think through some things and talk to people about things. I don’t have any answers at the moment but I want to continue to try to change the climate of young people’s theatre and do things that adults can come along to and not feel that they are wasting their time. That’s the main aim – whatever the plays are about, that’s the main aim.”
“The Responsibilities We Have “, Lowdown, Vol.9, No.3, May, 1987, pp.67-69.