By Dave Riley
The youth radicalisation that swept the world in the '60s bore with it a confidence and an experimental imagination that invigorated all areas of creativity. This was especially true of theatre. The staid old forms were found lacking and the tired old ideas irrelevant to youth bent on changing the world.
In Australia these aspirations found their best focus in the vitality of Melbourne's theatre/poetry hall/coffee house, La Mama. Inspired by like venues overseas, La Mama crammed the energy of a new theatrical movement into a space not much larger than your lounge room.
Here was a mecca for poet, actor and playwright, alike sustained by enthusiastic patronage. Its informality, intimacy and total dedication to freedom of expression revolutionised Australian theatre. Writers such as Jack Hibberd, Louis Nowra, John Romeril and David Williamson were products of the new theatrical wave engendered here, just as many actors honed their skills in La Mama's small space.
Activities at La Mama soon took a populist turn. By 1969 performers became increasingly concerned with the potential of street theatre to highlight social and political issues. This roughness and dedication to the politics of the performance were key features of the Melbourne theatrical wave at this time of the Vietnam War.
Actor and director Graeme Blundell got it right when he wrote, "When the issues that are being developed include digging at the nature of man in a society that is politically evil, emotions tend to thin out and the strain for most actors is intensified since they are expected to know and articulate the ills they must portray ... But for the performers, the life style that the art demands — the trust in others and the constant exercise of a socially creative imagination — is living the revolution."
While Blundell may disown such a sentiment nowadays, he caught the artistic and political fusion that so impassioned this alternative theatre.
La Mama's free-spirited concoction was a close cousin to the intimacy and revelry of the German cabaret of the '20s and '30s. A more traditional approach was adopted by Robyn Archer. Much influenced by the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, Archer was a self-conscious cabaret interpreter.
Her early performances relied heavily on the Brecht-Kurt Weill repertoire as she rejected the folk tradition in favour of the coarse and narrative song styles of Lotte Lenya and Helene Weigel. These were songs of commitment where the beat was jewelled by a wry, sardonic lyric as much preoccupied with its politics as its ability to entertain.
Later, as Archer became more feminist in performance, she explored the Piaf and in her succession of one-woman shows set a standard form that activated much of the women's cabaret and stand-up comedy that exploded in the 1980s. Indeed, cabaret has become almost synonymous with the theatrical articulation of women's liberation in this country.
But no review of this tradition in Australia is complete without paying homage to the work of Barry Humphries. Political conservative he may now be, his stage creations nonetheless place him as one of the great satirists of the 20th century.
Before he had left school, Humphries had mounted Dada exhibitions with his friends, and he continued in the same vein at university. His Dadaist cabaret, Call Me Madam, so incensed the audience that they stormed the stage, and the authorities banned any further performances.
This intent of simply shocking late matured into comic theatrical inventions that border on national archetypes. Sandy Stone, Colin Cartwright, Edna Everidge and the rest of his portrait menagerie are characters captured in the most witty and incisive of monologues. As Robin Boyd wrote of Humphries, "he has taped us in killing caricature".
Perhaps it is difficult to view the cabaret tradition through the monstrous persona of Dame Edna, but creations like her are of the same primordial stuff from which it was born.
Sometimes a purely apolitical sophistication masquerades as cabaret — best summed up Noel Coward as "more social than socialist". But cabaret has always been a thermometer of politics. It is one of the most malleable of theatrical forms and cannot exist without its content being sustained by current events.
Never truly professionalist, it functions almost as an extension of the audience. Its pretence is to entertain, perhaps to shock, even to jibe. In its blending of the preoccupations of political and artistic vanguards, cabaret attains a synthesis that works at many levels of creativity.
While enriched by its tradition, cabaret's possibilities of expression rest solely on the collective that creates it. Nothing is taboo. The satire and outrage of the cabaret are a response to the world as found.
It is a pity, therefore, that cabaret is still so little used in cultural dissent. Many events now dubbed cabaret are merely a succession of songs or pursue a revue format by imposing a rigid story-line on their material.
Part of the problem is the predominance of musical forms resting on a dedication to folk and ethnic cultural traditions. To be on stage is to sing or play a musical instrument, while much else is shunned. But in cabaret everything is allowed.
Of course this generates a different expectation. Cabaret is an event, e — dependent as much on its audience as on it contributors.
In its coarseness and rough presentation, there is no room for classic texts or reverent attention. The bar stays open, glasses clink and patrons in the front table never shut up. Deference to performance on stage comes not from kindness or a desire for edification but through a magic chord that fosters delight in audience and performer alike.
This is theatre without illusion. It turns reality into folly and demands a response in lieu of applause. It is performance cheaply made but boldly given with a passion that only radical ideas can sustain.
[Conclusion of a series on the history of cabaret.]