I didn’t see Senator George Brandis on Monday night at the 15th annual Helpmann awards, honouring live performance across Australia and held within the gorgeous mock Italian piazza interior of Sydney’s Capitol theatre, but a colleague reliably told me over the cheese platters at the after party that he was there. Opportunity missed!
I had been hoping to spot our bald, bespectacled, bookshelf-loving federal arts minister to seek clarification, between our no doubt mutual bedazzlement at handsome, bearded Simon Gleeson – accepting his statue for best male actor in a musical – the wonderful revamped piece of international commercial theatre, Les Misérables, or smart Cate Blanchett presenting best play to Belvoirfor its beautifully crafted take on Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie – for which Pamela Rabe deservedly won best female actor in a play.
I wanted to know: when the senator wrote in the program that we were gathered here to “recognise artistic achievement and excellence”, were we not also honouring the fragile bedrock of small-stage training and excellence and innovation upon which such prestigious artistic achievement is built? Did he think about what the Helpmanns mean for the state of theatre in Australia? I did. So did those applauding the on-stage allusions to some muddled ministerial dance steps.
Certainly, most of the theatre companies nominated were from the 28 major performing arts companies Brandis has quarantined from budget cuts, first in 2014 when the Abbott government cut $100m from the arts over four years, including $28m from the Australia Council, which dispenses theatre funds, and sheltered again in 2015 when the senator sequestered $104.8m over four years, at the expense of the Australia Council, for his in-house national “excellence” arts program. He hadn’t bothered to warn the Australia Council, or the public, of his looming budget raid this year.
Excellence is set to become increasingly unmoored from the democratic peer review expertise designed to spot its potential in infancy. Newly released guidelines do nothing to allay fears Brandis will play favourites with arts funding decisions. The National Program for Excellence in the Arts will use “at least three assessors” for each grant – chosen and appointed by the ministry, and including ministry personnel. The small to medium arts organisations and individual artists will scramble for what’s left.
Still, it’s important to ask: where and how did these performers honoured on Monday hone their craft? Cream rises to the top, provided we manage to find it first.
When Live Performance Australia’s president, Andrew Kay, stood on stage and pointed out that tiny arts companies too are “part of Australia’s cultural ecosystem, but being small, they are also the most vulnerable, and warrant our ongoing support”, did the senator nod sagely? When the New South Wales arts minister, Troy Grant, took a dig that he was “pleased to be here as an arts minister that didn’t cut funding”, did his federal ministerial counterpart (and party colleague) throw his head towards the ceiling cornices and laugh?
Whether physically seated beside us or not, we felt the chill of George Brandis’s judgment on Monday night. Sure, this award ceremony in large part had a safe, fiscally pleasing streak, its final gong for the night awarding best musical to one of four imported commercial ideas. Nominees were Once, the tale of Irish troubadour lovers staged by veteran John Frost and the Melbourne theatre company; Anything Goes, the Frost-Opera Australia collaboration starring the delightful best female musical actor, Caroline O’Connor; the twee Dirty Dancing (film turned into live pantomime); and Cameron Mackintosh’s Les Misérables, that also has its home at the Capitol – as if we didn’t know from the raising of the red flag for the opening number.
But there were also home-grown artistic hopes on the hill. In particular, The Rabbits, a children’s opera-musical fantasia beloved of critics and Perth festival audiences of all ages, and soon to be seen at Melbourne festival, with composer Kate Miller Heidke, librettist Lally Katz and arranger-composer Iain Grandage accepting the Helpmann for best new Australian work, best children’s work, best score, and best costume design.
Did it strike Brandis that here was the little West Australian theatre company, Barking Gecko, scooping four awards in staging The Rabbits as an Opera Australia co-production, in association with the West Australian Opera and commissioned by two arts festivals, in an act of fabulous collaboration. The Australia Council managed the project as part of the federal government’s major festivals initiative, and the Confederation of Australian International Arts Festivals selects such projects for support and manages their development.
When Blanchett presented the statue for the best play, Brandis would have seen nominee Calpurnia Descending, credited in his glossy program as a Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company co-production, both major performing arts companies. But it was more remarkably a wildly fantastic collaboration between the cabaret star Paul Capsis and the Melbourne queer theatre troupe Sisters Grimm, who began presenting works in abandoned shopfronts and a backyard shed.
Hurrah for innovation and excellence and entrepreneurship among the tiny-to-small-to-medium sector. But I doubt the senator would have snapped up a ticket to Sisters Grimm’s first staging of Little Mercy in a Collingwood car park.
As Belvoir’s The Glass Menagerie took best play and Sydney Theatre Company’s Kip Williams won best director for Suddenly Last Summer, the ceremony heralded a healthy changing of the guard, with Menagerie’s director Eamon Flack about to assume Belvoir’s artistic director mantle and Williams surely a frontrunner for the top Sydney job when Andrew Upton bows out at the end of the year.
The Helpmanns demonstrated the deep well of stage talent Australia possesses, partly by design, within a desirable, appropriate politically remote process. They remind us we have great playwrights such as Joanna Murray-Smith (Switzerland) and theatrical innovators (Sisters Grimm duo Declan Greene and Ash Flanders), even though we do still rely heavily for our biggest stages on the 2oth century canon of Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett (Endgame, for which Hugo Weaving won best actor in a play).
Sometimes, new, wholly original Australian works are billed as sideshows. But to achieve ongoing excellence in creation and performance requires nurturing of the rabbits, the little theatrical brothers and wicked stage sisters. That’s a feat that cannot be achieved by a self-appointed arts tsar-wizard in Canberra, pulling his own well-worn lever.
