Live Australian theatre is struggling to attract audiences amid new, more contemporary forms of entertainment. So what’s going wrong? Andrea Booth has this report.

Judy Davis. Sigrid Thornton. John Bell, Colin Friels, Cate Blanchett. These Australian actors’ names ring with acclaim and their reputations continue to grow. But the same can’t be said for the theatre that nurtured them.

While the dramatic arts garnered media attention with Blanchett’s appointment as co-artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, the day to day reality is that live theatre is struggling to retain more than a small percentage of rusted-on devotees.

The 2005 National Survey Report of Theatre Companies, commissioned by the Australian Major Performing Arts Group, shows Australian theatre’s box office received a paltry $10 million, in comparison to the cinema’s box office takings of $907 million. Mainstream and small-to-medium sized theatre companies are at their lowest level of support in 20 years.

Tony Knight, head of acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) says that while “you can go and see 100 movies and you won’t remember a single one of them; you can go to one single theatre piece and it can change your life forever,” there are still a number of issues holding the industry back. One is racism, he says.

“If there is something I get the shits about in the Australian industry, and in comparison internationally, it’s that colour-blind casting doesn’t exist in this country — and that’s disgusting.”

Colour-blind casting — where an actor’s race doesn’t impact upon the role he or she plays — is union practice in the West End and on Broadway.

The 2006 NIDA graduate play, The Laramie Project, was a colour-blind performance with a multi-racial cast all playing Americans.

“The Laramie Project was completely colour-blind and the audience didn’t blink. Colour-blind casting happens at drama schools. But it doesn’t happen on our stages, it doesn’t happen on our television, and it doesn’t happen in our film,” says Knight.

“We are racists. Put colour-blind casting into practice and prove me wrong.”

“It’s an old, baby-boomer, white supremacy way of thinking and they should be horrified that this is what a younger generation thinks that they are,” he says.

Director of Parramatta Riverside Theatres, Robert Love, agrees that much of the Australian theatre scene is culturally outdated.

Love believes theatre must beef up its appeal to the younger generation, which has grown up in a new cultural scene. Parramatta Riverside is pushing hard to breach that barrier, he says.

“Theatre tends to be very Anglo, Caucasian. So part of our role — and we struggle with it — is trying to get some cultural experience and international work in an Australian setting.”

For the recent 2007 Sydney Festival in January, Riverside produced a rejuvenated version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which incorporated martial-arts inspired dance, voice and percussion from the South Korean Yohangza Theatre Company.

“We’re diverse,” says Love. “That’s really our strength. We are not going out for one audience. If we just said we are going to run a professional theatre company here, we’d die.”

Riverside exists between large subsidised theatre companies, like the STC, and small independent companies. While it is not a professional theatre company, it has a range of sponsors and is government subsidised — and Love is keen to see it help fund outside productions.

“There’s this strange thing where the government drops a bit of money into independent theatre spaces like The Old Fitzroy Theatre, but not to the (independent) companies that perform in there. You see all these activities happening that are subsidised by young and mid-career artists who basically haven’t got any work,” he says.

“We are really filling in a bit of a gap. There are the big theatre companies, like STC and Belvoir Street Theatre. But certainly 20 years ago there were more mid-range theatre companies operating that were able to get money and pay people,” he says. “It provided the next step from when you move from co-operative (self-funded) theatre.”

In fact, Riverside is breaking down the old divide between large and small companies altogether. Both the STC and small independent company, Whoosh Productions, are lined-up to perform in Riverside’s 2007 season: the STC produced Ruby Moon, by Australian playwright Matt Cameron, and Whoosh Productions perform UK playwright Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water.

But according to Love, Australian theatre must also become more innovative if it’s ever to take off. Even though the self-funded nature of independent theatre gives it an opportunity to be experimental — albeit on a shoestring — Love doesn’t think it goes far enough.

“Independent theatres are still performing in a relatively conventional format within rough spaces — but they’re conventional rough spaces — opposed to unconventional spaces no one ever thought of.”

And another thing: Theatrical conventions — like leaving the audience to watch performances in the dark — are unappealing, he says. “We turn lights off, which is rather odd. People say: ‘Well, that’s theatre etiquette’.”

“Theatre etiquette is simply old-fashioned and alienating. Do they need to be regulated by conventions that no longer have a relevance to them?”

Instead, Love says we should be contemporising spaces.

“We have to start playing with technology and bring TV and film into the performance space.”

He says the text-based nature of theatre can be confronting for a younger generation, as opposed to the intuitive experience of music. “People see music as a lifestyle and it’s less separated from this concept of it being art. But we tend to create theatre as art.”

This divide can be lessened when theatre practitioners blend different art forms together in live theatre.

“We need the enhancement of total immersive experiences. That’s really the challenge — finding the spaces and convergences of various expressive art forms, to create works that people want to communally receive and get off on,” says Love.

Despite these challenges, Riverside and its audience has grown under Love’s management. Riverside produces over 700 events each year and its 2006-2007 season consists of 16 productions, compared to the Sydney Theatre Company’s 12- production season.

The success underlines that it’s Parramatta — not the inner city — that is becoming both the geographic and demographic heart of Sydney. “We’re trying to respond to being part of Sydney. In the performing arts you have to have the support of the arts industry — which is really an eastern suburbs, inner-west group. So gaining their trust and interest in Riverside means they talk about it, which spreads and brings people from outside Eastern Sydney.”

But it doesn’t matter where theatre is. It will always be a challenge to immerse it into the broader culture, says Love. One problem is that unlike visual arts, theatre depreciates in a sense, because it’s worth nothing once it finishes.

“We are selling memories and memories are intangible when it comes to giving them a value,” he says. “And thank God it [theatre] is here, because if you took it out, everything would be a product as opposed to an experience.”