The Pram Factory: The Australian Performing Group Recollection

By Tim Robertson, Melbourne University Press: 2001, , paperback, $39.95. Reviewed by Donald Pulford in the Dec 2001-Jan 2002 issue.

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The Australian Performing Group, or Pram Factory, is the most influential company in recent Australian theatre history but, in the two decades since it closed in 1981, not a single monograph devoted to it has appeared until now. Tim Robertson's The Pram Factory: the Australian Performing Group Recollected is a valuable corrective to an almost unbelievable absence. It is corrective in other ways as well. Because scripts are more accessible artefacts for researchers, articles on the company have overwhelmingly been written by outsiders concentrating on the company's writers. The Pram Factory is an insider's perspective from a performer, director and playwright.

His is not an easy story to tell. For much of the time, the APG was a complex amalgam of factions attached to the youth and counter culture of the sixties and seventies. It was a big, messy, protean and highly productive cluster/collective/conundrum. One of the book's several strengths is its making sense of the various factions and their ideological and artistic allegiances. Another is Robertson's ability to suggest the tone and tempo of the times, often through lively and startlingly inventive language.

After setting the historical, cultural and personal background to his involvement with the APG and the company itself, Robertson introduces us to the various subgroups within the Pram Factory and the personalities involved. Later, we gain an insight into the constant tensions between writer autonomy and group-centred approaches to devising theatre in the APG. Peter Cummins, John Romeril and Circus Oz's Tim Coldwell receive separate chapters at the end of the book and it is in reading the last of these that an absence in the rest of the text comes to mind.

Tim Coldwell was a founder of the APG offshoot, Circus Oz, and rose to be its artistic director. Late in his career, he suffered a crisis of confidence and lost direction. His story is a moving one which suddenly leads the reader to notice how emotionless the rest of the book has been. Though there were artistic passions and intense rivalries in the APG, Robertson's account suggests that it was all rather a romp and a rort. It makes for very entertaining reading, and Robertson is a skilled and linguistically inventive storyteller, but there is much more to the tale.

In 1968, while Paris students were tearing up cobble stones and hurling them at the establishment, Melbourne students and others were forming a theatre company with much the same aim, iconoclasm. They smashed through the cultural cringe and conservatism to create a space for an insistently national and radical theatre. They initiated theatre experimentation never before conducted in Australia. Though the Parisians made more widely known and arresting images, the Melburnians probably gave more to their country in the long run. The Pram Factory is an engaging and intelligent evocation of the people and the times, a personal recollection that will provide a very useful basis for the comprehensive history of the APG which must, surely soon, be written and published.

Citation

• Donald Pulford. 'Review: The Pram Factory: The Australian Performing Group Recollection by Tim Robertson' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), Dec 2001-Jan 2002. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 18 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• The Australian Performing Group was a democratic theatrical collective operating out of a former pram factory. Its prodigious output of original work, produced amid the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll of Carlton in the 1970s, revived and inspired Australian theatre.
  
  The collective created a theatre in opposition to the script-based, director-dominated conservative norm. It was up-close, non-naturalistic and centred on the presence and skill of the performer. The shows were raw, rough, vernacular, iconoclastic, experimental, tendentious, comical, musical and, from time to time, magical.
  
  Much has been written about the contribution of the playwrights (Jack Hibberd, John Romeril, Barrie Oakley, David Williamson) to this cultural effusion. Less has been remembered about the performers. Max Gillies, Jane Clifton, Greig Pickhaver (H. G. Nelson), Evelyn Krape, Jack Charles, Sue Ingleton, Peter Cummins, Red Symons, John Duigan, Graeme Blundell, Bruce Spence and Jenny Kemp were among the many influential actors, musicians and directors who developed their talents at the Pram Factory.
  
  Tim Robertson's freewheeling, almost first-hand, account privileges the place, the process and the members of the filthy workshop of creation. It sketches the characters, kitchen politics, lifestyle and modus operandi of a unique institution, and also attempts an overview of its origins, fortunes, splits and dispersal, drawing on previously unexploited primary resources and personal interviews with former members of the APG.
  
  'A history of the Pram Factory, by one who was there. He lived it--you can tell, because his analyses keep cracking open into wild laughter; but under the baroque comparisons of his style gallops a fine mind at full stretch. This version deserves an honoured place among the histories of that wonderful and fruitful time.' Helen Garner

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