The New Garrick Gazette Issue 574 April 2020
Garrick Theatre Club (Inc) www.garricktheatre.asn.au 16 Meadow Street, Guildford PO Box 122, Guildford WA 6935 Editor: Douglas Sutherland-Bruce In this issue:
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Editorial
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Letter From Your Future
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The Committee
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Why Self-Isolate?
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D E N O P T S
The New Garrick Gazette Published by: Printed by: ISSN (Print edition): ISSN (Online edition)
The Garrick Theatre Club (Inc) Docuprint 2652-4678 2652-4686 Copyright 2020 1
The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind. - Stella Adler
EDITORIAL IT HAS OFTEN BEEN said that ‘a week is a long time in politics’, and, of course, it is - but it seems nothing like a long as a month in theatre - a short month ago we were preparing to host our first Club Night for some time while TAG were in the final stages of rehearsal of The Hound of the Baskervilles, preparatory to opening this month. The stage is ready, painted and ready, Trybooking ticket sales open and ready for custom, but now the stage rings hollow as the actors remain at home in isolation, dust motes float in the stray sunbeams that make their way into the silent auditorium. Backstage is lit only by the ghost light, that single bulb that remains on even when the theatre is dark as a promise that we shall return and that the theatre will throb with music, laughter, light and the smell of greasepaint again. It is not the first time that theatres have been forced to go dark because of disease: [Bubonic] Plague had posed an ongoing danger in England since before the time of Shakespeare’s birth, but a particularly devastating outbreak of the disease swept the country in 1593 and 1594. During especially intense epidemics, the Privy Council would exercise its authority as the queen’s advisors to close all public theaters. The Privy Council viewed the theaters as crowded wellsprings of disease, especially lethal in times of plague, and it moved to shut down operations in the interest of public health. In late July 1606, in the midst of a theatrical season that included what may well be the finest group of new plays ever staged – Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth, Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy – Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, lowered their flag at the Globe theatre and locked their playhouse doors. The plague deaths had again risen to above the ‘40 deaths a week’ that the Privy Council considered the cut-off point and the theatres were again ordered closed. But out of disaster came something good. During the enforced retreat to the country Shakespeare, who had obviously lost his income from the theatre began to write poetry, making an incalculable contribution to English literature. So let us not think of this as lost time, but merely marking time, while we prepare for the coming season when we re-open again. For make no mistake, we will reopen. Over the long history of theatre, assailed by disease and political and religious enemies, theatre has prevailed. The Executive Committee of the Garrick Theatre Club Inc have faced difficult decisions over the past four weeks, but guided by the best medical advice available and the best interests of the casts, crews, audience and the community at large decided to have the theatre go dark for the time being. The same advice will guide when we re-open to the public, which is, as it will be for everyone and everything, uncertain. We can say with absolute certainty that, whenever it is, the next production mounted will be The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Executive Committee are working on the worst case scenario as far as the theatre is concerned and are assuming that the Federal Government’s stratagem of ‘flattening the curve’ works which means that the course of the disease is controlled, medical resources are not overwhelmed and the number of deaths reduced but the period of self-isolation and ‘social distancing’ prolonged. This being the case the Executive Committee are assuming that the Garrick Theatre will stay dark until this time next year, opening with The Hound of Baskervilles at what would have been much the right time, but a year later. Naturally, if the situation improves drastically, they will re-consider, but rather than say ‘We’ll open in May’, then postpone, say ‘We’ll open in July’, then postpone again or ‘We’ll open in November’ and be forced to delay yet further, bearing in mind that ‘hope deferred makes the heart sick’ as the Bible tells us. So then, what are we to do during this enforced period at home? Reading, naturally - play 2
scripts; the lives of great actors; works on stagecraft and method. It may even be a chance to get to grips with Konstantin Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares, the first, and probably most important of his renowned books on acting. His method of character development for actors was developed into The Method by the Group Theatre, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner. Watch great actors and learn how they achieve their effects on TV or YouTube. Some of the greatest actors have work now on YouTube in bits, or in full movies. You can watch great Shakespearean actors performing Shakespeare, or light comedy (Olivier in Lear or Sleuth) or great comics like Max Wall performing marvels in dramatic parts. People are often confounded to see comics in tragic roles, but I don’t know why as the old saying goes, ‘Death is easy, comedy is hard’. Or you could use the time to work on your voice - singing lessons can be had over Skype, or simply practice breath control by reading aloud. Books, plays, monologues, all are grist to our mill as performers. Practice before a mirror, or film yourself and watch - it may be painful, but we need to see what the audience sees. Try reading something like Paul Gallico’s Snow Goose, which has different moods, tempi and accents, as well a good true story (if you bear in mind Sir Terry Pratchett’s dictum ‘a thing is not necessarily not true simple because it never happened’). It’s very good practice to take a simple sentence and lay a stress on each word in turn to see how it changes the meaning of the sentence - ‘How can you help me?’ can have as many as five different meanings, depending on the stress. And the fruits of your labours need not go without an audience. Chris McRae (last seen on stage as the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland at Marloo) has set up a Facebook page ‘Perth Home Community Theatre’ where you can post or link your pieces and watch or listen to others’ performances. Submissions can be sent to Chris at: chris_mcrae04@yahoo.com.au. Further in this issue of the Garrick Gazette can be found an open letter from Rome by acclaimed writer Francesca Melandri about what may be expected plus a clear, honest explanation as to why we need to ‘flatten the curve’. Please stay safe, stay home and follow the instructions and advice from the Federal Government. There will be a further Garrick Gazette next month keeping you informed of the Executive Committee’s thinking and actions. I leave you with a quote from one of Churchill’s speeches which may sustain us. ... we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or - what is perhaps a harder test - a prolonged vigil. - Sir Winston Churchill
Douglas Sutherland-Bruce, Editor.
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LETTER FROM YOUR FUTURE FRANCESCA MELANDRI
I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance. We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood. As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that. • First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do. You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days. • You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it. • You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy. • You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom… • You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest. • Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes. • You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again. • You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training. • You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all. • You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules. • You will count all the things you do not need. • The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises. Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant. Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month? You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair. You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us. Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce. 4
Many children will be conceived. Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy. Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die. You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU. You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps. You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole. Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was. At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too. You will eat again. We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s just small-scale fortunetelling. We are very low-key seers. If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same." © Francesca Melandri 2020 Francesca Melandri is an acclaimed Italian novelist, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. She started writing very young, working first as a screenwriter, and has worked on films and television series as well as a number of prize winning documentaries. In 2010 she published her first novel, Eva Dorme (Eva Sleeps), set in the border regions of Northern Italy and Austria, a sweeping story about family, forgiveness, conflict and the search for truth. Melandri’s second novel, Più Alto Del Mare was published in 2012 and it has also won several prizes. Melandri has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Her letter From your Future, lays out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks and went viral on Facebook. It is reproduced here with her permission. Rove Charters is a WA-based family-owned & operated business. We service the greater Perth metropolitan and regional areas twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week providing safe, reliable and affordable transport options for airport, cruise and hotel transfers, tours, weddings and special events, dinner, concert and event transfers and any other occasion you may require transport for. Get your quote today! Find us by searching Rove Charters on Facebook or at www.rovecharters.com.au or call 0478 410 330 (Rodney) or 0478 411 143 (Evan) 5
The Executive Committee President
Dale James
0407 426 957
Dalejames911@iinet.net
Vice President
Rodney Palmer
0478 410 330
Rodpickels@gmail.com
TAG liaison
Rodney Palmer
0478 410 330
Rodpickels@gmail.com
Treasurer
Terry Brown
Secretary
Lynne Devenish
0488 906 076
Garrickarchives@hotmail.com
Production Manager Rodney Palmer
0478 410 330
Rodpickels@gmail.com
Siobhan Vincent
Douglas Sutherland-Bruce
Production Kerry Goode
Gail Lusted Ray Egan Jordan D’Arcy Archivist
Lynne Devenish
0488 906 076
Garrickarchives@hotmail.com
Bookings
Elaine Gilberthorpe 9378 1990
Minute Secretary
Barbara Brown
9275 5281
Bar Manager
Rodney Palmer
0478 410 330
Rodpickels@gmail.com
Wardrobe
Colleen Bradford
0414 579 752
Colleenbradford@iinet.net.au
Technical
Caileb Hombergen-Crute
Front of House
Yvonne Starr
Set Supervisor
James Nailen
Shed Supervisor
Alan Shaw
Publicity
Douglas Sutherland-Bruce 0418 934 850 GarrickEditor@gmail.com
Editor
Douglas Sutherland-Bruce 0418 934 850 GarrickEditor@gmail.com
Bookings@garricktheatre.asn.au
Social Convenor
2020 Adjudicators Dee Howells David Young Christopher Churchouse Yvette Wall
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WHY SELF-ISOLATE? This article was posted early in March of this year on Facebook, where it immediately went viral. The reason it did is that it is so frankly honest and patently truthful that it has been shared and read countless times. It was largely a private post by the doctor to her father, which he shared with her permission. I have obtained her permission to reproduce it. It ahs been edited for length. I HAVE been a doctor on the infectious diseases team this week, and many people have asked me the same questions about corona virus, and this is what I’ve been telling them: we need to be prepared and wary, but not alarmed. Covid-19 virus is coming to Australia, and in most places it is already here. For 80% of people who get it, you will develop mild cold symptoms. What’s the big deal then? Why are we talking about closing schools and cancelling events and sports? Cancelling large gatherings will slow the spread of the virus, so hospitals are not overwhelmed. I’m a doctor and I don’t want to have to tell you that we can’t treat your mum because we’ve run out of oxygen. I don’t want to call you to tell you that your dad died in a corridor, because we didn’t have enough beds. This is what Northern Italy is experiencing right now, and they have one of the best healthcare systems in the world. This is what areas of the US are currently experiencing. They are having to choose which patients live and which ones die. China had to build sixteen new hospitals in a few weeks for a city with the same population as Australia, and they still ran out of resources. They had to fly in builders, cleaners, kitchen staff, nurses and doctors from all around China. We don’t have this ability; it took four years to build the Perth Children’s Hospital. If we can slow it down, so there are enough resources and staff to treat everyone that gets sick, fewer people will die. A lot fewer. So yes, most people will develop mild symptoms, but upto 20% may need hospitalisation. That’s 1 in 5 people, and if this amount of people need hospital admission suddenly, as in Italy, China and America, our world class Australian healthcare system is going to struggle, and people will not be able to get the care they need, and they will die. In regards to closing schools, children in particular seem to not develop many or any symptoms. They can then pass it on to other children and teachers, who will then take it home to their families, and potentially give it to our grandparents. Older people and people with other medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease or high blood pressure are particularly at risk of dying from covid-19. People over the age of 80 may have a mortality rate of upto 14%. You don’t want your grandma to get it, if we can avoid it. You don’t want to accidently infect your child’s best friend’s mum, who is battling breast cancer, if we can avoid it. Your friend from book club or the men’s shed takes medications to suppress their immune system to treat an autoimmune disease, so you don’t want them to get it if we can avoid it. If you are asked to self isolate, please stay at home the whole time. Don’t just “duck to the shops” because “I’ll only be there for five minutes, it won’t hurt anyone”. It does and it will. When the lockdown in Italy started, people in Italy were still going to the gym, to cafes and other places in public. Look where they are now: the whole country is in lockdown and funerals are banned. They can’t even grieve their dead. Isolating yourself when asked to is a sign of altruism. Going out when you’ve been asked not to is essentially saying that your short term pleasure/job etc. is more important than someone else’s life. You might not feel sick enough to want to stay home, but if you don’t someone else could die. Or multiple people. On average one person with corona virus infects 2-3 others, but one person in Korea infected hundreds accidently before they were found and isolated. I want you and your family to get the best care possible, in one of the best health care systems in the world. But we can’t do this without everyone getting involved. Start physically distancing yourself from other people by more than 1 metre. Please stop handshaking, hugging or kissing people on the cheek. Please frequently wash your hands with alcohol hand rub or soap and water for 20 seconds. Notice and reduce the amount you touch your face. We need everyone to pull together. Please stay home if you unwell, even if you only have a mild cold, please only take what you need from the supermarket, and please just be kind. If we do this together, the impacts of the corona virus will be much less, and a lot more people will live. 7
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STAY SAFE! Please: Stay home - the life you save may be your own. If you have to leave the house for essential reasons, please practice social distancing wash your hands
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