A Tribute to Betty Burstall
August 2013
June this year a play that I wrote was performed at La Mama, the tiny theatre on Faraday Street in Carlton. One afternoon as I approached the theatre I was stopped by some words on the chalkboard out front: ‘Vale Betty Burstall.’ And beneath: ‘Our glorious founder.’
Betty Burstall died in Melbourne on June 14, aged 87. Tributes have rightly flowed. They are mostly from those who knew her personally, and by all accounts she was indeed glorious: a fierce, tenacious woman, but warm and hospitable to artists, their hopes and their ideas. A maverick. A mentor. A life lived well.
I did not know Betty. But I am one of countless Melbournians who have benefited from what she gave to the city. It seems fitting to reflect on her gift.
In the mid-1960s Betty Burstall, an English teacher from Eltham High, spent two years in New York on a grant with her filmmaker husband, Tim. The grant did not extend to the high price of Broadway shows, but she was able to indulge her love of theatre in a little basement venue called ‘La MaMa’. Entry was free. Coffee was served and a hat passed around for donations. “I saw some awful stuff, and some good stuff,” she later said. “I found it very stimulating altogether.”
Stimulating enough to organise a meeting back home to gauge interest in a similar venture for Melbourne. She knew the need was there. Fortunately for the city’s cultural and artistic future, the interest was there too. Betty had soon rented, with her own money, a disused factory on Faraday Street; painted it, got the fire going, and then opened it up to writers and actors and audiences who were willing to try something new.
She built it and they came. La Mama was, in its beginning, an act of faith – or rather, two acts of faith: one that the talent was out there, and another that what it produced would be any good. “She lived on nerve and altruism,” wrote the actor Graeme Blundell, an early participant, in his memoirs, “with a steely grace.”
It’s sometimes difficult for people born in the late seventies, as I was, to fully appreciate what the sixties were all about. We experienced some of the fruits of that period – the questioning of assumed norms, the sense of experimentation in art and life, the search for authenticity and meaning – but find it hard to imagine what things were truly like before. La Mama was more than just a new theatre. It was a claim about what theatre, at its heart, really is: actor and audience, word and movement, raw and unrepeatable. La Mama was a rebuke to the staid stage of 1950s Melbourne. It was a cry (in Australian accent) for something more than the latest drawing room comedy from England; for a taste of what could be accomplished beyond big budgets and small ambitions. (Incidentally, I have just calculated that the rumoured budget for the King Kong musical in Melbourne could fund La Mama for the next 500 years.)
Artists approaching Betty Burstall at La Mama did not need money, power or even reputation. All she required of them was the thing that really powers a culture and a city: ideas. These were not, and nor are they today, the sole preserve of the university down the road. A university is the conscious brain of a city; but in its theatre thinking takes a different form. It is less analytical and more dream-like – and we all know the importance of dreams. Betty understood that a city needs a theatre. La Mama was, and is, a place where the city can dream.
It is also, importantly, a place where artists can fail. (The real sin in theatre is not to fail – it is to reach too low in the first place.) It is a showcase for theatre-makers of all stripes. It is a place of community and hospitality, where actors and audience gather together after the show around the fire in the courtyard. Wine is drunk; the play dissected. People who are financially disadvantaged are let in cheap or for free.
It’s fitting, I think, that the first tribute to Betty Burstall was written in chalk in front of the theatre. It is a tribute as temporary as what goes on inside. Theatre does not have the permanence of film. Plays come and go. No two performances are the same. At the end of a show at La Mama the applause of an audience of 30 (often less) rings out for that night’s attempt to express – in language and story and movement and song – something of what it means to be human. I hope that, for some time to come, the applause at La Mama will also be thought of as belonging to Betty Burstall and her achievement.
Because thanks to her, the show can go on.