The History of the Stage

The History of the Stage

May 31, 2009, 1:11 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

History is a passion of mine. I am often ridiculed for my ability to quote cricket games from the 1930’s better than I can now. Upon reading that this assesment involved a History element, i was wrapped. The problem with History though, is that it has to be written down somewhere, this proved difficult with the History of Theatre and film in the Illawarra, as it appears very little is written down.

The best source of information I found was a website called, Theatre in Illawarra and even it had very limited information availible.

It gave a glimpse into the major theatre companies in the Illawarra and a brief amount of information about them.

In the Illawarra there is The Merringong Theatre Company, The Arcadians, The Roo Theatre, Wollongong Workshop Theatre, Stanwell Park Arts & Theatre Society (SPATS), Illawarra Performance Writers Group and the Dodo Express.

According to the Website, Wollongong Workshop Theatre is the oldest theatre group, formed in 1953 and performing continually since.

It is a community group of theatre enthusiasts who perform for pleasure, not for money. As a group it caters for all varieties of theatre – from experimental to mainstream. Each production is a unique creation of its director and cast. Being such a small and flexible group, Wollongong Workshop Theatre has the advantage of allowing directors, actors and production crews a lot more freedom to “do their own thing”.

The next significant/long running theatre group to appear, was the Arcadians back in 1964, the group formed to capitalize on the vaccant ‘musical’ scence and have been running predominately as a musical theatre group ever since. I talked with Derek Corrin of the Archadians, who gave me some background information on the group. Run for its members and its specators the Arcadians enjoys a mild success for a small theatre, with two of their shows last year selling 96% of their tickets.

The next theatre to appear by my reconing (more correctly the websites) is the Roo Theatre in Shellharbour. Run not for profit, the Roo opened in 1987 its

vision is to bring theatre to the general public at a price they can afford and to allow all members of the public, who have an interest in the arts, to become actively involved. To this day Roo maintains its philosophy of working together as a team to develop their vision of theatre into a reality.

Unfortunatley there is no detailed information about The Merringong, despite it being the largest venue in the Illawarra. It is therefore no surprise that nothing (that I can find at least) is on the history of the Wollongong Workshop Theatre, Stanwell Park Arts & Theatre Society (SPATS) and Illawarra Performance Writers Group.

As far as I know, Dodoexpress is also extinct, but I think it now lives on in the new Phoenix theatre I was talking about previously.

Currently the Major players in Theatre in the Illawarra are, the Merringong co., The Arcadians and The Roo Theatre, all of which are listed on Wikipedia’s entry about Wollongong.

I think the history of stage in the Illawarra is going to be a grand one, with a nice balance forming between groups like the Phoenix determined to be different, even risque and the more family orientated fun companies like The Arcadians. I know that I will certainly be attending the Theatre more often if I can be.

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