Joan Harris (12 June 1929 – 2 September 2016)
In the following article from The Age (26 September 2016), playwright Michael Gurr pays tribute to the late Joan Harris who was Head of the National Theatre Drama School from 1970 until her passing in 2016.
Joan Harris
Actress, drama school director
12-06-1929 – 02-09-2016
‘Her boundless generosity gave many people courage, allowed hope for big things.’ Joan Harris was first and last an actress. She was also the director of a drama school, a mentor to countless actors, writers and directors, an enabler and provoker of talent. But Joan’s feet never really left the stage.
Whether directing a student production or dissecting a new play, you could always feel her wonderfully impatient itch to get the story moving.
She was impatient with talent. Waste it and it withers, let it rest and it comes to nothing.
If Joan Harris cast her beady eye on you and picked you as someone worth encouraging, it was no easy ride. Not for her the easy compliment, nor the lazy endorsement.
Harris believed that you had a responsibility to your talent. She believed in work. From her earliest days at the Union Theatre Repertory Company (which she joined in 1954 and which evolved into the Melbourne Theatre Company), Harris was possessed by the urgency of stories told live. There was nothing to beat the face-to-face encounter of an actor and their audience.
Her early work ranged across commercial theatre, too, working with JC Williamson, appearing in Aunty Mame, performing in tents in coastal towns, and, memorably opposite Frank Thring in The Man Who Came To Dinner.
A scene called for her to throw a Bible at him; he had filled it with confetti. The following night he nailed it to the table, making it impossible for the actress to pick up. She improvised and threw a vase at him instead.
One of the productions she remembered most fondly was A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, no accident since she was playing opposite Frederick Parslow, whom she married in 1961. She dazzled audiences with her command of the stage and her beauty. But her ambitions lay elsewhere. As director of the National Theatre Drama School in St Kilda for about 30 years, she hounded the best out of her students.
Many were intimidated by her, misreading her theatricality for something domineering. In private, with her beloved Fred and son Justin, she was a nurturing force.
When I was living in a Fitzroy Street flat with no income and no prospects, she regularly called by with plates of food. She employed me as a stage manager, and later as a director at the NTDS. Her innovative and progressive engagement with young people was a beacon across an industry that too often expects its “talent” to arrive fully formed.
Many of the students who spent time at the NTDS did not emerge as actors, but as administrators, stage managers and writers. Many past students had caught Harris’s enabling bug.
She was still giving advice in the last weeks of her life.
Curiosity often wanes over a long career. In her case, it never did. A new writer excited her as much as a new recipe. Her boundless generosity gave many people courage, allowed hope for big things, allowed their artistic ambitions to ascend.
Theatre has a reputation for being a fickle world. Joan gave the lie to this – her pleasure in the success of others was palpable and real. We repay our debt to her by striving after her example.
Michael Gurr is a playwright, speechwriter and broadcaster.