Teaching at the nash drama school (1997-2022)
I started at the National Drama School mid-1997.
The director at that time, Kim Durban, invited me to take some sessions and soon after asked me to join the school’s teaching staff.
I taught Voice to second and third years for the next 14 years, swapping to first and third years in 2011, when Ken Boucher, the director at that time, asked me to take over first year Voice teaching. I remained on staff until 2022.
The National’s professional acting course has a prestigious place in Australian performing arts history. The drama school founding director William Carr, set the bar high, and later, Joan Harris established a dynamic training program during her long reign.
As Kim Durban told a new student group in 1998,’ This might be a part-time course, but there’s nothing part-time about our work.’ Babs McMillan, her successor, was tasked with the Herculean job of transforming the course from part-time to full-time, and to prepare documentation for VET accreditation – initially a Diploma of Arts [Acting] and later an Advanced Diploma.
The Drama School has always relied on the dedication of a small, core team of highly experienced teaching artists, all part-time. Anne O’Keeffe, Julianne Eveleigh, Margaret Mills, Vince Crowley, Andrew Gray, Danielle Carter and Margot Fenley are some of those I worked with and greatly respected. I also had the enormous pleasure of collaborating with the great Acting teacher Lisle Jones for seven years. We ’matched’ each other on many Acting and Voice class projects. Lisle is a legend in Acting pedagogy. It was an honour to work with him.
The school was renowned for splendid student productions, second and third years. Here are just a few of my favourites:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream William Shakespeare/ dir Kim Durban
Tiger At The Gates Christopher Fry/ dir Kirsten von Bibra
In The Jungle of Cities Bertolt Brecht/ dir David Symons
The Dutch Courtesan John Marston/ dir Margot Fenley
Fanshen David Hare/ dir Tom Healey
The Ramayana Peter Oswald/ dir Babs McMillan
The Comedy of Errors William Shakespeare/ dir Bruce Myles
The Crucible Arthur Miller/ dir Denny Lawrence
Attempts On Her Life Martin Crimp/ dir Tanya Dickson
The Man Who Came To Dinner Kaufman & Hart/ dir Ken Boucher
I was Voice Coach on all of these except for The Crucible, as that was a second year production and I was not teaching them at the time. That production of The Crucible, very simply staged and beautifully paced, could have held its own anywhere. Excellent.
A Voice Coach can contribute so much to a production, helping actors [and director] to discover texture, rhythms and cadences in a text. I’m not talking accents and dialects here [though they’re important], I’m talking about connecting with words and language, and making the text visceral through speech. All theatre companies should have an in-house voice specialist.
I had a wonderfully long stint at the National and I loved it. On the 50th anniversary of the Nash at St Kilda, I send love and best wishes to all former and current students and staff. You are amazing.
Les Cartwright