Author: John Senczuk
Senczuk, John, 2024 Louis Esson: The Last of the Colonial Playwrights, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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Louis Esson: The Last of the Colonial Playwrights
It was to study the visual arts that took Thomas Louis Buvelot Esson (1878-1943)—the nephew of Scottish born Australian landscape painter John Ford Paterson (1851-1912)—to Europe in 1904. It was on this trip, by chance, that he also connected with the leading figures of the Irish National Theatre Movement—WB Yeats (1865-1939), JM Synge (1871-1909), and Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852-1932)—and attended the inaugural performance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. On his returned to Australia, inspired by his stay in Paris with childhood friend and artist Max Meldrum (1875-1955), Esson was attracted to the literary Bohemians who gathered regularly at Fasoli’s café in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne. He was a founding member of the Victorian Socialist Party and began a creative career contributing verse, short stories and articles to The Bulletin, The Lone Hand, The Weekly Times and The Socialist from 1906.
Esson later identified himself as ‘a journalist,’ and was held in high esteem by a select and influential cohort of editors during the thirty years post Federation. He was also a recognised poet— known amongst his peers as ‘the poet of the slums.’ It was through the encouragement of critic William Moore (1868-1937) that Esson turned his attention to writing plays. In the latter role, from 1912, he advocated for a National Theatre and was a co-founder—with Vance Palmer (1885-1959) and Dr Stewart Macky (1890-1946)—of the provincial theatre enterprise The Pioneer Players in 1922.
Despite Esson’s prolific portfolio of verse and prose writing, it is his theatrical canon and his advocacy for local drama that has gained most scholarly attention, notwithstanding his relatively small repertoire of produced plays.
In the currently accepted foundation story of the Australian drama, a mythology has evolved concerning both Esson’s contribution to the National Drama movement, and his legacy. He was certainly a major contributor during his life to the push for a provincial theatre through his published commentary and the production of nine of his plays (most with ‘mixed’ critical response). Further, the obituaries following his death in 1943 positioned Esson as a ‘pioneer dramatist,’ ‘Australia’s foremost playwright,’ and ‘the father of Australian repertory theatre.’ In his seminal work, Towards An Australian Drama1, historian Leslie Rees’s codified this reputation in his chapter titled ‘The Legend of Louis Esson.’ Dennis Carroll perpetuated this mythology—in Australian Contemporary Drama 1909-19822—by stating that ‘the birth of modern Australian drama arguably occurred with the first one act plays of Louis Esson ... the first playwright to weld the emergent conventions of modern European drama to palpably Australian material.’
My thesis challenges the accepted mythology built around Esson’s legacy and canon [his nineteen extant plays provided in a Scholarly Edition, Appendix A; three of which I contend Esson should share authorship with his half-brother Frank P Brown (1887-1928)].
There has also been a tandem historic tendency to constrict the importance of the commercial theatre enterprise in the colonial era as being self-serving, and to see the sector as antagonistic to an evolution of the Australian culture and identity. Into the new century, Esson led the polemic that those associated with the commercial sector demeaned the art form and inhibited the development of a true National Theatre. This paper argues the contrary: that throughout the colonial area—which extends from the first productions presented to Barnett Levey to the advent of the Great Depression
1 With its significantly expanded companion The Making of Australian Drama: A Historical and Critical Survey from the 1830s to the 1970s, both published by Angus and Robertson in 1953 and 1973 respectively.
2 Originally published in 1985, and revised a decade later (1996), by Currency Press.
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(1832 to 1929)—the commercial theatre was not only the most important form of entertainment for Australian audiences, but also flourished as an industry that actively promoted a drama that was ‘by Australians for Australians.’ I also survey how the commercial theatre evolved compatibly with the fledgling film industry (sharing creative talent and entrepreneurial initiative) to further the development of a perceived national culture.
The dissertation posits that Esson (represented by his extant plays and as a contributor to both the fledgling repertory and provincial theatre movement, along with his public commentary) sits not as the beginning of a modernist movement, but at the last bastion of the colonial dramaturgy; Esson as the last of the Colonial playwrights
I conclude by surveying a range of neglected playwrights, contemporaries of Louis Esson— many of them women—whose valuable contributions have been neglected or diminished. If we are to build a new and better foundation narrative, two of these women, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Mary Maclean (aka Betty Roland)—with their plays Brumby Innes and The Touch of Silk respectively—should be seen as the matriarchs whose dramaturgy heralds the beginning of the Twentieth Century Australian modernist drama.
Keywords: Louis Esson, Australian Drama, Australian Playwrights
Subject: Drama
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2024
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Professor Robert Phiddian