Worlds Within: Hayes Gordon, Zika Nester, Henri Szeps and the Transformations of Australian Theatre

Abstract

In 'Worlds Within', Vilashini Cooppan challenges the idea that the movement of global capital acts as a homogenising force, arguing for the significance of the 'cultural and psychic' connections it engenders, which operate variously with, against and beyond the flow of capital (3). This is important as a way of linking our understanding of individual lives to national life. Australian literature and particularly Australian theatre are located in and connected to world literature in many important and unexplored ways. Yet some significant contributions to this placement, this series of connections with world literature and theatre, are as yet undocumented. This essay seeks to address a gap in the understanding of modern theatre in Australia and its direct connections with European and American theatre. It explores the ways in which the actors Hayes Gordon (1920-1999), Zika Nester (1928-2014) and Henri Szeps (born 1943) lived out, and in Szeps's case continue to live out, what Cooppan calls 'twinned identifications and doubled dreams' (4). Cooppan does not accept that globalisation is a 'heterogenising' force in which national cultures are transcended, instead charting a 'politics of relationality' in which the national and the global are dual ideas held in balance though subject to change (4). This is a useful idea for understanding any nation, including Australia.