The Old Tote Theatre Company (1963–1978) is a defunct NSW theatre that began as the standing acting and theatre company of Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and was the precursor to the Sydney Theatre Company. It was one of the leading Australian theatre companies of the period.
History
The Old Tote began in a converted tin shed on the campus of University of New South Wales in Sydney. The wood and corrugated iron building (originally an army recreation hall) became known as the "Old Tote" because it had previously been part of the group of buildings that had formerly housed the totalisator betting machine when the site had been Kensington Racecourse. The building still stands, and is now known as the Figtree Theatre.
The company was founded by the University's Professor of Drama, Robert Quentin, and NIDA Director, Tom Brown. The University contributed six thousand pounds to convert the building into a theatre and its debut production, which opened on 2 February 1963, was a highly successful production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, starring Sophie Stewart and her husband Ellis Irving, with Gordon Chater as Yepihodov, John Bell as Trefimov and Ron Haddrick as Gayev, which ran for almost two months. This was followed by a double bill of The Bald Prima Donna and The Fire Raisers, with a cast that including Brian James, Gwen Plumb, Neil Fitzpatrick, Anna Volska and Jack Allan. Other productions in the first season included Hamlet, with John Bell in the title role, and Playboy of the Western World. The first season was an outstanding success and was extended to 28 weeks, with an average nightly capacity of 95%.
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art and stagecraft are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").
Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from ancient Greek drama, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical language, stage writing, and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that differentiate theatre from the other performing arts, literature, and the arts in general.
7:84 was a Scottish left-wing agitprop theatre group. The name comes from a statistic, published in The Economist in 1966, that 7% of the population of the UK owned 84% of the country's wealth (compare the Pareto principle).
The group was originally founded by playwright John McGrath, his wife Elizabeth MacLennan and her brother David MacLennan in 1971, and operated throughout Great Britain. In 1973, it split into 7:84 (England) and 7:84 (Scotland). The English group folded in 1984, having lost its grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain. The Scottish group lost its funding from the Scottish Arts Council in 2006, though Artistic Director Lorenzo Mele successfully secured funding for a further year from April 2007. He subsequently commissioned a series of four plays, Wound by Nicola McCartney, Eclipse by Haresh Sharma, A Time To Go by Selma Dimitrijevic, and Doch-An-Doris (A Parting Drink) by Linda McLean. Together, these short plays formed Re:Union, a production which toured Scotland in early 2007. This was followed in September 2007 by Raman Mundair's The Algebra of Freedom, which also toured extensively throughout Scotland. This production was directed by 7:84's Associate Director, Jo Ronan, and designed by David Sneddon.