Brian Syron - Theatrical Career

Theatrical Career

Syron began his artistic career in 1960 at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, Sydney under the guidance of New York trained American actor/director and esteemed teacher of the Strasberg Method, the late Hayes Gordon. His fellow students included Jack Thompson, Clarissa Kaye Mason, Reg Livermore and John Ewing. Syron always believed that it was Gordon who gave him the dream to be part of the theatre by allowing him to experiment, expand and create.

Wishing to travel overseas, Syron was forced to deny that he was Indigenous in order to obtain an Australian passport. This was because Indigenous Australians were not allowed to have passports and were designated in government publications as fauna. Syron left Australia in 1961 to work in Europe as a male model with Dior, Cardin and Balenciaga. In the Fall of 1961 he moved to New York living initially on Fifth Avenue with one of Australia's first supermodels, Pauline Kiernan, and later in a small walk up when he became an acting student again. In September 1961, he was accepted as a student with the Stella Adler Studio, where he studied for the next 18 months with fellow students Robert De Niro, Gloria Graham, Pamela Tiffen, Warren Beatty and Peter Bogdanovich. Then followed two years of study under various teachers including Olympia Dukakis, Sanford Meisner, William Bell and Rose Ingram while continuing study with Adler. As a result of this 3½ years of training, Syron became the first Australian, indigenous or non-indigenous, to study with Stella Adler and one of the few Australians to have learned the Stanislavsky drama technique from so close to the source – "the source was almost pure - only one place removed."

Completing his American training, he spent 12 months in Britain studying with Cecily Berry as well as Doreen Cannon, head of acting, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before returning to New York. There, he co-founded a theatre company based around the Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, upstate New York while touring as a director with the Boston/Herald Travellers Shakespeare Company with such actors as Spalding Gray and Clara Duff-McCormack and doing stints as a teacher for Adler's studio. In 1965, Mrs. Hollister Rexford Shause donated the Caffè Lena theatre company 27 acres (110,000 m2) on the Mohawk River near Schenectady to build a theatre complex. Following this donation, Syron returned to New York, where he worked as an actor on various American Shakespeares festivals, toured through the Appalachian Mountains and worked with the Louisville Shakespeare Festival, Cincinnati In the Park, as well as productions in Ohio, New Jersey and Paducah, Kentucky.

As well as touring, he worked as an actor with the Establishment Theatre Company for producers Sybill Burton Christopher, Joseph E. Levine, Ivor David Balding, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He worked for The New Theatre on 53rd and 3rd and various productions including The Mad Show Review for Stephen Sondheim and Mary Rogers.

In the last months of 1967 and the first of 1968 Syron toured the Southern states of America playing in Atlanta, Georgia; Roenoke, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina and from these tours he was to say

"came the finalisation of my black politicisation. No black person travelling through these States during this period of peace marches, race riots and assassination could have remained untouched and I had to go home."

Syron returned to Perth, Western Australia following the 1967 Referendum which finally allowed him to freely move through his country without having to have a Permission to Leave Pass to let him go about his business. In Perth he directed at Arnie Neeme's The Playhouse, Perth. He had hardly time to settle in to Perth before he was invited to return to Sydney and direct Fortune and Men's Eyes at his old alma mater The Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli for which he received the Inaugural Drama Critics Award for Best Production and his leading man Max Phipps received Best Actor for his role of "Queenie".

On his return from the United States in late 1970, Syron was invited to join the Old Tote Theatre by Professor Robert Quentin, Head of Drama at the University of New South Wales, and Robin Lovejoy, Artistic Director of the Old Tote Theatre, Kensington, Sydney. He was the first Indigenous Australia to work as a director in the mainstream Australian theatre industry and in 1972 was appointed Theatre Consultant for the Aboriginal Arts Board of the inaugural Australia Council for the Arts which Board was headed for the first time by an indigenous person, Wanjuk Marika.

The following year, 1973, Syron co-founded the Australian National Playwrights Conference with Katharine Brisbane. Lloyd Richards, Head of Acting at Yale University and Artistic Director of the American National Playwrights Conference wrote to the Aboriginal Unit of Australia Council in September 1993

I have been asked to comment on Brian Syron whom I have not heard of in many years. I am nonetheless not hesitant to do so because his contribution to the theatre and to his people had by the late 70s been so significant that he might have been considered for award by then. The National Playwrights Conference of Australia exists because Brian Syron visited the National Playwrights Conference in Waterford Conn. and recognised it as an important idea for Australia and he went back to champion the possibility. Others visited and the rest is history."

Syron returned to the theatre again in 1976 with his direction of Dimboola (written by Jack Hibberd) in Newcastle, New South Wales as well as at Bonapartes Theatre Restaurant, Kings Cross, Sydney where his stage production ran continuously for the next two years and four months with many cast changes during that time. He followed "Dimboola" with a production of the American play Falling Apart at the New Theatre, Newtown, Sydney and in 1978 he played the role of "The Actor" in Livieu Cieleu's production of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths which ran for six weeks at the Sydney Opera House. In this same year he opened The New Group Theatre at the All Nations Club, Kings Cross, Sydney where he directed among other productions A Tribute to Tennessee Williams before the ongoing costs of keeping an independent theatre going forced Syron to close after 12 months.

Syron co-founded the Aboriginal Theatre Company (ATC) in 1981 with Robert Merritt, scriptwriter/playwright/director and, in conjunction with the Aboriginal Educational Unit of TAFE, was founder of the Eora Arts Centre, Redfern, Sydney. The first production of the ATC was Merritt's play The Cake Man which toured under Syron's direction, to the 1982 World Theatre Festival in Denver, Colorado where the play received a tremendous audience response. Following this success, the play then toured various colleges around the United States. Returning to Australia, Syron directed a season of The Cake Man at the Universal Theatre in Fitzroy, Melbourne after which it was funded by Australian federal government's Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs to play at the 1983 Warana - Commonwealth Arts Festival, Brisbane in Queensland.

In January 1987, Syron founded the National Black Playwrights Conference, which was held at the Australian National University, Canberra. In an interview with Angela Bennie, Australia's leading Indigenous actress Justine Saunders commented :

It was Brian Syron, in fact, who was the instigator not only of the first National Black Playwrights Conference but the National Playwrights Conference. Syron always said our culture is an oral one, it comes through our painting, through our singing, through our stories that's how we pass down our laws, that's how we have passed down our history for 60,000 years

During the National Black Playwrights Conference (NBPC), the delegates awarded Syron the 1987 Inaugural Harold Blair Award for his Lifetime Achievements in the Performing Arts, which brought with it the additional honor of the title "Elder". As a result of the first NBPC, Syron proposed and co-founded the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust (ANTT) with headquarters in King Street, Newtown under Administrator, scriptwriter Vivian Walker (son of poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and brother of actor Dennis Walker), Chair, actor Lydia Miller and directors Justine Saunders, Rhoda Roberts, Lillian Crombie and Syron. ANTT closed in 1991 following the very early death of Vivian Walker.

At the second NBPC held in 1988 Syron directed a video of Jimmy Chi's stage musical Bran Nue Dae produced by Chi who travelled from Broome in Western Australia to Macquarie University at North Ryde, Sydney to take part in the event.

Syron carried out a two-week workshop, a stage reading, plus a production in 1991 at the Belvoir Street Theatre, Redfern, Sydney of Mudrooroo Narogin's "courageous and brave new play" "The Aboriginal Demonstrators Confront the Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with the Production of Der Auftrag by Heiner Muller" and starring Justine Saunders, Michael Watson, David Kennedy, Pamela Young, Ray Kelly and Graham Cooper. The play and the production are also the subject of Mudrooroo Narogin's book The Mudrooroo/Muller Project - A Theatrical Casebook, with a chapter by Syron and edited by Gerhard Fischer in collaboration with leading indigenous academic Paul Behrendt and Syron.