Loudon was the shy and retiring type Harry, the entrepreneur and life of the party. This book is as much a tribute to Harry as it is to Loudon. Loudon died in 1969 and in 1976 his lifelong partner, Harry Tatlock Miller, came back to Australia with the idea of setting up a scholarship for young designers in Loudon's name. I don't know how those poor umpires manage!' He asked, 'Sir Robert, are you alright?' Helpmann replied, 'I'm alright. When the stage manager came around to give the call for beginners, he found Helpmann standing on the chair on top of the table, close to the light bulb, applying the blue eye-shadow. The only dressing room available was the umpires' changing room which had just a little table and chair and a naked light bulb high up on the ceiling. That reminds me of a story about Helpmann after he returned to Australia in the 1970's: He was asked to perform in some sort of Gala at the Sydney Cricket Ground. You could pick which one was Helpmann because he was wearing more jewellery and blue eye-shadow. Again I couldn't get to see the shows but I cut the coloured photographs out of my grandmother's Women's Weekly – pictures of Hepburn as Portia and Helpmann as Shylock – both dressed in Sainthill's typically exotic costumes. In 1955 the Old Vic toured Australia again, this time with Robert Helpmann and Katharine Hepburn in Measure for Measure, Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, the last designed by Loudon Sainthill. How I pined then, and wished I had been old enough to see those productions! I was only eight at the time so took no notice, but years later I came across the memorial programme of the tour, designed by Loudon Sainthill and edited by his lifelong partner, Harry Tatlock Miller. In 1948 the Old Vic made an historic tour of Australia with the Oliviers in Richard III, School for Scandal and The Skin of Our Teeth. Some of the fun and romance has gone out of planning a production as technology has taken over. Now it seems model boxes are too expensive to build, so all you get is a computer image (hopefully a 3-dimensional one) but even the lighting is done virtually, via computer. They would also present you with a model box – a sort of toy theatre with an accurate scale model of the set, so that you could plot your staging, entrances and exits with little figurines and experiment with lighting. Just a few years back a designer had to know what fabrics should be used, how they behaved and how you would construct a hat, jacket or a pair of shoes. 'These look interesting,' I said, 'When do I get to see the drawings?' He looked at me with a baffled expression and said, 'I don't own a pencil!' They were witty enough but there was no indication of how they were to be made, or of what. Last year I gave a project to a young designer and he came back to me with a portfolio of costume designs that had all been photoshopped on a computer then made, digitally, into collages. They were exotic, wildly imaginative, extravagant and sensual and, what's more, the man could draw – a facility not universal among theatre designers. So as a teenager in Maitland I pored over those books of photographs for hours on end, and to me, Sainthill's designs became the essence of what theatre and Shakespeare were all about. The costumes were all hired in, and I was thrilled to find myself wearing that same costume worn by Paul Scofield, and designed by Loudon Sainthill.) (Many years later I played Richard II in Manchester. The most astonishing and exotic designs in those books were by Loudon Sainthill, especially his Richard II with Paul Scofield, his Tempest with Michael Redgrave and his Othello with Paul Robeson. Hungry for information about the theatre, I scoured the thinly stocked shelves of the Maitland City Library and luckily there were a couple of books with photographs of productions at the Old Vic and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon – the precursor to today's R.S.C. At school we had no art, no drama, no music but I did have two wonderful English teachers who inspired in me a love of theatre, especially Shakespeare, and encouraged me to perform. He was born in Hobart (small enough in 1918) and I grew up in Maitland, which was, in the 1950's, rather culturally bereft. When I was a teenager I didn't realise that Sainthill was, like myself, a small-town boy. I feel a very personal connection with this book, because to a large extent it was Loudon Sainthill who got me excited about theatre. Actor and theatre director John Bell spoke of how vital Loudon Sainthill's work was in his own artistic journey, in this speech delivered at the launch of Fantasy Modern: Loudon Sainthill’s theatre of art and life, available now from NewSouth.
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