Visionary arts leader John Clark, who led the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) for 35 years and shaped it into the powerhouse institution it is today, has died aged 93.
Born in Hobart on October 30, 1932, Clark was educated at the University of Tasmania, where, an obituary on the NIDA website recounts, he became involved with the Old Nick Theatre, eventually going on to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in the UK.
There, he designed sets for the initial production of Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room. He also met his future wife, Henrietta Hartley, who would go on to become a TV producer, working on ABC Television’s Play School.
Clark returned to Hobart with Henrietta in 1959 and directed a Hobart Repertory Theatre Society production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – a job that would change their lives forever.
The play mad such a splash that the ABC, Melbourne Theatre Company and interests from NIDA – which was founded in 1958 and began enrolling students the following year – all attempted to recruit him. Clark accepted an offer from Robert Quentin, one of the founders of the new institution, and his path was set.
Clark would later recall that the institution was initially met with some scepticism:“There was huge opposition, the feeling being, why train for an industry that doesn’t exist?”
He spent the next decade teaching and directing for NIDA’s newly formed professional theatre company the Old Tote Theatre Company, a predecessor to Sydney Theatre Company. The building in which it was housed had once been part of Kensington Racecourse and home to the totalisator betting machine (which displayed odds and other race information on the course). Among the plays Clark mounted was the first Australian production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In 1969, Clark became the director of NIDA, soon appointing Elizabeth Butcher as bursar, a position that evolved into general manager. The duo worked together for 35 years. In a piece published on the NIDA website this week, Butcher said that when she took the job, she knew nothing about theatre and had not even been to the Old Tote.
“John taught me everything I knew. From the very beginning, he guided me and showed me what to do. That was John. He taught by doing and he trusted people to grow into their roles,” she wrote.
“Very early on, after I had only been there a month, he went to England and sent me a note asking me to help find a play. Among those scripts – I had never read a play before – was one with rude words and foul language. It was Don’s Party, long before anyone knew what it would become. That was John, always thinking ahead and shaping what Australian theatre could be.”
When the Old Tote closed in November 1978, then NSW premier Neville Wran approached Butcher – who at that time had been seconded from NIDA to run the Old Tote – to establish a new, state theatre company to mount works in the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre. The Sydney Theatre Company was born, with Clark joining Butcher to act as artistic adviser, programming the first season in 1979.
“His vision extended well beyond NIDA and helped shape the cultural life of this city,” Butcher noted.
Meanwhile, the pair also had their eyes on improving facilities at NIDA, which at that point were, according to the obituary on the institution’s website, “a collection of old army huts and racecourse buildings under constant threat of demolition”.
However, Clark and Butcher managed to convince then opposition leader Malcolm Fraser to go into the 1980 election with a commitment to give NIDA a new home. It took a few years, but in 1987, NIDA moved into the campus it still occupies today.
The courses available were also expanding over the decades. NIDA’s first group of 23 students graduated in 1960 with diplomas in acting. A year later, a two-year production courses was added, followed by a three-year design course and a one-year graduate course in directing in 1972, then myriad other theatre arts courses over the decades. The campus expanded along with it, with a new complex opening in 2002 that housed a teaching theatre and TV studio. The jewel in the crown of the new complex – the 730-seat Parade Theatre – was opened by NIDA graduate Mel Gibson in 2002.
In 2004, Clark directed his final show for NIDA, an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, then retired. He returned to Hobart in 2009, coming full circle by directing a production of Hamlet for the Old Nick.
Clark was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981 for service to the theatre, and received a Helpmann Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. In 2022, he released a memoir, An Eye for Talent: A Life at NIDA. Fittingly, it was structured around quotes from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which Clark last directed at NIDA in 2003.
Clark is widely viewed as having significantly influenced and shaped a thriving theatre culture that is now exporting our works to the global stage.
“John’s legacy is everywhere,” Butcher wrote in her tribute on the NIDA website. “It lives in the thousands of graduates across acting, design, production and directing who trained under his leadership.
“It lives in the international careers of people like Cate Blanchett, Baz Luhrmann and so many others. Most of all, it lives in the principle he held without compromise, that students come first, and that excellence in training creates excellence in the art itself.”
Clark is survived by his wife, Henrietta, his three children, Kate, David and Jo; his five grandchildren, Jack, Hetty, Owen, Amanda and Alex; and his great-granddaughter, Pip.
NIDA will host a commemoration of Clark’s life on May 29.
Chris Hook is Culture News Editor Sydney for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
