From St Ignatius to St Andy – December graduation speech

After receiving his honorary LittD, Christchurch actor Elric Hooper
gave the graduation address:

"As well as expressing my profound gratitude to my old university for the great honour it has done me in conferring this degree, I would like to recognise, just as David Gunby has so wittily and embarrassingly done, the great sea change that has occurred in the last generation in the attitudes of this country towards the arts – and specifically toward the performing arts.

University in ’50s taught ‘drama’ not ‘theatre’ "The University I went to here in the ’50s was still the stone gothic heir to a tradition begun by the Jesuits in the 17th century. St Ignatius Loyola and his followers saw how useful drama could be in the training of missionary priests. The performance of plays not only brought them into contact with elevated thoughts and language, it exercised the organs of oratory and gesture, most useful in preaching and conversion. This activity was carefully called ‘drama’, not ‘theatre’, in order to preserve the dignity of the University and to separate it from the taint of the shady and meretricious world of the acting profession. After all, the professional stage sacrificed intellect to entertainment and art to avarice.

"A life in the theatre was discouraged on two grounds – one financial and one moral.

"This attitude is summed up, in its extreme form, by the response given by the father of the comedian Kenneth Williams, when young Kenneth told him he wanted to go on the stage.

"You’ll never earn any money. Get yourself a good trade like plumbing or paperhanging. And, anyway, all the women are tarts and all the men are nancy boys.”

"Well, Mr Williams senior was absolutely right on his first point and only partially correct on his second.

"But as anyone committed to any art will tell you, it is rather like being infected by malaria or a recurring disease and, as with any illness or addiction, all monetary and moral warnings go for nothing.

"The theatre bug got me" "Although I had been predisposed to this sickness from infancy – as witnessed by my constant showing off – it was really at Canterbury University that I was first bitten by the theatrical anopheles mosquito. Professor John Garrett and Ngaio Marsh had a lot to do with this. The theatre bug got me.

"Very few people earned a full-time living from performing in New Zealand then and those mostly in radio. There were no schools in this country in which to learn the crafts of the stage. Anyone who wanted to pursue the theatre as a profession had to go abroad to study. And so I went, like so many others, to London.

The ’60s a golden era of the performing arts "I arrived in England at the beginning of what is now seen as one of the golden eras of the performing arts, the ’60s.

"A whole new school of dramatists, like Pinter and Stoppard, emerged. The debate over theatrical theory from Lee Strasburg to Bertholt Brecht was furious. New teaching methods were adopted. The older generation of actors like Olivier and Richardson combined with the younger firebrands like Vanessa Redgrave and Albert Finney to form an unparalleled pool of great performers. The classics were re-invented. Opera became avant-garde. The theatre renewed its social and political responsibilities. Music and athleticism threatened the verbal dominance of the stage.

"It was to the theatre – as now it is to film – that young people instinctively went to say what they needed to say. It was the most exciting decade in modern theatre history. The theatre has not held such intellectual and aesthetic primacy since. And I think all this may have spoilt me forever and skewed my judgement.

New Zealanders’ attitude to the arts changing – arts becoming respectable "Meanwhile, in New Zealand, similar sea changes were taking place and it was these changes I could see well-established when I returned to live here in 1975.

"Post-war prosperity and pre-Common Market trade had brought many New Zealanders to that fateful moment which comes in all affluent bourgeois cultures, when they had to decide whether to buy another car or (take) a subscription to the National Orchestra, the quandary as to whether to spend money without or within. Fortunately, enough chose the inner course for theatres to be established and for the arts to flourish.

"In our fundamentally Puritan society, the arts were ceasing to be a guilty pleasure. In short, the arts were becoming respectable. And that is not entirely a good thing.

New Zealand seeking its own unique artistic identity "But there was probably an even more significant transformation taking place deep down and this was signalled by the founding of The Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council – New Zealand nationalism. The country was beginning to seek, most vehemently, its own and unique artistic identity.

"Now, art has always been a political and nationalistic weapon. Since the Greeks, states have been well aware of the importance to internal morale and external prestige that works of art give a nation. The Athenians knew that their great sculptors and dramatists added to their glamour. But, in pursuit of the national image, things can go awry when art is harnessed and specially created to bolster an ideology – as it was in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.

"Increasingly, since the ’60s, New Zealand has become aware of the political power of the arts. And while it is very commendable, as in the Prime Minister’s recent championing – that they are now seen as one of the most potent and appealing aspects of our culture – there are things that worry me. Too many works are praised for their cult content, their good intentions, their power to express the latest ethnic and educational nostrums and their usefulness to the tourist industry. Whilst we have accepted the principal of the arts as a national banner, I think we may also have accepted them as a means of propaganda – and with this the consequences of poor standards and future ridicule.

Growth of institutions offering training for professional theatre "Perhaps the most obvious sign of the huge changes in our attitudes is in the number of institutions that now offer enlightenment and training in the performing arts.

"When I was young, drama was what a few odd pupils and an eccentric teacher did on Friday afternoons at the end of classes. Now there is scarcely a secondary school in the country that does not have its performing arts department. In this, the Jesuit tradition lives on. Universities all offer degree courses in theatre. And whereas I was forced to go to Europe to study acting and directing, because there was nowhere to learn these skills at home, there are now, rather alarmingly, more than a score of institutions offering training for entry into the profession.

"This is not just evidence of a great enlightenment and a mature appreciation of the arts, which is to be celebrated, but of something a little more strange and perhaps a little more sinister.

"Not St Ignatius Loyola but St Andy Warhol must be invoked here. In the search for immortality, fewer and fewer seek it in the saving of the soul within but in the acquisition of celebrity without. It is our contemporary religion. As the Warholian 15 minutes of fame seems most easily achieved through public performance, all the world’s a sound stage and all the men and women in show business. If we cannot establish ourselves in the eyes of God, then at least we most certainly can in the eyes of our society.

"All over the developed world there has been an alarming proliferation of performing art. Not just in theatre, but in politics, journalism, universities and the law. We are, as the phrase goes, entertaining ourselves to death. And with it has returned the ancient distrust of the actor. The age-old suspicion of the distance between surface and substance. Clinton, Blair and, in the B movies, George W. Bush.

"However, despite the electronic deluge and the dominance of film and television, the living theatre can still offer unique pleasures – it continues to possess haunting powers in the realms of words, ideas, poetic images and sheer camaraderie. It is through these qualities that the theatre is assured of renewal and survival."