Julia Britton.
JULIA BRITTON
PLAYWRIGHT
27-06-14 — 05-11-2012
JULIA Britton, a noted and prolific playwright has died in Adelaide. She was 98.
Possessed of a dynamic imagination, sharp wit, talent and a vivacious personality, Britton was a challenging and versatile writer whose output was prolific.
Born Hilda Hartt in Romiley, Cheshire, she was educated at Withington Girls School and graduated from the University of Manchester. Six years later she emigrated to Cape Town to take up a job teaching Latin and Greek at a girls school. In Cape Town she met her husband, composer-musician Philip Britton, who she married in 1939. There also she became one of South Africa's first female journalists, working on the Cape Argus, and soon afterwards began to write plays, her passion for writing having found a brilliant musical collaborator in her husband. The couple moved to Natal where they wrote and produced intimate revues and two full-length musical plays, Golden Country and Jersey Lily. In 1967 they emigrated to Adelaide where Britton taught classics at Adelaide University.
After her husband's death, she returned to writing for the theatre. Decades of shelved ideas, scenes, characters and plots were released in a flood of vibrant new plays, establishing her as one of Australia's most prolific writers of the 1990s.
In 1982 Britton won the Awgie Monte Miller award for her play Exits and Entrances. She was appointed playwright-in-residence at the Stage Company, a position that led to the production of her most acclaimed play, Miles Franklin and the Rainbow's End. A popular and critical success, the production was invited to the San Antonio Festival in Texas for a short season, where it was met with equal acclaim. The play was later revived at Melbourne's Playbox Theatre and has since returned, at La Mama in 1992 and at Melbourne's Theatreworks by Fly-On-The-Wall Theatre in 2000, followed by Perth's The Blue Room as part of the inaugural WA Fringe Festival.
She was introduced to young director Robert Chuter by a friend, the director Malcolm Robertson, in 1988. Chuter soon became her long-time collaborator, confidant and close friend. Their unusual partnership created many site-specific shows, starting with the legendary Loving Friends, which played to sell-out audiences at the historic Elsternwick mansion Rippon Lea. The success of that play, dramatising the lives of the Bloomsbury set, spawned a sequel, An Indian Summer, a year later, which also proved enormously popular. The ability to visualise new plays and complete them in an extraordinarily short time, without the need for editing, was the badge of her seemingly boundless creativity and massive output.
In 1995, Britton and Chuter unleashed their notorious adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, again at Rippon Lea, which remains the production for which Britton is probably best known. Daring, frank and faithful to the novel, the 1999 Perth season, produced by Peter Holmes a Court, met with opposition from the Christian Democrats, whose unsuccessful attempt to get the production closed down only added to its appeal and popularity. The season also received an unwelcome but otherwise flattering visit from plain-clothed police who, expecting to close down the show from the inside, instead stayed to watch the production in its entirety. Controversy aside, the play again was hugely successful and received additional high-profile seasons in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.
The duo's outdoor seasons at Rippon Lea continued with popular adaptations of Seven Little Australians, Anne of Green Gables, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Women In Love and the maverick reproduction of Melbourne's 1920 ball for the visiting Prince of Wales - I Danced with a Girl who Danced with the Prince of Wales.
Britton and Chuter continued their controversial trail, with the 2001 premiere of The Singing Forest, a jaw-dropping three-hour epic about the journeys of three Holocaust protagonists struggling to survive the horrors of Auschwitz. By contrast, the theatrical site-specific romp Five-Minute Call - in which the audience was moved through the various bars and rooms of Melbourne's The Butterfly Club - used Britton's gift for quirky comedy.
In 2009 The Dream Children had its premiere at the La Mama Courthouse, and later that year production started on a feature film adaptation. The film, directed by Chuter, is due for release next year.
Her debut productions in England, with which she travelled at the age of 92, Oblomov's Dream at Jermyn Street Theatre and Fresh Pleasures at the Pleasance Theatre, were greeted with mixed reviews. Britton's personal life and the lead-up to the production of Fresh Pleasures were recorded in Rob George's Screen Australia documentary Fearless, which has been screened worldwide.
Undeterred by age, Britton's ideas and views were modern and progressive. In addition to her enormous output of plays, music theatre, poetry and screenplays, her nurturing and encouragement of emerging actors, directors, artists and musicians, supported a new generation. Her wit, wilfulness, vision, ideas, storytelling and great generosity will be missed.
Britton is survived by two daughters, Louise and Stephanie, her son Simon, three grandchildren, Eugene, Francesca, Alex, and a great-grandchild, India-Rose.
She also leaves behind her many beloved colleagues, friends and cohorts who will not forget her - she was unforgettable.
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