Amanda Smith: Today, sport in the Australian theatre. This Sunday it's the 21st anniversary of the very first performance of David Williamson's play 'The Club', the best-known and most celebrated theatrical representation of our sporting culture.

Ted: ... would have paid for nothing.

Danny: Well they were stupid. If I'm out there risking a fractured skull or a ruptured spleen for the amusement of a pack of overweight drunks in a grandstand bar, then I want to get paid for it.

Jock: Overweight drunks!

Ted: That's what you think of your supporters, eh? The lifeblood of the club. Overweight drunks? Well let me tell you something ...

Hi, I'm Amanda Smith, thanks for your company on The Sports Factor, as we have a look at sport, and in particular Australian football, as theatrical drama. As well as talking to David Williamson about 'The Club', I'll be speaking with one of a new breed of creative artists who's also using football as a performance subject. And we'll look at what's changed around football since 'The Club' was written, specifically the emergence of women into positions of power, on the AFL Tribunal and club boards, that would have been inconceivable 21 years ago.

Well, since 'The Club' was first staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company back in 1977, it's had seasons all over Australia, as well as in London, New York, Washington and Berlin. You could say it's spread further afield and more successfully than the game itself has.

And to mark the coming of age of 'The Club', there's a new production of the play on in Melbourne at the moment, again produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company.

But for David Williamson, what was the question or issue that inspired the writing of 'The Club' those 21 years ago?

David Williamson: A great curiosity about the phenomena of tribal loyalty, Amanda, was the first thing that struck me. Why do people who have no physical connection with a football club go and feel it's a matter of life and death as to whether their club wins or doesn't win? What's the nature of that, what seems to be an innate tribalism within us, and why is it so powerful? What is happening to sport in the crossover era between loyalty to the tribe or loyalty to the club, and loyalty to the almighty dollar? I tried to catch football at that crossover point.

Amanda Smith: Yes well it was an interesting time from that point of view, with that crossover. I also think I've read somewhere that in that mid-1970s post-Whitlam Government dismissal period, you were looking around for where the drama was in Australian society, and ended up finding it on the football pages. Is that right?

David Williamson: Absolutely true. I thought, what deep and meaningful thing can I write about now that we've surged into this new conservative era? Where is the drama? And day after day I'd keep seeing these headlines: 'Coach Sacked', 'Player Walks Out', and it never filtered through (that's just how slow the minds of playwrights often are), it never filtered through to me that this was where the drama was. And this is where you could create an allegory about power that could spread out beyond the boardroom of a football club to just about any other organisation; but because the power struggles are so vivid, so blackly funny within a football context, it might be a good dramatic way to generate that allegory.

Amanda Smith: How radical was it in 1977 to write this play about football?

David Williamson: Well it was considered with some scepticism by my old friends around Carlton, where I was working in the theatre in those days. They felt that football was very much a part of their lives, but certainly not a part of art, and not a part of what when on the stage, and how dare I exploit the noble football experience and lampoon it on stage.

Amanda Smith: But the interesting thing is that you're not just lampooning it. What strikes me as interesting about 'The Club' is that it neither wholly celebrates nor wholly denigrates football or indeed sport in Australian culture. Why the ambivalence?

David Williamson: I think good writing comes from an ambivalent stance. I think if you don't have ambivalence towards your subject then you tend to write totally black and white, and you tend to write predictably. The audience know which way your sympathies are lying and know how the play's going to unfold. If you come into an area where you are ambivalent, then you can like all your characters to some extent; there is no doubt that there are some characters who are more villainous than others and some who are more decent than others. But at one level sport is ridiculous. I mean why do we race round, as Geoff Hayward says, kicking a leather ball, to chase it again, and kick it again when we get it? But there is something deep in human nature that does find meaning in tribal activities, and I don't know why, I don't know where it comes from, but somehow part of our identity is wrapped up with the tribe or the tribes, or the groups we belong to. And sport is a very powerful generator of identity in that sense. Who do you barrack for? seems to be the first question anyone asks in Melbourne.

Jock: ... look, level with me, Geoff. That's more than being out of form. What's going on?

Geoff: All right, if you really want to know, what's going on is that I'm sick to death of football and I couldn't care less if I never played another game in my life. It's all a lot of macho, competitive bullshit. You chase a lump of pigskin round a muddy ground as if your bloody life depended on it, and when you get it, you kick it to buggery and go chasing it again.

Jock: I wish you'd let us know your attitude to the game before we paid $90,000 for you.

Geoff: If you think you can buy me like a lump of meat ...

Amanda Smith: David, if you were writing 'The Club' now, in the '90s, how would it be different?

David Williamson: Well commercialism and corporate takeover of sport has become all the clearer. I suppose you'd have to have some of the characters being media moguls now and trying to buy world television rights, and stuff that's actually happening out there, if you were doing it today. But I'm rather glad I did it back in the '70s because it allowed me to concentrate on that very vital time in football when club loyalty was dying and the corporate dollar was growing. I think I've captured the crossover point in the mid-'70s that I wouldn't be able to capture now, and it may have more resonance because of that.

Amanda Smith: But in terms of some of the broader themes of the play, the things that move out of the specific sports theme, if you were still wanting to write a play that was concerned with those themes, would you use sport as the setting?

David Williamson: I don't know. I mean it's a very good question. Obviously the days are long gone; in 1971 I think it was, when Ron Barassi switched from his club Melbourne to play and coach Carlton, there was almost a national furore. How could this man switch loyalties from one club to another? That sort of feeling is not available any more in sport because it's now totally assumed that young sportsmen play as professionals for as much money as they can get. And in a sense, as Danny says, you have to give some credence to that viewpoint. He says, 'If I'm risking my neck every week for the benefit of a pack of overweight drunks in the bar, then I want to be paid for it'. I can see both points of view, but I might be choosing a different arena now to have a look at human loyalty versus materialistic gain.

Amanda Smith: Another one of the themes that's been cited as being part of this play is that it shows how uneasy and how unsatisfactory relations between the sexes are in Australian society. Is a football club still the most appropriate place for a theatrical examination of that?

David Williamson: Yes. I think the feeling of the play when I was writing it was that it was a satire about male behaviour, at the surface level at any rate. It was, how could this group of males make the game of football the central beacon and only beacon of their lives, to the exclusion of often decent relationships not only with their wives or families, but with females in general. I mean it's a totally enclosed male world of male power games and male achievement, a satire on that sort of obsession.

Amanda Smith: And even the title of the play, it being simply called 'The Club' and that nobody in the play ever says an actual team name, that certainly seems to imply a metaphoric use of football so that I guess it stands for any club or institution where 'secret men's business' goes on?

David Williamson: Well sport is warfare with stricter rules than normal, as it's said. And I think it's the old male tradition of one tribe getting together and beating the hell out of another tribe. And that 'secret male business' is how do we trick the other tribe? What strategy do we get up to and how do we thrash them? And if we don't thrash them, let's get the knives out amongst ourselves because we haven't thrashed them. It's that sort of world.

Amanda Smith: David Williamson, and his play 'The Club', 21 years old and still going strong.

As David Williamson said, in the 1970s it was considered pretty radical to use sport, football, as the theme for drama. But according to Richard Fotheringham, the author of a book called 'Sport in Australian Drama', this wasn't always the case. In colonial Australia, live theatre and sport were often quite comfortably intertwined. Sporting dramas were common in the theatre, and often the winner of a major sports event would be presented in the theatre that night. For example, in 1893, the horse that won the Melbourne Cup was ridden on stage by a singer, in between the two acts of a show called 'At the Races'. So when and why did sport and theatre go their separate ways?

Richard Fotheringham: Well I think there was always an intellectual minority who weren't very happy with the emphasis on sport. But it really hit after the Great Depression, which pretty much wiped out most art forms in this country. And we had a terrible 20 years between the '30s and the '50s where very little happened, comparatively; I mean occasional things did, but not a lot. And then in the '50s you started to get agitation to rebuild our national theatre, our opera, our ballet, all the performing art forms. And to do that I think they wanted to separate themselves out from sports and say, just having a sporting nation isn't enough; we need the arts and other activities as well. And therefore sport was pushed very much to one side.

That lasted for about 20 years I suppose, and then in the period that David Williamson's 'The Club' relates to, the 1970s, it suddenly came back in as the larrikin drama. It celebrated a lot of Anglo-Australian male values, to try and reassert them against what was seen as very much the imported models of a lot of the arts that were around at that time.

Amanda Smith: Well how has the sporting narrative functioned in Australian playwrighting over time?

Richard Fotheringham: I think if we're talking about the modern period, really the '70s was the decade in which they tried to push the positive side of sport, with plays like 'The Club'. And then the '80s was the decade where it all fell apart, where people started saying, 'Well hang on, these plays don't have any women characters, they don't have any non-Anglo Australian characters; they're really talking about a very specialised sub-section of Australian society, and it just doesn't ring true for us any more'. So it will be interesting to see when those plays like 'The Club' are revived, pretty much as period pieces now, whether they'll just look quaint, or whether there'll be some other valid and contemporary way to stage them.

Amanda Smith: Do you think that 'The Club', which is Australia's best-known and most celebrated sports play, does still have something to say?

Richard Fotheringham: It does, but I find it does creak a bit. It is an all-male play, and it's kind of one of those environments where every single member of the cast, every role, is a man who is very damaged by his relationships with women, and behaves in some respects very badly towards women, and yet talks incessantly about them. It's kind of a male locker-room conversation. It's showing you sport being used to keep women on the outside.

Amanda Smith: So are you saying that in general sport as a theme or as a metaphor has little currency any more in the theatre?

Richard Fotheringham: Well I think writers, or all kinds of creative artists, have got to re-think the ways in which they can use sport. I was very interested in a feature film that came out in 1992, not a particularly successful one, but it was called 'Greenkeeping'. And it was a comedy about, as it says in the press release, 'sex, drugs and lawn bowls'. And the director said the inspiration for the film came from a radio broadcast of the Commonwealth Games in 1992, in the lawn bowls final, which was between a 17-year-old Chinese boy from Hong Kong and an older Italian-Australian. And so you can see once you start changing the paradigm, you put new kinds of characters, sport can in fact shift, it gets different connotations. I mean instead of lawn bowls being about old people and old Anglo-Australian men and women, you actually get a fresh and interesting look at a social phenomenon by the injection of a different perspective.

And sport is one of those things that can be a microcosm of society, and if it is a microcosm of society and we see it that way, then the stories that are told about sporting contests and activities can be very potent and very meaningful. I think the problem with the 1970s one is that we just don't see the world they portray as being a microcosm of our society any more. Get that quality back, and yes, it's a very potent symbol.

Amanda Smith: Well as Richard Fotheringham suggests, things have changed in life and sport since David Williamson wrote 'The Club' in 1977. And one of the things that's started to shift just a bit in the real-life drama of football, and that would have been unthinkable 21 years ago, is the emergence of women into positions of power.

Beverly Knight was the first woman to become a director of an Australian Football League club board. Beverly's family have had a long history of association with the Essendon Football Club. Her grandfather was on the board of directors, and five years ago Beverly herself was elected to the board. She's also now a director of the AFL's group training company. And Beverly thinks that women have something to add to the mix of a board that makes a difference to the way a football club's run.

Beverly Knight: I think we're very mindful of the human resource element, and at football clubs, because it's just been a one-gender sort of race if you like, a lot of that has been overlooked. You know, men are meant to be tough and strong and all that sort of thing, and I think we just look differently at players' welfare, and administration staff's welfare. You know we just look very differently. And what's happened is with me being there and perhaps just looking at things differently, even people who didn't care about that before have, well, at Essendon anyway, they've made sure that all the doors are open for male and female, and it's been a huge change there. We have at least half the senior managers are females, and they were appointed because they were the best person applying for the position at the time. So I think there's been a real change in that sort of attitude.

Amanda Smith: Do you actually enjoy operating in that world, being the one woman among a bunch of chaps on the Essendon board and with the AFL group training company?

Beverly Knight: I don't actually. People don't realise it's very difficult. I can remember the AFL merger conference at Leonda, and four directors from each club were invited to attend; it was a very important seminar. I was one of the four directors at Essendon with our president, general manager and one other director. And I remember it started at 4 o'clock, pouring with rain. I got there into the car park. All the television cameras were at the entrance, filming everyone, I had to fight my way through. I got to the front door, and they wouldn't let me in. And then they said 'Who are you?', and I thought 'who am I?' And then I said 'I'm with the Essendon Football Club', and they had to go and check the list. And all the other men were just walking, in their suits, and it really took me back again, and I thought 'oh really'.

And then when I went into the room, you're confronted then with people's backs to you all the time. I think that's gradually changing, but it's quite difficult. They always think that you're someone's wife; and you didn't play the game. So yes, you do have to overcome that.

The first official function of the first season that I was a director, (the main season hadn't commenced, it was a pre-season game), and my official blazer wasn't ready so I just wore a suit, and I didn't worry too much about it. But I remember when I got into the room, and once again the backs went to you and you were put with the group of girls over in the corner. I thought, 'I'll always wear my blazer when I get it, I will always wear my badge and my blazer'. Because it's very important that you have to push yourself, but it's for the benefit of the club anyway. And those days are becoming less and less, so it's really good. They actually call the players' girlfriends by name now, and some of them are even calling their wives by their name, so they've come a long way, haven't they?

Amanda Smith: And you're going to hang in there?

Beverly Knight: Oh I really enjoy it. I mean it's a very exciting business to be in. We have a board meeting once a month, and really the business that we have to look at, it just grows and grows at a very rapid pace and it's very, very exciting. And I think if you can add something to the club, I think for me personally, being a lifelong Essendon supporter and being part of the family history, whilst you have to be very careful with your tradition, that it is the tradition - meaning that you save the good parts that you don't get totally besotted by the past - I think for a club like Essendon that we have an enormous capacity to have a really strong future as well.

Amanda Smith: Beverly Knight, on the board of directors of the Essendon Football Club.

Probably the most powerful woman in the Australian Football League at the moment though is Elaine Canty. A lawyer and broadcaster, Elaine sits on the AFL Tribunal, the board that passes judgement on players who've been reported for misdemeanours. But when Elaine Canty was appointed to the Tribunal in 1996, there was an outcry from traditional football circles that a woman couldn't do the job, having never played the game. The criticism came from footy legends like Ron Barassi.

Elaine Canty: At the time he made those comments he hadn't realised that not all the members of the Tribunal had actually played League football. In fact I think it was either three or four of the nine had played League football. So in fact they'd never asked the question before.

Amanda Smith: Right. Well, did he then not shift his argument around to say that it should be mandatory for anyone on the AFL Tribunal to have played League footy?

Elaine Canty: No, he didn't do that. And the other thing he did say which I'm not too sure how to take this, a bit ambivalent about this, was had he also realised at the time that I was married to Roy Masters, he wouldn't have made the same criticisms that he did. But I'm not too sure how to take that one.

Amanda Smith: No I guess that's establishing your credibility by marriage, I'm not sure about that one.

Elaine Canty: I think it's showing that I understand a football culture, perhaps is what he was coming at. I think if people understand the way the Tribunal operates, then there wouldn't be nearly the criticism that there has been, because there's a huge amount of ignorance really, surrounding the operation of the Tribunal. There is in fact a panel of nine, three people sit every time, obviously, as a tribunal, we're on a rostered basis so we sit every approximately three to four weeks.

The general make-up of the Tribunal is that two or the three will have played football at a senior level, not necessarily League football; two will be lawyers and one a lay person. So I make up a legal and a lay component, so my gender as you can see, is totally irrelevant.

Amanda Smith: At the time of your appointment there were some other pointed articles in the press. Gareth Andrews, a former player for Richmond and Geelong, at the time said 'the Tribunal was about what happened on the field. It's decisions could make or break a footballer and the whole thing could only be understood by those who had been out there on the field'. Now with your experience on the Tribunal, is there anything to that argument?

Elaine Canty: Well no. Well it's a tribunal, as I say. We have such varied expertise in that panel. Now if something comes up that I quite honestly feel that you need to have been on the ground and in amongst the groins and knees to understand exactly what has happened, and I am obviously, when we're discussing the evidence behind closed doors, I'm obviously going to bow to my colleagues on the tribunal if they have expertise in that area. Similarly if they feel I have expertise in a particular area, because I'm representing the community after all, I'm supposed to be there to represent how the community views something; I also take a legal approach to it. Then they'll respect my views on it. So it operates very well. The system operates extremely well.

Amanda Smith: Well what do you think might be the possible spin-offs, Elaine, from you being on the AFL Tribunal? Do you think for example we might see more appointments of women to positions of authority within the AFL or its clubs, on the Commission itself for example?

Elaine Canty: It is going to happen that when an appointment is made in an area where there hasn't been a woman before, it's going to attract a great deal of publicity. I'll quite freely admit I was quite taken aback at the extent of the publicity which it attracted. I knew that there would be some publicity, but I didn't really expect it would be interstate publicity and it would continue for as long as it did. And that there would be such attention, doing interviews from Darwin down to Hobart. I was surprised at that, but if I think about it very carefully, then really I shouldn't have been surprised, it's the first time in 70 years there's been a woman sitting on the Tribunal.

Amanda Smith: Is it about caution on the part of the AFL and its clubs, or a shortage of women of merit, or is it still a mindset around the League that's hard to shift?

Elaine Canty: It's tradition. It's history, it's a very old game, it's very hard to interfere with tradition. And you mentioned Gareth Andrews before, probably the most animosity has come from people of perhaps his age group: former players, who don't like to see appointments such as mine because it interferes with their memories of the game. You know, it's a nostalgic thing really. I find young people, really it makes no difference to them, they fail to see what all the fuss is about. I have three children at university, and in their age group, it matters neither one way or the other. The only thing that happened to me was one of my son's college friends said to him, 'Tell your mother if she suspends a Collingwood player, we know where she lives'. And that's about it, as far as they're concerned: a Tribunal member is a Tribunal member, they're hateful, horrible people no matter what their colour.

Amanda Smith: Elaine Canty, being loathed with the best of them on the AFL Tribunal.

And as a further sign of the changing times, Kevin Sheedy, the coach of the Essendon Football Club, along with Carolyn Brown, has just put out a book called 'Football's Women', which celebrates and acknowledges the role that women play in Aussie Rules football. It's published by Penguin.

And now, back to art and football. Because if David Williamson's play 'The Club' is in some respects a bit of a period piece now, as far as the particular football world it represents goes, there's a new theatrical work on in Melbourne tonight that melds football with performance art.

Jason Keats is an ex-country league footballer turned performance artist. He's created a piece called 'Ball' that he's performing tonight as part of the Next Wave Festival of young and emerging artists.

Now, to experience this event, you get on a bus with Jason, and you go to the Whitten Oval, the old home ground of the Western Bulldogs AFL Club. Once you're at the ground, it's a multi-media event that seeks to unpick (deconstruct I think is the term) the rituals and conventions of the sport. It's also an exploration into group behaviour. At one point the audience is invited to tackle a training bag in the centre of the oval, which they may or may not know that Jason Keats is actually hiding inside.

Jason Keats: Well word's got out; people may know that I'm in the bag. But again, they won't see me get inside the bag so it kind of creates a bit of a surprise in itself, because they don't really know. You know, they're tackling something heavy, and body-like, but they're not kind of sure.

Amanda Smith: Are you hoping to be injured in this experience, Jason?

Jason Keats: Well yes, I guess there's some sort of masochistic kind of thing there, but I don't want to be injured. But I'm sure that I will come out of it bruised. I've modified the bag so I can put a gridiron helmet on and pad myself up. But what I'm interested in is creating a kind of a situation for the audience to respond in an aggressive way.

Amanda Smith: Why?

Jason Keats: Well I'm kind of interested in that group mentality that is in place at football and sanctioned by the arena. Who starts it, who continues it and is it like a sheep mentality where it just manifests right through. Now I'm giving a few little markers to the audience to do that. I mean allowing them to do it. And I guess in a way it's like a kind of experiment to see whether they take it on and it does incite aggressive behaviour.

Amanda Smith: What are you trying to do in this performance beyond recreating what goes on at the footy? I mean you just have to go to a game to experience that.

Jason Keats: That's true. I guess I'm interested in probably bringing two types of performance together.

Amanda Smith: The performance of a football game and --

Jason Keats: -- Performance art. Something that's again normally sanctioned by a gallery, or art-goers. So it's a kind of marriage of the two. And there'll be a mixture of a crowd, you know, the crowd could be football-goers coming along because it's at Whitten Oval, and that invokes lots of memories for them.: 'I remember going there as a kid', blah, blah, blah. And then there'll be the art-goers that will be coming along, looking at it from more of an art kind of perspective I guess.

Amanda Smith: In this work, are you celebrating or are your criticising the culture around Australian football?

Jason Keats: I'm certainly looking at it as a phenomenon that you cannot escape from. But there are elements that I'm critiquing, elements that as a player that I was a part of, on and off the field. Probably one reason why I stopped playing was the aggressive nature of the footballer. Another one is the off-field antics and the club-room antics, things that footballers get up to in night clubs, and the aggressive nature of the environment that you're involved in. So yes, there is an element that I am critiquing, and rather than place it inside a gallery, I'm really interested in using the site, the venue, where that does take place.

Amanda Smith: So why the Whitten Oval, the home of the Western Bulldogs, apart from their being at the top of the League ladder at the moment?

Jason Keats: Yes, well. It's that idea of their ground becoming obsolete now, and only used for training. It's another area that I'm interested in, the whole corporatisation of football, and how the community is losing the connection to their local club. So I think it's great to take place at Whitten Oval for that reason. They still use it for training, they've been very supportive of me out there to use the ground, and I think it is the home of football in many ways, the old style of football where you used to get the kids together, the Mum and Dad, packed the lunch and go off to the footy. You know, there was a brass band playing there. So yes, I'm interested in the move away from that into these other new grounds that are getting built now.

Amanda Smith: Jason Keats, and his performance art piece called 'Ball', at the Whitten Oval in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray tonight.

And that's The Sports Factor for now. I'm Amanda Smith, hope you'll join me again next Friday at 8.30.

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