University of Sydney's Footbridge Theatre has a long and rowdy history

After nearly 20 years as a lecture theatre, the University of Sydney’s Footbridge Theatre is reopening as a live performance venue in the university’s arts precinct.

The Footbridge is home to a long history of student theatre on campus. When it opened in 1961 as the 655-seat Union Theatre (replacing the old Union Hall) it was the first theatre to have been built in Sydney in more than 20 years.

Hopes were high for the new venture to be shared by student theatre groups and Sydney’s first professional repertory company, the Union Repertory Theatre Company (not to be confused with the Melbourne Theatre Company’s original name, the Union Theatre Repertory Company).

For decades, the Footbridge Theatre was host to both industry heavyweights and budding talent from across the arts sectors, before being converted to a lecture hall in 2006. Now, it’s back.

The theatre opened with productions from the Sydney University Musical Society, including Claudio Monteverdi’s ballet Il Ballo Delle Ingrate and Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas.

Also on show was the Sydney University Theatre Council’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, starring John Bell in the title role. Ken Horler, with whom Bell founded the famous Nimrod Theatre a decade later, co-directed the play with May Hollinworth, who ran the university’s Dramatic Society in the 1920s and ’30s. The production also featured John Gaden, Bob Ellis, Bruce Beresford, Richard Brennan and Mungo MacCallum.

The following year, Horler directed Coriolanus, with Bell in the title role and Gaden and Arthur Dignam in the cast.

Horler would go on to direct the first Australian production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage in 1963. The cast included Germaine Greer as Mother Courage, Peter Carroll and Ron Blair.

Bell also acted in and directed a number of shows in the following years. He returned again in the early 1990s to stage a series of productions with his fledgling Bell Shakespeare company.

The university students of the 1960s had been delighted to have their “own” venue after years of makeshift spaces. They produced some adventurous – as well as some scandalous – works.

When the Dramatic Society staged its Revue of the Absurd in 1963, it included a controversial film by the then-nascent filmmakers Bruce Beresford and Albie Thoms. It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain depicted a cocktail party coming to a sticky end as shit rained down from the sky.

The film was promptly banned. This ban was reinstated the following year when Beresford and Thoms sought to show it at a gala commemorating the Dramatic Society’s 75th birthday.

Student revues were a popular feature of the theatre in its early years. One of these was the 1964 revue called Jump, which starred Colin Anderson, Germaine Greer, John Gaden and Paul Thom.

The Union Repertory Theatre Company was short-lived, collapsing within 12 months of its launch in 1961.

Also, ironically, the Footbridge was too expensive for students to hire often. Nonetheless, it was still a launching pad for those involved in student theatre, including Henry Szeps (who later acted in the 1984–94 series Mother and Son), Jack Thompson, who played Claudius in a production of Hamlet (1969), and Neil Armfield in Much Ado About Nothing (1974).

Fellow student actor and director David Marr would later acknowledge Armfield’s genius as a director, while diplomatically adding “acting was not his strength”.

The Union Theatre was a venue for hire throughout the 1970s, with student theatre, concerts, music theatre, French language theatre and other genres sporadically staged. In 1981, it was renamed the Footbridge Theatre (after a footbridge that was constructed over Parramatta Road in 1972).

For two decades from the mid-1980s, the Gordon Frost Organisation leased the theatre to present a number of popular commercial productions.

It also rented the theatre to other companies, including Bell Shakespeare, the Sydney Theatre Company, Ensemble Theatre and Sydney Festival, which programmed outstanding international works such as the Irish Druid Theatre’s 1998 production of The Leenane Trilogy.

The 1990s also saw students back onstage in annual faculty revues.

A squeeze on space at the university led to Footbridge’s conversion to a lecture theatre in 2006. Following extensive renovations, the now 300-seat theatre is opening once again, with Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

The university’s Dramatic Society first produced Into the Woods in the early 2000s (starring Virginia Gay). The Sydney University Musical Theatre Ensemble (MUSE) staged it again in 2011.

This time around the production is showcasing the talents of the inaugural cohort of music theatre students from the university’s Conservatorium of Music.

Just as it was for the “Johns” (Bell and Gaden) who, in the early 1960s, took their first steps as student actors into their future careers – and are still going strong six decades later – campus theatres remain vitally important for students finding their feet as the artists of the future.

Now, in a new decade and with a new generation of students, it’s time to go into the woods again.

Laura Ginters is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. She has a research interest in historical rehearsal processes in Germany in the 18th-19th centuries, and her translations of German and Austrian plays have been performed, published and adapted (including for Belvoir St Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company). Her recent work on 19th and 20th century Australian theatre history includes student drama (The Ripples Before the New Wave: Drama at the University of Sydney 1957-63. Sydney: Currency Press, 2018, co-authored with Robyn Dalton) and early productions of Bertolt Brecht’s plays in Australia. This story was first published in The Conversation. 

Hero image: The Footbridge Theatre in the 1960s, when it was known as the Union Theatre. University of Sydney Archives.