The playwright of Queensland Labour history

errolBy John Jiggens

 

Errol O’Neill died on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, his timing as always a marvel.

Like Shakespeare, Errol had a great love of history and like Shakespeare he translated his history to the stage. He wrote 12 plays, and the core of his work is a quintet of plays dealing with the history of the labour movement in Queensland: On the Whipping Side, Red Soil White Sugar, Faces in the Street, Popular Front and The Hope of the World.

While Shakespeare wrote in an age of kings, and had kings as his heroes, Errol O’Neill wrote about a time, now vanished, that was called ‘the era of the common man’ and his heroes were the men and women who built the labour movement in Queensland.

Shakespeare employed a class-based rhetoric: his nobles spoke in beautiful blank verse, while the lower classes spoke in prose. Blank verse is a relative rarity in Queensland, but Errol O’Neill’s dialogue was similar to Shakespeare in his lower register, when he was writing for the proles: often crude, disrespectful, very funny, and exhibiting a deep love of the language of the low.

I knew Errol O’Neill from my Queensland University days, when he was one of an extraordinary group of actors and directors, including Geoffrey Rush, Bille Brown and William Yang, who were associated with the Architecture Revue and DramSoc. While Geoffrey Rush and company left to conquer the world, Errol stayed behind, striving to create a local theatre in Brisbane.

I worked most closely with Errol in the 1990s, when he was the Chair of the Brisbane Theatre Company (BTC) when he championed a vision of a local theatre that was concerned about Brisbane, which produced and workshopped plays by Brisbane writers, with scripts and subjects that were important for Brisbane.

We edited the BTC’s publication Brisbane Theatre Magazine together. I handled production and design, while Errol was the commissioning editor.  As commissioning editor, he organised great pieces from the likes of Lorna Bols, Sue Rider, Sean Mee, and the other directors and writers of the Brisbane theatre community, many of whom were also members of the BTC and who also championed the project for a theatre that spoke to us about our city and our lives. Although Errol initiated the Brisbane Theatre Company, it was a shared aspiration, the culmination of a collective vision for theatre in Brisbane. Errol O’Neill was its intellectual leader, but he was an ensemble player, who blended and harmonised, listened respectfully, and never dominated. Like one of his heroes, Fred Patterson, Errol O’Neill was always the first amongst equals.

Although the Brisbane Theatre Company failed, this was when Mary and Errol started their family. In later years our sons would play together while Errol and I talked about politics and history and writing and the projects we were working on, while he prepared another marvellous meal. He and Mary were fantastic hosts, both for the Brisbane diaspora and for locals.

As an actor, I make a passable extra. The only play I performed in with Errol was in the grounds of Ithica Creek State School, which our sons attended. It was a play for the children, performed by their parents, about the Gold rush, a humorous romp, which Errol had written. Errol played starring roles in all the major theatres in Brisbane and he performed at humbler, spontaneous spaces in street-theatre, at protests, in factories, and in school yards with the same sense of bon-hommie.

In forty-five years I never had one quarrel or argument with him. My face would always light up with a smile whenever I saw him, as it did on the last day we met, the week before he died. He cocked his head slightly in reply, and smiled that wry, Errol smile. He’d been researching the conscription debate during the First World War because he’d been commissioned to write a play about it. He was happy, that happy feeling writers get when their minds are engaged and their creative juices are flowing. For a writer with his love of radical history, the subject was ideal. In its day, the conscription referenda debate split the nation. And there were two of them, because Prime Minster Hughes did not accept the decision of the first. What a plot twist that would be! Errol would have Queensland Premier T.J. Ryan as one of his heroes, and Archbishop Mannix as the other, with Billy Hughes as villain!

I received the news of his passing by email. I cried and swore obscenity after obscenity. It was the worst sentence I have ever read: Errol O’Neill is dead.

 

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