Visual arts leader John Clark, who led the National Institute of the Performing Arts (NIDA) for 35 years and made it the powerful institution it is today, has died at the age of 93.
Born in Hobart on October 30, 1932, Clark studied at the University of Tasmania, where, the obituary on the NIDA website is tellingHe got involved with Old Nick’s Theatre, and eventually went to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in England.
There, he designed the sets for the original production of Harold Pinter’s first play, The room. He also met his future wife, Henrietta Hartley, who would go on to become a TV producer, working at ABC Television’s. Play School.
Clark returned to Hobart with Henrietta in 1959 and directed the Hobart Repertory Theater Society production of Arthur Miller’s. Death of a Salesman – a job that would change their lives forever.
The play was such a hit that the ABC, the Melbourne Theater Company and interest from NIDA – which was founded in 1958 and began enrolling students the following year – all tried to sign him up. Clark accepted an offer from Robert Quentin, one of the founders of the new institution, and his path was set.
Clark would later recall that the institution initially met with some skepticism:“There was a lot of opposition, the feeling that, why train an industry that doesn’t exist?”
He spent the next decade teaching and directing NIDA’s new professional theater company Old Tote Theater Company, the forerunner of the Sydney Theater Company. The building in which it was housed was part of Kensington Racecourse and home to a totaliza betting machine (which displayed the odds and other details of the races on the course). Among the plays in which Clark was cast was the first Australian production of Edward Albee Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In 1969, Clark became director of NIDA, soon appointing Elizabeth Butcher as bursar, a position that evolved into general manager. The two worked together for 35 years. In a piece published on the NIDA website this weekButcher said that when he took the job, he knew nothing about theater and hadn’t even been to the Old Tote Theater.
“John taught me everything I knew. From the very beginning, he guided me and showed me what to do. That was John. He taught by doing and believed in people growing in their roles,” he wrote.
“Very early on, after he had been there only a month, he went to England and sent me a letter asking me to help him find a play. Among the writings – I had never read a play before – there were foul words and foul language. Don’s partylong before anyone knows what will happen. That was John, always thinking ahead and shaping what Australian theater could be.
When the Old Tote closed in November 1978then NSW premier Neville Wran approached Butcher – who at the time had been supported by NIDA to run Old Tote – to set up a new government theater company to put on work at Sydney’s Opera House. The Sydney Theater Company was born, with Clark joining Butcher as artistic advisor, producing the first season in 1979.
“His vision extended beyond NIDA and helped shape the cultural life of this city,” Butcher noted.
At the same time, the two also had their eyes on upgrading NIDA’s facilities, which at the time were, according to records on the institute’s website, “a collection of former army barracks and racecourse buildings under constant threat of demolition”.
However, Clark and Butcher managed to convince former opposition leader Malcolm Fraser to enter the 1980 election by offering to give NIDA a new home. It took a few years, but in 1987, NIDA moved into the campus it still occupies today.
The courses available were also expanding over the decades. NIDA’s first batch of 23 students graduated in 1960 with a diploma in acting. A year later, two-year production courses were added, followed by a three-year design course and a one-year graduate course in directing in 1972, then another ten thousand performing arts courses over the decades. The academy expanded with it, with a new opening in 2002 that housed a teaching theater and TV studio. The jewel in the crown of the new complex – the 730-seat Parade Theater – was opened by NIDA graduate Mel Gibson in 2002.
In 2004, Clark directed his final NIDA show, a adaptation of John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wraththen he retired. He returned to Hobart in 2009, coming full circle by directing the production of Hamlet to Old Nick.
Clark was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981 for service to theatre, and received the Helpmann Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. In 2022, he released a memoir, Eye for Talent: Life at NIDA. Fittingly, it was created around a quote from William Shakespeare Twelfth nightwhich Clark last directed at NIDA in 2003.
Clark is widely regarded as having influenced and created a thriving theater culture that now exports our work internationally.
“John’s legacy is everywhere,” Butcher wrote in a speech on the NIDA website. “It lives on in the thousands of graduates in acting, designing, producing and directing who trained under his guidance.
“It lives on in the international careers of people like Cate Blanchett, Baz Luhrmann and many others. Above all, it lives on in the principle he held without compromise, that students come first, and that excellence in training builds excellence in art itself.”
Clark is survived by his wife, Henrietta, his three children, Kate, David and Jo; his five grandchildren, Jack, Hetty, Owen, Amanda and Alex; and his grandson, Pip.
NIDA will host a commemoration of Clark’s life on May 29.
Chris Hook is the Sydney Culture News Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
