It has been 17 years, 1995 to 2012, since I last taught Shakespeare or any other drama content in my classes in an educational system. The drama I did teach from 1989 to 1994 was part of English literature at the matriculation level in Western Australia. In these last 17 years, as I completed my teaching career and went through the first dozen years of my retirement from the world of jobs, I have accumulated additional notes on more than 2 dozen dramatists and a host of films.
I can see a potential for my personal study of drama in the years ahead, as I head into the last years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80+), if I last that long. This potential is especially due to my exposure to drama on TV in these years of my retirement, 1999 to 2012, as I say, from the world of jobs: 1959 to 1999 and, if I include my student years: 1949-1999.
The cinema is now too costly with my finances circumscribed by a pension which does not allow extravagances like movies, restaurants and trips to tourist destinations. But I have a fertile base for the study of drama which began to be built in the plays I studied in primary school as far back, if I recall correctly, as 1954, and at high school from 1957/8 until 1962/63, the year I graduated from secondary school. This base was also built on the drama I taught in my years as a primary and secondary teacher: 1967 to 1973. Drama was part of the school curriculum during those years and my job was to teach it.
During the more than 60 years I have been exposed to dramatic productions in one form or another, 1950 to 2012, I have rarely attended live theatre. I can number on the fingers of one hand the major plays I recall seeing during those years: Waiting for Godot in 1974 at the Tasmanian college of advanced education, and two or three plays put on by Baha’i theatre groups in Perth Western Australia in the 1990s.
There were, of course, the inevitable short dramatic sketches put on at innumerable Baha’i conferences and summer schools, in my own classroom and at schools where I taught or attended. Such were some of the elements of the more than half a century of influences from the world of drama on my literary proclivities.
The first Shakespeare I recall studying was in grade 11 at the age of 16 in 1961—more than 50 years ago. From grade 11 to grade 13 one of Shakespeare’s plays was studied each year. After 1962/3 I never studied a Shakespearean play again until 1989 to 1994 when I was teaching senior high school students.
Television and radio, especially TV of course, has provided much of that fertile ground for dramatic productions of Shakespeare among other dramatists. I have seen or heard a variety of dramatic productions in the electronic media as early as 1950 right up to 2012, with some 20 years off for the period when I had no TV and listened to little to no theatre, as far as I can recall, on the radio in the years: 1956-1976.
I have yet to build on this exposure to 40+ years of dramatic productions from TV and radio experiences, and my work as a teacher, although I have written several prose-poems about my experience of particular dramas. I have always found TV productions of the Bard difficult to follow.
Drama has never had a significant impact on my emotional and intellectual life, I must confess, and a confession it is. There has been an expectation, at least in some of the circles in which I have moved for at least half a century, including my consanguineal family, although not my two affinal families, that I should get something out of drama. I am inclined to think they are at least partly right.
I have, of course, done some studying of major dramatists, but much remains to be done as I have indicated above. Since my retirement from FT, PT and volunteer-work in the years 1999 to 2005, I have come to study drama as a result of the daily TV programs that have become part of my life. I now watch an average of two hours a day of TV and have done so since 1999.
Before that, before 1999, I had too many demands on my time, demands from: employment, the Baha’i Faith and family activities, as well as various social responsibilities. Of course, this was not the case back in the 1950s when my parents had a TV. They got rid of it because they felt that 2 hours of TV-watching a day had a negative effect on my studies.
In the last dozen or so years, then, I have begun to make up for the lack of exposure to drama; the lack of my study of this important part of contemporary culture has begun to turn a corner in both exposure and study of this art form. I hope in the years that lie ahead that I can continue to remedy my lifelong, my somewhat unfortunate, deficiency in this area of the arts and culture. I must admit, as I pointed out above, to a curious disinclination to be part of live dramatic productions as audience or as student. Perhaps this has been due to my many other intellectual interests and the simple demands of life. I feel an enthusiasm for only some things, ideas, fields and subjects.
My interests in drama have expanded, as I say, in the last dozen years due to the stimulus of TV and I look forward to a future enriched by dramatic productions and the works of dramatists.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 2 July 2012.
The above statement makes no mention
of cinema, the pictures as it is called very
colloquially. I started to get heavy doses
of movies at the Roxy theatre where I set-
up the marquee and got free tickets back
in the fifties, and for the next fifty years I
occasionally went to the movies…..As the
years went on I said to myself “I can watch
that on TV, if I just wait long enough;” and:
a lot of good drama had moved to television
anyway as my pocketbook had also moved
to thinner-pastures with little cash to play
with, as I headed into & through the years
of my retirement…….And so it is that I am:
making-up for that dearth; I now have a
file nearly 25 years in the making with a
lot of notes on drama and the TV gives
me tons and tons of stuff for analysis!!1
1 I wrote this piece, in the process revising an old-piece, after watching a study, a documentary on one of the seven categories of drama, melodrama, and its sub-category chick-flicks. The doco was entitled: From Weepies to Chick-Flicks, ABC1TV, 3:55 to 4:45 p.m., 1 July 2012.
Ron Price
15 July 2010 to 2 July 2012
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