AustLit

'Conceived at Helen Garner’s Fitzroy share house during the 70s, this women’s show upended the establishment – and reminds us why arts funding matters'

'In January 1972, five women took to the stage of Carlton’s Pram Factory to preview their women’s play Betty Can Jump. Claire Dobbin, Helen Garner, Evelyn Krape, Jude Kuring and Yvonne Marini mocked the ocker character beloved by Pram Factory playwrights, and performed monologues about men, sex, and how they felt “as a woman”. Directed by Kerry Dwyer and produced by the Carlton Women’s Liberation group, the play’s frank revelations stunned audiences and shocked the Pram Factory world.

'Set against a backdrop of moratorium marches, inner-city cafes and share houses, and the rising tide of sexual liberation and countercultural movements, Kath Kenny uses interviews and archival material to tell the story of Betty Can Jump. On the 50th anniversary of this ground-breaking play, she considers its ongoing impact on Australian culture, and asks why the great cultural renaissance of women’s liberation has been largely forgotten. She sets out her stake in this story, as a theatre reviewer today and as a child born into the revolutionary early 1970s. And she asks why feminism keeps getting stuck in mother-daughter battles, rethinking her own experience as a young feminist who clashed with Garner over the publication of The First Stone.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'There’s a climactic scene in Helen Garner’s third and latest diary where she describes tipping a box of her then husband’s cigars into a pot of soup, picking up a pair of scissors, slashing a straw hat that belongs to his lover and stuffing the pieces in his “ugly black suede shoes.”' (Introduction)

'In Nancy, France, at the Centre for Theatre Training and Research, Kerry attended a workshop with Jerzy Grotowski, whose work at his Theatre Laboratory in Poland was exciting the European theatre world. Grotowski and his leading actors taught the international students their basic approach to actor training and dramaturgy. The work was intense, rigorous and spiritual, and had a profound effect on her. On her return to Melbourne, keen to share her discoveries of the intensity and power of Grotowski's work with colleagues from university theatre days, she found that they were engaged in fostering a new Australian theatre. It was 'Ocker' theatre with a decidedly male point of view and in no way sacred. Determined for women's voices to be heard, Kerry and a group of women created Betty Can Jump, a powerful, witty, provocative feminist theatre piece at the Pram Factory, partly in response also to Grotowski's question to her, 'Who are you?''  (Publication abstract)