Not for sale: Gift plan imagines Twelfth Night Theatre’s next leading role

After 36 years, Gail Wiltshire is offering her theatre, and its legacy, to the people – much to the frustration of developers.

To the frustration of developers eager to spend upwards of $10m, Gail Wiltshire’s aims to ensure the theatre is heritage listed and preserved.

Impresario Gail Wiltshire, then a university lecturer in education and arts, took the financial risk of her life on October 26, 1988, borrowing $1.3m at 24 per cent interest (during the recession we had to have) to save Brisbane’s Twelfth Night Theatre.

Thirty-six years on, perusing a range of seven-figure offers for the near-CBD property at Bowen Hills, it is clear the investment was a winner.

But it’s not for sale. Now, as then, Wiltshire’s priorities are the stage and the theatre’s heritage, which stretches back several generations to her time in London, in the days when a group of young actors – including John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson and Michael Redgrave – captivated post-war audiences.

Auditions for the 2004 production of Rocky Horror Picture Show at Twelfth Night Theatre. Picture: David/Kelly

TNT’s Australian heritage is no less compelling. Sigrid Thornton cut her teeth in the theatre’s junior workshop in the 1970s; for 15 years, Max Gillies, Jon English and Rowena Wallace (Mrs Danvers in Rebecca) headed the casts of comedies and dramas that toured the nation; South Australian-born Keith Michell (BBC television’s most famous Henry VIII) was brought back to Australia by Wiltshire to lead the cast of retired High Court judge Ian Callinan’s playBrazilian Blue.

Generations of children cheered as they discovered Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar and Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop in shows Wiltshire wrote and produced, with teaching packages for schools. And after the publication of the solution to the fictitious Picnic at Hanging Rock mystery in author Joan Lindsay’s will, a stage show of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Year after year, Christmas saw characters from Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl and Hans Christian Andersen return to the stage. So did the Muddle Headed Wombat, Blinky Bill and Charlotte’s Web.

What has changed most is the staging, the lighting, sound and illusion – think Mary Poppins flying, chimney sweeps walking on walls and upside down on ceilings, and mermaids under water.

Over 36 years technology and stage effects have transformed live theatre, which is one of reasons that Wiltshire, now 70-something and looking to the future, intends the heritage of the theatre to be preserved. Her vision is to provide a stage for affordable community theatre, with state-of-the art technology.

Gail Wiltshire’s vision is for Twelfth Night Theatre to remain a base and catalyst for productions not just for Brisbane audiences but also to tour country Queensland.

To the frustration of developers eager to spend upwards of $10m to buy and demolish the theatre, Wiltshire’s plan is to ensure it is heritage listed and preserved. She is ready to gift it to the ­people of Queensland, through a state government, for ongoing arts, entertainment and education. That way, Wiltshire said: “The spirit of the past continues into the future.’’

That’s why October 26, 2024 – election day and her 36th anniversary at the helm of the theatre – will be crucial. Whatever the election outcome, Wiltshire’s intention is this: “If either party wants to come to the party I’ll meet them.” Unlike most arts companies in Australia, TNT has never had a taxpayer-funded subsidy. Nor has Wiltshire sought one.

Twelfth Night Theatre was opened by former Liberal treasurer Sir Gordon Chalk in 1971. It was built on land donated by Marjorie Johnstone, who lived on the site, where she had founded the historically iconic Johnstone Art Gallery (which displayed the works, among others, of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Margaret Olley). “She dreamed of a theatre at the bottom of her garden, full of roses and fountains,’’ Wiltshire said. “And she gave the land.’’ Opening the building, Sir Gordon quoted from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “There is no darkness but ignorance.’’

Hard times hit the theatre, however, and by the time it was listed for auction in 1988 it was earmarked for demolition.

Wiltshire, who had previously hired the theatre to stage The Diary of Anne Frank and Anne of Green Gables, bought it. She knocked on the door of the Johnstone Gallery, found Marjorie Johnstone, by then seriously ill, and said “Please don’t die Mrs Johnstone. Help me save the theatre.’’ She did.

They discovered they shared a heritage, three generations apart, based in the Old Vic, the fountainhead of the best of London’s classical and Shakespearean theatre from the Victorian era to the 1970s.

Actors John Inman and Joan Sydney in the 2001 production of Are You Being Served at Twelfth Night. Picture: Adam Smith

In the 1930s, Johnstone had trained at the Old Vic, on London’s Southbank, with Gielgud, Olivier, Redgrave, Richardson, Leigh – their talents moulded by Lilian Baylis, creator of nascent performing arts troupes that evolved into Sadler’s Wells, the English National Opera, the National Theatre and the Royal Ballet.

One of Baylis’s proteges, who was studying directing and production contemporaneously, was Rose Bruford, who later established her own college. In 1970, one of Bruford’s intake of 10 students was Gail Wiltshire, originally from Boonah and an arts and education graduate from Queensland University. Against that background, Johnstone and Wiltshire felt an instant rapport, that brought them into daily contact until Johnstone’s death in 1992.

Towards the end of that decade Wiltshire, who had a long-standing interest in the benefits of the arts in overcoming physical, mental and emotional challenges, especially in young people, set up the Fantastixxx. Using teaching techniques propagated by Rose Bruford, they sing, they dance, they play instruments, they write poetry and short stories, they paint and their works are auctioned, with all proceeds going to the artists.

“Creativity unlimited is the belief system, inspired by World War II flying ace Douglas Bader ’’ Wiltshire said. “The Fantastixxx also reach for the sky.’’ The TNT has also presented, in German and English, a stage adaptation of Austrian Jewish author Ilse Aichinger’s classic wartime novel The Greater Hope, a production transferred to the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, at their request.

Gail Wiltshire, centre, with Lyn Pelgrave, left, and Lisa Broadby took the theatre on the road in 1996.

Like Baylis decades before in London, Wiltshire established what impresarios call a “stable’’ of local, national and international actors. The portraits throughout the theatre tell the story: Geoffrey Hughes and Judy Cornwell (Onslow and Daisy from Keeping Up Appearances), Britt Eckland, John Inman (Are You Being Served’s Mr Humphries), Dennis Waterman, Gordon Kaye and Sue Hodge (‘Allo ‘Allo), Christopher Timothy (All Creatures Great and Small) and Keith Michell, who described Wiltshire (whose portrait he painted) as “Australia’s Lilian Baylis”.

She has also taken productions on the road around the country, and ran three companies that put on plays for 165 weeks, from Cairns to Hobart, Melbourne to Perth and Perth to Karratha. Wiltshire and several of her staff became “theatre truckies’’, driving a giant truck to transport the sets.

Just as Baylis’s legacy created foundations that have been the mainstay of the best of British classics and entertainment for decades, Wiltshire’s vision is for the Twelfth Night Theatre to remain a base and a catalyst for productions not only for Brisbane audiences but also to tour country Queensland.

That is why she is prepared to gift it, through the state government, to be run as a community theatre. “Everything must go to the bush, it’s where I came from, via London to Twelfth Night and it’s where I’ll return. It’s a circle, and the wheel keeps turning.’’