Tim Eliott (a tribute from John Smythe | Downstage Theatre, Saturday 7 May 2011)
When I was a lad, Tim Eliott was ‘that voice’ on 2YA’s Monday night radio plays. When I first saw him I couldn’t believe that such a skinny chap with no chest could have such a resonant voice.
He was born in Taranaki. His mother died when he was one; his father managed a box company. And when he was four or five, Tim was taken down the road by his father to receive instruction in the pronunciation of English.
He recalled ‘the door opening to a dark interior and two equally dark people. At first I could see only their white hair, eyes and teeth. These were my teachers: an elderly Maori couple whose resonant voices and profound vowel sounds were music to me. A lasting influence, I believe.’
Tim went to primary school as a boarder at Hereworth, was raised by aunts and grandparents during the war, then was summoned to join his de-mobbed father in post-war England. He attended public schools in Bath and Bristol until rheumatic fever cut his education short.
It was New Zealand’s beneficial climate that brought Tim and his father back home. Then he came to Wellington, where he became an actor by accident. But first, at seventeen, Tim was an office boy with the advertising company Carlton Carruthers du Chateau and King. A bit of an artist, he tried illustration but was disillusioned by the habit of copying drawings from the USA, so he had a go at copywriting. And, inevitably, his rich-toned voice was used for the odd radio commercial.
In 1955 a work mate asked Tim to accompany him, for moral support, to an audition. Nola Millar was casting a Thespians production of Richard II with expatriate English actor Peter Varley in the title role. Tim was persuaded to get up and read and – despite having had no formal tuition in acting, let alone Shakespeare – he was cast as Bolingbroke. His stage début, at the Concert Chamber, excited great interest.
At the age of 20, then, he got his first role with NZ’s only fully professional theatre company, the New Zealand Players, which toured nationally. He played Worthy in a Restoration comedy called Virtue in Danger. Radio drama and commercials became Tim’s main source of employment. In 1959 he returned to the stage to play Jimmy Porter in Nola Millar’s production of Look Back in Anger for Unity Theatre.
Two years later Tim played the male lead in Romeo and Juliet with the New Zealand Theatre Company, which also toured, despite that having been the cause of The New Zealand Payers going broke. It was during this tour that he began to think seriously about an alternative theatre: small, flexible, modest, content to stay in one place and be absorbed into the community. By 1963 Tim and his wife Carole had three children, and they were sustained once more by his radio and voice work.
Peter Bland was also a radio actor and the producer of a poetry programme who often employed Tim as a reader because of his splendid voice and the extraordinary intelligence he brought to the spoken word.
Peter and Martyn Sanderson met at a party and bonded over their love of poetry. Martyn directed Peter in Ablee’s Zoo Story for the Contemporary Arts Society but it was to Tim and Carole’s Mount Victoria home that Martyn made the trek on New Year’s Eve 1963 to expound his vision for a new kind of theatre. Tim suggested Harry Seresin be brought in on the business side – and this was the genesis of what became Downstage (after names like Onion Soup and The Flea Pit were discarded).
At the stormy public meeting in mid-May 1964 – 47 years ago tomorrow week – detractors claimed Tim could not know anything of the art of theatre because he sold his voice to radio commercials. Undaunted, Martyn, Tim and Peter presented their vision for a small, Wellington-based professional theatre.
Tim said it was too early to be specific on artistic policy or get too idealistic. The company needed to be free to change as they learnt. He also felt a small theatre would not have to try to please too many people; and that would meet the need for theatre to reassess itself through experimentation. He anticipated a theatre that would deserve playwrights and confidently expected a time when the company would be producing plays written specially for it. (That took a while.)
In Downstage’s first thee-and-a-bit years, Tim acted in Eugene Ionesco’s Exit The King, CH Hazelwood’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Nikolai Gogol’s Diary Of A Madman, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What A Lovely War!, Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Duende, George Bernard Shaw’s Arms And The Man, a Hutt Valley jubilee show called Three Dreams, a lunchtime programme that included Elizabethan poetry and readings from John Lennon, his own adaptation of E H Ruddock’s Vitalogy, subtitled Dr Ruddock Takes A Trip, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (playing the title role), and Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s The Sponge Room and Squat Betty.
He co-designed Exit The King, designed Peter Bland’s revue The Bed Settee, and designed and directed Jean Genet’s Deathwatch. He co-wrote (with Peter Bland) and directed a children’s play, Once Upon A Timepiece.
He directed Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, Jean Genet’s The Maids, Warren Dibble’s Operation Pigstick and a Chekhov triple bill: On The Harmfulness Of Tobacco, The Bear and The Proposal. And somewhere in the middle of all that, he acted in The Comedy Of Errors for the New Zealand Theatre Centre.
Martyn was the executive director of Downstage from 1964-66, then he moved on to Australia. Tim Eliott became the acting executive director in an atmosphere of scepticism and doubt (that was the year I worked here as a kitchen hand and appeared in two plays, one with Tim).
It was under his watch that Downstage produced it’s first full length play written for them: Father’s Day by Peter Bland – following which Tim directed local writer Warren Dibble’s Operation Pigstick, a ‘cartoon for theatre’ that satirised the political landscape of the Vietnam War.
There was ‘much soul-searching by the Theatre Society’s management committee on the propriety of the piece at Downstage’ (Bill Sheat, who was the chairman, tells me two committee members resigned over it). Its brief season began within a fortnight of US President Lyndon B Johnson’s whirlwind 24-hour visit to Wellington.
After the Sunday night technical run-through, actor Jeremy Stephens went on a drunken rampage, setting fire to rubbish bins around the city. He was duly arrested and thrown into prison. Next morning Tim managed to convince a judge that Jeremy’s release that day was essential. He did a whip-around and, armed with the bail money, drove to Mount Crawford to get him out for opening night. But Jeremy wanted to stay: ‘I’m really into this, man. These guys are great!’ He would not be moved and Tim had to take over the role for the members’ preview nights.
One critic described it as ‘a brilliant piece of political satire … Tim Eliott has excelled in the use of highly inventive techniques, including closed circuit television … It is hoped that it can be produced in other centres of New Zealand.’
With Operation Pigstick, Downstage was fulfilling Tim’s desire for the theatre to be a focus for social, political and artistic debate (the actors and audience engaged in open discussion after each performance), Martyn’s desire for it to be relevant, up-front and non-naturalistic, and Peter’s desire for it to feature the work of local writers.
And yet the houses were far from full, to Bill Sheat’s great frustration. ‘I was so cranky! Where were all the people that turned up in droves to demonstrations?’ Tim’s term of office ended with his being warmly congratulated by the committee, including those who’d doubted him. It was a complete vindication of his capabilities.
Early in 1968 Tim and his family moved to Sydney – the same year I went, to become an acting student at NIDA. The Old Tote (later to become the Sydney Theatre Company) shared our campus at the University of New South Wales, and in my second year I was quietly proud to witness Tim playing, back-to-back, Hamlet in Hamlet and Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
A few years later we caught up again in Melbourne when I was a scriptwriter for a TV serial called The Box, in which Tim played a TV sports reporter. (The memorable night when he came to dinner with Ian and Jo Mune is not for public consumption.)
In 1983 Tim came ‘home’ to play Colonel Elliott in Geoff Murphy’s film UTU.
He returned to Sydney as I was compiling, producing and directing a tribute to the Australian novelist and playwright Katharine Susannah Prichard, at Nimrod Theatre. I was delighted when Tim agreed to take part in the play-reading excerpts. As always he was charming, witty, urbane, whimsical and an absolute pleasure to work with.
In Australia Tim played more than 80 roles on the small and large screen and remained constantly in-demand as a voice artist, even after his throat cancer was diagnosed.
The voice has died. The rest is silence. Good night sweet Tim …
Tim Eliott (a tribute from John Smythe | Downstage Theatre, Saturday 7 May 2011) When I was a lad, Tim Eliott was ‘that voice’ on 2YA’s Monday night radio plays. When I first saw him I couldn’t believe that such a skinny chap with no chest could have such a resonant voice. He was born in Taranaki. His mother died when he was one; his father managed a box company. And when he was four or five, Tim was taken down the road by his father to receive instruction in the pronunciation of English. He recalled ‘the door opening to a dark interior and two equally dark people. At first I could see only their white hair, eyes and teeth. These were my teachers: an elderly Maori couple whose resonant voices and profound vowel sounds were music to me. A lasting influence, I believe.’ Tim went to primary school as a boarder at Hereworth, was raised by aunts and grandparents during the war, then was summoned to join his de-mobbed father in post-war England. He attended public schools in Bath and Bristol until rheumatic fever cut his education short. It was New Zealand’s beneficial climate that brought Tim and his father back home. Then he came to Wellington, where he became an actor by accident. But first, at seventeen, Tim was an office boy with the advertising company Carlton Carruthers du Chateau and King. A bit of an artist, he tried illustration but was disillusioned by the habit of copying drawings from the USA, so he had a go at copywriting. And, inevitably, his rich-toned voice was used for the odd radio commercial. In 1955 a work mate asked Tim to accompany him, for moral support, to an audition. Nola Millar was casting a Thespians production of Richard II with expatriate English actor Peter Varley in the title role. Tim was persuaded to get up and read and – despite having had no formal tuition in acting, let alone Shakespeare – he was cast as Bolingbroke. His stage début, at the Concert Chamber, excited great interest. At the age of 20, then, he got his first role with NZ’s only fully professional theatre company, the New Zealand Players, which toured nationally. He played Worthy in a Restoration comedy called Virtue in Danger. Radio drama and commercials became Tim’s main source of employment. In 1959 he returned to the stage to play Jimmy Porter in Nola Millar’s production of Look Back in Anger for Unity Theatre. Two years later Tim played the male lead in Romeo and Juliet with the New Zealand Theatre Company, which also toured, despite that having been the cause of The New Zealand Payers going broke. It was during this tour that he began to think seriously about an alternative theatre: small, flexible, modest, content to stay in one place and be absorbed into the community. By 1963 Tim and his wife Carole had three children, and they were sustained once more by his radio and voice work. Peter Bland was also a radio actor and the producer of a poetry programme who often employed Tim as a reader because of his splendid voice and the extraordinary intelligence he brought to the spoken word. Peter and Martyn Sanderson met at a party and bonded over their love of poetry. Martyn directed Peter in Ablee’s Zoo Story for the Contemporary Arts Society but it was to Tim and Carole’s Mount Victoria home that Martyn made the trek on New Year’s Eve 1963 to expound his vision for a new kind of theatre. Tim suggested Harry Seresin be brought in on the business side – and this was the genesis of what became Downstage (after names like Onion Soup and The Flea Pit were discarded). At the stormy public meeting in mid-May 1964 – 47 years ago tomorrow week – detractors claimed Tim could not know anything of the art of theatre because he sold his voice to radio commercials. Undaunted, Martyn, Tim and Peter presented their vision for a small, Wellington-based professional theatre. Tim said it was too early to be specific on artistic policy or get too idealistic. The company needed to be free to change as they learnt. He also felt a small theatre would not have to try to please too many people; and that would meet the need for theatre to reassess itself through experimentation. He anticipated a theatre that would deserve playwrights and confidently expected a time when the company would be producing plays written specially for it. (That took a while.) In Downstage’s first thee-and-a-bit years, Tim acted in Eugene Ionesco’s Exit The King, CH Hazelwood’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Nikolai Gogol’s Diary Of A Madman, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What A Lovely War!, Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Duende, George Bernard Shaw’s Arms And The Man, a Hutt Valley jubilee show called Three Dreams, a lunchtime programme that included Elizabethan poetry and readings from John Lennon, his own adaptation of E H Ruddock’s Vitalogy, subtitled Dr Ruddock Takes A Trip, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (playing the title role), and Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s The Sponge Room and Squat Betty. He co-designed Exit The King, designed Peter Bland’s revue The Bed Settee, and designed and directed Jean Genet’s Deathwatch. He co-wrote (with Peter Bland) and directed a children’s play, Once Upon A Timepiece. He directed Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, Jean Genet’s The Maids, Warren Dibble’s Operation Pigstick and a Chekhov triple bill: On The Harmfulness Of Tobacco, The Bear and The Proposal. And somewhere in the middle of all that, he acted in The Comedy Of Errors for the New Zealand Theatre Centre. Martyn was the executive director of Downstage from 1964-66, then he moved on to Australia. Tim Eliott became the acting executive director in an atmosphere of scepticism and doubt (that was the year I worked here as a kitchen hand and appeared in two plays, one with Tim). It was under his watch that Downstage produced it’s first full length play written for them: Father’s Day by Peter Bland – following which Tim directed local writer Warren Dibble’s Operation Pigstick, a ‘cartoon for theatre’ that satirised the political landscape of the Vietnam War. There was ‘much soul-searching by the Theatre Society’s management committee on the propriety of the piece at Downstage’ (Bill Sheat, who was the chairman, tells me two committee members resigned over it). Its brief season began within a fortnight of US President Lyndon B Johnson’s whirlwind 24-hour visit to Wellington. After the Sunday night technical run-through, actor Jeremy Stephens went on a drunken rampage, setting fire to rubbish bins around the city. He was duly arrested and thrown into prison. Next morning Tim managed to convince a judge that Jeremy’s release that day was essential. He did a whip-around and, armed with the bail money, drove to Mount Crawford to get him out for opening night. But Jeremy wanted to stay: ‘I’m really into this, man. These guys are great!’ He would not be moved and Tim had to take over the role for the members’ preview nights. One critic described it as ‘a brilliant piece of political satire … Tim Eliott has excelled in the use of highly inventive techniques, including closed circuit television … It is hoped that it can be produced in other centres of New Zealand.’ With Operation Pigstick, Downstage was fulfilling Tim’s desire for the theatre to be a focus for social, political and artistic debate (the actors and audience engaged in open discussion after each performance), Martyn’s desire for it to be relevant, up-front and non-naturalistic, and Peter’s desire for it to feature the work of local writers. And yet the houses were far from full, to Bill Sheat’s great frustration. ‘I was so cranky! Where were all the people that turned up in droves to demonstrations?’ Tim’s term of office ended with his being warmly congratulated by the committee, including those who’d doubted him. It was a complete vindication of his capabilities. Early in 1968 Tim and his family moved to Sydney – the same year I went, to become an acting student at NIDA. The Old Tote (later to become the Sydney Theatre Company) shared our campus at the University of New South Wales, and in my second year I was quietly proud to witness Tim playing, back-to-back, Hamlet in Hamlet and Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. A few years later we caught up again in Melbourne when I was a scriptwriter for a TV serial called The Box, in which Tim played a TV sports reporter. (The memorable night when he came to dinner with Ian and Jo Mune is not for public consumption.) In 1983 Tim came ‘home’ to play Colonel Elliott in Geoff Murphy’s film UTU. He returned to Sydney as I was compiling, producing and directing a tribute to the Australian novelist and playwright Katharine Susannah Prichard, at Nimrod Theatre. I was delighted when Tim agreed to take part in the play-reading excerpts. As always he was charming, witty, urbane, whimsical and an absolute pleasure to work with. In Australia Tim played more than 80 roles on the small and large screen and remained constantly in-demand as a voice artist, even after his throat cancer was diagnosed. The voice has died. The rest is silence. Good night sweet Tim …
Growing up through the eighties and early nineties visits to the Blue mountains home of my Grandparents were regular highlights of my life. Loved the atmosphere,the garden with all the stately trees,my grandads pipe smoke lingering in the air everywhere and most of all the time generously devoted to nurturing my natural artistic talent with wood work that he some how knew I had before anyone one in my family did. Your memory will forever reside with clarity within the temple of my workshop. Vale Oopa will forever miss you so so much. XOXO Oliver.
Growing up through the eighties and early nineties visits to the Blue mountains home of my Grandparents were regular highlights of my life. Loved the atmosphere,the garden with all the stately trees,my grandads pipe smoke lingering in the air everywhere and most of all the time generously devoted to nurturing my natural artistic talent with wood work that he some how knew I had before anyone one in my family did. Your memory will forever reside with clarity within the temple of my workshop. Vale Oopa will forever miss you so so much. XOXO Oliver.
Tim was always a great man, from when I was a child, and his twinkling eyes full of intelligence and drive. As I grew up, I was amazed by his gentle generosity and ferocious belief in what was right. I remember him cooking for us in the kitchen at Wentworth Falls and how devoted he was to his task, as he prepared perfect steak and chips and would laugh heartily at suppertime. His love for his family and his sense of life and beauty will always resonate with me. Sadly missed by myself and my partner Pj.
