Amateur theatre. It's a term that has certain, shall we say, connotations, although these change according to who's doing the connoting. For some, it conjures up a group of earnest drama types, yearning above all to "play the Dane". For others, it's a forum for extroverts only.
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But for a steady number of people in and around Canberra, taking part in an amateur acting workshop has been something else entirely. From a creative outlet to a nostalgic side project, a step towards self-acceptance for the socially awkward to a place to really hone one's Shakespearian aspirations, there are many reasons to study acting for fun, rather than as a vocation.
And Peter Wilkins – whose theatre reviews have been appearing on these pages for many years – has seen them all come and go in the workshops he's been running for nearly 30 years. Acting for the Fun Of It is exactly what the name suggests, although people tend to enrol with varying levels of gravitas or gameness.
"It was always designed for anybody who felt, 'I haven't done it for a very long time, I did it in high school, I'd love to do it again'," he says.
"Or, I'm in a public service position, which is very kind of head-oriented, and I would like to explore my creativity, so I'll enrol in it for that. People who want to meet new friends, but they want to with something that's active and fun and participatory."
He says almost all his students – and there have been more than 1000 – have left with a heightened sense of what's possible when they drop their shackles for a few hours.
"Some of those people will go on into amateur theatre, largely," he says.
"Some of them have done five courses with me, they just keep doing them. One person had difficulties with stuttering, and did all the courses over the years."
He even ran the workshop during a year-long sabbatical in Vienna, in 2000, at the National School, and the original course has developed several offshoots – Brush Up Your Shakespeare, From Page to Stage and An Actor Prepares.
Wilkins, who taught drama at Narrabundah College for two decades, began the workshops in the mid-70s in his hometown of Adelaide. Before that, acting and theatre had long been an inadvertent feature in his life.
"It's a funny thing, because there was no professional theatre company in Australia when I started, as an 11-year-old," he says.
His mother, who was Czech, was worried he was developing too broad an Australian accent, and sent him to drama classes. This, in itself, he finds a fascinating aspect of the drama school landscape – why do people choose to send their kids to acting classes in the first place?
As it happened, his first teacher was a fine actor, and taught him for many years.
"There was nothing in high school – we did extracts," he says.
"I played a fat Macbeth – the fat version of Macbeth. I was a very fat kid, after I came to Adelaide from Mildura. So there wasn't anything there. And then when I came to teachers college, I did a diploma in speech and drama ... And then after that it was just doing stuff on the job."
He eventually came to Canberra with his family in 1979, to take up the helm of the now-defunct Jigsaw Theatre Company.
After a short stint in the public service, he took up a temporary teaching position at Narrabundah, which turned into a very long stint as head of its acclaimed drama department. He ran his out-of-school workshops all the while, although they were aimed mainly at adults, and the age range has varied wildly, from the odd Year 12 student to people in their 70s.
"They'll all come for very, very different reasons, personal reasons, but with one shared interest, which is to explore the world of the actor," Wilkins says.
"Because all the courses are actor school-based. So if we're doing ensemble games, they're what actors will do to create an ensemble, to work together. If they're looking at a text extract, it's an interpretation. What happens in the workshops, really, is that you gear it towards that particular group and they all share the same experience. Some will share it at a particular level, some will share it at a higher level, and I would hope at the end of it that they leave the course having gained what they specifically came to gain. The feedback is that, over the number of years I've been doing it, that they do."
It's not surprising that, seven years on from his official retirement from teaching, he has never once thought of stopping the courses, even though he runs them in his spare time and doesn't earn a great deal of money in the process.
"I love it," he says.
"It's that first lesson, when they come together, they don't know each other, they don't know what the course is like, they're anxious, some of them may have done a previous course, so they have some contact with someone else.
"Then they enter into these name games, and trust exercises and mirror work and whatever, and by the end of the first lesson, they're chattering on, they have a coffee break. It's as though they are children. We are all children, effectively, we don't lose that. It may be suppressed or hidden, or not employed, but essentially, who are we? We have to be what we were at some stage."
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive over the years – he's only ever had one person break down in tears, triggered probably by something else entirely – and most people leave with what they wanted.
"What keeps me going is seeing people excited and passionate, and having fun. And also, at the same time, gaining a confidence," he says.
He's seen people with Asperger's, elderly acting aspirants, high-level public servants, a dentist, a doctor, an architect and even, once, a blind person.
"He did the most wonderful Henry V speech at Agincourt," says Wilkins, with a sigh of great satisfaction.
"You don't expect performance standard in these – you don't put people under the spotlight and say, 'Learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture'. You're saying, 'Have a go at it, enjoy it!' There'll be workshops and exercises that give you that kind of grounding, but we don't expect first-rate performances."
The next Acting for the Fun of It workshop runs from April 25 to May 30, on Mondays at 7.00pm-9.00pm, at ImproACT Studios in Allara Street, Civic. Cost $150/$100. For more information, contact Peter Wilkins at peterwilkins@grapevine.com.au or on 0408 034 373.
