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Actor and writer Henri Szeps speaks three languages fluently. He was born in a refugee camp in Switzerland during the Second World War. His parents had fled Poland in fear of the invading Germans in 1938, and he lived in two countries before arriving in Australia at the age of eight. He already spoke Swiss German, French and Yiddish. The young Henri discovered acting at Greenwich primary school in Sydney and taught himself tumbling on a grassy slope in the park at Lavender Bay. As a teenager he found a gymnastics teacher called George Sparkes who taught him to do back flips and had a profound impact on his life. It was this man, Sparksey, who eventually helped Henri to put together a club act. Szeps studied science and engineering at university and also took acting classes with Hayes Gordon at his boatshed theatre in North Sydney. In 1963 Gordon cast Szeps in a play by Durrenmatt called The Physicists, and he has performed at the Ensemble Theatre regularly ever since. Szeps recalls that Hayes Gordon advised his young student actors to do ‘vaudeville, variety, stand up comedy’. Szeps took his teacher’s advice, worked the clubs, and went on to become one of the most well-known comic rogue characters on Australian television, playing the selfish older son in the landmark series Mother and Son that ran from 1984-1994.
Szeps is an actor whose repertoire extends beyond comedy however, and he has appeared in a wide range of plays, including works by Shakespeare, Chekhov and Brecht. Szeps has also appeared in musical theatre and on television and film. He has written and presented three of his own one-man shows, and translated, composed and devised works for the stage. He is at home in monodrama and is adept at engaging an audience whether he is playing a comic or dramatic role. He has undertaken numerous tours to regional Australia with various productions, has served as an advocate for the cause of refugees in Australia, and is one of a select group to have been taught swimming by Dawn Fraser.
Szeps’ infant years were difficult. He was sent to live with a Swiss family before his first birthday, due to health problems in the refugee camp. With the Meyer family, Henri learned to speak Swiss German. He was reunited with his mother when he was three but was unable to speak French or Polish and so could barely communicate with her. He began to learn to speak French. When he was four years old, and his mother had to go into hospital, Henri was sent back to the Meyer family. By then he had forgotten German but began to learn it again. At the age of six he was sent back to his mother but ended up in Rothschilds orphanage outside Paris after a short period. When Henri arrived in Australia at the age of eight he began learning English.
It is extraordinary that Henri Szeps became what Katharine Brisbane calls a ‘classic comedy actor’.(1) Szeps understands comedy, and its place in theatre. In his book All in Good Timing he talks about the ‘soothing effect’ of the theatre and says that ‘performance deals with our problems without us actually having to face them’. He explains that watching drama:
'takes the unruly parameters out of life and confines them to a manageable, imaginary world, up there on the stage. Up there, because that world is important, because it is man-made, our fears and problems can be given free rein. They can be inspected bravely at close range, and in the case of comedy they can be blown away by laughter.'(2)
Szeps has remained true to the ideals and techniques of the Stanislavsky system that he learned from Hayes Gordon in the 1960s, in that he continues to experiment with new forms – living out the ideal that an actor is always learning and changing, throughout his career, and he believes in serving the audience. He refutes the idea that an actor’s job is ‘interpretive’, explaining that the actor provides the constant flow of what the audience ‘feels’.(3) Szeps admits to feeling comfortable and powerful on stage – and sensing a flow of energy from him to the audience and back again. When he first felt it he said it was the first time he felt that he was ‘really alive’ but there was another dimension to this sensation, the certainties of a script taking you in a direction and knowing what came next, that contrasted with the uncertainties of his early life. The theatre (unlike anywhere else) offered him a place where he knew the rules, learned lines and knew how the play ended.(4)
Henri Szeps with his mother, Rose, and sister, Maria, 1946.
At Randwick Boys High Szeps played Sakini in The Tea House of the August Moon. His lines are imprinted on his brain to this day. He enjoyed the experience, and when his drama teacher took the boys to see the film adaptation of the play with Marlon Brando playing Sakini, Szeps was captivated by Brando’s performance. Later when he realised that Hayes Gordon had been trained in Method Acting, by one of the same teachers as Brando (Lee Strasberg), he knew he wanted to pursue acting with the American performer. In addition to taking acting classes with Hayes Gordon, Szeps observed the Bostonian actor at work. He watched Gordon in musical theatre, in productions of Fiddler on the Roof in 1967 and numerous other plays. Szeps also learned from the other actors with whom he appeared. He described to me how he had noticed Reg Livermore’s ability to work with an audience, and his mastery in contacting them with both discipline and warmth.
Szeps was still studying mathematics and physics at university when he first appeared on stage at the Ensemble. He had a small role in The Physicists (1963). It was unpaid but he recalls that the ‘seed was planted’. When he graduated he took his first professional role in Paint Your Wagon for a six-week arts council tour. Most importantly he took Gordon’s advice about learning how to sense an audience and how to engage them by working in comedy on the club circuit, presenting stand up acts with somersaults and backflips to punctuate the gags. Szeps studied with Hayes Gordon for four years, appeared in several plays at the Ensemble and toured in the American comic play The Boys in the Band, playing a suicidal Jewish homosexual man called Harold, the birthday boy in the play. It was a shocking play for audiences in 1968 and during the Melbourne season in 1969 three actors were charged with using obscene language in public.(5)
Szeps met Mary Ann Severne during the Sydney run of the play. They married in 1969 and have two sons, Amos and Josh.
Henri Szeps performing a standing back somersault, 1969.
In 1971 Szeps and Severne set off to seek acting work in the UK. Szeps found work at Stoke on Trent for six months with Peter Cheeseman who, like Hayes Gordon at the Ensemble in Sydney, ran a theatre that presented plays in the round. Cheeseman cast Szeps in Measure for Measure and taught him to vary his performance subtly in order to retain freshness and interest over a long run. Hayes Gordon had insisted on a disciplined and consistent approach to performing. Szeps learned over time that the two ideas were not inconsistent, and that physical actions could be changed to bring articulation and interest to a line or a moment. The changes might be so minimal as to be almost invisible to an audience member on any given night. This revelation took years for Szeps to accept and to execute, but it transformed his way of performing, especially over long runs. Cheeseman helped him to loosen up his approach to performing Shakespeare.
In the UK Szeps closely observed actors, including David Warner, with whom he appeared in I Claudius at the Queens Theatre in London in 1972, directed by Tony Richardson. He noticed Warner’s intense concentration, stillness and focus as the actor trained his attention on a small crack on the rehearsal room floor. Szeps told Warner how much he admired his performance and realised that Warner was genuinely surprised and pleased to receive the comments. It was another lesson for Szeps: that actors are often unsure of whether they are pleasing anybody, unsure of what the director wants or thinks, and no matter how celebrated they are, they worry about failing all the time. In a Prospect Theatre Company tour of the Mediterranean, Szeps appeared in various plays with lead actor Derek Jacoby. Once more he had an opportunity to observe significant actors at work.
When he returned to Australia Szeps appeared in a variety of plays including Chekhov’s comedy The Good Doctor (1975), alongside Colin Croft, Max Cullen, Denise Davies, Patricia Hill and others. Hayes Gordon directed the production. Szeps appeared in Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1977) alongside Zika Nester who had joined the Ensemble in 1957 and became a chief instructor at the acting school, following a world tour of theatre training schools, including the Moscow Art Theatre and various studios in London and New York.(6) Szeps also appeared in the premiere of David Williamson’s Travelling North at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney in 1979 amongst a glittering cast of actors that included Jennifer Hagan, Carol Raye, Graham Rouse and others, directed by John Bell.
Szeps has appeared in five premiere productions of plays by David Williamson including Celluloid Heroes, directed by John Bell in 1980, Dead White Males for the Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Wayne Harrison and Heretic in 1995, also for the STC. In 2014 Szeps appeared in Williamson’s sharp and hilarious satirical comedy Cruise Control, directed by Williamson himself, with Michelle Doake, Kate Fitzpatrick, Kenneth Moraleda, Peter Phelps and Felix Williamson (son of the playwright). Szeps played a wealthy New York dentist who has attempted to write a novel.
Henri Szeps and Kate Fitzpatrick in David Williamson’s play Cruise Control, 2014, Photograph by Clare Hawley, Courtesy of the Ensemble Theatre, Sydney
In his autobiographical play, I’m Not a Dentist, referring to his notorious character in Mother and Son, Szeps transforms the events of his own life into jokes, anecdotes and moments of intense theatricality. The play premiered in the Hakoah Club in Bondi, Sydney, in 1995, and later played at the Ensemble Theatre as well as in Melbourne, Perth and 70 other locations around Australia.
Szeps describes the constant movement of his young life in the monodrama with wit and dark humour:
I’ve worked out that I had at least six changes of parenting, and five changes of culture and language in my first 8 years of life on the planet. Multiculturalism? I invented it. Is it any wonder that I became an actor? It was either that or become a psychopath. Wherever I was I never felt I belonged. He confronts the audience with the words for foreigner, stating clearly that ‘from that time on - I have had a normal, happy, new-Australian, wop, reffo up-bringing’.(7)
We learn that Szeps won a scholarship to Sydney University, and that it was a friend who told him about the Ensemble in North Sydney, a theatre in a boatshed. Szeps explains the way in which Hayes Gordon taught his acting pupils:
Hayes taught this new, revolutionary approach to acting as it was then, called the Method, where you didn’t try to pretend your feelings, you didn’t try to fake them, you learnt to actually generate them by thinking the right thoughts.
Szeps reveals in the play that Hayes Gordon was another in a long line of father figures he collected.(8) His candour is disarming as he uses comedy to make sense of his own life. The play is about his own life and about the life of an actor. It is brimming with anecdotes about other actors, with the focus on Szeps at key points in his life.
At the beginning of the play he describes one of the times he was woken up early in the morning in Switzerland to be sent back to France by train at Christmas. He is six and his foster father, Meyer and he have stayed the night in a strange house. Before Meyer took him to the train, his foster father asked him to sing Silent Night for the people at the house.
With intense concentration Szeps returns to that moment of his life in the play, and begins to sing as though he were that six-year-old child, obligingly:
Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, Alles Schlaft
And I can’t remember the next line … He’s showing me off to these people who I don’t know very well. I think one of them is my real mother come to take me back. And now I’ve dried. And I know the song so well!
That is my earliest memory of forgetting my lines.(9)
I’m Not a Dentist and Szeps’ other play about his own life, Why Kids? (2003), demonstrate his ability to dramatise his own life. In each play he achieves a depth of emotion and humour and a real engagement with his audience. His pace is fast and the script is moving, and inspiring. Although he is the central character in each drama, he tosses all of the ideas and emotions back to the audience, making them the centre of the drama in an ingenious and entertaining, highly dynamic one man show.
John Misto wrote a full monodrama for Henri called Sky, that presents the true story of the disappearance of Freddy Valentich in 1978 over Bass Strait in a light aircraft through his father’s voice. The inexplicable disappearance and its effect on the father, Rocco, propel the play. With no wreckage and no remains Rocco is almost deranged with grief. In Henri’s view it is the best theatrical piece of his entire career. Szeps presented the play at the Ensemble Theatre in 1992, and later in Melbourne, Perth and Penrith. Szeps has undertaken numerous long tours with his own plays and with other productions. He toured for seven months with a two hander by the English playwright Lionel Goldstein, called Halpern and Johnson, Szeps worked with Garry McDonald in the play and recalls the experience as ‘a joy’.
In an extended regional tour of Elizabeth Coleman’s black comedy It’s My Party (and I’ll Die if I Want To) in 2013, Szeps played the leading man and had to die on stage every night and remain still for some seven minutes at the end of the play. It was difficult and exhausting executing this death after a rollicking highly physical comic performance night after night over three months, and then without much of a break, moving into another two hander with Douglas Hansell, called Freud’s Last Session. At 70 years of age it was not an easy period but it was rewarding and productive, playing in both the comedy and playing Freud in the complex and richly imagined drama of CS Lewis and Freud in a meeting in 1939 (fictional) in which they discuss major existential questions.
Henri Szeps as Rococo Betoni in the asylum, in John Misto’s play Sky, Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, 1992. Courtesy Ensemble Theatre.
Szeps appeared in many Australian television series in the 1960’s including Homicide (1967, 1969), Division Four (1969, 1971), Skippy (1969), You Can’t See ‘Round Corners (1969) and others. In the UK he appeared in television productions of Colditz (1973-4) and The Strauss Family (1972). When Szeps saw the comic Australian film Alvin Purple in a West End cinema, he wondered why he was trying to make a living in the UK when so much was going on in Australia on stage and on film and television. He returned to Sydney in 1974 and soon afterwards appeared in the ABC series Taxi, produced by John O’Grady. Szeps also appeared in Ride on Stranger (1979) playing Vincent Sladder in the ABC television adaptation of the novel by Kyle Tennant.
In 1982 Szeps presented his first one-man show called A Little Brown Hairy Eye in a short run of just three nights at the Ensemble Theatre. Szeps invited John O’Grady to see the show. O’Grady then suggested that Szeps and Garry McDonald should perform in a second pilot program of a new situation comedy, Mother and Son, written by Geoffrey Atherden, with Ruth Cracknell playing the exasperating mother, Maggie Beare. Initially Szeps thought the drama would not appeal to audiences with its strange ‘tall, demented woman’ and her ‘tall, skinny, gangly’ son Arthur (Garry McDonald) ‘who couldn’t find his bum with both hands’, Szeps recalls. But the series struck a chord and ran for ten years, with 42 episodes. It was sold overseas, and was one of the most successful Australian television series to be broadcast, in a period of exceptional drama on the ABC and on commercial television. Szeps in his role as the older son Robert, a dentist and an ‘asshole’ (Szeps’ own word), became a household name for his portrayal of the selfish and wealthy womaniser. The series is both uproarious and poignant in its portrayal of the problems of aging and the cruelty of family life.
In the ABC drama Palace of Dreams (1985) Szeps played an immigrant publican called Mr Mendel, a Russian Jewish family man living in inner city Sydney during the Depression. The series portrayed the family’s struggles to fit in to Australian life and their relationship with a young man called Tom (Michael O’Neill) who comes to live with them from the country. The story was in part based on the producer’s family history. Sandra Levy’s grandparents had operated the Burdekin Hotel in Sydney.(10) Many writers contributed to the series, including Ian David, Denny Lawrence, John Misto, Debra Oswald and Mark Rosenberg. Misto wrote the episodes in which the family are devastated by the death of their young son in this landmark television drama.
Szeps played Saul in the mesmerising fllm adaptation of David Williamson’s play Travelling North (1987) with Leo McKern and Julia Blake, and appeared as Dr Charles Herpes in Barry Humphries’ anarchic comic film Les Patterson Saves the World (1987), directed by George Miller. In 2012 Szeps played a strange magician-clown character and carer of his aging mother, in an extraordinary film called Bathing Franky that interrogates the nature of comedy and performance as well as the reality of looking after another person. Szeps, in the lead role of Rodney, demonstrates his power to bring depth and subtlety to his performance, juxtaposing disturbing scenes with whimsical comic moments and unsettling black humour. He reveals his complete mastery of comedy and his ability to bring intense emotions to the form. The actors, Szeps, Maria Vanuti, Bree Desborough and Shaun Goss accepted minimal remuneration in order to make this innovative, low budget independent film.
Throughout his career, Henri Szeps has returned many times to appear in plays at the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney, the most successful independent theatre company in Australia. He has contributed to the development of independent theatre and film in Australia over 50 years. Szeps has lived out Hayes Gordon’s teachings, never giving up on the ideals and highly ethical approach to his work. Szeps has pioneered an Australian style of acting based on the Method that is radical, versatile and connected in both profound and practical ways to European and American traditions of the theatre in service of art and of humanity.
Henri Szeps in Henri Szeps’ play Wish I’d Said That, Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, 2011. Courtesy Ensemble Theatre Sydney.
Footnotes
(1) Katharine Brisbane in The Companion to Theatre in Australia, ed. P. Parson, Sydney: Currency Press, 1995, 575.
(2) Henri Szeps, All In Good Timing, Sydney: Currency Press, 1996, 2.
(3) Szeps, All In Good Timing, 25.
(4) Jones, Caroline. Interview with Henri Szeps. The Search for Meaning. ABC Radio National, 1992
(5) Katharine Brisbane, ed. Entertaining Australia, Sydney: Currency Press, 1991, 309. John Krummel, Charles Little and John Norman were charged with using obscene language in public during the Melbourne run in May 1969.
(6) Zika Nester and Lorraine Bayly undertook this study tour on behalf of the Ensemble Theatre and observed training in many theatre training schools including the Actors Studio in New York and Sandy Meisner’s Neighbourhood Playhouse. See Anne Pender, '"Worlds Within": Hayes Gordon, Zika Nester, Henri Szeps and the Transformations of Australian Theatre', Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 15, 3, 2015, 1-12.
(7) One Life, Two Journeys: I’m Not a Dentist; Why kids? Sydney: Currency Press, 2003, 6.
(8) Szeps, I’m Not a Dentist, 21.
(9) Szeps, I’m Not a Dentist, 4.
(10) Janet Bell, Curator’s Notes, http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/palace-dreams/notes/; retrieved 9 November 2016.
Image Credits
Header image: Henri Szeps in Henri Szeps’ play Wish I’d Said That, Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, 2011. Courtesy Ensemble Theatre Sydney.
Image one: Henri Szeps with his mother, Rose, and sister, Maria, 1946. Courtesy of Henry Szeps.
Image two: Henri Szeps performing a standing back somersault, 1969. Courtesy of Henry Szeps.
Image three: Henri Szeps and Kate Fitzpatrick in David Williamson’s play Cruise Control, 2014. Photograph by Clare Hawley. Courtesy of the Ensemble Theatre, Sydney.
Image four: Henri Szeps as Rococo Betoni in the asylum, in John Misto’s play Sky, Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, 1992. Courtesy Ensemble Theatre.
Image five: Henri Szeps in Henri Szeps’ play Wish I’d Said That, Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, 2011. Courtesy Ensemble Theatre Sydney.