Errol Bray the playwright and theatre practitioner

It is likely that, outside Australia, there will have been minimal press coverage of the recent passing of Errol Bray, the playwright and theatre practitioner. His death should not go unremarked because Errol was over at least six decades one of the most tireless and devoted proponents of community-focused theatre and workshop- based productions and had a reputation for this which extended far from his native Oz. Like many of us working in that field his foundational work in Youth Theatre, and most notably with Shopfront Youth Theatre in Carlton, Sydney, has tended to overshadow his other attainments, as the author of many plays, including “The Choir”, and several novels, as workshop leader and teacher, and ambassador for the essential quality of theatre made with non-professionals.

To say that Errol was international in his reach is almost an underestimate. Although in every sense a (very) Tall Poppy he was an oddity in that he preferred to leave the enviable Australian “summer” to winter in freezing European capitals like London and

Berlin, partaking of as much culture as he could. Indefatigable in his travels, he was only stopped in his tracks later in life by his ongoing health problems. Many of us who worked in UK Youth Theatre will have met him first during one of the Shopfront tours he organised in the 1980’s, and I for one kept up the acquaintance over the ensuing decades, hosting him in Liverpool and being hosted by him in my turn several times in Brisbane. His company was generous and garrulous, and he has left his mark on several generations of audiences and theatre enthusiasts. I last met him in London at a production of “The Choir” at The Stag in 2009, but we kept in touch throughout the following decade.

Errol was hardy and an enduring memory is of him trudging through the London snow trailing his wheeled suitcase, but he lent his resilience to adventures in many landscapes including upland Queensland trekking to work on public transport wherever. He was a battler and a refusenik and an experimentalist and an outsider and queerly mischievous and funny and prone to trenchant rejections of the commonplace alongside warm embraces of the renegade tendency - a total one-off.

As sometimes happens a person who you haven’t met up with for a long time but have known deeply and well will become a permanent fixture in one’s psyche and, as a colleague and friend to me, there will always be Errol. I hope somebody will bring together all his aspects in a suitably comprehensive and celebratory memorial text. I didn’t know enough of him to be able to do that – but I will want to read it and celebrate his life anew, and so should we all who have worked the work he so restlessly dignified.