We are all subjected to one ultimate truth of life: nothing is permanent. Parliaments, plants, people, jobs, relationships, and homes – everything that surrounds us is fragile and fleeting.
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again…
Yesterday we came across few stories at the Alpha restaurant which promotes great causes. Patricia Azarias and MEdia Dragon 🐉 share a decade of drama 🎭 at the NSW PAC (we were so young once :-) and what a privilege it was to serve as the crown employee and collect so many untold stories from behind the scenes of the Bear Pit … Patricia used to joke that if the Greek man or woman was not talking, one should Czech ;-) for vital signs …
Yesterday I was also informed that in ancient Athens, only the very wealthiest people paid direct taxes, and these went to fund the city-state’s most important national expenses—the navy and honors for the gods. While today it might sound astonishing, most of these top taxpayers not only paid happily, but boasted about how much they paid.
There was a time when the rich bragged about how much they paid in taxes
One day selected readers of the MEdia Dragon 🐉 will die and that is a fact of life. Ghosting the Partyopens with an extensive list of the many horrific ways it could happen – spurring an honest, funny and touching conversation about an ultimate certainty without skirting around the edges.
Griffin Theatre Company is home to the Lysicrates Prize. Each year it’s awarded to a play assessed on its first 20 pages. As a previous judge of the award I can say it was an initially daunting process: what if the pages following the first 20 were rubbish – or marvellous? What if the playwright was really good at a quick sprint but didn’t have the wherewithal for the long haul?
Only certainty of death and taxes bring me to ponder on my draft yammering blogging play whether there are more Machiavellian characters inside the tax landscapes than at the bear pit 🤣
Patricia knows that metaphors are inescapable in any play as they can add the force of a grenade.
Sydney philanthropists John and Patricia Azarias create the Lysicrates Prize Kevin Chinnery
John Azarias looks up at the Lysicrates Monument in Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden. Above us, in newly carved sandstone, the Greek god of wine and theatre Dionysus is once again turning his pirate attackers into dolphins.
When John saw it three years ago, he thought the then crumbling frieze might be beyond saving. He wondered aloud to his wife Patricia if some funds might be raised to repair it. "In fact, I was just the boring male in that conversation", recalls John.
She was already one step ahead: why not revive the whole Ancient Greek drama competition that the monument commemorates? That was the Great Dionysia Festival where the founders of Western literature – Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus – made their names in front of vast crowds of Athenians.
John and Patricia Azarias have the same aim as the Athenians did in their theatre contests: innovative, bleeding-edge drama written by locals for local audiences. Daniel Munoz
The Greeks loved their monuments and inscriptions," says John. "They keep the memory of the drama, congealed in stone," he adds, almost to himself.
Just seven months later, they watched on this spot as all the old drama was released again, and the first modern Lysicrates Prize was awarded for a newly written Australian play.
This was no faux cloak and sandals re-enactment. The Azarias' had the same aim as the Athenians did in their theatre contests: innovative, bleeding-edge drama written by locals for local audiences.
We slowly wander up to the nearby Botanic Gardens Restaurant to eat. We order a very simple lunch – poached salmon each for them, while I have roast chicken. Our afternoons are to be busy, so no wine.
Velvet bulldozer
John Azarias is a man for whom the phrase "European charm" was coined, but in the manner of a velvet bulldozer, honed as a diplomat for Greece before his second life as a Deloitte tax partner in Australia. The couple met in Zimbabwe when Patricia was working for the United Nations.
They returned to Australia, their "heroic period" as they call it, where, starting in 1987, John worked 17-hour days promoting investment for the NSW government, and then studying tax law by night. With children grown up, they thought Patricia should restart her UN career to become director of external audit in New York between 2004 and 2006, where she dealt with the UN's peacekeepers and unarmed military observers – "the most magnificent people I had ever met," she calls them
John's diplomatic background had made him a rainmaker for two of the big four accounting firms, finding new business for them. "Creating something out of nothing has always attracted me," he says. His networking energy also explains how the first Lysicrates Prize happened in just seven months.
"The truth is it wasn't done quickly," says Patricia. "Oh no. It was seven months, plus 35 years: calling in contacts and favours built up over the decades. John makes friends with all sorts of people. From car park attendants to governors. He never walks away from anyone. He's the soul of discretion. And when he picks up the phone, they listen."
The third Lysicrates Prize will be presented next Friday evening, February 10, once the first 20 minutes of three new unfinished plays have been performed at the Sydney Conservatorium. Uniquely, the whole audience gets a vote on the winning playwright – who gets $12,500 to complete the work.
With it now goes a foundation with a board, and structures to run the competition long after both Azarias have gone. A handsome book has been published for each annual prize. A critical ally has been Lee Lewis, theatre fireball and artistic director of the Griffin Theatre Company, the only company that specialises in newly written Australian plays, and which runs the competition.
The count of federal and state government ministers at the events is also high. John has been scrupulously bipartisan with the foundation board and in courting support. "He is very good at bringing people together," says Patricia.
But three other people hover over this table as we eat.
There's Sir James Martin, three times Premier of NSW between 1863 and 1872 – and the amateur classicist who built Sydney's copy of the Lysicrates monument in Athens for his own garden in 1870, before it was moved to the Botanic Garden in 1940. (The original of the monument was put up by the wealthy producer and sponsor Lysicrates on Tripodon Street in Athens to celebrate his own big win at the Dionysia in 334BC.)
First real cultural leader
Then there is the early 20th-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and the ancient Greek playwright Menander.
Martin was the son of an Irish horse groom at Government House in Parramatta, who walked and hitch-hiked 21 kilometres to school each day at what's now Sydney Grammar, to become a ferocious journalist, a campaigner for colonial self-rule, and the first Australian-trained barrister. "He was Sydney's first real cultural leader," says Patricia, "but he had all the cards stacked against him."
Martin, for both of them, seems the real hero of this story. His walk to school has inspired a children's version of the competition, the Lysicrates Martin Prize to be held at Parramatta's Riverside Theatre early next year. John and Patricia believe that unrepeatable live theatre will appeal to a generation raised on iPads.
Martin was repeatedly blackballed at the Australian Club, and the Governor's wife kept him away from receptions at Government House. "He was an Irish force of nature," says John, "but the English system meant that doors were closed to him, but not bolted – he could push them open."
The ancient Athenians too had a genius for absorbing talent from their colonies and their diaspora, I say.
"It is why the Greek civilisation lasted so long," says John, who was born into the Greek world of the melting pot city of Alexandria. So was Cavafy, the poet that John and Patricia have translated for two editions of the book that accompanies the prize.
"Cavafy is clear, profound and short," says Patricia. But the real reason for including him is that he represents a vanished world, and a reminder to everyone, says John, "that when a society is gone, it's their scribblers that are left."
Greek playwright Menander also risked vanishing for good though, as father of Western comedy he created stock characters like the crafty servant and the grumpy old man that we know well. His sole surviving complete play, The Curmudgeon, was discovered only in 1952. "It was crying out to be performed," says John. For the first time in many centuries, it was put on at Sydney University in 1958 – the couple have even managed to track down one of the players, now in his eighties.
Giving back
John and Patricia are a living history of the Mediterranean. His family was forced out of Egypt after the 1956 Suez crisis, their import business seized from them. Her mother was a descendant of medieval Spanish Jews who had fled, first to Izmir and then to Cairo. There, she met Patricia's Anglo-Irish father and came to Australia in 1948; French was the common language at home. Patricia's family story became her PhD thesis after she discovered her mother had, until after her death, made a secret of her first husband, an Italian anti-fascist who volunteered as an agent for the British only to be caught and executed.
"John does this as a way of giving back to the country that has been so kind to him," says Patricia. As an adopted Australian, he seems driven by bringing in old wisdom and giving it an Australian identity, much as their colonial patriot hero James Martin did with Greek myth and English law.
Neither of them are from the silver spoon class of philanthropists: Patricia got to Oxford and Princeton as a young woman only because of scholarships. That guides their own contributions to the project. "It's smart money, you would call it in business, judiciously deploying some money to make sure that things happen," says John.
Martin's great replicated monument and the Menander performance show Australia's long pedigree in classics. But Patricia stresses that it's modern Australia's real depth in writing, acting and theatre skills that are making the competition work. "I always knew the talent was there," she says. "The small companies are brilliant."
So where did the Athenians get the urge to start acting out their moral dilemmas and social problems – murder, incest, infanticide; all the worst things that could happen – in front of each other? No other society had been so self-reflective before.
The theatre started as ritual to worship Dionysus, explains John. But then the Athenians extended it to human purposes, and made the things they raised in drama into part of their already noisy democratic debates and to reinforce their wider sense of community.
It was important, says Patricia, that Greek theatres "were not serried ranks, but had everyone facing each other while these events acted out". In the end, says John, the Greeks could not imagine their civilisation without theatre.
The Lysicrates Prize performances are theatre in the raw. No costumes, few props, and only the skills of the actors to make up for the few days of preparation they get. From 2018, they will be live-streamed as well. That makes the event even more democratic, and will help give the theatre event the visibility that the Archibald Prize has in portraiture.
It has to please an audience
Most of all, it is not a little cabal that decides the winner," says John. Playwrights know that they are not writing for critics with their academic and stylistic tastes. "It has to please an audience, that's the KPI" – a key performance indicator, says John lapsing into Deloitte-speak for a moment. But when I ask the hard-nosed tax lawyer over tea if taxpayers should subsidise art – middle-class welfare, perhaps – they both get positively animated.
"Sure," says Patricia: "if you start from the position that many subsidise the pleasures of the few, then it can only be unfair." But, she argues, the London Proms, the Domain opera, and New York's free classical concerts are all examples of how, if great art is made affordable, people will flock to it. "And even if people don't attend, in all civilised societies some sections of the community subsidise others. If we pay for the well-being of people through Medicare or the NDIS, what's so objectionable about enriching the people's cultural or emotional life?
"It's a form of discrimination and reinforcement of inequality if we keep people out of great art through high ticket prices, or even poor access to good teachers," she says.
John says that the Lysicrates competition is made possible by both private donors and public funds, and has the support of both major parties and a bipartisan board. The events are free: "It makes great art available to all, and it's thrilling and meaningful."
That is the Athenian model, he says, with drama festivals financed by both the city and by private backers like Lysicrates. The lesson from the inventors of democracy, John continues, is that art is for the demos, the people, not the rulers. Art is us.
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Sydney playwright Brooke Robinson has won the audience vote at the 2020 Lysicrates Prize Event for her play “Deoxyribo-Whatever Acid”, in the presence of Australia’s Governor-General, His Excellency Gen. David Hurley, AC DSO, and his wife, Her Excellency Mrs Linda Hurley, patron of The Lysicrates Foundation.
Statue by the Lysicrates Foundation stands proudly in Martin Place, Sydney
James Martin Institute: New independent public policy institute launched for NSW
CODA: You have a right to your madness. We live in a mad world, and sometimes we have to lose our minds in order to find them, we have to be weak in order to understand the importance of resilience and strength. Every day I constantly have to remember to be patient with myself through this beautifully challenging process. We are all Cold War Spies and Warriors.