Nick Enright OAM 1950-2003

At the end of 1977 Enright returned to Australia. From 1978 until 1981 he was assistant and
then associate director at the South Australian Theatre Company (later the State Theatre Company of South Australia) during one of its busiest and most productive eras. One of his first assignments was Royal, a four-times-a-day variety extravaganza staged at the Adelaide Showgrounds to honour the centenary of the founding of the city’s much-loved Theatre Royal, which had been demolished in 1962.

In April 1979 the ABC aired Enright’s delightfully whimsical radio play The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet, with music by Vincent Plush. Six months later came Enright’s ebullient musicalisation of Goldoni’s knockabout commedia dell’arte masterpiece The Venetian Twins. With a score by Terence Clarke and a brilliant performance by Drew Forsythe, it was premiered by Nimrod at the Sydney Opera House on 26 October 1979. It has since enjoyed countless professional and amateur revivals, and the mock ‘hometown’ song ‘Jindyworobak’ never fails to stop the show. The following year Enright wrote another musical, On the Wallaby, set in the outback during the Great Depression. In 1982 he wrote the lyrics for Fatal Johnny, ‘a fairy tale without fairies, but with little children’ presented by Ariette Taylor’s Australian Dance Theatre for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, and also in Adelaide.

For a while Enright’s seemingly limitless energy was split three ways: directing, writing, teaching. Direction lost. His Measure for Measure for the Sydney Theatre Company in 1986 was his last directorial credit. In 1983 Enright headed the Acting Course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, but after a couple of years he sacrificed the position and the regular income it provided to concentrate on his real love, writing for performance – musicals, plays, radio drama, even special ‘party pieces’ for his friends. He wrote the musicals Variations (1982) and Summer Rain (1983) with Terence Clarke and Orlando Rourke (1985) with Alan John, but there was no second Venetian Twins. Real success eluded Enright for most of the 1980s, but the drought broke in 1989 with two triumphs – the multi award winning ABC television series Come in Spinner, set in wartime Sydney, and the modern comedy Daylight Saving.

Enright had also developed extraordinary skills as a translator and adaptor. His achievements included Sophocles’ Electra (with Frank Hauser, 1978), Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters (with Ron Blair, 1978), Oh What a Lovely War, Mate (an Australianisation of Joan Littlewood’s original, 1979), Gozzi’s King Stag (1980), Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro (1983), Molière’s Don Juan  (1984), Hans Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1985), Euripedes’ The Trojan Women (1989) and the Offenbach operetta La Périchole (for the Australian Opera, 1993). And he returned occasionally to radio, most notably with Ship Without a Sail – The Songs of Lorenz Hart (1985) and Watch over Israel (1990).