The Ishmael Club

The Ishmael Club is a play centred around a mock gentleman’s club of the same name, where artistic types hung out in the heart of Melbourne around the time of 1884-1915, making fun of everything and everyone. It focusses on Norman Lindsay, remembered mostly for The Magic Pudding and some risqué nudes, and Will Dyson.

A talented cartoonist, Dyson became very politically motivated after spending time in London, his work became directed towards the socialist movement that was happening in pre-WW1 in Britain. Together with Lindsay’s sister, Will, and his wife Ruby Lind, they had a certain notoriety.

“They were the avant-garde, really into Italian restaurants and German romantic influences. In 1890 it was the done thing, if you didn’t have bad garlic on your breath you weren’t a real artist. The avant-garde did bohemian cheap living, scraping by”, explains Jasper Garner Gore, who plays Norman Lindsay. “The play centres around… Mrs Maggie, who owned the café where the Ishmael Club used to meet. [She] tells the story, she frames the play.”

“It’s a play about the loss of innocence, the tension in Australia in The Arts, between populists and elitists, Lindsay who was an elitist in his politics and his art, and Dyson who was a Democrat and a Socialist,” says Jasper.

“My parents, Bill Garner and Sue Gore, are the original playwrights of The Ishmael Club, and they asked me if I was interested in putting the play on,” explains Jasper, who saw their original production when he was 16. “My Dad discovered that Ted Dyson, Will’s brother, had actually owned the property that we lived in, in St Kilda. He did some research and came onto the story of Will, his sister Ruby Lind, and the relationship with Norman Lindsay. It was happenstance,” he concludes. (MS)

July 7-18. The Old Fitz Theatre, 129 Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo. $22. Bookings & info: www.oldfitztheatre.com/ishmael-club/