HELMUT BAKAITIS
PLAYWRIGHT DIRECTOR ACTOR


Helmut Bakaitis speaking at the
opening of the NIDA complex
in 2002
Helmut Bakaitis, the current Head of Directing at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), has written, directed and produced many plays. It all started in 1959 when he was 15 years old, a student at Fort Street High School, Sydney and played Hamlet in a school play. The play was so successful that it was made into a film. Suddenly an acting career reared its head for him. However, he preferred writing plays to acting, and by the time he was a teenager he had written 10 dramas and as a young adult 10 more, which, in hindsight, he considers to be frightful. Nonetheless, he still writes plays and considers having written 10 successful ones. Furthermore, he translates plays from French and German into English having mastered all three languages. To further his career as a dramatist he enrolled at NIDA to gain an insight into acting - a necessary quality for a good playwright. After graduation in 1965, he started a company with Jim Sharman and staged and directed plays, sometimes written by him. Then followed seven years with the Melbourne Theatre Company as an actor and head of the youth workshops. From this period dates his successful play for teenagers The Incredible Trial of Jack Smith. Together with Jim Sharman, he also wrote a film script Shirley Thompson versus the Aliens and became involved with the Old Tote Company, later the Sydney Theatre Company.

Helmut Bakaitis - Playwright,
Director, Actor
He spent several years in Adelaide as co-director of the Youth Festival, Come Out, where he successfully staged his play Carlotta and Maximilien that had a cast of 200 young people. Then followed a period of three years in England, where he completed a post-graduate diploma in Drama and Education at Newcastle-on-Tyne University and established youth programs for young people at risk in the inner London areas. On his return to Melbourne, he was offered the position of founding Artistic Director of the St Martin’s Youth Arts Centre, Melbourne, where he worked for the next 5 years. At the end of this period of exhausting work, he was told on doctors orders "to take it easy". Nonetheless, he accepted the directorship of the New Moon Company in Cairns. But the latter was not easy. After 3 years he came back to Sydney and worked as a freelance director and actor. To quote his own words: ".. as an actor I was the victim of every director’s prejudice. With my name Helmut Bakaitis I had some difficulties, and experienced discrimination...".

Helmut Bakaitis next to a NIDA poster
That spurred him to accept the directorship of the Q Theatre at Penrith, Sydney where he worked for the next 7 years. And finally he was invited to take up the post as Head of Directing at NIDA. Bakaitis now directs and stages plays with NIDA students that are varied in their dramatic form and content, ranging from Ancient Greek tragedies to comedies of manners. The polished staging and competent performance by the young actors vouch for his achievements as an inspired and creative teacher who brings out the best in his students. The stage settings and imaginative costumes produced by the students on a restricted budget add to the enjoyment of the plays. The Curse of the House of Atreus by John Barton (1998), Le Legs and La Dispute by Pierre Marrivaux (1999) - in Bakaitis’ translation from the French original, Glory by Jennifer Compton (1999), The Ugly Man by Brad Fraser (2000), a Techno-Rock version of Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare (2001), and Goodnight Children Everywhere by Richard Nelson (2001) are a few of the successful plays that he directed in the last four years. In the play Glory, Bakaitis had a cameo role portraying a forceful and domineering character. In view of his acting talent it sounds somewhat ironic that he wanted to become a playwright and not an actor.
However, Bakaitis’ full acting potential was revealed in Richard Foreman’s avant-garde play My Head was a Sledgehammer. It is a non-conventional play, without a delineated plot, without well-realised characters and without conventional drama possibilities, like scenes and acts. It is a play in which philosophical ideas of truth-relativity, reality-possibilities, tensions, sex, emotional and intellectual impotence are thrown from one actor to the other and ...yes, at the public at such a furious pace, that it is difficult to grasp their implications. It helped to have read the author’s intention in writing this play and how it should affect the audience in the program notes. Richard Foreman is quoted as saying:
"The spectator’s question should not be: ‘What does the play mean?’ The question should be. ‘In response to which of the world’s possibilities and tensions is the play created?’ That is it's meaning."

Helmut Bakaitis with parents 2002
Being a non-conventional play it puts great demands on the cast of three actors - a professor played by Bakaitis, his two students and three players of short stature who underscore and extend the actions of the principal actors. The cast played well, for the pace of repartees often charged with metonymic or double meanings and frequent echoing of bits of phrases was bewildering. Barbs and taunts interspersed with political, religious, sexual cliches and music were delivered at lightning speed. Then again moments of complete silence and immobility were charged with explosive tension that left the public on tenterhooks. Then, suddenly they were broken by acrobatic feats and musical fragments - similar to Brechtian alienation effects. One could only describe the scene as a well-orchestrated chaos. The acting was so effective and smooth that there wasn’t the slightest hesitation or lapse in concentration throughout the performance. Bakaitis was, however, excellent in his role as the aging professor. Changes of his facial expressions, gestures, body positions, agility and his ability to dominate space were excellent. Added to that he has a well-trained voice that he modulates at will: a raucous sarcastic laughter one minute changes into a pitiful whimper the next and back into a normal, ingratiating or sharp tone. His portrayal of the professor was so convincing that Bakaitis the man ceased to exist until the final curtain call. That is truly the mark of a great actor.
Helmut Bakaitis Directs Too Young for Ghosts At NIDA in 2005
It is stated in the program of the play Too Young for Ghosts by Janis Balodis that it is "... the first major Australian play to deal with post-war immigration. It parallels the story of the explorer Ludwig von Leichhardt with the arrival of a group of displaced people (DP’s) from war ravaged Europe." This statement should be expanded and it should be explained, that Too Young for Ghosts is the first part of Balodis’ epic trilogy The Ghost Story. The two other parts are: No Going Back and My Father’s Father.
The playwright, Janis Balodis, has written articles, essays, cinema scenarios, and twelve plays for the stage. He has received several awards for his literary output. Too Young for Ghosts was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award - Best Play in 1985. The play was staged in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane and in 2005 by the NIDA Head of Directing, Helmut Bakaitis, with his Third Year Acting Students and the contribution of NIDA’s Design and Production Students in Sydney, 2005.
The director, Helmut Bakaitis, maintains that he found several reasons for staging a play about displaced persons. He felt an ethnic bond with the playwright. The author’s parents came from Latvia and his from Lithuania - two kindred small nations sharing their Indo-European descent and language in Northern Europe. Furthermore, he felt an emotional bond with the people who shared a common fate, by leaving their countries before the onslaught of the returning Soviet armies and becoming displaced persons in European camps. They had to start a new life elsewhere.
This second reason parallels Ludwig von Leichhardt’s exploration of Northern Queensland. There is also a third, perhaps not so obvious, underlying reason why these displaced persons and the Australian explorer Leichhardt, in particular, had a common trait. Leichhardt received financial support from William Nicholson to come to Australia and to explore hinterland routes. The displaced persons also received an assisted passage from the Australian government, for which they had to fulfil a two year work contract wherever they were sent. This parallelism was an interesting, but a difficult task, for the director to portray in the play. Too Young for Ghosts has two acts and fifteen scenes.

Helmut Bakaitis
The scenes are constantly changing - from displaced persons’ camps in the American zone in Stuttgart, Germany, to Leichhardt’s journey from Brisbane to Port Essington in the Northern Territory and back again to a group of young Latvian DP’s arriving in the Australian sugar cane fields in Queensland.
It was, therefore, essential that costumes (several actors played double roles) and set changes were reduced to a minimum. This was very ingeniously achieved by using the same stage sets, props and lighting for all three locations and adding a slight change in actors’ outfits. The NIDA Design and Production students can be proud of their perceptive problem resolution.
The director aimed at identifying, juxtaposing and opposing the aims and goals of the explorer, the members of his expedition and the young DP’s. He accentuated their reaction to the unfamiliar landscape, people, customs and language.
The director wisely kept broken English and Leichhardt’s unmistakable German accent to a minimum - just enough to give the play an additional ethnic flavour. His choice of actors playing double roles - young Latvians and Leichardt, Australians and/or American GI’s - highlighted the common human moral traits, values and underscored the duality of human nature, its human and animal instincts. The director brought out positive sentiments and feelings, but didn’t shy away, albeit in a more subdued form, from portraying the darker side of human nature: black market dealings, selfishness, racism, rape and murder. Overshining these opposite poles was the common theme in the two parallel strands of the Latvian displaced persons and Leichhardt’s expedition. Both parties are exploring a new continent; both are hoping to find deserved rewards. This forward looking quality the director symbolically accentuated in Ilse’s late stages of pregnancy, as well as in her steadfast belief in a future life and Leichardt’s optimism and expectation of fame and handsome rewards in the future.
The Third Year NIDA Acting Students under the taut direction of Helmut Bakaitis played their roles and dual roles with competency. Their interplay was well coordinated. Some actors mastered the pauses in actions and in delivering their lines more confidently than others. However, this is a gradually acquired quality that comes with greater stage experience. On the whole, it was a well thought out, faithfully interpreted and well directed play about periods in Australian history that have rarely been explored.


Isolde Poþelaitë - Davis AM