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Rex Roy Cramphorn (1941-1991) (sometimes known by the variant Cramphorne) was an Australian theatre director, active in the 1970s and 1980s

FREELANCE DIRECTOR AND THEATRE CRITIC Cramphorn was one of a generation of talented theatre directors who emerged in Australia in the 1960s. He aspired to establish a permanent Australian performance ensemble, multi-skilled and committed, such as had been done by the Polish theatre guru Jerzy Grotowski with whom he worked for a time, but there was not the population, the assured funding nor the interest in Cramphorn’s preference for non-commercial projects to achieve this. As a freelance director he was involved in some 55 theatre productions around Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. The best were said to be the equal of any Grotowski production; in others it was evident that Cramphorn seemed to demand almost as much of his audience as he did of his players. In a 1973 interview, Cramphorn described the kind of productions he hoped to create: -


 * I’m not interested in presenting the violence of life around me or its chaos and doubt. I’m interested, in a very simple-minded and romantic way, in things that confirm one’s faith in something – whether it be a thing as abstract as the skill of story-telling or whether it be a story like “The Tempest” about a personal and spiritual development.  The theatre that I like to see and I’d like to make is outside reality.  I’d like it to be an artistic whole, to have the kind of discipline that ballet and opera have.  So I think I work in reaction to the life around me.

As a theatre critic during the early 1970s, Cramphorn contributed 110 theatre reviews to several newspapers.

PRIVATE LIFE Many men and women fell for Cramphorn. His capacity for empathizing with actors, encyclopaedic knowledge especially of all things French , and “large pocket-Adonis” good looks prompted many to seek his personal commitment. Most remained his friends, however, long after he had persuaded them, gently, that they could be no more than that.

DEATH AND COMEMORATION Rex Cramphorn died in Sydney, 22 November 1991 of AIDS related causes, aged 50. Glowing tributes and obituary notices began to appear, in contrast to the faltering recognition Cramphorn had received in life. In them may be read assessments such as: -


 * this most intelligent, gentle and well-read of Australian directors
 * the only real philosopher the Australian theatre has produced
 * the Australian theatre has lost one of its most challenging and sensitive talents
 * that rare and important figure, a philosopher and visionary of the arts
 * the most formally innovative director this country has ever produced
 * the most original director of his generation, and certainly the most rigorous and uncompromising.

Among Rex Cramphorn’s effects were thirty boxes of papers which he bequeathed to the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Selections from this archive form the basis for Associate Professor Ian Maxwell's publication A Raffish Experiment – The Selected Writings of Rex Cramphorn, Currency Press Pty Ltd, 2009. A biennial $30,000 Rex Cramphorn Theatre Scholarship has been established by the New South Wales Government

An annual series of Rex Cramphorn lectures – a memorial set up by his friends and colleagues - was begun in 1995, Jim Sharman giving the first lecture.

A studio in the University of Sydney’s Centre for Performance Studies has been named in his honour (popularly known as “The Rex”).