Albie Thoms

Albie Thoms (July 28, 1941 – November 28, 2012) was an Australian film director, writer, and producer. He was born in Sydney, Australia. He was nominated for at the 1979 AFI Awards for Best Original Screenplay for Palm Beach. He is best known for his work with Ubu Films, the Sydney Filmmakers’ Co-operative, and the Yellow House. He died on November 28, 2012.

Theatre Productions: Thoms’ first production for SUDS was Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1962), followed by Harold Pinter’s [[The Dumb Waiter]] (1962). He then staged a production of his own devising, A Revue of the Absurd (1963), consisting of playlets, poems and performance pieces by such authors as Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jacques Prevert, N.F. Simpson, Edward Albee and Kenneth Koch. One of its items, Alfred Jarry’s The Song of the Disembraining was thought by the police to be obscene, but Thoms refused to remove it from the show and was summonsed to court, where he was successful in refuting the charge. A Revue of the Absurd was also staged in Melbourne as part of the Marlowe Society’s Theatre of the Absurd season, organised by Bill Wakler. Thoms’ next productions were Arrabal’s Fando and Lis and the Two Executioners (1963) for SUDS, after which he formed the Contemporary Theatre Company (CTC) with Arthur Hynes, and staged Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1963). Under the CTC banner, he also directed A Tribute to Jean Cocteau, and produced a Lunchtime Revue (directed by Hynes). Thoms then became manager of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s Lunchtime Theatre, which played in suburban shopping Malls, with productions of N.F. Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle, G.B. Shaw’s Overruled, and Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (all 1964). For SUDS 75th Anniversary celebrations, he directed Samuel Beckett’s Embers (1964), before embarking on a massive production of Theatre Of Cruelty (1965), which was developed and rehearsed over a six-month period. It involved applying the theories of Antonin Artaud, as expressed in his The Theatre and Its Double, to short plays, poems and performance pieces by such authors as Alfred Jarry, Oskar Kochoschka, Wassily Kandinski, F.T. Marinetti, Gertrude Stein, Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dali, And Jean Tardieu. It also included Happenings by Martin Sharp, and work from the La Monte Young and the New York Fluxus group, as well as work from Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz, who had been running Artaud workshops in London. It also included Australia first dramatic piece generated by an IBM1440 computer. Theatre of Cruelty represented Sydney at the 1965 Australian Universities Drama festival in Newcastle, where it underwent considerable modification and refinement.

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