Life's a Stage, Richard Gill

By Michael Quin

At the top of a stairway in an old bluestone hall, a character with glasses and unruly white hair – described by colleagues as ‘intense’, ‘brilliant’, even ‘mad’ – creates operas.

If Richard Gill’s story were set on stage his office could be the set: a cabinet-full of opera records, books titled Callas and 50 Greatest Operas, an Italian-English dictionary. Stage left a black piano with the music of Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, one of the most difficult operas to perform, waiting to be learnt.

And if Victorian Opera’s 67 year-old music director were a character, surely he could only be played by himself.

He’ll spend more than a year learning the intricacies of an opera before conducting the orchestra, and when it comes together there is no parallel.

“When it’s working, it’s heaven,” he says. “When it’s all going right and the music is wonderful and it’s absolutely joyous – it’s fantastic. It’s the most wonderful experience.”

But he’s more than a conductor. He selects the season’s repertoire, casts the singers and designers, and mentors young artists while actively campaigning about Australian education after years as a teacher.

When I meet him, the office is sweltering and he’s cursing an out-of-control heater.

If the opening scene for a play about him were not set here – with its intense atmosphere, ringing phones and collection of opera vinyls – it could be in the church at Sydney’s Convent of Mercy school.

The curtain rises to the sound of Gregorian chants, and a young Richard Gill singing in the choir. Mass, which he always saw as an occasion for theatre, was where he fell in love with the stage.

“It was in Latin and there were priests and altar boys in vestments, statues and flowers and incense, bells and smells and god knows what. And lots of boogie boogie. It was very theatrical and very dramatic and I loved it,” he says.

But it was a Catholic education of “brainwashing”, he says with more than a hint of bitterness.

“I hate it to death now, it was hideous,” he says. “I can see that I was seduced by it in one sense, but it was Catholicism in the bad old days and they screwed us up monumentally with guilt. The Jews invented guilt and the Catholics perfected it and my generation are riddled with guilt about everything.”

He excuses himself to open the door as the heat in the room has now become unbearable.

When he continues, he tells me the guilty pleasures of his youth weren’t so guilty at all. When he was suspected of being a ‘communist’ it was for singing Bob Dylan or Peter Paul and Mary songs.

“It was just coming into the age of hippies and we wore duffle coats and moccasins and drank black coffee and smoked cigarettes at night and got back at 10:00, can you imagine? And it was considered way out behaviour,” he says.

As a student he frequented Sydney’s only Italian wine bar, where Monday nights were spent drinking Manhattans and Martinis. Otherwise he could be found at the Savoy cinema watching “continental picture shows” like Virgin Spring, 8 1/2 or The Crucible, much to the horror of his parents.

“They used to use bad words like ‘fuck’ occasionally, and you would occasionally see love-making. There was no full-frontal nudity, but we were ‘depraved’. To go to those movies you were described as being ‘depraved’ and ‘degenerate’,” he says.

Beyond this he admits to never being much of a rebel. As he describes the bookish child with an overactive imagination who never stopped reading or wanting to learn, he’s instantly recognisable.

He sounds all his vowels to perfection and stresses Latin words the way lawyers and academics do. He can speak German and French or analyse Bach in a depth students describe as “mind-boggling”, and then there’s his knowledge of poetry, politics and education.

One conductor he mentors, Nicholas Carter, is convinced Richard’s read every book ever written.

“I’ve never met someone who knows so much about so many different things,” he says.
“It comes not only from years of experience, but also being almost manic in his strive for knowledge. If there’s stuff to be learnt he wants to know it. He’s not content to sit by and learn it another day or leave it to someone else to know.”

When asked to explain his prodigious creative energy, Richard brings it back to imagination, and credits radio with stimulating it.

Every Sunday in the 50s he’d listen to The Goon Show, then with a friend in the street, over the phone, even on buses and trains, he’d perform it for the whole week. Richard tells me that 60 years on, they still ring one another to do this.

The impersonation he offers involves a horrible shrill voice with the confident delivery from six decades of practice.

He sees dramatic material in everyday characters and loves eaves dropping on public transport for “juicy-cool conversations”.

“I find people really interesting and when I’m in a train or a tram, I study people. I look and I listen to conversations,” he says.

He breaks into another spontaneous impersonation. This time he’s a private school girl from the tram whose conversation, full of ‘f this’ and ‘f that’, he seems to thoroughly enjoy retelling.

Despite being 50 years too old and the wrong sex for the part, he gets swept up in the role for a moment.

Then, as if a curtain had fallen, she’s gone and the old opera director with messy white hair is back, and he tells me:

“Theatre is a way of getting in touch with reality.”