Elizabethan Theatre Trust

Elizabethan Theatre Trust, Australia, body founded in 1955 to mark the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Australia the previous year, and to establish the principle of government subsidies for the performing arts throughout the country. It was hoped that among its activities would be the training of young actors, the encouragement of promising young playwrights, and eventually the founding of an Australian National Theatre. Its initial preoccupation was however to provide touring companies covering the whole country, and with this in mind a Board of Trustees under Hugh Hunt took over the former Majestic Theatre in Melbourne (built in 1917 but later used as a cinema) as a base for the Trust's work. Renovated and redecorated, it opened as the Elizabethan Theatre in 1955 with a cast of guest artists from England in Rattigan's The Sleeping Prince. The Trust's own company, headed by Judith Anderson, made its début in Canberra the following Sept. in Euripides' Medea, and then embarked on a long tour. Among the new Australian plays presented by the Trust were Ray Lawler's The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Alan Seymour's play about Anzac Day The One Day of the Year, and Douglas Stewart's verse drama Ned Kelly. The Trust also had its own ballet and opera companies which later became autonomous; the theatre company was then disbanded and the subsidy work of the Trust largely taken over by what is now the Australia Council.