The big Steel

Anthony Steel. Picture: HEIDI WHO PHOTOS Source: The Advertiser

Current festival director Brett Sheehy pays tribute to his mentor, winner of this year's Ruby Award for lifetime achievement.

I first heard of Anthony in 1985 from my then-boss and mentor at Sydney Theatre Company, the late Richard Wherrett. He didn't know Anthony well, but remembered a dinner in Adelaide at which litres of red wine had been consumed. One of the guests, Anthony, had laughed so hard that his chair kicked backwards, throwing him to the floor. There he remained for a full minute, still laughing convulsively, before he resumed his seat. In Richard's book (one filled with a thousand such incidents of his own) this endeared Anthony to him for life.

My own first experience of Anthony was more sober. Richard and I had come to the 1986 Adelaide Festival to see the work of the New York-based theatre ensemble The Wooster Group, one of the many ground-breaking companies which made its Australian debut under Anthony's directorship.

Anthony was giving a speech, or maybe conducting a forum, I can't recall which, and he seemed fearless, formidable and impossibly articulate. He was also extremely glamorous, with a regal handsomeness, an aristocratic accent, and a retinue of younger women, many of them gorgeous, who seemed to follow him everywhere. At the time I wrote to a friend that "being director of Adelaide's festival must be the coolest job in the world".

That festival in 1986 was Anthony's fifth and final one for this city. It introduced Australia to the work of not only The Wooster Group but also the Rustaveli Company from Georgia in the Soviet Union, Jan Fabre and Gidon Kremer to name but a few. As a festival director, Anthony has premiered the work of more international artists and companies in Australia than any other.

It was during his respective tenures in the 1970s and 1980s that I believe this city's festival truly took its place among the world's finest. Anthony's programming was relentlessly sophisticated, eclectic, cultivated and erudite. He will loathe the expression, but his work is and always was "a class act", and his redoubtable qualities gave him a pulling power the Australian arts had not seen before.

Luring many of the greatest artists of the times - James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Stephen Spender, Michael Tippett, Alberto Moravia, Hans Werner Henze, Kurt Vonnegut, Wole Soyinka, Zubin Mehta, Antoni Miraldi, Kazuo Ohno, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray and dozens more - in person, on to our antipodean stages, was a Herculean accomplishment.

And he has been especially prescient in his artistic choices. Just one example - Laurie Anderson as well as Merce Cunningham and the late John Cage all appeared in Anthony's Adelaide Festivals.

Now 20 years and 30 years later respectively, the work of these three artists forms the foundation of the imminent 2007 Melbourne Festival.

In late March, 1986, I returned to my job at Sydney Theatre Company and vowed to return to Adelaide in 1988. Thanks to Anthony, I was hooked - a hopeless festival junkie.

In 1995, while still working at Sydney Theatre Company, I was headhunted for the role of Anthony's operations manager at Sydney Festival, which by then he was directing. I asked Anthony soon after I joined why he employed me. I was expecting a long, complimentary dissertation on my artistic and administrative strengths, my keen eye for art, my obvious leadership skills - my imagination was wild with hubris. His single-sentence, deadpan reply shocked me back to earth: "Because you're cheerful."

While I was underwhelmed at the time, it was my first important lesson of festival life - surround yourself with colleagues whose company you enjoy, and with whom you're happy to form a tight-knit team under the pressure-cooker conditions of a festival experience. The second lesson was don't fish for compliments.

Working on two Sydney Festivals with Anthony (1996 and 1997) was an apprenticeship to die for. He was inclusive to a fault, eager to teach and there was nothing about producing the performing arts he didn't grasp.

His team management had a tremendous impact on me. He surrounded himself with six type-A personalities, five of them heading a department - programming, production, sponsorship, marketing, finance - and me, the administrator.

Every Tuesday morning we seven would lock ourselves away for two hours and debate every significant issue the festival faced, across all fields. No one's opinion was irrelevant; everyone had their say should they wish. And out of this would come not the mediocrity of consensus - Anthony led decisively - but a judgment call by him, informed by thrillingly robust intellectual jousting. He remarked that our audiences had an opinion on everything, so why shouldn't we?

This gave us all a sense of ownership of every detail (even when we'd lost the argument), and it was a format I religiously applied five years later when I became chief executive and director myself.

He could also be tough. He drove the activity in the festival office relentlessly, moving through each department with a perfectionist's zeal and a headmaster's authority. I remember a host of withering stares when a colleague or I would complain that we hadn't received a response to an email, message or letter. The cool gaze was reinforced with a curt "Haven't you heard of the telephone", and many nights were spent calling around the world to finalise contract details or budget negotiations. You dared not report back the next day that you couldn't track down an agent in Buenos Aires or an artist in Lithuania; you kept going until you succeeded.

I surprised myself by enjoying this after-hours activity very much - even setting the alarm at 3am for New York lunch-time conference calls - and Anthony always stressed the importance of personal contact in working with artists and their managements.

Perhaps the trickiest of these negotiations concerned the Ballets Africains, a company Anthony had seen and loved in Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. We had almost finalised the contract when images came through of the international version of the show, then being presented on its European tour. The ensemble of stunningly beautiful, semi-naked female and male dancers was suddenly clothed in garish blue satin, an addition that displeased us all, but had been demanded by the puritanical European presenters.

I drew the short straw and was assigned the job of delicately informing the management that the satin tops had to come off. Anthony enjoyed my squirming, but the negotiations were a success. The production was staged in its original form to sell-out audiences in the Sydney Opera House.

The only dark cloud over Anthony's Sydney Festivals was the sometimes crippling lack of financial resources. Corporate sponsorship was minuscule and, through gritted teeth, Anthony would hit the hustings to drum up support. Even then, he refused to tap-dance, and after imperiously declaring to boardrooms full of CEOs and senior managers that "I suppose I'm here as exhibit A", our sponsorship director or I would desperately fill the conversational chasm that followed, covering for this aloof, slightly eccentric alien in the midst of bemused, hardcore corporate jocks.

Anthony also loves to encourage young talent. He has staffed his companies and festivals with generations of our best young arts workers and a little of the Steel magic has rubbed off on all of them. I know of directors and senior executives in arts and production companies, performing arts centres, festivals, opera houses, radio networks, publishing firms, film institutes and arts ministries across the nation and the world who have worked for Anthony and count him as a mentor. And I know hundreds of artists around the world who recall his contribution to their lives and work with relish, fondness and deep respect.

Last year Anthony wrote a long and thoughtful article about his concern that too much emphasis in the arts is being placed on box office, marketing and fund-raising, leading to risk-averse programming and safe, bourgeois art. He has told me that of all the festivals he has staged, his two finest were those which resulted in a deficit. As he has said: "Does history remember the deficit or does it remember the art?" In a climate in which discussions about the bottom line dominate nearly every arts boardroom across the country, it is a salient reminder.

After reading Anthony's article I researched my own backyard - of the 24 Adelaide Festivals to date, five have returned surpluses and 19 deficits.

In an "industry" (a word he loathes being applied to the arts) known for its occasional bitchiness and Schadenfreude, Anthony has retained a unique integrity and purity of judgment. I have never heard him be cruel or catty, I can't recall him ever speaking ill of someone behind their back. If this is a two-faced world, Anthony's gaze is head on, sometimes bluntly, but always directly.

Anthony left Sydney in 1998, and after a long geographic separation punctuated by overlapping schedules here and there, he and I renewed our friendship when I moved to Adelaide.

I'd always had a slightly formal relationship with him, a collision of awe and employee deference on my part, and English old-school propriety on his. I think we had shaken hands only a few times, and most of our greetings were awkward.

But the hugs, when they finally came, were those of a bear of a man - warm, strong and long. For friends who haven't experienced it, being hugged by Anthony is unforgettable and wonderful. I wish more of his hugs on everyone - we'd all be the better for it.

On reading this article, Anthony will quip that it sounds more like an obituary than a tribute, and he will scan it for split infinitives and grammatical catastrophes, of which there are no doubt many (or should that be "of which there are many no doubt"?).

On the "obituary" quip, I'll reply that his Dylan Thomas-ian "rage against the dying of the light" will sustain him for decades more; no septuagenarian is as full of passion and the juice of life as he.

And on his scanning for written errors, I'll remind him that one of the great joys of working with him was the fun we both had "correcting" my letters, his advice being always helpful, never cruel. Indeed, his command of the language and its written form is professorial and encyclopaedic.

In being awarded his first "lifetime achievement award", I and the Adelaide, South Australian, national and international arts communities wish him well, thank him for his astonishing, outstanding and incomparable contribution, and look forward to spotting his signature red-and-white baseball cap in foyers, auditoriums, galleries and concert halls for years and years to come.

Anthony Steel is Australia's most eminent and experienced festival director. He has directed five Adelaide Festivals, three Sydney Festivals, two Australian Theatre Festivals, two Brisbane Biennial Festivals of Music, the Coriole Music Festival, the 1988 Brisbane World Expo on Stage and the Singapore Festival. 
He advised the Tasmanian Government on the establishment of Tasmania's biennial arts festival and prepared the national report to the Federal Arts Minister on Australia's Confederation of International Arts Festivals. 
He has been general manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Adelaide Festival Centre, and management positions with the London Symphony Orchestra and London's South Bank Concert Halls. 
 Anthony's family founded the United Steel Companies Limited in the UK. He was educated at the exclusive Charterhouse school and read modern languages at Oxford for his MA. His first arts role was as general manager of London's Mozart Players.