`Art' in Australia: why it's causing a row

Australians are angry that Britain's Tom Conti is starring in the hit comedy, reports Rosanna de Lisle

The hit comedy Art opened in Sydney last week, but the Australian theatre industry is not amused. The sticking-point is not the funniness of the play, which has consistently had audiences rolling since it opened in London in 1996. Nor do Australians object to the idea of a play about male friendship: "mateship" is revered as a central component of Aussie culture. The problem is Marc, the character who splits his spleen when his old friend Serge spends 200,000 francs (pounds 20,000) on an all-white painting. For Marc is played by Tom Conti, the British star of films such as Shirley Valentine and last seen on the London stage last Christmas in Jesus, My Boy.

Conti arrived in Sydney a month ago to find himself the subject of a storm of protest from the local actors' union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), which incorporates Australian Equity. Nineteen actors from the Sydney Theatre Company wrote a letter complaining about Conti's casting, arguing that the role should have gone to an Australian.

The Sydney Art is a co-production between the government-subsidised Sydney Theatre Company and two commercial producers, Sports and Entertainment Ltd and the Gordon/Frost Organisation. STC is the minor partner - its stake is 15 per cent - but Art is part of its subscription season and, according to the 1993 Live Theatre Agreement, productions in the STC's subscription season should feature only local actors.

The producers of Art claim that they did set out to find an all- Australian cast, and only approached Conti late in the day. "We looked for three big-name Australian actors," says John Frost of the Gordon/Frost Organisation, "And a year ago, we thought we had a cast - Jack Thompson, John Doyle and John Waters. But it turned out they weren't available."

The producers tried to sign up Bryan Brown, Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh, all household names in Australia, "but ran up against one particular obstacle: Fox Studios, the new Sydney outpost of Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century-Fox. Since Fox Studios opened, Australian agents have become very protective of their clients. All the actors you'd want are waiting for elusive deals with Fox and their agents aren't putting them forward for other thing ... I made the decision to import."

But MEAA claims that on top of ignoring the convention that subsidised theatre is "an import-free zone", the producers of Art broke regulations on "labour-market testing", the immigration rule that states that employers must make certain provable efforts to appoint an Australian before offering a job to a foreigner. "They'd approached hardly any agents," asserts the union's Lynn Gailey. When the cast was announced, the union moved to stop Conti's appointment. "I thought Equity's objection was absolutely outrageous," says Frost. "So I fought it."

Meanwhile, Australian actors making names for themselves in London include Nicole Kidman (in last year's hit The Blue Room), and Cate Blanchett, who has just opened in the Almeida's Plenty. "I think it's a disgrace," Frost complains. "There should be a free transfer of artists between countries. You've Hugh Jackman in Oklahoma!, and you've just had Adam Garcia and Anita Louise Coombe in Saturday Night Fever - as the stars. And if you go through the choruses of all the musicals in the West End, you'll find two or three Australians in each."

If Art does well in Sydney, the producers will take it to Melbourne and then Adelaide and Brisbane. The show will have to be recast, as Conti and David Wenham, who plays Ivan, the fence-sitting friend, already have other commitments.

The union expects the next cast to be Australian, but the producers may again defy convention. "I would be looking to replace Tom with another international star," says Frost. "We haven't heard that," says Gailey for the union. "We have been told that they would be recasting with Australian actors."

It looks as if this row - like Art itself - will run and run.