Sharman, shaman, showman

Jim Sharman and Rex Cramphorn (a future artistic director of Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre) first met at NIDA in the 1960s, and Sharman returned there as a tutor in the 1970s. He was then a ‘radical populist’, while Cramphorn was scholarly, mad about Racine and Corneille. But they agreed that theatre was a vocation, and shared a ‘crypto-mystical’ interest in the slippery relationship between reality and illusion. They would set up a short-lived theatre company at the Paris Theatre (later demolished), and mount two premières of Australian plays, Dorothy Hewett’s Pandora’s Cross (1978) and Louis Nowra’s Visions (1979).