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Reviews of A Leader of his Craft

Living in Melbourne… I never knew much about the legendary Sydney Morning Herald theatre critic H.G. Kippax, except that he was feared, and wrote beautifully cadenced, often quite erudite prose that cultivated his sorrow, his anger and his narrow hope. His duty, he said, was to the discussion, the public debate, and he contributed assiduously on his own, unfashionably conservative but formidable terms…

Reading these gorgeous pieces of dramatic writing, some as elegiac as poems, you sense [he] was sustained by a modest sense of serving dramatic art, preserving a hope for culture through the sustaining of standards and, in resisting the commercially gross and deceitful, holding the way open for the shapely and the true… It was like sneaking a look through someone’s hidden love letters; his devotion to theatre was really a private, almost sensual pleasure. As I closed the book I felt despondent that those days of special intensity, considerate critical enquiry and deep friendships have gone and will never return.
Graeme Blundell, Limelight, December 2004 

Kippax’s principles and judgements are integral to a history of theatre in Australia for the past 50 years. Reread, his reviews are not only a parade of fair judgements but an unbroken record of benevolent cheering for theatre in this country.

His enthusiasms were very enthusiastic indeed. Beckett, in 1986, was ‘the world’s greatest dramatist’, ‘Hedda [Gabler] stands to our century as Hamlet did to the Renaissance. [Judy] Davis shows us how and why.’ He was acute on individual dramatists—always stimulating on Shakespeare, but equally so on Oscar Wilde—‘all is high seriousness. So it must be, if we are to have high comedy…Mr Collingwood’s cast act as though they re in Ibsen—as well they might be if you attend to the subject matter of their conversation. Death, taxes, the class system, money, marriage, morality, religion, education, culture…’ Kippax’s theatrical literacy, his individualised thoughtfulness, his courtesy and his sense of a journalist’s vocation (giving a ‘report’ to the community) were what marked his work. He had a range and was forever a gentleman.
Gerard Windsor, Australian Financial Review, 3 December 2004

Kippax drew up his own templates and charted his own course…He was witness to—and enthusiastic supporter of—the flowering of an Australian voice and vernacular in the ’70s. And finally, he became a living repository of that which had come and gone but left its mark on the modern Australian imagination, the tribal elder in whose head was the lore and legend of his lifetime…It’s a history of a time, a style and a town in transit from sleepy colonial past to dynamic and—sometimes—independent city. Kippax’s own style remains a constant. ..He was a critic of conviction and integrity, old-fashioned concepts, for sure, but their time will come again. The book is aptly titled.
Diana Simmonds, The Weekend Australian, 4–5 December 2004