Ab-Intra Studio Theatre

Amateur dramatic company in Adelaide, founded in 1931 by Kester Baruch and Alan Harkness. Closed 1935. venues North Terrace. King William Street South. first production Demon's Mask translated by Arthur Waley, 23 December 1931. Cast: Alan Harness, Kester Baruch. Choroegraphy: Mina Bauer. landmark productions The Poetasters of Ispahan by Clifford Bax and Suilven and the Eagle by Gordon Bottomley, July 1934.

During the Great Depression Alan Harkness and Kester Baruch founded Ab Intra – Latin meaning ‘from within’ – and gave a new visual emphasis to theatrical production in Adelaide. Harness, an actor, had been trained as a painter and he believed in visual communication with an audience. Baruch was a writer and lighting designer. They also improvised living quarters and a workshop. In a larger space on the ground floor, coffee was served during intervals. 

Baruch devised lighting and scenic effects, and Harkness was designer and director. Both men also acted. Other actors included Agnes Dobson, Patricia Hackett and Robert Helpmann. There were also dancers – Mina Bauer, Walter Dasborough and Joan Joske from Melbourne. Ab Intra, operating as a club, mostly presented one-act plays or dramatisations of poems by European writers. Its first production, Demon’s Mask, was a one-act Japanese noh play. In August 1931 they presented another, The Robe of Yama, after a year’s preparation. It had music especially written by Spruhan Kennedy, and created an appropriate sensation. Douglas Loan wrote in Town Topics magazine that in its Oriental splendour and visual symbolism the production’s ‘sheer plunge into the icy waters of unorthodoxy’ left him breathless. ‘Every movement of the finger is a lyric poem in itself’, he write. ‘Ab Intra is not a hothouse of fanatics…whatever be its faults – and there are many – it cannot be fairly accused on being a stunt.’

Much of the company’s work included dance and mime, sometimes to the accompaniment of poetry. There is a vivid account of the style in Lilias Gordon’s down-to-earth review in Adelaide Truth: ‘How on earth Kester Baruch and Alan Harkness achieve their lightning effects with the aid of ingenuity and jam tins, would earn then positions with any electric power company. Joan Joske makes up her dances as she goes. There are time when she looked like an Egyptian traffic cop, and there are others when she appears like an underwater shot of Undine. There is something strange and almost terrifying in her lean brown hands and arms, that are as sinuous as a Javenese dancer’s…’.

Ab Intra’s repertoire had a strong symbolist bias. It included plays by Leonid Andreyev, Clifford Bax, Jacques Copeau, Nikolai Evreinov, Luigi Pirandello, August Strindberg and Thornton Wilder. Late in 1934 Ab Intra and Patricia Hackett’s Torch Theatre joined in a season of short classics. In 1934 Ab Intra produced two long plays, The House into Which We Are Born by Copeau and Martine by Jean-Jacques Bernard. In March 1935 Baruch and Harkness gave two benefit performances in the home of the Lady Mayoress, Mrs J.L. Bonython, and then left for England.