STC's John Preston retires

After more than 600 productions and almost 27,000 performances, the Sydney Theatre Company's production manager John "JP" Preston is retiring, aged 71. Photo: Peter Rae/SMH

By Elissa Blake

In the nearly 40 years John “JP” Preston has worked for the Sydney Theatre Company, he hasn’t set foot on a live stage once. Not even accidentally.

“There is a tradition in the theatre for us backstage people that if you get caught on stage during a show, you owe the company a slab of beer,” says Preston. “It’s called getting slabbed.”
To this day, the one and only time he ever appeared in front of an audience was in a boy scout show at Rockdale Town Hall. He was 12. “My mother spent ages making me this kangaroo costume. When I hit the stage I was so scared that instead of hopping around in a circle, I bolted across the stage from one side to the other and my parents didn’t even see me.”

Yesterday, Friday April 21, was Preston’s official last day at the office as Production Manager, supervising set building, prop making and scenic art. His work contract was signed on the same day the STC was formed: December 11, 1978. Over 600 productions and nearly 27,000 performances later, he’s retiring aged 71.

With the Wharf theatres closing for a $60m makeover in 2018 and the company moving to temporary accommodation on the Fox Studios lot in Moore Park, Preston reckons this is the time to go.

“My ego wanted me to hold out to December 11, 2018. The company would be 40 and I would have been at the company 40 years,” he says. “I like to round the numbers off. But I think this is a good place to end for me. I was asked to oversee the move to Fox but nah … I remember what it was like moving the company into this place and we have so much more stuff now.”

Everyone at the STC knows JP and he knows everyone, including the waiters in the restaurant where we sip tea and coffee before taking a backstage tour. He is clearly much-loved.

“My parents always said to me when I was first starting out that I should always treat people the way I expected to be treated myself,” Preston says. “Saying please and thank you will get you miles more than being demanding. That’s the way I’ve applied my management skills. They are like my family, these people in here …”

JP’s eyes mist over. “I’m getting all upset now,” he says.

Preston began his backstage career with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1969. He had just finished his army service and had trained in carpentry.

“I was thrown in with these blokes I thought were really old men. The head carpenter was an ex-Spitfire pilot,” he recalls. “I was only 23 but they mentored me and they taught me the culture as it was then. These were men who’d worked in the vaudeville theatres and back then they would do scene changes in three or four theatres in Sydney on the same night, running from one to the next. I really treasure that experience now.”

Preston helped build the sets for what were, at that time, some of the most technically advanced productions Australia had seen; the Harry M. Miller blockbusters Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. After leaving the Trust in 1973, Preston worked for Miller’s Scenery Centre, then based in an old jam factory in Paddington. From there, Preston moved to The Old Tote. His first production was Patrick White’s Big Toys in 1977. The following year, the Tote went into liquidation and from that, the Sydney Theatre Company was born.

Preston worked on the STC’s first production, Patrick White’s A Cheery Soul. When the STC moved into its current home on Pier 4/5 at Walsh Bay, Preston was there on day one.

In fact, he was there before day one. Building a revolve for a production of Chicago, Preston and his team cut the chain on the padlock and moved in like squatters. “Pigeon poo was everywhere, it was unbelievable,” he says. “But we urgently needed the extra space to lay out the sets.”

He still loves the place, he says. “It’s cold in the winter and hot in the summer but the beauty of it is being able to open up the big double doors in the workshop and let the air and natural light in. It makes it a pleasure to work here.”

Preston’s favourite shows? “Nicholas Nickleby,” he says, without hesitation. “She Stoops to Conquer, I loved working on, and Arms and the Man. But I’ve always loved the musicals - A Little Night Music, Chicago, Company and especially Into the Woods, that was massive. Victory with Colin Friels and Judy Davis, that still resonates with me even now. And I’ll never forget the moment in Caesar and Cleopatra when John Waters would carry Robyn Nevin on to the stage wrapped in a carpet and unroll her at Caesar’s feet. It was magical.”

Much has changed backstage over the decades Preston has worked at the STC. Computer design and cutting equipment and 3D printing have revolutionised the business of putting a designer’s ideas on to the stage, he says. “It’s made things easier in some ways, a lot more efficient, but I do yearn for the old designs sometimes. In the 60s and 70s a lot of the scenery was there to trick the eye with perspective in painted backdrops. It was very clever. Now design is going mainly for realism. Film and television has brought that kind of design to the stage. A lot of the designers might disagree with me completely but that’s how I see it.”

Preston isn’t a big fan of empty black box shows, either. “Backstage, we don’t like to see them too often because we start to worry they might start cutting staff,” he says. “A little bit of paranoia kicks in. We all suffer from it.”

Preston says he’s looking forward to spending more time at home with his wife Christine and a new beagle puppy Bonnie. But he knows he’s going to miss the company, the onstage and offstage dramas too.

“Sometimes you want to wring people’s necks and sometimes people create heartache with their personal issues, and I get cranky when I see injustice in the workplace,” he says. “There have been times I’ve gone home and thought, that’s it, I’ve had enough. But mostly it has been fantastic. We bitch about the company on the inside, but we are very protective. It’s like a family and you always look after the family.”

This story was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald on April 21, 2017.