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Actor, Composer, Director, and colleague, former Head of Directing, NIDA

I have been asked to speak of Kevin and words.

Like any good actor – and Kevin was a good actor: not all teachers of acting are – Kevin loved words. He loved reading; he loved books. He was never far away from a book. He never owned a car; in fact, I think he never even learned to drive. Driving would have robbed him of precious reading-time. Instead, he took – not taxis or Ûbers – but public transport. And read.

Although he won a place at Teachers’ College, it seems to me a pity that he never went to university, where his reading and diligence would surely have secured him honours. Educated in Catholic systemic schools, in – as he told me – classes of 50 and 60, he was really self-educated. A proud autodidact. ‘Autodidact’: a word I’m sure he relished.

That Teachers’ College time eventually paid off, not in the classroom, but in the studio, as a teacher of acting. He taught in formal classes, he taught as he directed in the rehearsal room, and even in the audition room. As director – and he was a fine director – he was thoroughly prepared, was knowledgeable about author, about previous productions, about historical context. He was devotedly faithful to the text, would not tolerate paraphrase or other inexactitude. And he was strict, not only about the playwright’s words, but the bits between them; always insisting that his actors pay scrupulous attention to punctuation. That struck me as ironic, as his own punctuation could be – well, idiosyncratic.

Soon after he started his blog of theatre criticism, I sent him an e-mail; in the title field I wrote, ‘How to end a friendship’; then offered to proofread his blog copy, to check the punctuation, and the occasional solecism or misuse of a word: despite his love of words sometimes his use of a word was … approximate. It was typical of his generosity that he was not offended, although he declined my somewhat pompous offer.

It was something of a disgrace that he was never invited to join the circle of Sydney critics who make the Sydney Theatre Awards. If a future historian wants to know what Sydney theatre was like in the early twenty-first century, Kevin’s blog will be required reading. Unlike most of our supposed theatre critics, he wrote both from the point of view of a theatre practitioner of great experience and as one who knew the canon thoroughly. His long-form reviews were often themselves educational, informed by a scholarly erudition – footnotes and all. One example. Of Belvoir’s 2013 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he tells us that, after the Broadway production, Tennessee Williams changed the ending – which of us knew that? He knew, of course. And he knew which version was being presented, though the program did not mention it. An edited selection of his blogs should be published.

I just said ‘he tells us’. Not ‘he told us’. Through that blog, Kevin Jackson – great teacher, theatre critic without equal – still speaks to us. Dear Kevin, you live on through your words.

– Terence Clarke