A Brilliant Mind, A Dangerous Legacy: Brian Lipson on A LARGE ATTENDANCE IN THE ANTECHAMBER

Theatre has long been a space for interrogating the figures history chooses to celebrate — and the ideas society once accepted without question.

In A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, performer and creator Brian Lipson resurrects the complicated legacy of Sir Francis Galton: inventor, statistician, cousin to Charles Darwin, and the controversial figure behind the pseudoscience of eugenics.

Set within Galton’s book-lined study, the production blends dark comedy, historical inquiry, and meta-theatrical playfulness to examine the uneasy intersection between intellect, prejudice, and the pursuit of “truth”. In an era often described as “post-truth”, the work revisits Galton’s legacy not as a distant historical curiosity, but as a lens through which to examine the enduring dangers of certainty, authority, and unchecked ideology.

At the centre is Lipson himself, whose performance invites audiences into the eccentric and unsettling mind of a man both brilliant and deeply flawed.

Brian is an acclaimed Australian theatre-maker whose work spans directing, writing, performance, and design. He trained in theatre design under Ralph Koltai at the Central School of Art before studying acting at East 15. Over several decades, he has collaborated with leading companies including the Old Vic, the Royal Court, Greenwich and the Gate, Notting Hill. His directing and design credits include The Harry Harlow Project at the Melbourne Arts Centre, which toured nationally, Song of the Bleeding Throat at the Eleventh Hour, and Photographs of A for MTC Neon. As a writer and director, he created Love, Death, Music and Plants: A Musical Infringement on the Life of Baron Ferdinand von Mueller for the Melbourne Botanic Gardens with Matthew Hindson, and Berggasse 19 – The Apartments of Sigmund Freud for the 2005 Melbourne Festival with Pamela Rabe. His celebrated self-devised work A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, first presented at The Royal Society in Melbourne and later touring internationally, returns in 2026 as part of RISING. In recognition of his contribution to Australian theatre, Lipson was awarded an Australia Council Fellowship in 2011.

What drew you to this particular theatrical form or structure for A Large Attendance in the Antechamber?

Brian: That’s a big question.  And I can give you a very long answer or a very short answer. The short answer is I came across this man, Francis Galton, back in 1974.  I read a biography about him and I found him absolutely fascinating, because he was so brilliant and exciting and adventurous, as well as at the same time being one of the most evil men who’s ever lived.   And I found it very difficult to come to terms with that and gradually over a series of decades, I found a way or representing my confusion in a theatrical form.

The title feels deliberately enigmatic – can you unpack what “the antechamber” represents in this work?

Brian: The title matters, and once you know why I chose it, it’s quite clear and I always make sure that people, when they come to see the show, have an opportunity to see that that phrase. A Large Attendance in the Antechamber is a quote from Francis Galton.   He wrote a very, very beautiful description of what he thought, the process of thinking was.   And for him, he’s compared it to a large room where daily life takes place and daily thinking takes place.   But then sometimes unbidden thoughts will come in from an adjacent antechamber, and he felt he had no control over those thoughts, but he thought it was very important that there was a large attendance in the antechamber. And he thought, that’s what made him a great thinker, and an inventor and he thought that people who are creative have this large attendance in the antechamber, but they have no control over it.   And the entrance that each individual thought makes into the main chamber is almost impossible to control.

How has your practice evolved since your earlier works, and where does this piece sit in that trajectory?

Brian: I’ve been working for a long time, and I started off as a theatre designer, and I’ve always been really, interested in events and happenings – that was a phrase that was used in the 70s for the kinds of experience, kind of events nowadays, that are talked about as immersive, but you know, it’s different from that, really, because it was a bit more political, I think.  Then, I was very involved in experimental theatre in London in the 70s and 80s, which was a Golden Age of experimental theatre.   At that time, in Europe and we would make a couple of shows a year and they were always.   Built on the premise of ‘wouldn’t it be great if’ so, we would just say something like, wouldn’t it be great if we did a show where everybody wore 4 foot wigs.   And then we’d make the show, which is called Rococo.  We often would design the show before we wrote it or improvised it or made it.   It’s a way of working, which is unusual today. But then it was something we often did.   And what I brought to this piece is that sense of experimentation of the design and the words being of equal importance.   They’re almost interdependent on each other, and one doesn’t make sense without the other.  And so the show is a direct descendant of the earlier work.

What role does the audience play in this work – are they observers, participants, or something else entirely?

Brian: This is a very good question.  I think they are all 3.  They are certainly observers. They are in a way, just people who have come to attend a lecture. They are also participants because they have to actually work very hard to keep up with what Francis Galton and Brian Lipson are doing and how much of what is being said, should be believed and how much should be contradicted.  And they’re actually invited to contradict and disagree with what is being said. There’s also another sense in which they are – perhaps participants, in a seance and in that, the spirit of Francis Galton is very dangerous man, but also quite a beguiling man, who does enter the room.   Participants in that sense as well, that they are kind of under a spell.   Hopefully they have the ability to break out from that spell. but it will take some effort to do so.

You’ve worked across so many forms throughout your career. What made theatre the right medium for this particular idea?

Brian: I couldn’t imagine doing it in any other way.  Since first doing the show, there have been several attempts to draw me into doing some sort of filmed version, or you know, some kind of work related to Francis Galton on film, and I can’t imagine doing it mainly because stage is my home, and I understand it better than anything else. I have done quite a lot of film and TV. But I always feel that’s not really where I belong quite honestly, whereas I belong with theatre. I am a person of a theatre. I wouldn’t know how to express this in any other way, because, as I said before, in the answer to an earlier question, the form of the piece where what is happening is also being contradicted at the same time, and that is only possible in theatre. You can’t do that on film. I think it’s because in theatre you can stop at any time, and certainly in this show, he can drop out of character and into character. Whereas you can’t really do that on film because what you’re of what you’re seeing  – we’re so used to looking at TV and film and seeing real people and real people talking and working, believing or disbelieving what they’re saying, whereas in the theatre, an actor is putting on makeup, putting on a show.   He’s pretending to be someone else.   And you can keep on coming back to the fact that this is just pretence, and at any time he could stop and the audience could walk out. In the cinema or TV, you actually have to turn the TV off.

Without giving too much away, what do you hope audiences are sitting with as they leave?

Brian: I hope they see how dangerous and pervasive Galton’s theories of eugenics have been.   I hope that they see that something which could be thought of as just an eccentric invention by an eccentric inventor, turns into a malevolent part of society which has never been extinguished, and never gone away.

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A Large Attendance in the Antechamber plays at Trades Hall, Melbourne as part of RISING festival.

For tickets and more information, visit the RISING website.