IN MEMORIAM – HELMUT GROSSER

We tend to remember HG as administrator, diplomat, even politician, (although I suspect the last would be a term he would not welcome) because OISTAT is a large international organisation and calls for all those qualities from a man who led it for so long.

It is also an association of practical theatre people, of practitioners, and it is as one of those that I shall remember Helmut.

When I joined the New Theatre Words revising group, sometime in the 1980s, Helmut was an active member, with an encyclopaedic grasp of technical terms clearly based on experience. I had little idea that the organisation’s President was involved in such an activity. To talk to Helmut about a technical problem was to live its practical solution. Even in a nation so well supplied with theatre technicians, he was a master of his craft and not simply the abstract knowledge, but the rounded knowledge which comes only from applying theory to the business of getting a production on the stage.

He understood the nature of technical theatre, and that his innovations, in opera production where the challenges are at the extremes of the practical and sometimes of the available technology, were in the service of the art of theatre, not a separate branch of it.

Like all good technicians, he was ingenious, curious, patient, and concentrated on the outcome for the production... qualities which we all recognise in his long leadership of OISTAT.

He also had an impish wit and an elegant conviviality.

I count myself fortunate to have known him.