Theatre director John Clark’s close namesake John Clarke, in character as that infamous Kiwi schlep Fred Dagg, once averred that autobiography

is a highly recommended form of leisure activity, as it takes up large chunks of time and if you’re a slow writer or you think particularly highly of yourself, you can probably whistle away a year or two … It’s not a difficult business and remember this is also your big opportunity to explain what a wonderful person you are and how you’ve been consistently misunderstood …

Clark (no ‘e’) may not feel misunderstood exactly, but his memoir, An Eye for Talent – a diaristic account of his remarkably enduring directorship of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) from 1969 to 2004 – certainly reads like the seizing of an opportunity to burnish the author’s legacy.

The book joins others by contemporaries of Clark – Jim Sharman’s Blood and Tinsel (2008) and David Williamson’s Home Truths (2021) to name two – as insider chronicles of Australian theatre’s coming of age. The beats are well-trodden, from the early dominance of commercial theatre under the aegis of J.C. Williamson’s to the rise of ‘indigenous’ (i.e., not US or British) playwriting via trailblazing works such as Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) and the ‘ocker’ plays which constituted the New Wave of the 1970s.