An extraordinary life in stages – Frank Perkins, Kester Baruch, Kester Berwick – leaves impact on Adelaide's theatre
Kester Baruck (previously Frank Perkins, later Kerster Berwick) pictured in theatrical mode by The Mail, Adelaide, in 1932. At right: Robert Dessaix's 2001 book Corfu: A Novel was based on the life of Perkins/Baruck/Berwick.
Frank Perkins, later Kester Baruch and later Kester Berwick. crammed an extraordinary line between being born in Adelaide in 1903 and dying an expatriate on the Greek island of Corfu in 1992.
Frank Perkins was born in the Adelaide seaside suburb of Largs Bay and his childhood interest was ships and trains from wandering Port Adelaide’s wharves and jetties. He completed his education at a business college and during his late teens and early twenties studied English and French. Starting work at an Adelaide advertising firm, he became a cub reporter with The Mail newspaper in Adelaide.
Perkins then spent several years in Sydney where he took the name Kester Baruch because a friend told him it sounded “less plebeian” for articles he wrote, such as “Mass art and individualism” for Hugh McCrae and Ernest Watt's New Triad (1928).
In the early 1920s, Perkins joined the Theosophical Society in Adelaide and was a prominent in L'Alliance Francaise when he returned to Adelaide in the late 1920s. Speaking fluent French, Baruch brought his interest in theatre to L'Alliance Francaise in dramatic sketches, including from George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, at the Adelaide Women's Club, in Hindley Street in 1929. His talks to the society included one on Swedish dramatist/novelist August Strindberg and he wrote articles for The Mail.
Through the Theosophical Society, Baruch met aspiring visiting theatre designer and actor Alan Harkness. In 1931, they founded the Ab-Intra Studio Theatre an inventive, experimental, and “probably the most genuinely creative of all the little theatres in Adelaide during the 1930s”. Baruch and Harkness closed Ab-Intra in 1935, and went overseas for more theatrical experiences. The company's final Adelaide production was Baruch's Archway Motif, staged in the ballroom of supporter Jean Bonython, wife of John Lavington Bonython, over three days in March.
In England 1936-38, Baruch and Harkness studied acting at Dartington Hall, Devon, with Michael Chekhov (a former student of Stanislavski). Baruch also joined the Peace Pledge Mission. When Chekhov moved his theatre company to the United States of America in 1938, Harkness went with him as assistant producer and later formed his own group in California.
Baruch went to Innsbruck, Austria, to teach advanced English at Folks High School. He arrived as Hitler annexed Austria, and friends advised him to change his Jewish name. He became Kester Berwick.
Back in Adelaide in 1939, Berwick was in demand as a public speaker on stage and on radio, notably the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s 5CL. Berwick's stage lectures were for organisations such as the Red Cross and South Australian Ballet Club. Berwick's stance as “Frank Gale Perkins, 39, of Ralston Street, Largs Bay”, a conscientious objector to war service, gave him his biggest media coverage in Adelaide in 1942. In court, Perkins/Berwick claimed his primary income came from working on a dairy farm on Adelaide’s outskirts.
Through he made return visits, Berwick left Adelaide in 1948 and returned to England in the 1950s. Berwick moved to Greece in the 1960s to teach English language and customs to boys selected by the Royal Foundation of Greece for agricultural courses in England.
Berwick spend his last 30 years in Greece, firstly on the island of Lesbos (the subject of his novel Head of Orpheus Singing) and later on Corfu where he lived on a meagre pension in a shabby house in the middle of the village of Gastouri. As Mirabel Osler recalls in her memoir The Rain Tree: “With no bathroom, (Berwick’s) shower was a cold trickle through holes punched in the bottom of a plastic bleach bottle… He was always welcoming and warm and the villagers loved him”.
Berwick’s life became one of the major storylines in Robert Dessaix's 2001 book Corfu: A Novel.
