Promote local where possible, and be braver. That’s what Australia’s premier stage producer, Sydney Theatre Company (STC), needs the courage to do, as its board searches to fill a vacancy created by the premature departure of its British-born artistic director, Jonathan Church, just nine months after his appointment.
Church, who remains artistic director of the UK’s Chichester Festival Theatre until September and has his own production company in London, announced he was “stepping down” as Sydney Theatre Company artistic director on 26 May.
There has been speculation Church left in a manner not of his own choosing. The Sydney Theatre Company’s annual report, released two weeks earlier, carries a cheery message from Church looking forward “to work at STC’s home at The Wharf every day”. That was never going to be the case: the previous board knew that Church planned to commute from Sydney to London for the duration of his tenure, despite the commitment the Sydney gig requires.
Banking chief Ian Narev, appointed Sydney Theatre Company’s chairman in February, pointedly made clear in the annual report that Church’s appointment was one of the last actions of David Gonski, his predecessor as chair.
That the UK and wider Europe continue to lure away Antipodean directorial talent – such as Simon Stone, Benedict Andrews, and Barrie Kosky – should only strengthen the board’s resolve: these Australian directors are in demand because they’re good. There’s a host of potentially great artistic directors still left in this country, too; we should do what we can to hold on to them.
As a reminder of STC’s elevation to world stage player under the previous artistic team of husband and wife Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett, the company is preparing to open its critically lauded play The Present, a Chekhov adaptation by Upton starring Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh, at New York’s Barrymore Theatre in December.
There’s no denying the dropping of delicious Australianisms into Russian farce and Blanchett dancing drunk on a tabletop has its charms, but perhaps a better, quintessentially Australian offering for Broadway might have been the company’s Helpmann award-winning adaptation of Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River, about bloody frontier conflict between British invaders and Indigenous tribes.
With such momentous, truly original works that cut to Australian identity, greatness walks the stage of the STC, which was formed in 1978 and generated $38.3m in revenue last year. But now the company is scrambling to complete the programming of Church’s unfinished 2017 season, to be announced early September, only after which the board will start looking for his replacement.
Having ignored the disquiet that followed his appointment (actor Jonathan Biggins told fellow STC board members that bringing Church in “doesn’t really send very positive signals to theatre-makers in this country that, you know, you can’t aspire to this job”), what lessons can be learned?
A local artistic director would be preferable, if at least for that very idea of aspiration. If it’s an international appointment – Kenneth Branagh was among the wilder speculation 10 months ago – then that appointee needs to be committed full-time. She or he will need to build relationships with Australia’s artistic community, like Church was starting to do, mostly from scratch.
Australian talent, of course, benefits from working internationally. But when that talent is young, there is time to scale the heights at home before moving away.
It’s a shame, for instance, the Sydney Theatre Company didn’t snare one of Australia’s most provocative theatre directors, Simon Stone, whose feature film The Daughter has been well received, to replace Upton as artistic director (Blanchett finished co-artistic duties after six years, in 2013).
Stone, born in Switzerland just 31 years ago, has been directing for the likes of Toneelgroep Amsterdam theatre company and London’s Young Vic of late, and with his European sensibility was always going to try his hand there. But he’d have reinvigorated the Australian theatre scene for longer if given artistic control of Sydney Theatre Company’s main stage, the Roslyn Packer Theatre, first.
There’s also Adelaide-born Benedict Andrews, 43, who directed Blanchett in Upton’s adaptations of Botho Strauss’s Gross und Klein at the Barbican in 2012, and Jean Genet’s The Maids at New York’s Lincoln Centre in 2014. Andrews, now based in Reykjavik, has just finished his own debut feature film, Blackbird, written by David Harrower and starring Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn.
Andrews is another risk-taker who would have been an interesting choice for Sydney Theatre Company. Curiously, in a phone interview last August, I asked Andrews his thoughts on Jonathan Church’s then fresh appointment. “I don’t know who Jonathan Church is,” said Andrews. “Who is he? I have no idea who he is.”
Andrews said Robyn Nevin, STC’s artistic director from 1999 to 2007 before Upton and Blanchett, carried on a vision to “encourage brave and adventurous repertoire”.
“I think it should be an Australian voice in there, continuing that,” he said, but then demurred. “No, hold on, I backtrack on that: I’m working outside of Australia. I don’t think the people who run institutions [in Australia or abroad] have to be from there, that’s myopic thinking. Look at Barrie [Kosky’s success] in Berlin.”
Melbourne-born Kosky, 49, once the enfant terrible of the Australian stage, is now artistic director of Berlin’s Komische Oper.
I don’t know whether Stone, Andrews or Kosky would have been interested in the job of running the Sydney Theatre Company. Kosky has been critical of Australia in the past. But there’s still plenty of good talent working in Australia – and they’re not all white men.
Who will dare to reach the aspiration laid out by playwright and actor Kate Mulvany in her recent Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, in response to commonwealth funding cuts hitting Australia’s art scene and the “tightening fist” around the industry that was causing companies to become “shrewd – and not in a good way”. She argued for innovation, collaboration and creativity, and more diversity at every level.
“We need to keep those voices on the ground floor and middle floors ringing out with Australian stories or our much-loved house will collapse beneath us,” said Mulvany, using a three-storey house as a metaphor for the Australian theatre industry. “If they’ve been evicted from the middle and ground floors, then you’ve got to invite them upstairs. Now more than ever.”
So who should run Australia’s biggest theatrical house? Former Griffin Theatre artistic director Sam Strong, alas, has been snapped up to run Queensland Theatre Company, and Indigenous director Wesley Enoch to run the Sydney festival. But consider Strong’s successor at Griffin, Lee Lewis, for one; former Belvoir Street Theatre resident directors Adena Jacobs and Anne-Louise Sarks, as well; and current STC resident directors Kip Williams and Sarah Goodes, who have all hit high marks recently.
When the late Richard Wherrett was appointed artistic director of STC in 1979, he said: “I want it to be something the theatrical professional as a whole aspires to and is inspired by.”
Sydney Theatre Company is a national beacon for the arts, and probably Australia’s best-known theatre company outside the country. It needs to be led by a visionary and a full-time provocateur – someone good enough to lose to a global stage.
View all comments >
comments
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion.
This discussion is closed for comments.
We’re doing some maintenance right now. You can still read comments, but please come back later to add your own.
Commenting has been disabled for this account (why?)