In the heart of this precinct is where the Melbourne Theatre Company headquarters reside. Nestled within Sturt St the offices are constantly abuzz with an atmosphere of artistic creation, imaginative endeavours and the constant evolution of story-telling on the stage. It’s on the second floor of these offices where I sit with Brett Sheehy. Set to reveal his sophomore season as the Artistic Director of the Melbourne Theatre Company (having previous worked for the Melbourne Festival, Sydney Festival, Adelaide Festival and Sydney Theatre Company), as we flick through the newly printed 2014 season program the passion and excitement that he exudes for the body of work that he has compiled is paramount if not contagious.
The 2014 season features 11 mainstage plays, two add-on productions and two education shows which include five world premieres and three Australian premieres. Alongside this, building upon the pioneering success of the inaugural NEON Festival of Independent Theatre, five Melbourne–based independent theatre companies will participate in the 2014 season including Angus Cerini/Doubletap, Antechamber Productions & Daniel Keene, Arthur, Little Ones Theatre and Sans Hotel. Rounding out the season is the Cybec Electric play readings – a joint venture with the Cybec Foundation and the MTC to celebrate the gifted playwrights of Australia’s future.
“We started the 2013 season very emotionally dark with The Other Place, the story of a woman unravelling with dementia and losing her mind,” notes Sheehy as we reach the first mainstage production in the program. “To contrast that I wanted to start this year very bright, glittery and glamorous – and Private Lives appeared to be the perfect vehicle for that.” Opening the 2014 season will be Noël Coward’s seminal comedy of manners Private Lives, directed by Sam Strong and with a cast led by Lucy Durack and Leon Ford. “Sam was very keen to direct it – and whenever you have an in–house director so passionate it’s a no-brainer that we should try and get that work on stage,” tells Sheehy. “His casting of Lucy is absolutely inspired, it means that we can weave in some musical and singing elements. I think it’ll be an incredibly fresh and new Private Lives on top of the Coward classic that many people already know. But what really appealed to Sam and myself about this play is that while it’s a beautifully written romantic comedy there is also a very dark undertone to the work – a lot of people aren’t aware of this because it’s always played down. Sam will pull (these undertones) out of the play and will present Australian audiences with a Coward work they are much less familiar with.”
A deconstruction of contemporary perceptions of love, sexuality and relationships, Mike Bartlett’s Cock is an exploration of emotional indecision and society’s ongoing phobia of commitment and change within grounded social ideals. “It pulls love and people’s relationships out of the general gender and sexual orientation discussion,” explains Sheehy. “It’s begins with the platform of two men in a relationship as the normative base, then for the upset in the narrative to be a guy starting to fall in love with a girl, it’s the flipping the clichéd closeted man coming out idea on its head. It deconstructs the need of boxing people into descriptions of straight, gay, transgender, etc. Valid as all of those are – it pulls away to simply ask, ‘well, what is love?'”
The 2014 season will also see the return of Gale Edwards to MTC, in an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. “It began with my wish to do something with Gale Edwards who has now, in terms of living Australian directors, directed more for the international stage than any other director alive,” explains Sheehy with a voice of admiration. “She hasn’t worked with MTC for eight or nine years, so I went to her and asked ‘if there was any production in the world that you wanted to direct, what would it be?’ She said ‘I wanted to do a production of Ghosts for such a long time’. Coincidentally, Ghosts was already very high of my list of classics, but I wasn’t going to impose that or warp the conversation. She went away from that lunch and ten minutes later called me to say that Philip Quast was in – it was that quick that he signed up.”
Working Dog, the iconic team behind The Castle, Frontline and The Hollowmen, will take to the stage with the world premiere of their political satire The Speechmaker. “I’m a complete political junkie, I love international politics. They had me at ‘it’s set on Air Force One,'” laughs Sheehy. “It’s an incredibly funny political satire that’s completely dry and straight with a West Wing velocity to it. The American President is on his way to London during Christmas to do a photo–op with the British Prime Minister, a kind of ‘rah-rah we’re America and Britain we rule the western world kind of thing’. While they’re in the air, Air Force One learns of a terrorist threat on the ground and it all unravels from there. Those guys can write political satire like no-one else in the world, it’s beautiful comedic writing, and while being hysterically funny it’s also saying astonishingly scary things about global politics and the power of the American state.”
Other mainstage highlights of the 2014 season will include Lally Katz’s Neighbourhood Watch, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, John Logan’s I’ll Eat You Last, Joanna Murray-Smith’s Pennsylvania Avenue, Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, the Tony award–winning Broadway hit Once and Sheehy’s second commissioned work at MTC, Brendan Cowell’s The Sublime, a perceptive take on Australian culture and what we hold dear; footy, mates, tinnies and sex scandals (playing all throughout September to coincide with the AFL finals, no less).
As we reach the end of the program and reflect on the season past and the season to come, we conclude by discussing the importance of theatre in contemporary culture – and the role it plays in the rapidly evolving landscape of the performing arts. “Ever since I was much younger people have always said ‘theatre is being threatened, live performance is being threaten because of screen culture’ – cinema, television, computer screen, smartphone screens,” ponders Sheehy. “I’ve been thinking about this for decades, having worked in the performance world for over 30 years. I don’t think it could possibly be further from the truth. It is written in our DNA that we as a species want to gather together with members of our tribe in real-time to tell stories to each other, and that’s been the story for millennia past and millennia to come. The live experience will never be threatened.”
BY TYSON WRAY
