Sometimes you encounter
a piece of theatre which seems to shine with its own light, theatre which
reaches out into the darkness of the auditorium and gently holds you, slips its
fingers under your skin and doesn’t let go for a very long time afterwards. It
was March 2012, and Rita Kalnejais’ Babyteeth was
playing in Belvoir’s Upstairs theatre; billed as “a
mad, gorgeous, bittersweet comedy about how good it is not to be dead yet,” it
was filled with a warmth, a big-heartedness, and an almost-visible hum, and was
– still is – one of the most beautiful new plays I’ve ever seen.
Babyteeth was directed by Eamon Flack,
Belvoir’s Associate Director – New Projects. I don’t make a secret of being a
strong admirer of his work as a director, in particular his work at Belvoir. Following
his recent appointment as Belvoir’s new artistic director from 2016, I sat down
with Flack at the beginning of the year for what became an in-depth discussion
about the classics, dramatic and historical context, his intentions as incoming
artistic director, and about the need for compassion.
*
Flack’s 2011
production of As You Like It
for Belvoir was something of a theatrical lightbulb moment for me. Underneath
the playful exterior – with its flower-cannons, the pond in the stage, Gareth
Davies’ red dress, Charlie Garber’s blue-and-white cloud-suit, the relationship
between Alison Bell’s Rosalind and Yael Stone’s Celia, and those
unforgettable sheep (his idea) – there was a very specific and rigorous engagement
with what the play was about, and what Shakespeare was perhaps trying to get at
in the play, too. “We gave ourselves the same task Shakespeare gave himself and
his company, [and] I get kind of annoyed when people assume that kind of [creative]
freedom is willy-nilly.” ‘The task’ is something Flack talks about a lot with
regards to his directorial process, not in a nebulous way, but in a way that
tries to get to the core of a text, that tries to articulate the historic
context or resonances of a particular play when it is put on the stage. “It’s always very specific, and it changes very much from show to
show,” but it is present in every decision, beat, and action that you see on
stage, and focuses on how to make the performances as rich as possible, how the
actors can inhabit the space.
In the case of As You Like It, the task was to create
the kind of play that Shakespeare might have written to be performed on Shrove
Tuesday at Richmond
Palace
‘The task’ is also
firmly rooted in Flack’s more recent work with plays like Angels
in
America and The Glass
Menagerie and, more pertinently, his upcoming production of Mother
Courage and Her Children. While one of the tasks for Angels in America was to find a way of
realising Tony Kushner’s play on the stage – that is to say, finding a way of
staging “fifty-nine transitions and sixty-scenes on a
stage with no capacity for illusion” – Flack’s self-assigned task for Mother Courage relates more specifically
to a rigorous understanding of the play’s historical resonance, namely ‘what
does it mean to do the play in Sydney in 2015?’
Due to our physical and, at times, political remoteness to “a lot of
the history that these [classic] plays are grounded in,” it can appear that
there is a greater freedom afforded to us to explore the themes and resonances
in these works. But “it also means that sometimes we don’t really find the
context of that work, so the whole [thing] floats completely free of the actual
moments we’re living through, in this history, here.” And this is where Flack’s
production of Mother Courage comes to
the fore.
*
Written by Bertolt Brecht during World War Two, and premiered in the
ruins of a “failed thousand-year empire,” Mother
Courage and Her Children is set in seventeenth-century Germany and Poland
In articulating his
task for Mother Courage, Flack
explains how in the West, the seventeenth-century was “the last full thrash of
violent sectarianism and medievalism before the overall drift of society and
history gave way once and for all to the emerging modern era. But large parts
of the world today are still in a violent confrontation with the elemental
forces of modernity.” While this might be a general observation, Flack believes
you can “see the pattern broadly at work in the Middle East, in much of Central
and South Asia, in large parts of Africa . [The]
crucial thing is that this is not a first encounter between the
“old” and the “new”. [They have both] been cheek-by-jowl for some time, and
what’s happening is the fight-back of the threatened “old” against the
ever-expanding entrenched interests [of the] “new”. What is so seemingly
apocalyptic about seventeenth-century Germany
and modern Syria ,
for example, is the viciousness of ideology… [It’s] not so much about seizing
power as engaging a final battle between whole ways of life.”
In Brecht’s play,
however, “there’s a tougher, more adult account [which] is about the vile mix
of economic and superstitious forces – the terrible mix of material scarcity
and human fear on both sides.”
These are not “pseudo-theological sectarian questions” we’re dealing
with, but rather “fundamental questions like human dignity [vs.] material
power, human virtue [vs.] material need. This is not millennialism… this is
human chaos. The battle, then, is not so much to do with which side you’re on
or who has more firepower, it’s simply to do with how much of a notion of
humanity you can hold onto and still survive. That’s what Brecht is writing
about.”
“Vast numbers of
people are experiencing [this] in places like Syria ,
Iraq , Sri Lanka , Bangladesh ,
Papua New Guinea and West
Papua, the Sudan ,
Nauru (!) etc etc – and in a slightly different way in Russia , the Ukraine ,
China …
And it seems that we have thoroughly excused ourselves from any fellow-feeling
with these people, and that strikes me as foolish, because – quite apart from
the standard of our own humanity – it’s clear in a globalised world that the
chaos, trauma and ideological extremity of the current
seventeenth-century-ish-ness is not going to remain neatly compartmentalised in
far-off countries. We’ve seen that already in different ways in places under
our jurisdiction like Nauru ,
the seas between Christmas Island and Indonesia , Cronulla, Martin Place , even
the antagonism between cyclists and 4WDs… It’s foolish to think we will be free
of this chaos.”
Hence Flack’s Mother Courage at Belvoir in 2015, which
he sees as “a vision of twenty-first century globalisation as a
seventeenth-century-ish force of chaos; as an argument for fellow-feeling as a
necessary counterpoint to economic theology; and as an attack on our sense of
comfortable superiority, on the almost racial belief that our material wealth
and political stability makes us inherently better humans than people who don’t
benefit from these things. Decency is not inherent,” he continues. “You only
need to look at the rising incidences of family violence when families are
under economic pressure, or the ugly rise of right-wing racial hatred in
economically uncertain Europe … The
seventeenth-century-ish conditions of chaos are only ever a moment away, and
every one of us is capable of becoming Mother Courage, or Eilif, or Swiss
Cheese, in an instant. And we shouldn’t kid ourselves about either of those
things.”
While the intellectual rigour
behind this production is not unusual for Flack, nor for any other director,
the breadth of passion and vehemence with which it is articulated makes it a
thrilling and, potentially, harrowing prospect, one we’ll have to wait until
June to discover the full extent and exploration of. But in a way it’s
emblematic of Flack’s approach to theatre – to theatre-making – and something
he’s very keen to bring to Belvoir during his tenure as artistic director – that
is, the idea that the arts, and not just theatre, must have the same plurality
of experience and variety of life as the society they are a part of. “Variety
is the only thing that matters… it’s a positive embrace of the very nature of
what is best about our society – our variety of life.”
*
In his keynote
address at the 2014 National Play Festival, playwright Andrew Bovell argued
whether the question of class and access and privilege and training wasn’t part
of something bigger, that the continual revisiting of classic dramatic texts –
the canon, in other words – was simply a reassertion of the “vast history of
whiteness that has dominated and shaped western theatre, [and] that what the
plays actually say, their content, is secondary to the directorial and design
approach,” which often reaffirms this notion.
Flack agrees with
Bovell in believing that this kind of “orthodoxy has
made our stages more conservative, like the world-view of our stages in Sydney
In the first instance, it means “coming to a very rigorous
understanding of the way in which the arts in Australia are a privileged
undertaking, [and] how do we change that,” as well as actively asking what role
the government plays in the construction of this idea of privilege, even while
they “[claim] the opposite.” While Flack can’t say too much about how he
intends to tackle and address these issues, he believes it means “finding ways
to get out of the inner-city, [and] finding ways to make sure that the actors
and artists who work here present us with the glorious fullness of life, rather
than with just a tasteful sample of middle-class struggle.” As Flack asked in
his notes to The Glass Menagerie last
year, “[what] do we do about the gentle, the odd, the peculiar, the monstrous,
the marvellous, the broken? [What] are we without them?”
Bovell reflects
this in his address, concluding “I sense a rise of conservatism in this country… A
meanness of spirit has crept in to the social discourse. [If] we are to truly
reflect who we are, [we] must ensure that our stages don’t reflect that more
narrow vision of what this nation is. We must make room for the new. We must
place it at the centre of what we do.” It’s not an obligation to “this thing
called ‘diversity’,” says Flack. “It’s got to be more real than that, otherwise
we’re just obliging and I don’t want to do that.”
*
Flack’s current role at
Belvoir is Associate Director – New Projects, a position he has held since late
2010. When asked what he looks for in new writing – whether in choosing work to
produce, or in developing new works – he pauses for a moment, before saying in
a hushed almost off-hand way, “just that it’s damn good!” What is important is
that “someone can write for actors and for the stage; [that it’s] something that only theatre can do, that only the stage could do.”
He values the originality of the voice, and story over form; that is, the contents
of the story over the way the story is told. “I don’t really care if the form
is whizz-bang new, or if it’s completely traditional. I feel like traditional
form allows you to be more radical with content anyway.”
One thing that has always felt
incredibly tangible and visible in Flack’s work is his sense of ensemble, not
just among the actors on stage, but among the creatives as well, and I wonder
if it is part of his ‘process’ or how theatre should be, something that should
always be inherently present in the theatre-making process. Flack affirms the
latter: “Everyone on that stage is responsible for
making the meaning and making the world, for delivering the experience
connecting that to the audience.” He continues that while he can’t stand group dynamics
in life, on stage it’s one of his favourite things ever. You could see it at
the end of As You Like It, where the
cast lined up across the stage and sang and played before dancing off into the
street. You could see it at the end of Angels
in America too, even if there were “ghosts filling in all the empty
chairs.” To ask whether there’s any underlying significance to this conceit
seems unnecessary considering Flack’s response: “I just love seeing a line of
people being alive in some way on a stage, I think it’s the most glorious
thing.”
It also feeds into what Rita Kalnejais talks about in her essay
‘Humans Being’ in the Belvoir
book, about grace and empathy on the Belvoir stage. I mention Babyteeth, in that it’s kind of my litmus test for how I see
Flack’s work, because of its aliveness and awareness of
other people, not just in how to be, but in how to act, how to carry on and how
to survive, and we
return to the question of process first discussed at the beginning of our
conversation. By his own admission, one of the things Flack does, in any piece
of theatre, is to “make it very difficult – and
therefore very necessary – for the actors to have to talk to each other on the
stage.” By putting numerous obstacles in the way of them being able to achieve
this and be honest, “the more that the characters and the actors are
constrained, the more the need to speak matters; the more the desire for
contact matters.” It’s an extension of the classic acting principle of
identifying objectives and obstacles in motivations and character beats, the
way drama is created in any context. “The more obstacles there are, the more
things – when they get to connect – the more they shine and hum.”
Above all else, there’s an
overwhelming sense of compassion in all of Flack’s work which is hard to
ignore, hard not to fall in love with. “I think compassion is the most
important thing ever. You’ve got to have faith in
something bigger than just your family, or your economic prowess, your earning
power, which is all we [seem to] value now.” It’s the question of faith that
sits at the heart of Angels in America,
the same question at the heart of Mother
Courage – ‘what are we going on for?’ “[It’s] what drama is so often about,
finding a way to get back some sort of shining faith in spite of all that
stuff. [It’s] what Babyteeth was
literally about: that girl is dying, it is going to end for her, and what is
the bigger thing? What Rita wrote, a glorious kind of insubstantial other
thing, what exactly is that? What is beyond death? What is life? That is
literally what that play was about.”
Flack acknowledges there are particular qualities people associate
with his work, but doesn’t believe he is the right person to talk about them.
“I like kindness [and] generosity; I don’t know if I am optimistic,” he says,
continuing that “we’re all fucked,” but it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t “have
faith in some essential human things.” And we come full circle: at the
beginning of the conversation, discussing the propensity for continually
producing ‘the classics,’ Flack stated that beyond being the best plays, it was
perhaps a more serious and compassionately-minded reason that made them
mainstays of the theatrical repertoire. “I don’t believe that humanism – or the
qualities we love most in humanity – are innate… I think they must be learnt
and practiced and kept across time and passed on, and that’s why I love
theatre, because it’s the truest expression of that – of all the art forms,
it’s the truest expression of that – because it can only go from person to
person.”
I’m reluctant to use the word ‘optimistic’
to describe Flack’s body of work, but perhaps a more pragmatic understanding of
optimism is at play here. By allowing – and necessitating – alternative points
of view, what Flack is illustrating is a more realistic view of the world than
you might expect. A world which revels in Keats’ negative capability; a world
which requires the presence of the cynic Jaques in the otherwise ebullient As You Like It. “If you asked me what
I’m interested in, it’s everything that’s in that play. [It’s] one of the
greatest, I think it’s glorious… I’d quite like to do it again.”
This is the
first in a (hopefully) ongoing series of interviews with theatre-makers about
their work, craft, and process. (You can view the series here.)
An excerpt from this article was published with
permission in Belvoir's subscriber magazine, Interval, in May 2015.
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