When John Doyle’s play Vere (Faith) was announced as part of
Sydney Theatre Company’s 2013 season, I leapt at the chance to become
acquainted with director Sarah
Goodes’ work. I had heard positive reviews from her previous productions at
STC – Anthony Neilson’s Edward Gant's Amazing
Feats of Loneliness in 2011,
and Hilary
Bell’s The Splinter in 2012 – so although
I had been unable to see both those productions, I knew of her work’s
reputation as being generous-spirited, inquisitive, and compassionate pieces of
theatre.
Since 2013, I’ve had the pleasure to see
four of her productions, with a fifth – Orlando
– about to open. Following the end of Battle
of Waterloo’s run, I sat down with Goodes for a discussion about her
work as an independent theatre-maker and as a Resident Director at STC, the
importance of new work, the role of a director, and the seriousness of playing.
*
While Sarah Goodes has been a director for
the better part of fifteen years, it was acting that set her on the road to a
career in the theatre. Acting “was something that I’d always done, and I’d loved
it, but [I] just did it at school and stuff.” But when she went to San Diego
In America,
Goodes met a great woman who said, ‘don’t wait to be cast in a play, put on your
own shows,’ so after spending time in New York and London, she came back to
Australia and hired the Kirk Gallery with a friend, co-directing, producing,
and acting in Cigarettes and Chocolate,
an Anthony Minghella radio play for four nights. From there, she applied to VCA
and NIDA as a director, before graduating from VCA in 1998 and returning to
Sydney where she has been directing work ever since. “[When] I came back to Sydney , [I] had to figure
out a way of earning money so I could then put on my own shows. I found it a
real struggle – how do you earn your money and be an independent theatre
director? I could never figure it out; other people figured it out, but I could
never figure it out, so I always had to work other jobs and stuff.
“I’d do one or
two shows a year, independently, which meant that you had to produce it, raise
the money, all of that stuff. I did about five [shows at] the Old Fitz, and about four or
five at Downstairs Belvoir Street ,”
over a ten year period from 2001 through to 2010. From 1998 to 2010, Belvoir
(or Company B Belvoir, as it was then known) developed a year-long season of independent
productions known as B Sharp in their Downstairs theatre, in much the same way
that Griffin Theatre Company’s independent season now works. Inaugurated and
initially curated by Lyn Wallis, B Sharp became home to the Boiler Room
initiative in 2005, responsible for nurturing and mentoring a group of
‘emerging’ theatre directors. Goodes was part of this program along with Wayne
Blair, Joseph Couch, Tanya Denny, Chris Kohn, and Lee
Lewis, and while she is proud of the work she did during this period, at
the time she felt like nothing came from it – a result of seemingly-entrenched
artistic directorships – and “sort of felt like I was going to stop.”
It was only
when Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, as co-artistic directors at STC,
appointed Polly Rowe as the literary manager at STC that things began to
change. Goodes had worked with Rowe on The
Small Things at B Sharp, and believes this was integral to being asked to
be assistant director on Elling in
2009, and Honour in 2010. Later that
year, “[Cate and Andrew] said ‘We’d like you to come in and pitch for a play.
You can choose between one or two, but you have to come in in three days.’ So
they couriered them to me, and I read one and I went ‘I love it, I’m not even
going to read the second one,’ and then they rang and said ‘Can you come in
tomorrow?’ So I only had a chance to read it once, and then I had to go into
the office with Cate and pitch my ideas.”
That play was
Anthony Neilson’s Edward Gant’s Amazing
Feats of Loneliness, and resulted in a co-production between STC and Brisbane ’s La Boite, with costumes by eclectic
fashion designers Romance Was Born. I
wonder if the involvement of Romance Was Born was part of Goodes’ pitch, but
she says it wasn’t. “I pitched to Cate that I wanted it to be a costume piece,
and I wanted the costumes to kind of come out of the set. I remember in the meeting
her going, ‘So you imagine the costumes are born out of the set?’ and I went
‘Yeah,’ and didn’t think anything of it [until] she rang with the idea that I
collaborate with them.” While it was a great experience it was “a very complex
scenario, because La Boite doesn’t have a costume department, and Romance Was
Born had never done theatre before.” It was also the first time Goodes worked
with theatre-designer Renée
Mulder, a partnership which has flourished over the past four years, and
they have been working at STC ever since.
“Renée is my
preferred designer, and we have [a] process that I could never put into words
as it involves lots of conversations, interrogation of ideas, back and forth,
ploughing through scripts, playing with model boxes but what we have now is a
wonderful confidence in our process that even when we feel completely
stuck we know we will come through with something, we always do, so we now
trust our weird process, our short hand. I honestly think this is why people
work together again and again.”
*
Following Edward
Gant, most of the plays Goodes has directed at STC have been new Australian
works – Hilary Bell’s The Splinter,
John Doyle’s Vere (Faith), Joanna
Murray-Smith’s Switzerland,
Kylie Coolwell’s Battle of Waterloo –
or new international plays in their Australian premieres, like Lucy Prebble’s The
Effect and the forthcoming production of Orlando, adapted by Sarah Ruhl from Virginia Woolf’s love
letter-cum-novel.
Our discussion takes place in the week following the
Helpmann Awards (where Goodes was nominated for Best Direction of a Play, for Switzerland
For Goodes,
perhaps somewhere inside this lack of recognition is “a lack of confidence –
you can tell a classic [text] in a really elaborate way, and I think a
director’s voice is really developed through telling classics… but when you
work on a new work, it’s really about serving the story [and] serving the
writer. The more you collaborate with the writer, the more it becomes this very
intensely collaborative theatre-making, where the writer, the director – some
of the actors – are involved in those final stages of finishing the play.” This
is where Goodes’ strength and passion as a director shines, where our
discussion really takes wing.
“You have to
find ways to make it work on stage for the first time; you’ve got no previous
productions to think ‘how did they do it?’ You’ve got to bring it to life, and
if the writer trusts you, they’ll trust that what you’re attempting to do [as a
director] is tell their story in the best possible way, in a theatrical way in
a theatrical space; [that we’re] not trying to fuck with [their] writing.” What
you don’t want as a playwright, is “the clash of a director going ‘Yeah, I’ll
do the play, but it’s my opportunity to show how clever I am.’ That’s the
danger with new work.
“Sometimes the
work you do on new work is enormous,” in a different way to working on the
classics, or older, more established plays; “sometimes it feels like it’s more
work to work on a new play. You don’t have a sure thing on your hands that you
can then do what you want with; it’s a huge leap – if it’s going to work on
stage, I don’t know – but that is the core of theatre; that should be the core
of where everyone’s at on the first day of rehearsal. ‘Is this going to work?’
‘Who knows?’ It’s a leap of faith, and it’s got to have that in it for the
magic to happen.”
It is this leap
of faith which should be inherent in all work – regardless of whether it’s new
or centuries old – and it very much forms the centrepiece of our discussion.
But the leap is not just limited to the way writers, actors, and directors
should trust each other to create a production; it also informs the way a
director works, the way a rehearsal room runs. “I feel there’s a bit of
expectation sometimes that people like someone in the room to have all the
answers. People want to believe ‘Are you the leader? Are you going to lead us
into the light? Great!’ but that’s not the way I work, and I don’t agree that
it always has to be like that… Theatre is so collaborative, so that when [it]
stops being collaborative or when one person in the room has all the answers,
you don’t sort of enjoy it as much.”
*
Since 2013, Goodes has been one of STC’s Resident
Directors. Along with fellow Resident Director Kip
Williams, Goodes is involved
in the artistic life of the company in a dramaturgical and programming
capacity, fostering artistic development and the public’s interaction with the
company, as well as directing mainstage productions. From the beginning of the
Resident Director program, there has appeared to be a clear distinction between
Williams’ work with the classics, and Goodes’ work with new plays, but this was
never intentional. “It certainly hasn’t been a conscious decision,” Goodes
says, believing it “just sort of happened. I come across plays in a very
organic way – sometimes I find things, sometimes Polly will give me a play to
read; it’s much more random and stepping-stone…
“Either way
there has to be some thing at the core of them – a question, an idea, a social
dilemma that sparks enough of a fire for me to pursue it – even though a play usually
has a four to five week rehearsal period, I usually work on a play for a good
year part-time before rehearsals start so my interest in the idea needs to be
bigger enough to sustain me through this period.”
While the role of the Resident
Director(s) was established by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton in 2013 as part
of their final season as co-artistic directors, its continuation has been a
particular strength of Upton’s (recently-concluded) tenure as artistic
director, and it is a program Goodes hopes will continue to grow in one form or
another in the coming years. “You can’t get to the level you’re meant to
be at without mainstage work; you just have to be getting it. To have visions big
enough to fill things like the Roslyn Packer Theatre or the Drama Theatre or
[Wharf 1], you have to be working; if you only get an opportunity to work once
a year or once every couple of years, you’re not match-fit.”
Goodes believes one of the
intentions behind the creation of the Resident Directors program was that they
would “really be involved in each others’ work, and support each other,
go and see each others’ work and give notes,” and it was something Upton actively encouraged
– “an incredibly generous, caring kind of environment between us which I think
is so important. In an industry where
people, through lack of work, have to be so focused on their own, having a bit
of generosity in this industry really bears great fruit. And I know that I have
that with other female directors as well, just having that thing where you know
you can ask a fellow director in to look at your work and they’re going to be
generally supportive and give really good notes.”
*
When she was growing up, Goodes’ family moved around
as a result of her father being in the army. “You have to exist in a world where
something happens, and then you pack it all up and create it somewhere else.
Contrast is a really amazing thing, especially when you’re very young. We went
from Canberra to Germany
in the late 1970s, and from there to Ocean Grove, [next] to Geelong … It’s a great little beachy town,
[but] the cultural kind of shock of those two places was incredible.” Goodes
also believes that when you’re younger, “you like the fact that suddenly you’re
with a group of people you don’t know, you get to know them, you all have a
great time, and then you move on… You learn to just meet people and be open and
engage.”
It is this
openness to new ideas and places that she tries to carry through into the
rehearsal room as a director. This is in turn compounded by having a young
family, and by observing the seriousness with which her children play. “What it
opened up for me was how when you say ‘play’ [as an adult] it always sounds
flippant and silly, but what I loved was the absolute commitment you have to
make to bring an imaginary world into being.” She describes an instance of her
children playing with remarkable accuracy, yet while it may sound glib or seem funny,
it is “two people going ‘what is the imaginary world? Is there a bridge here or
is there not a bridge here? Because if I say there is and you say there isn’t,
we can’t keep playing. Because you’ll walk there and there should be a bridge
there…’ I think that’s really important to acknowledge – you’ve got to be
playful, but you’ve also got to take the play seriously.
“The other big
thing for me was storytelling. Every night they want a story told, and it helps
make sense of their day, and of who they are, and the stage of life they are,
the fear of growing up, the fear of their big emotions… [But] the thing they
kept saying to me was ‘Can you watch it with us?’ Like, they can watch a movie
on their own or read a book on their own, but they want you to do it with them, because then they look at you
and go ‘Did you think that was funny? Mummy laughed, she thought it was funny!’
and then we talk about it.” Like theatre, the act of watching it, as much as
being in one is a shared experience – “a shared story, a connection that binds
a group of people together. And that’s what theatre does – you’re all sitting
in there together, and you laugh, you look at each other, maybe someone’s
crying.”
One of the
highlights of her work thus far at STC was the community show for Battle of Waterloo. “We got a big group
from Waterloo to come, and I stood up the back of the theatre so I could see
people’s faces, and the look of recognition on some of the faces of the people
watching – of seeing their own lives as performed in front of them – was just
one of those moments when you go ‘that’s why theatre’s important. That’s why
theatre exists. That’s why I do theatre.’”
*
At the 2014 Sydney Writers’ Festival, Goodes hosted a
selection of readings from Helen Garner’s work, both fiction and non-fiction.
As we come to the end of our discussion, I ask if this was merely a standalone
event, or if it is indicative of a project Goodes might be exploring in years
to come. “I hope so,” Goodes enthuses. “I wish! A lot of people feel that Helen
Garner would not be dramatic enough on stage because she’s so psychologically
internal, but I disagree, and I desperately want to try and get one of her
stories on stage.”
While Helen Garner’s work might not be overly
outwardly dramatic, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Alongside Orlando
Only time will
tell how these productions will come to life on stage, but you can be sure they
will be like Woolf’s Orlando
This is the third instalment in The
Process series of interviews with theatre-makers about their work, craft, and
process.
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