On Babyteeth: seeing a play twice, the nature of breath, balancing relationships, and why I don’t like the term life-affirming.

To listen as you read:

In this piece of writing, I talk about the beginning and the end of Babyteeth and all the pieces in between. This is not a piece of writing for the spoiler adverse. If you want to hold out and learn the story as it plays out on the stage, leave now. This is a piece of writing for those who want to pore over details: for those who have seen the play, and for those who have not.

In the beginning, we see the end. The end of the play; the end of a life.

A family starts just another day. A mother talks about making pancakes. A father has forgotten to put on his pants. The young man they barely know smokes his cigarette just outside the door.

The mother enters her daughter’s room, to find her daughter’s life has left her daughter’s body.

And at the end, when we again watch this beginning, I remain unmoved.

This is the story of a play I was hopelessly, achingly disappointed in. This is the story of a play that my friends said made them bawl. This is the story of a play my friends said they found beautiful. This is the story of second chances more than paying off. Of a play finding its feet.

This is the story of a play I saw twice.

On opening night, something was missing. No energy passed between the characters. No tension was traded between moments and scenes. There was a distinct lack of movement on stage.

On the page, Rita Kalnejais builds her world around people’s breaths.

Characters use commas like they use air. Often these people are breathless – a breath at that moment would change the course of history.

 But these characters I watched never felt breathless: they never felt like they had any breath to lose.

On opening night there was a medical emergency in the audience and we were asked to leave the theatre. In this makeshift interval we caught up with friends, we discussed the state of the world. We wondered, as time ticked on, if we would be invited back into the theatre that night, if the audience member would be okay, if the cast would be, too. But invited back we were, the cast picking up from the beginning of the scene they had to abandon.

And those first five minutes back in the theatre were the best five minutes of the play. In those five minutes the cast found tension. An energy crackled on stage as a petulant daughter scowled at her mother, as parents tried to settle a fight without showing their daughter that a fight was being had at all.

And then, as soon as we had it, it was gone. We were back in a world without breathing. There was no pull between the stage and the audience. The story was relayed to us in muted tones.

The world of Babyteeth was still.

And I left frustrated. Disappointed in a production that failed to find its way.

My friends started to go, and their reports trickled in. Am I the odd one out? I thought. It would hardly be the first time. But then should I go again? I asked one friend who raved. I heard that it was a bit cold the first performances, he said. Definitely see it again if you can. 

And so, one week after I went the first time, I went again.

It’s not unusual for me to see works more than once. Before Babyteeth, in 2013 I’ve returned to four productions: Hedda Gabler after a couple of weeks, Persona after a year. For works I am taken by, I enjoy the chance to pick up new details for the first time, to study the piece and pick it apart, to see how it changes after I’ve grown up a year, to see how it responds to a new space, to take friends along on the journey with me.

This, however, was the first time I returned after disappointment.

But in that week, the cast found breath. Not always. Sometimes the world built by director Chris Drummond still felt too still, but when it didn’t breaths circled up and around the characters, through the world, connecting the people on the stage to one another, the people on stage to the people in the audience.

Kalnejais’ Milla, played here by Danielle Catanzariti, exists in a world that is breathing. As she is losing her breath, she feels more acutely the breath of the world.

MILLA looks up through the smashed glass ceiling of the station, at the squall of pigeons, doomed skywriting plane, clouds, unbelievable space.

Hilary Kleinig’s composition brings much of the breath to this world and often when it is absent the world feels too still. Her rich cello swirls around and engulfs the theatre; her piano hesitant with breaths seeming to catch and fall between the notes. The music intersects with Geoff Cobham’s lighting design: soft blues and radiant yellows, unnatural and iridescent against the raw wood of Wendy Todd’s set.

Drummond’s work is most seen with Brink Productions. There, he directs plays that he has had a hands-on role since the very first devising workshop in the rehearsal room. He works with diverse playwrights with varying results, but you always walk away with a sense of his fingerprints to the work.

Babyteeth doesn’t come from this lineage. And yet, it feels uniquely appropriate for Drummond. The plays he has worked on through development often have a sense of times and places intersecting: from the eighty years and two continents we traverse in Andrew Bovell’s When The Rain Stops Falling, to the lives of strangers in the same city on the same day in Bryony Lavery’s Thursday.

Kalnejais plays with a similar sense in her text as scenes softly flow into each other, and this production is at its strongest when Drummond really works with these slippages of time and space. Outside Gidon’s door, Milla cries on a train platform. Anna stands up from Gidon’s piano stool and walks towards Milla’s bedroom door.

Occasionally this movement isn’t found. A full blackout feels out of place and lasts a few beats too long. Scenes don’t flow over and into one another: it feels we are being shown the quietness of an empty stage, rather than the quietness of a lived space.

In Belvoir’s original production these intersections and flows between spaces were solved through using a revolve. Here, the living space of Milla’s family, Gidon’s apartment, Henry’s office all share one space. Through slated wood we steal glances into the bathroom, through the smallest of slivers we can see into Milla’s bedroom, until the action takes place in this room and a bed rises from the traps system created by elevating the stage level in the Space Theatre.

In the final scene, Kalnejais asks for the stage to be turned around: what we once watched from inside the house, we now watch from the garden. The benches in the family home lower, the wooden walls move out and cross the front of the stage, and suddenly we are outside looking in. It is intelligent and moving set construction.

Babyteeth is a lovely play to read on the page. Kalnejais writes impossible stage directions, there to expand the world of the piece in the mind of the reader, to give clues to the creatives.

She writes:

A crowd of greased-up, slick-back’d pigeons fling themselves at the sky. Feather and lice fall on the platform with their shadows.

She writes stage directions that bore down into the heart of the characters. She writes:

ANNA nods looking at the stream of water as if it were a skipping rope – as if with the right timing she could slip in without disturbing the stream of droplets.

Kalnejais’ Milla is softly haunted, grabbing glances at and hearing snatches from a world that exists beyond the world she currently lives in. And still, she grounds herself in an unadorned reality.

“A cloud like a … I don’t know. Just a cloud. Isn’t it? But very white.

I guess it could be a dragon. Or … I keep coming back to the fact it looks like a cloud.”

Catanzari starts her performance too naïve, her fourteen-year-old Milla too young as she meets Matt Crook’s twenty-five-year-old Moses. As the play progresses and Catanzari finds the ground that Milla stands on, this deep investment in reality, her performance becomes stronger. This strength of character battles against a growing weakness of body, Catanzari’s small frame seemingly trying to climb inside itself, a hunch in the back becoming more pronounced, a stoop in the legs struggling to hold her body.

Drummond gives just the slightest of hints of this haunting of Milla: once we catch the sound of a call to Milla as if traveling on the wind; sometimes Kleinig’s  music embraces notes like an ethereal voice; Cobham will place Milla in a bright yellow spotlight. But here, too, often the stage is too still, no hints are given to connect Milla from this world to that.

Kalnejais refers to this haunting as what the dead said moments, and passes the solution for staging them over to the production. When we read them on the page, there is a real sense that this is Milla’s story. The reader is offered insights into her life above all other characters, it’s her who we see the innermost core of.

On stage, however, you sense there is a balancing issue in this text. Too often Babyteeth doesn’t feel like Milla’s story at all. Through both Kalnejais’ writing and Catanzari’s performance, it is Milla’s relationships that are the most compelling. When she is with Chris Pitman as her father Henry, cautious and caring, a love encompasses the stage. As Milla sits in the lap of her mother Anna, Claire Jones gives us a woman that is nervous, often hesitant, sitting on the edgy of a bubble that threatens to burst at any moment letting her emotions get the better of her.

It’s the hugs and the fights between these characters that the work most comes alive in. These moments predicated on Milla’s illness, and those resting only on being a family with a young daughter.

Kalnejais’ takes us beyond this core family. She shows us Henry and Anna in strained, dulled conversations. Kalnejais then takes us into Henry and Anna’s worlds beyond their family, the foils for each of them there holding purpose in the text. In a burgeoning relationship with Henry, Alyssa Mason’s Toby is the young woman his daughter will never be and brings the promise of new life as his daughter loses grip on hers. Through the sometimes crass Latvian violin teacher Gidon (Paul Blackwell) and the young boy Thuong (Lawrence Mau / James Min) who he takes on, Anna must acknowledge she will lose a girl she perhaps never truly got an opportunity to know.

But still, while we learn more about Milla’s family, a family of which Milla is always at the heart, it feels like Milla herself is too often relegated to the shadows.

At the centre of the play is Milla’s relationship with Moses, the young drug dealer who first meets Milla by helping her with a blood nose, and then asking her for money. Crook’s Moses may be wrong for Milla, making the best of a situation he has found himself in – a bed, a pantry stocked with food and with drugs – but he still carries himself with a generous heart.

The terminal unromantic that I am, I get the feeling Milla knows this isn’t her true love. She seizes onto this young man because he is kind to her, yes, but also because he is there. Because as she feels the grasp she has on her life becoming ever more tenuous, grabbing onto this man feels like the safest option. She is living out her days hopeful for the world that speaks to her, for the love of her parents, for the jokes and the life they share, for a world where love is a grand adventure still to be explored. She holds on to this man not because she thinks he is her one true love – but because she knows he will be her one love.

The story, therefore, is of Milla’s romance. But it isn’t a romance. A tragedy, perhaps, that a young girl must try and manufacture a first love story, knowing it will be her last.

With Babyteeth, we are given the first production in the State Theatre Company’s new commitment to giving new Australian plays second productions. Under Artistic Director Geordie Brookman we are seeing the strongest artistic program in many years, and if reports are to be believed their strongest audience numbers. These productions are only one of the ways the company is working towards strengthening national connections, but for me it is the most exciting. It is a commitment to giving Australian playwrights pride of place, it gives playwrights the ability to revisit their work, and will hopefully allow the lives of some plays to flourish more fully.

Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play explores the nature of new play development and production in the American not-for-profit theatre sector: a sector that seems to hold many similarities to our own. In the study, the authors speak to the fact that productions begat productions: once a play is produced by three American theatre companies is more likely to find its way into theatres across the country. How these economies work in a country so much smaller I don’t know, but it will be exciting for Adelaide audiences to watch these plays come in – and hopefully go on.

Finally, I want us to take one step back from the play for a moment.

In relation to Babyteeth, I’ve been fascinated by the way people speak about death and loss. Or, more accurately, the way we speak about life in the face of death. From the marketing of this production, to the marketing of the original production at Belvoir, from reviews now and then, the play is repeatedly described as ‘life-affirming.’

Do we need to watch a play about a fourteen-year-old girl coming to grips with the fact that she can no longer fight for her life to have our own lives affirmed? Is it a strange cultural tick, this there but for the grace of god? Are we supposed to think at least it’s not me? Or is this a romanticisation of suffering: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Everything happens for a reason.

Do we need to find a happy and uplifting metaphor in the theatre to make it palatable? Is it not enough for a play to acknowledge the world can be terrible; terrible things happen; that is life. Is that not good enough for the theatre? Do we think that’s not good enough for audiences?

We live in a world of at times unfathomable tragedy. If its war or starvation or abuse or illness, if it’s a tragedy that is happening to a country or if it’s happening to a family: do we need to desperately search for some good in that? Does theatre need to pretend there is good in that?

I don’t think theatre should have to comfort us. It shouldn’t have to hold our hand.

The final strands of Kalenjais’ play show us that life moves on. Nothing more; nothing less. The world will keep spinning. Grief will keep consuming. Milla’s parents will live on because parents live on. Not because their lives are affirmed: because their lives exist.

GIDON takes the little Gliga violin from the case and fits it under THONG’s chin. It is as if this violin has been made for him.

GIDON picks up his instrument and plays with him.

ANNA places her hands on the piano. She takes a deep breath. They play and play and play.

The world Kalnejais has created is filled with laughter and with kindness. For Toby and Thuong in particular, it is filled by a grand and expanding future. Perhaps that’s what people mean when they say it’s life affirming?

For me, I’ve just found living in the face of grief to be life.

And for me, that’s what this play is. It’s not tragedy nor comedy nor romance, but life. As huge and a tiny as that is: it’s everything. I don’t need my life affirmed to appreciate that. I just need my life.

Babyteeth by Rita Kalenjais, directed by Chris Drummond for the State Theatre Company of South Australia in the Space Theatre, 16 August – 07 September 2013. Tickets available here.

Designer Wendy Todd, lighting designer Geoff Cobham, composer Hilary Kleinig, associate sound designer Andrew Howard. With Paul Blackwell, Danielle Catanzariti, Matt Crook, Claire Jones, Alyssa Mason, Chris Pitman, and Lawrence Mau and James Min alternating in the role of Thuong.

All quotes taken from Babyteeth (2012), published by Currency Press in association with Belvoir. Available here.

Music featured here by Hilary Kleinig. Photographs by Shane Reid.

Further reading:

Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, a study of the Theatre Development Fund, written by Todd London and Ben Pesner. It is available here. 

On Guardian Australia, Alison Croggon writes on Second thoughts: return visits to favourite productions.

Rita Kalnejais’ first play BC, produced by Hayloft Theatre and Full Tilt in 2009, published by Red Door, an imprint of the Australian Script Centre can be read here.

Further listening:

We’re Gonna Die by Young Jean Lee, a theatre/cabaret piece about coming to grips with death and pain. “The thing everyone has in common: We’re gonna die. You may be miserable, but you won’t be alone.” Recorded with the band Future Wife, available in iTunes here, closing song available to listen to here.

I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die someday,
Then I’ll be gone and it’ll be it okay.
Someone will miss me, someone will be so sad.
And it’ll hurt, it’s gonna hurt so bad.

No Plain Jane around the web

On Vitalstatistix’s Adhocracy for the Adelaide Review:

The landscape of the arts in Australia is changing. Increasingly, artists aren’t making works that can be easily defined as theatre or visual arts, etcetera, but instead work across art forms and disciplines. It is in this spirit many of the works at Adhocracy will be developed.

Emma Webb, Vitalstatistix’s Creative Producer, says programs like Adhocracy are part of a “growing movement to engage with how we make art, and art’s position in the world”.

On the excitement I felt of the ‘Australianess’ of Belvoir’s Angels in America for the Guardian:

Angels in America is certainly not a new Australian work in terms of its text, and the production makes no pretensions to be. The story may not be ours in 2013 – and probably never was ours even when Tony Kushner wrote his story about AIDS in a 1985 New York City. But the theatre of the piece feels firmly ours of today.

It’s both surprising and exciting how Flack’s production has this spirit to it, and he has found this largely through an Australian irreverent sense of humour. While Kushner said it’s “okay if the wires show” in his stage directions, in this production Flack’s stage magic is, for the most part, so delightfully rudimentary there aren’t even wires to hide.

A review of You, Me, and the Bloody Sea in the Adelaide Cabaret Festival for ArtsHub:

The Space Theatre for the Cabaret Festival was the wrong venue for You, Me and the Bloody Sea. We needed a pub.

The kind of pub where the wind howls by outside, its salt stinging faces as they hurry inside to where bodies pack under the slightly too dim lighting. As the band plays, we want not so much as to watch them perform but to feel them. To stamp our feet and clap our hands and yell and sing along; or to tightly wrap our hands around another and softly sway.

An interview with Anna Krien about her book Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport for Artery:

Exploration of these themes has lead to a book that is frequently uncomfortable, and I wondered if Krien needed breaks from the material in developing the work. ‘You just kind of wade into it’, she replies.

‘I can’t get out of it. There is no real point in taking a break from it because it kind of consumes me, so no. You just go into that dark place and dig your way out.’

A review of The Comedy of Errors from the State Theatre Company of South Australia and Bell Shakespeare for the Guardian:

[…] scenes happen under the glow of a tanning bed, in 24-hour table tennis halls, and under the flashing strobe of a night club. It’s Shakespeare shown at his crudest and broadest, and his text feels comfortable in this world. At times the language is near impenetrable, at others it feels startlingly contemporary – but Savage’s production finds most success and its biggest humour when it goes beyond the text and into the physical.

And I’ll leave you with these sentiments from an unpublished (big on the One Man, Two Guvnors spoilers – shoot me an email if you want to read it) interview with Richard Bean for Arts Centre Melbourne’s Artist to Artist critical conversations:

“One thing that maybe this play has brought back into the tool kit of a playwright is the aside,” he tells me. “We’ve completely lost that from modern theatre – comedy or drama. There is absolutely no reason you can’t do a very serious play about a very serious topic and have asides. It doesn’t have to be comedic. And I think it’s quite refreshing to see this. It’s not the expansion of the form because it’s always been there, but the recovery of different techniques is going to be with me forever now. Why isn’t the actor talking to the audience?”

“It may have ruined me”, he finishes, thinking he’ll never be able to do a work without asides again. This draws contemplation to thoughts about what other facets of theatre have been dropped for being old fashioned or out dated, and how they can be re-employed in contemporary work.

Review: In The Next Room, or the vibrator play

In this house in the 1880s, the drawing room can be the domain of Catherine Givings (Amber McMahon), the slightly frustrated wife, slightly depressed new mother. In the next room is the domain of Dr Givings (Renato Musilino). This is the room where the man of the house can do his work, treating his patients. Largely women. Largely though the power of that newfangled beast: electricity. And the newfangled thing that electricity powers: the vibrator. A strictly utilitarian machine for therapeutic treatment, the cure for hysteria.

Mr Daldry (Brendan Rock) is concerned about his wife, Sabrina (Lizzy Falkland). She is faint, shaky, tired, shies away from bright lights. Hysteria, Dr Givings diagnoses. Not to worry, he and midwife Annie (Katherine Fyffe) will treat her. Once daily. It will all work out fine. Not only is Sabrina treated, but she strikes up a friendship with Catherine, and offers her maid Elizabeth (Pamela Jikiemi), recently bereft of a infant son, up as Catherine’s wet nurse.

But now there is a new patient at Dr Givings office. Leo Irving (Cameron Goodall). But surely Dr Givings couldn’t treat a man? Or could he?

Sarah Ruhl’s In The Next Room, or the vibrator play, gives it all up to its audience front and centre. In this production under director Catherine Fitzgerald, the plot points detailed above are no more than window dressing: this is a comedy about vibrators.

Review: Pornography

There have been three major terrorism attacks in the past decade which significantly cut through to the Australian media, and thus our own dialogues about terrorism. The first, the 9/11 attacks in the USA. The second, the Bali Bombings, targeting Australian tourists. And the third, the London Bombings.

Each year, we notice their anniversaries. Eleven years after 9/11, much of the currency around the discussion of the remembrance focused on the choice of major US newspapers to no longer carry the anniversary as front page news. Ten years on from the Bali Bombings, the event was carried with significance.

The London Bombings perhaps though, held the most currency looking back from 2012. Occurring the day after the announcement the 2012 Olympics would be held in London, the two events would be inextricably linked.

Simon Stephens wrote Pornography in the aftermath of the bombings, in a city which was very much in repair and recovery. His work distills the event down into stories of a handful of people in the week leading up to the event, at the same time almost makes a point of the fact that this bombing was just one day in the lives of people which are frequently full, and complicated, and messy.

The impact of the bombings, the immediacy of the event, the knowledge that these characters lives will now forever be tied up in a narrative of what occurred that day is at the forefront throughout Pornography. Directing the work for the State Theatre Company, Daniel Clarke holds tension throughout the work: relief in humour is short lived, as audience members we are privileged in knowing where the work is taking us. Jason Sweeney’s composition, too, weaved throughout the production, holds the audience on teter-edge.

And yet, the bombing is almost the least important part of the work and the stories. While these characters stories culminate in this event, more pertinently Stephens writes about a fractured England.

Review: Top Girls, or, why I’m happy to be a young feminist

In 1982, the New York Times described Top Girls as “intent on breaking rules.” Thirty years later, Top Girls feels rather a lot like a Well Made Play. Playwright Caryl Churchill has been so influential on the current crop of playwrights that seeing her work on stage now as part of the canon it feels simply that – part of the canon, no longer radical.

And in that tradition, Catherine Fitzgerald’s production for the State Theatre Company is a well made production. Maintaining the eighties setting with shoulder pads intact, and with solid performances from the cast the show rips along much faster than you would suspect of its nearly three hours running time.

Mary Moore’s set keeps it mainly simple: a curved dining table in the first scene, several (computer-less, even for 1982) desks and a office percolator, a small wall for Kit (Carissa Lee) and Angie (Antje Guenther)’s hideaway, a couch and table in Joyce’s home; location settings somewhat unnecessarily indicated by large stagnant projections. The simplicity of Moore’s set – which places the characters and text at the centre of the production, is overshadowed though, by a confusingly literal interpretation of the “glass ceiling” metaphor.

At the dinner party the glass ceiling has been broken – although it is very clear that most of these women just managed to survive within the patriarchy, not beyond it: being stoned to death, giving up their children at the test of their partners, living as a concubine and a nun. At the office, too, the glass ceiling is broken – Marlene (Ulli Birvé) receiving a top job at Top Girls, this is clear enough. In Suffolk, at the home of Marlene’s working class sister Joyce (Eileen Darley), the ceiling remains intact and unbroken. Most confusingly, though, is when the glass ceiling descends during the last scene of the play (the first scene chronologically), as Marlene and Joyce talk. Saying what, exactly? The more time you spend in a lower class area the lower your ceiling becomes? The act of women talking to each other causes the ceiling to drop? The restrictions on the  working class Joyce are certainly greater than her now middle class sister, but why the lowering?

Review: Pinocchio

With guest reviewer Aria Noori, aged 12.

Jane’s review:

Pinocchio – the little wooden boy whose nose grows when he lies – isn’t quite so little in this production from Windmill and the State Theatre Company. Nathan O’Keefe in the title role towers over many of his cast mates, but carries it with such childlike joy – and young manipulative ignorance – that the almost awkward height of the boy is endearing.

In 2009, Windmill’s last big-scale family musical production was The Wizard of Oz, building off the established stage show (in turn based on the film) with new musical arrangements and  a bizarrely twisted lens. While the production toured to Sydney, a much larger scale tour was planned before the rights were stripped by virtue of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production opening on the West End.

Partially to avoid a similar loss, this Pinocchio doesn’t derive from Disney’s 1940 animation, but is a new version built off Carlo Collodi’s original stories. Created by director Rosemary Myers with writer Julianne O’Brien, Windmill have shifted the emphasis of the work off the nature of lies which we all associate the story with, onto lessons of greed and love.

Myers and her creative team mix both flashy stage technology with obvious and delightful theatre trickery. Geoff Cobham puts on just as much as a light show we’ve come to expect, with his trademark balance of creating lighting which is at once obvious but manages to fit perfectly within the action and the rest of the design. Jonathon Oxlade’s stage includes several revolves, where much of the scenic design and transitions are created by projected imagery (video designer Chris Moore) onto an otherwise blank wooden structure representing a tree stump.

It’s the moments when the play fully invests in the unadorned theatrics of the affair and the environment, though, where it truly comes alive.  As Geppetto (Alirio Zavarce) “carves” Pinocchio out of a tree trunk, we simply have O’Keefe hidden in a wooded tube, which drops down in layers before the boy is reveled.  As Geppetto searches for Pinocchio out at sea, we see Zavarce’s legs sticking out from under the row-boat, as pieces of blue material spin around the base of a revolve. Cricket (a puppet operated and characterised by Sam Routledge) frequently breaks the fourth wall and makes jokes often more about the audience and the act of watching a play than the play itself. These moments are also embellished as the band, rabbit ears sticking up over the pit, are joined by cast members, costumes and all, to build up the sound.

Restoring the balance

This article was originally published in the June Adelaide Review. 

A recent report has found that women are underrepresented in key Australian theatre company roles such as writing and directing. But why?

Not one of the eight plays the State Theatre Company of South Australia (STCSA) announced for their 2011 season – in late 2010 – was written by a woman. Indeed, from 2001 to 2011, women have written less than a quarter of the plays the company has mounted.

Come their 2012 program, there is now a female writer or co-writer on five of the eight productions. While outgoing Artistic Director Adam Cook told The Adelaide Review(‘Bright Future on the Stage’, October, 2011) this programming was a “coincidence”, the shift speaks to a much wider national acknowledgment of the underrepresentation of women in the key creative roles of writers and directors in our funded theatre companies.

While conversations about this misrepresentation have been occurring for years, they reached tipping point in late 2009, when several high profile theatre companies announced seasons of work with exceedingly few women. When Company B (now Belvoir) in Sydney released a season of works with only one female playwright and one female director, the first significant waves of awareness occurred in the debate.

First reported on the blog of Sydney playwright Joanna Erskine, who called it an “unacceptable gap in statistics”, the debate quickly spread through theatrical blogs, and began to focus on the underrepresentation of women in many of the country’s highest funded organisations.

This April, the debate came to a crux with the release of the Women in Theatre report from the Australia Council for the Arts. Compiled by academics Elaine Lally and Sarah Miller, the report casts an unflattering light on the theatre sector.

The report looks at the qualitative statistics to get an overview of the true position of women in funded theatre companies; and takes quantitative data through a series of interviews to try and shine better light on the causes of the issues.

One of the key findings of the report focused on the major performing arts companies in the period between 2001 and 2011. These eight theatre companies, of which the STCSA is a member, are the highest funded theatre organisations in Australia. The report showed women make up only 21 percent of the playwrights and 25 percent of the directors working for these companies. At 36 percent, the proportion of productions with at least one woman in the key roles of writer or director is no less dire.

Below the funding levels of the MPA companies, the Theatre Board Key Organisations are a collection of companies funded by the Australia Council with multi-year funding. Typically classified as in the ‘small-to-medium’ sector, Key Organisations represent a larger number of companies than the MPA companies, but each with typically lower outputs of work.

While the report showed greater representation of women in these companies, the proportions are still significantly below parity, with women writing 37 percent of the productions, and directing another 37 percent.

Raised in interviews Lally and Miller held with artists and stakeholders, the reasons for this continuing disparity between gender representations are complex.

While some of these reasons will be familiar to women in many industries, including the structure of employment pathways and the challenges of balancing a career and family, some are unique to the nature of the arts. As one interview respondent told the report, “all new work is risky but women’s work is perceived to be riskier”.

In 1984 the Council endorsed the paper Women in the Arts: A Strategy for Action, which was the first comprehensive look by the Council at the underrepresentation of women in the sectors they fund. While many strategies were implemented, the current statistics paint a concerning picture for how little things have changed.

That same year, Vitalstatistix Women’s Theatre Company was founded by artists Margie Fisher, Roxxy Bent and Ollie Black to champion the work and stories of women in theatre. While the Port Adelaide company has undergone many incarnations over the years, no longer presenting with the word women in their title, gender-aware programming is still a core part of their mission.

In response to this new report, current Creative Producer of Vitalstatistix, Emma Webb, said while the face of the industry is changing, “both statistical and anecdotal evidence shows there continues to be barriers and cultural issues that affect the career advancement of women in the arts”.

“Changes comes in stops and starts, peaks and troughs; the national debate around women’s leadership in theatre over the last few years, and reports like this, ensure the discussion around women in theatre is not some kind of historical survey but rather are in the here and now,” she said.

While the long-term effects of any response to the new report are yet to be seen, radically fast changes in programming at major companies like the STCSA gives hope for a changing industry face. Hopefully, the 2013 seasons will show us the only way is up.

Women In Theatre Report

I speak a lot about how blogs are changing the culture around the way we speak around theatre and the arts. I think, possibly, the greatest thing theatre-blogs in this country can do is speak for and create a movement with speed and with power.

When Belvoir announced their now infamous 2010 season, lining eleven men and one woman up on stage to say this is the theatre we’re making this year there was outrage. This physical manifestation of the gender disparity which has plagued the Australian theatre for as long as we have had one threw a new generation of theatre-makers and commenters up in arms.

I documented the main-stages of 2011, and things weren’t rosy. I fully plan to do the same thing again for 2012, as soon as I have a sliver of time in my life. But I was just one tiny fraction of the national movement.

In 2011, two companies – the State Theatre Company of South Australia and the Queensland Theatre Company – had no women playwrights. STCSA’s AD Cook said:

there is no conspiracy, you just have to be talented, and the people who would hire you have to agree that you are … And that is the blunt fact of getting a job.  You just have to be good.  And the same with playwrights, they think “why aren’t you doing my plays?”  Well, I don’t think it’s very good. There’s always one answer, isn’t there?

By contrast, QTC’s AD Wesley Enoch said:

When you look at gender, women make up more than 53 per cent of the population. How are we responding to that as artistic directors? … When you look at the figures, then action comes about. QTC has no women playwrights in [2011’s] season, no indigenous playwrights or from a non-English speaking background. What are we saying?¹

Come 2012, STCSA has 54.69% female playwrights; and QTC has 22.22%. No one said this battle wasn’t going to be confusing.

It’s going to be long. And hard. And stressful. And, yes, always always confusing.

But yesterday, it took another huge leap forward with the publishing of the Women In Theatre paper through the Australia Council.  I contributed some of quantitative data to the report, which is compiled with quantitative interviews, and together they paint a national picture across the Major Performing Arts Group companies and the Theatre Board Key Organisations.

Please, read the paper. Share it among your networks. Take its statistics and try to make it better. And when it’s not better, call people out.

I like to think we’re part of a movement, that something is happening, that things will get better. But I can’t do it without you.

¹AWG “Raw Sexism at Play” Storyline Issue 29, Summer 2011

Interview: Geordie Brookman and The City

Already this year Adelaide theatre director Geordie Brookman has worked as assistant director on the Force Majeure / Sydney Theatre Company / Sydney Festival production Never Did Me Any Harm; directed the development and reading of Nicki Bloom’s 170 page, five hour long The Sun and the Other Stars for the National Play Festival in Melbourne; was the community coordinator at the Adelaide Festival club Barrio; and, in a “stupidly swift manner”, applied for and was announced as incumbent Artistic Director for the State Theatre Company of South Australia.

But before any of this came along, Geordie and wife Nicki Bloom had planned a year’s worth of work for their independent theatre company nowyesnow, for which they are co-artistic directors. I meet with Geordie twice in the last month to discuss directing nowyesnow’s first production for 2012, Martin Crimp’s The City.

Chatting on the second day of rehearsals in March and during bump-in to the theatre three days before the first preview in April gave me the opportunity to learn more about how a work is approached at the beginning and end of a rehearsal process, and (here’s hoping) gave me an opportunity to come to a clearer understanding of the work before seeing the piece and formulating my response to it (which you can now read here). The traditional approach is, of course, there is no connection between the artists and the critic before a work, as if conversations will some how “taint” the opinion (or, at worst, “subjectivity”) of a critic. But trying to stand completely outside of the theatrical culture in Adelaide is rather impossible, and I’m also interested in the place a critic occupies between the “audience” and the “artist” and how, by forming a clearer picture of intents and processes, the gaps on all sides (between audience and critic; between critic and artist; between audience and artist) can become smaller.

How this works in practice is something I’m still working out, but I’m glad to have artists who will help me in the process.

Geordie previously directed Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life for STCSA in 2008. “He’s always struck me,” he told me at our first meeting.

“Whenever I read something of his it always has an impact, and it doesn’t mean every word of his is perfect, but every one is so finely wrought and so deeply intelligent and so determined to simply be what it is. That beautiful thing in an artist: he doesn’t try to please anybody except himself, and he just allows the audience to come to him.”

Of The City, Geordie said the work is “a really quiet, really controlled, very very very intimate piece of chamber theatre that maintains that wonderful, dark, wicked sense of humour that he has, but makes no apologies for being deeply intelligent and highly cerebral.”

Adam Cook to leave State Theatre Company

Minister for the arts John Hill has broken the news via twitter that Adam Cook, artistic director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, has resigned after eight years in the top job. With the company shortly about to announce a new CEO after Pamela Foulkes announced her resignation towards the end of last year, this could lead to a huge shake up of the highest funded theatre company in the state.

This also calls into question the interesting timing of Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton announcing they won’t be extending their term at the Sydney Theatre Company. Is there a move to Adelaide in their future?