A Conversation in the Moment

Billed as Don’t Miss the Moment, Melbourne Theatre Company has combined the talents of Robyn Nevin, Pamela Rabe and Aidan Fennessy to program the 2012 season: the twelve months between the departure of outgoing artistic director Simon Phillips and the arrival of the new Artistic Director Brett Sheedy.

It is a unique collaboration. Because of production demands Sally Heath emailed Nevin and Fennessy, and spoke to Rabe on the phone.

SH: Will 2012 be like a gap year, where new things are tried, where you ask the audiences to sample new things with you? Will it necessarily be more experimental?

RN: Our brief was to create a program in line with Australian state theatre programs, and with MTC programs as they are known to Melbourne audiences. Typically the companies select from the classics repertoire from deep time and more recently from 19th Century, new writing both Australian and foreign with focus always on new writing from Australia! And being a Melbourne based company, in particular, from local playwrights. This is the basic format for all State theatre companies (variations would reflect the interests and ambitions of artistic directors). As we were not artistic directors we had to collaborate with each other, sometimes self-censoring our own preferences/ambitions, and this was clearly not a year to be more experimental.

PR: I read up and immersed myself with as much information as I could about the nature of what Melbourne audiences respond to. But in the end we sat down, the three of us, and kind of hot housed and brainstormed and…responded to what we felt the brief was¬–that the three of us with different experiences, different tastes and sensibilities and our different networks of collaborations would throw ideas on the table and out of it a vision would form itself, which I think it did.

AF: Every season aims to provide audiences with novelty and also to achieve balance in terms of the experiences on offer and 2012 aims to do exactly that. There’s a good balance of challenge and reward on offer next year I think.

SH: Each of you are combining practitioner and programming skills. How will those talents inform the other?

AF: They are in my opinion quite different tasks. The commonality across both roles is the aspiration to produce works of high quality.

RN: As an actress, director and producer I am a product of practicing all three over decades. Hard to define, in brief, how one impacts on the other.

SH: How do you imagine you will bounce ideas and desires off each other?

RN: At our initial meeting I suggested we each put on the table projects close to our own personal ambitions. My first project was rejected! Others were slow to voice theirs. As I was accustomed to the process (having created twelve as an artistic director) I probably moved faster than my colleagues.

The basic process was to read plays, respond to them, some of which we argued strongly over, and if we agreed or were in semi-agreement, we positioned the play on our whiteboard. We assigned each play to a particular space where it sat until another play forced it into a different space. For example the Arts Centre, Fairfax is every director’s dream space as the intimacy advantages the play and the actor. Not all projects can sit in that space as it is limited in terms of scale and so design, but we did argue on behalf of the play’s needs, in terms of its intimacy, many times. Availabilities affected this process also. For example if a director was not available for the dates the Fairfax was available we moved it up into the MTC Theatre, Sumner, a larger space but not as large as the final option, the Arts Centre, Playhouse. The Playhouse has the most pressure as it is an 850 house, so the production loses intimacy and must attract large audience numbers. On the positive side it can take large scale design and large cast productions.

The whiteboard actually remained pretty much fixed after we took the courageous step of writing up twelve plays! I left at that point, due to prior commitments, at which point we lost a couple due to the final budget outcome. This is just process. We get excited, we think we have a season and then the pesky figures are added…

AF: Well the process of drawing together the season involved lots of intense discussions and a very complex matrix of timings and personality. Always in the forefront is the desire to engage an audience.

SH: Robyn said that she suggested a play to start with and that was dropped pretty quickly but how in the end did you come up with a program from all your different talents and perspectives?

PR: Well I don’t know actually remember the things that hit the cutting room floor particularly but obviously there was a process that meant would spruik for something they felt quite excited by and if it didn’t illicit a strong response, a positive response or consensus then it probably would drift further down a pile. But we very quickly arrived at a number of projects that we all were very excited about unanimously.

When we first began I had discussed do we do the ‘two to one wins rule’ or what? I remember Robin saying, ‘let’s tackle that when we come to it if we need too’ but I don’t think we ever needed to call on that one.

SH: So there was a process and everyone agreed in the end?

PR: Well in the end there was kind of a wealth of ideas that we were all excited by unanimously, so in the end our three disparate kind of personalities and sensibilities converged. But we all share a love and affection and admiration for the classics while we were also actively seeking new and recent writing. Somebody would say ‘what about?’ or ‘has this been done?’ and whatever there was a quick and positive response to, well most of those have ended up in the programme.

SH: What is the biggest risk for you in the programme?

RN: A play which we assume will not be broadly popular, even if we consider it worthy of programming. MTC earns a large percentage of its income at the box office and the budget is designed accordingly so all productions must earn. Or we must find what we can safely assume (tricky!) is a huge box office earner to make up for the losses on the production which will result in a deficit. It is my view that Government subsidy is there to make it possible for works which might ‘fail’ at the box office but which are clearly ready, or desirable, for production. If subsidy remains at its current levels this remains extremely difficult to achieve; finding the big box office earners is the difficulty… needing a Geoffrey Rush to make this happen (as with The Importance of Being Earnest or The Drowsy Chaperone which will/did earn well for MTC).

PR: Risk is an odd word so I think in this context risk is always financial. The biggest risk is when you don’t match all the ingredients of a creative project together well. But if you start from a place where we all started from–what do we love? What are we passionate about? Who are we passionate about working with and collaborating with? Then that to me, is minimizing risk, and making sure that every project that ended up on that program was there because somebody had a really burning desire to tell that story. It’s matchmaking on that scale and in that regard but it’s also matching a particular project or a particular story to the right space.

SH: What is ‘the moment’ for you?

RN: I have been Sydney based until I left STC as Artistic Director and CEO so my experiences of Melbourne theatre have been as a director or actor. As a director I recall, with a visceral thrill, the performance of Genevieve Picot, as Olive, in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Her final scene was a moment indeed. As an actor it is all too subjective but perhaps being in the Trojan Women, a Barrie Kosky production, at the Malthouse… Wrong theatre company but you asked!

AF: That’s yet to be seen in terms of 2012. To me the ‘moment’ describes the intersection of a passage within a play that transports and transcends and lodges in the mind forever.

PR: In the end it’s a pale shadow of that fleeting moment, that lost moment sitting in a theatre and letting your own kind of personal individual baggage melt away at least for the couple of hours that you are there. It is how it touches you and the kind of the residue it leaves in you. It is very personal and individual.

SH: Does a season need plays that cover the emotional and intellectual range or the extremes of these?

RN: In a season of twelve plays, if we have done our job well, inevitably these extremes will be covered. Queen Lear, Red, Tribes, National Interest, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll… there you have them, plus comedy.

AF: I’m happy that the range on offer is vast.

SH: What is the play that got away?

RN: There were few only, but in combination with the season as it stood, due to them being too expensive… process… they were replaced.

AF: There were a few works that we either couldn’t attain rights for or were put on the back burner because we couldn’t line up the right artists for it or simply were too expensive. This is part of the process but our strike rate was quite good this year.

PR: Quite a few but…there was a wealth of ideas and in the end the ideas where there was a consensus and a convergence of support amongst the three of us are the ones that have kind of risen and ended up here on the page.

Find out more about the MTC here.

© Meanjin 2011