The World Premiere of Hannie Rayson’s The Swimming Club, the tale of a group of friends who spent one glorious summer together in the Greek Islands. Cast includes Caroline Gillmer and John Waters. Click for more photos

The World Premiere of Hannie Rayson’s The Swimming Club, the tale of a group of friends who spent one glorious summer together in the Greek Islands. Cast includes Caroline Gillmer and John Waters. Photo: MTC

  • The World Premiere of Hannie Rayson’s The Swimming Club, the tale of a group of friends who spent one glorious summer together in the Greek Islands. Cast includes Caroline Gillmer and John Waters.
  • A new production of William Shakespeare’s classic Richard III, the story of one of England’s most controversial kings and one of the theatre’s greatest villains. MTC Artistic Director Simon Phillips will direct Jennifer Hagan, Deidre Rubenstein, Alison Whyte, Meredith Penman and Ewen Leslie.
  • The Australian Premiere of The Drowsy Chaperone, the great hit of the 2006 Broadway Season, starring Geoffrey Rush, Shane Jacobson and Robyn Nevin.
  • The Australian Premiere of J.T. Rogers haunting mystery Madagascar. Sam Strong?s MTC directing debut starring Noni Hazlehurst and Asher Keddie.
  • Boston Marriage, an American revival by David Mamet, which demonstrates how even sophisticated women of society will stop at nothing to get what they want. Starring Pamela Rabe and directed by MTC Associate Director Aidan Fennessy.
  • The Australian Premiere of Dead Man?s Cell Phone, a romantic fantasy, full of insights into the way technology transforms our lives. Directed by MTC Associate Director Peter Evans and starring Matt Day.
  • The Melbourne Premiere of David Williamson?s Let the Sunshine, directed by Queensland Theatre Company?s Artistic Director Michael Gow and starring Jacki Weaver, John Wood, Robert Coleby and Andrea Moor.
  • The Australian Premiere of Samuel Adamson?s stage adaption of Pedro Almod?var?s Oscar-winning film All About My Mother, featuring Wendy Hughes alongside Paul Capsis.
  • The World Premiere of Daniel Keene?s MTC debut, Life Without Me, the tale of a group of people who get stuck in a run down two-star hotel. Starring Robert Menzies, Greg Stone, Kerry Walker and Brian Lipson.
  • Joanna Murray-Smith?s new play Songs For Nobodies the tale of five anonymous women whose brushes with fame had a profound effect on their lives. A one-woman play showcasing the extraordinary talents of Bernadette Robinson.
  • Studio production of The Ugly One, German playwright Marius Von Mayenburg’s comic masterpiece, MTC Associate Director Peter Evans will direct Patrick Brammall and Alison Bell.
  • The World Premiere of Tony McNamara?s hilarious satire The Grenade, starring Garry McDonald and Genevieve Picot.
  • MTC Artistic Director Simon Phillips.

Half the trouble with Australian theatre is caused by directors who feel they are above realism'

THE rumour was that the Sydney Theatre Company was no longer interested in mainstream naturalistic playwrights such as David Williamson or Hannie Rayson. Or so Williamson said. The Melbourne Theatre Company might showcase Joanna Murray-Smith's Rockabye, but Sydney wanted to lure the kids with an edge so sharp that there would be no place for anything like literary theatre. Then Cate Blanchett opened as Blanche in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in a production by the great Liv Ullmann. It was straight, it was classical, it showed what theatre could do rather than what could be done with the theatre.

It could hold any stage in the world — and not simply because of Blanchett's histrionic skills — but it was naturalistic and muted. Someone remarked it was a bit Scandinavian for Tennessee. Much quieter than the superb Melbourne Theatre Company production of that more recent American domestic August: Osage County — which also delivered, on the note, without distortion.

Both were far removed from Blanchett's last appearance on the stage in Benedict Andrews' deconstruction of Shakespeare's history plays, the eight-hour War of the Roses. Blanchett was a superb Richard II and Lady Anne in Richard III, but the production took Shakespeare as its demolition site with its smeared body fluids and blood spitting. There was plenty to admire in Wars of the Roses, plenty to deplore. And then there was Andrews' radical revisiting of Patrick White's Season at Sarsaparilla with veteran Peter Carroll in drag and a Big Brother-style camera.

No one after Streetcar could suggest that the STC disdained naturalism or traditional production — the company will mount that textbook classic Uncle Vanya next year. But there is, throughout Australian theatre, a powerful pull away from traditional illusionistic conceptions of the theatre.

Traditions and the innovations that disrupt it are two sides of the one coin. The theatre of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan hardly nurtured the mime-oriented experimentalism of Robert Wilson.

Nor could you have plays like Eugene Ionesco's if you stuck to Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

The Malthouse welcomes the Barrie Kosky approach of standing a play on its head until its teeth rattle to see if it's alive.

Consider his production of Women of Troy (adapted with the STC's Tom Wright) which exploited an ugly-ugly aestheticism that pushed Euripides' tragedy towards Grand Guignol. But the Malthouse also brought us Geoffrey Rush in the Neil Armfield production of Exit the King. That absurdist ballet of ghostly actor-kings is hardly naturalism, but the production paid scrupulous attention to the text.

Naturalism and disruptive high jinks: the theatre needs both. Yes, we need a writer's theatre that is also an actor's theatre, where the director serves the text and highlights — and disciplines — the strength of the actor. We need Rush and Steve Sewell and a director such as Kate Cherry, who can quietly find the music in a Hannie Rayson play. Maybe in the end we need it more than the declamatory atonal music of Andrews and Kosky.

Half the trouble with Australian theatre is caused by talented directors who feel they are above realism and well-made plays. Often they cut their teeth with student theatre and have been too narcissistic to grow up. It's much easier to treat student actors like puppets and to improvise a text than it is to treat Judy Davis like that. Most cut-and-paste postmodern tinkerings with classics make Joanna Murray-Smith look like Racine on a good day. But for every production such as Osage, there's hand-me-down cardboard rubbish of the traditional kind.

We want the best actors commanding the respect of directors who will allow the best of our playwrights to take their places alongside the Pirandellos and Greeks. A theatre which is ancient and modern, classic and cutting-edge, Australian and internationalist, with a deep instinctive sense that to make it new, you have to have a theatrical eye for the glitter of the old. Where is naturalism in all this? Well, we need a theatre that has emotional truth, and we need a theatre that understands the magic of its own artifice.