First published on 14 Sep 2011. Updated on 19 Sep 2011.
“I want to direct classics. I want to sit on the shoulders of greats and break bread with the dead... I want to direct Euripides, Shakespeare, Pirandello and Wedekind. It’s a link with the past that propels us toward the future. In a country so young as Australia, the canonical texts can link us to the beginnings of human thought, plight and passion and incite us to demand a better society. It is theatre to change the world.” – Kate Revz, 2008
As the co-founder of independent theatre company Cry Havoc, Kate Revz has devoted herself to revivifying classic texts. She’s earned a reputation for bold, imaginative work: her 2010 productions of Orestes 2.0 and Three Sisters were daring, thrillingly modern and frequently unhinged.
Directing only one production in Sydney in 2011, Revz decided to go all out and take on Shakespeare’s ferocious Titus Andronicus. “We said, if we’re only doing one, let’s make it the mother of all Shakespeares,” Revz says. “It’s got 15 cast members from age eight to… I don’t even know how old the oldest person is.”
Revz says she’s always wanted to direct the murder-heavy Titus. Coming after Three Sisters, the urge to take it on was even stronger. “As much as I loved doing Three Sisters I really missed the blood,” Revz says with a smile. “I thought, well, what can I do that has the most blood in it?”
Actor Helmut Bakaitis (“the architect from The Matrix, for those who don’t know,” Sarah Giles chimes in) is also “coming out of retirement” for the role of Titus.
“I’m really excited,” says Revz. “I’m just so ready to start. We’ve been doing collateral for a long time and having meetings with the cast and things like that. So it’s time to get it up on the floor.”
“Why do I direct? OK – I’ll get straight to the point. I don’t get life. Seriously. It’s really weird, exciting, confusing, thrilling, unfair and filled with joys, problems and fun. And so I try to make the most sense of it as I can. And when I can’t make sense of it I ask questions. I present problems and sometimes I offer solutions. And sometimes I roll about crying why? why? why? And I want to share this with other people.” – Sarah Giles, 2008
Since graduating from NIDA, Sarah Giles has assistant directed several tremendous productions, including Strange Attractor, Tot Mom and Long Day’s Journey into Night. In 2010 she directed two razor-sharp productions in Sydney – The Pigeons for Griffin Independent and Kreutzer vs Kreutzer with the Australian Chamber Orchestra – and in 2011 the Sydney Theatre Company brought Giles on as its Richard Wherrett Fellow resident director.
Having directed K.I.J.E. for Tamarama Rock Surfers and Ruby Moon earlier in the year – gripping, intelligent productions both – Giles’s next project under her STC residency is Money Shots, a curated collection of five short plays written by emerging playwrights and theatre-makers, performed by the company’s resident actors.
The five works are inspired, to varying degrees, by the theme ‘money’. “The playwrights have taken that idea and interpreted it more as an exchange,” says Giles. Whereas Zoe Pepper’s Fiddler’s Coin (devised with the actors) is a comedy about finance getting in the way of family, Rita Kalnejais’s How to Get Very Clean is an emotional exchange between two strangers at a funeral. Tahli Corin’s The Arcade – “an exquisite piece of naturalism,” Giles says – is an 80s coming-of-age story, while Angus Cerini’s revenge tale Drill Down has the playwright’s heavily-accented language “front-and-centre”.
Giles describes No Exit from the Roof, by playwright Duncan Graham, with an image borrowed from the piece itself: “It feels like throwing a coin off a roof and seeing moments of it as it falls to the ground and smashes into a million pieces."
It’s a colossal undertaking for one director. (“Have you got a nice rehearsal period?” asks Revz. “Not really,” says Giles, with a hint of something resembling terror.)
“Who knows what it will be?” Giles concludes theatrically. “Each piece will be very different. It should actually be quite an exciting night. It’s not a huge budget, it’s very rough, it’s very raw.”
“Theatre should be an experiment. Always. As directors we should be constantly striving to work in ways that are unfamiliar to us, with collaborators who extend our knowledge and skills. We should sit in a place of fear. Fear of failure. Fear of mediocrity. Fear of imitation. This fear is what should drive us to create our work. Theatre should never be safe. It should never be ‘all right’. It should be anything but ‘all right’.” – Imara Savage, 2008
As a director, Imara Savage has two quite recent, extremely confident and muscular productions to her name: The Brothers Size for Griffin Independent in 2011, and Fool for Love for B Sharp in 2010. Aside from these, Savage has been assistant director on a number of fine productions in Sydney: Opera Australia’s La Sonnambula, The Wonderful World of Dissocia and The Mysteries: Genesis with the STC, and Like a Fishbone for Griffin/STC.
In 2011, Savage was appointed Bell Shakespeare’s director in residence. She was John Bell’s assistant director for Much Ado about Nothing, and, more recently, Peter Evans’s assistant director for Julius Caesar, which arrives in Sydney in October. “Peter runs a pretty collaborative rehearsal room,” says Savage. “It was just about sharing ideas and opinions, being involved in the movement training, as well as being a support for the cast on their regional tour, popping in and out along the way.”
Having never studied the play, Savage says that, initially, Julius Caesar didn’t particularly interest her. “I was not a Julius Caesar fan really,” she says. “I’d just never been exposed to it, in a way. And as soon as we started sitting in a rehearsal room and pulling apart that language – all those images, the gods and the superstition and the mythology and the other-worldliness – it started becoming incredibly exciting for me.” (Revz smiles appreciatively – she directed Julius Caesar in 2009.)
“It’s a political play,” Savage continues, “but it’s also got this whole world of dreams and gods and superstition around it that I think has been exploited quite beautifully in this particular production. Every day I’d walk out of the rehearsal room and think: this guy’s a really good writer.”
Revz nods. “Every time.”
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