We are in the rehearsal room for Bernhardt/Hamlet!! Woohoo!!! It is awesome to be back in a room with a gorgeous group of creators bringing to life the world of The Divine Sarah Bernhardt as she tackles the role of Hamlet. So, we are imagining the life of a theatre company in 19th century France… yes there is champagne, yes there are baguettes and yes, even back then it was a problem figuring out how to do the ghost of Hamlet’s father. But the rehearsal room is filled with laughter and the building is coming to life again.
Nat Ryner is down in the costume department overseeing the team of seamstresses and tailors making Simone Romaniuk’s lush designs real… I do love a bit of brocade. After a bout of Covid hitting the construction team everyone is back on deck getting ready to move the set into the theatre… which is nearly finished!!! I have to warn you though, the bar may not be fully functional in time for the beginning of the Bernhard/Hamlet season. But I figure, as long as the play is on stage, we can make do with eskies for a bit. Yes? We might have to rough it in the foyer for a while but if that’s our biggest problem we are doing OK.
High school students and teachers around the state are participating in The Scene Project which will see nearly 100 schools create versions of Suzie Miller’s new play Chroma Town. The Young Artist Ensembles are all back rehearsing in the building, our teaching artists have been training, the Youth and Education Program is in full swing — the team are absolutely unstoppable!
In four weeks’ time, we will know which party will lead us for the next three years and Bernhardt/Hamlet will be previewing onstage in the restored Bille Brown Theatre. It’s a big month! Whatever the ups and downs of Australian political campaigns, the devastation of Ukraine must make us treasure our political freedoms and work to make sure they are not eroded by fear. Whatever the weather, as long as the theatre stays dry, I’m happy. Whatever the challenges in rehearsal, as long as we keep Covid out, I’m happy. Whatever the strangeness of this year, we are getting through it!
I can’t believe it’s nearly May! It feels like three years since January. While there is nothing in our theatre at the moment there is plenty to see as the Anywhere Festival kicks off next week in Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast and Noosa. Artists will be making work in strange, surprising, and inventive spaces all over the place. If you love a bit of theatrical adventure, check it out! I hope you and your family are OK and I can’t wait to see you in our foyer really soon!
Love Lee,
How great is Emily Bates of the Brisbane Lions?! She just won the AFLW MVP and Best and Fairest. It may be because I am getting ready for rehearsals of Bernhardt/Hamlet and so my eye is drawn to stories of women doing great things — I know it’s a long journey from Sarah Bernhardt onstage in Paris in the 19th century to Emily Bates on the field in Brisbane 2022 but they are connected — both doing the things that seemed impossible when they were little girls… both changing the futures of women who will come after them.
There will be sword fighting rather than ball kicking onstage when Angie Milliken takes the stage as The Divine Sarah, corsets rather than mouthguards. But please know that while I do love brocade, I am also a fan of sports plays!! The great Steve Le Marquand (you would have seen him here in The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll) always talked about working to make theatre as focussed as a great game of sport — for the actors and the audience. I’ve made plays about Rugby Union, League and soccer (football in my house) but none about the AFLW yet…
The work of rebuilding the theatre is frantic — we are determined to be ready in time for the First Preview of Bernhardt/Hamlet on 28 May. The pace is picking up across the building. The costume department has started work on the frocks — the aforementioned brocade is moving from bolts of fabric into beautiful waistcoats (there is a great cape!). The scenic art department is recreating the work of the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, the artist behind Bernhardt’s theatre posters. It is a rich and wonderful world that we will be conjuring up for you.
Rehearsals start in under two weeks. Yes, I am very excited. No, I am not exactly match fit after the stops and starts of the year. But bring it on! Let the games begin!
Enjoy your Easter eggs!
Love Lee,
Silver linings sometimes come in the shape of dinosaurs. With the theatre a construction site and everyone working from home (thank you Covid, we now know how to do that easily), I realised I could work from anywhere. So, I took the opportunity to join my partner on a job he had taking photos of the new Eromanga Natural History Museum. He picked me up at Quilpie airport and we drove west to Eromanga. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was blown away by this world-class paleontological research laboratory in the middle of the most beautiful landscape. This museum, when completed, will be the home to Australia’s biggest dinosaur — a Titanosaur nicknamed ‘Cooper’! (Australotitan Cooperensis) We were there for the opening of the visitor centre, and we met the wonderful team of people who have spent nearly 20 years working to build this museum.
Led by the extraordinary Robyn Mackenzie (whose son Sandy found the original dinosaur bone when he was a teenager and kicked this whole project off) the vision for this museum is incredibly inspiring. Brisbane architects Stephanie Donigi and Dr Stephen Long have made an oasis for discovery, research, and preservation in the harshest of environments. A home for the oldest story. Before all the human mess, there was the world of the dinosaurs on the edge of the Eromanga Sea. There is a great display explaining that, if the history/timeline of the planet is the drive from Brisbane to Eromanga, humans don’t exist until the carpark of the Museum. I think I needed a bit of that perspective to be honest.
And the sunsets… I definitely needed the sunsets! I hosted an artist’s conversation night on Zoom from the café of the museum so everyone got to enjoy the gorgeous going down of the sun behind me. And that night I got to see the Milky Way for the first time in years! The team are raising the money for the big gallery to house the skeleton of Cooper — right now the skeleton is stacked in a small room awaiting assembly (free Cooper!!!). But when the display is complete it will be a highlight of any western tour of Queensland. I feel lucky to have had a glimpse of their huge achievement and look forward to the day when the ribbon is cut on the completed museum. It will be one of our national treasures.
On the opening day, Assistant Minister for Tourism Industry Development Michael Healy cut the cake for the opening of this stage. Students from Eromanga State School all had a piece before taking a tour of the facility with all the dignitaries and builders. There was much celebration. And when the last guests left, the scientists went back to the enormous task of preserving the bones of creatures who existed before mankind was even a possibility.
Really, for all the talk about Eromanga being the furthest town from the sea, it’s really not that far. Highlights of the hop skip and jump back included a visit to the Cosmos Centre, a great steak dinner in Charleville, an encounter with a troupe of cute dachshunds at the Overlander Homestead Motel in Roma before purchasing a bottle tree for the garden, being a complete tourist at the big watermelon in Chinchilla, and dealing with a photographer driver who kept stopping the car to shoot all the silos (there are a lot). I love a road trip.
I got back in time for the Matildas Awards of course! What a great celebration of theatre managing to survive the last two years! Congratulations to everyone who was nominated. Congratulations to all the winners including Jayden Popik who won for his performance in Mouthpiece (how is that over two years ago!), and Craig Wilkinson for his Video Design in Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe adapted for the stage by Tim McGarry. Congratulations to every artist who managed to create theatre work in the last two years. Thank you to all the people who have made theatre possible in these awful times, especially our beautiful audiences. And thank you to our fabulous Arts Minister who announced that the Queensland Government will be contributing $100,000 to the Actors Benevolent Fund, a compassionate organisation that exists to support entertainment professionals through times of crisis. Obviously this organisation has never been more needed by our industry.
What a week! What a year! Stay dry if you can, stay safe, stay healthy, stay together!
See you soon,
Love, Lee
So yes, our theatre is a mess at the moment. The floors are pulled up, the walls have been cut away, all the joinery is being ripped out and all the wiring is being tested to see what works and what doesn’t. It is horrible. But to everyone who cares so much about this Company, please know that we will be OK. The Department of Energy and Public Works has a great team of people working hard to bring it back to life, and bit by bit we will build it back to the beautiful space everyone contributed so much to create.
It is yuck, but it is not tragic. Our hearts go out to the people who have lost homes and businesses and who do not have insurance or resources to rebuild. Our theatre hearts go out to our friends at NORPA whose building sits in the middle of Lismore. And of course, this morning, waking to see the photo of the Mariupol Drama Theatre from the sky, with the word ‘children’ written in big white letters in Russian on the ground outside, followed by the story that this theatre has been bombed while it housed people needing refuge… well this makes our problems very manageable.
When I was young, theatre was a refuge for me – still is, truth be told. Stories, fiction, imagined worlds have always been safe spaces to wrestle with ideas from the real world that are very difficult. Playwrights have always offered up ways of thinking about complexities that I could not have come up with myself. When we come together for a performance, we come together to collectively examine an idea in a not real way. Then we go back out into the world and use bits of that hypothetical fictional story to help us tackle problems in our reality. Sometimes playwrights will write a sentence so good you want to write it down and use it sometime in the future – Oscar Wilde and Joanna Murray Smith are great for winning arguments stylishly. Sometimes they offer a window into a world view that we would never otherwise have access to – Meyne Wyatt’s monologue from City of Gold is now inscribed in the national imagination. Sometimes they pull the laughter out of our chest when we least expect it, binding us together in a moment of community joy that creates light in the sometimes unbearable darkness.
Yes, I am looking for a lot of laughter in the 2023 Season! And I can’t wait to offer you the ideas hived inside the plays we have planned for this year. The darker the times, the more we need our theatre. The more catastrophe surrounding us, the more our theatre is an oasis.
Our theatre is damaged but not lost. But today is a huge reminder that we must cherish it —the refuge it offers, the freedom it houses, and the intelligence and empathy it inspires. Washing gross mud off all the equipment is disgusting, but the laughter and companionship of all the people who volunteered to help last Saturday was inspiring – and how good were those brownies thanks to Mia and her mum! So, thank you to all the people who have helped so far and to all of you who will continue to help us to get back on our feet. Queensland Theatre is not a building, it is hundreds of thousands of people every year who need a building to house ideas.
And I look forward to seeing everyone back in that building as soon as it is possible!
Love, Lee
So this hasn’t been the greatest week ever. The whole company would like to say thank you for all the offers of help to clean up the mess of the flooding in the building. Monday saw about 75cm of water through the whole first floor of our building – the theatres, backstage, the foyer, carpark and reception. A small but amazing team of people headed up by Dan Maddison managed to get most of our valuable equipment up to the second floor which was awesome. And a lot of the planning after the 2011 floods really helped to make sure the damage wasn’t as catastrophic as it was back then. But our beautiful theatres, the Bille Brown Theatre and the Diane Cilento Studio were badly affected and will take a while to be functional again.
You will recognise the process – drain the water, get the electricity back on, start getting rid of the mud (not as much as last time) and disinfecting everything in sight before getting rid of damaged stuff and rebuilding. YUK!!! But it’s not the end of the world – we have survived it before, and we will prevail again. Thank you so much for all the offers of help! We will reach out once we are back in the building, but for the moment we should all focus on helping friends and neighbours getting back into their houses.
It seems a lifetime ago that we closed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but that was just last Saturday that we said goodbye to that gorgeous team. What a pleasure it was to start the year with such a great piece of writing. It’s not often that a play demands attention with every line. Thank you for being so up for a big night in the theatre – especially those of you who are married, or academics or both! Secretly, one of the things I love about a two-interval show is having an ice-cream in the second interval! And QPAC confirms that a lot of you share my vice, because ice-cream sales were above average in this production. There won’t be another play this year that will be quite as full on as the Edward Albee/Margaret Harvey vision… but what a way to start.
Our next play would have been First Casualty, which thanks to Omicron is now at the end of the year. So yes, you could say this has been a rocky start to the year. But if Covid has taught us anything it is that we can adapt, and re-plan. So we are all working from home for a couple of weeks (which we are all set up to do these days) and getting on with preparation for the next play of the year which will be Hannah Belanszky’s don’t ask what the bird look like. We are finding a temporary space for our Young Artist Ensembles until we can get back into our rehearsal rooms. I am reading plays and having conversations with companies around the country about potential tours and co-productions for next year because (YAY!!!) the borders are open.
I can’t sign off with ‘see you in the foyer soon’, as usual. I will just say stay dry and stay safe, and send extra love to all the families who have been hit by floods.
Love, Lee
It was opening night last night and you could feel the buzz of excitement in the building. The sun was shining, messages of luck and love were coming in from companies around the country, flowers and gifts for the cast were arriving, my gold sneakers were shined and ready and I had my RAT ready so that I could go backstage after the show to see the actors. The new normal! Welcome to the 2022 Season.
I can think of nothing I would rather do than jump into the great big juicy play pool of Edward Albee’s writing. Jimi Bani and Susan Prior are so full of passion, Margaret Harvey’s direction is so fierce, Ailsa Paterson’s design is so striking but the words… the words that Albee crafts into some of the most brutal sentences in the English language! You must be in the room with them to feel the force of their power. So, mask up and come and see one of the world’s great plays in action on the Playhouse, QPAC stage!
Despite all the ups and downs of the last few months, it feels like we are pushing through finally to a functional theatre again. Vaccinations, boosters, masks and RATs notwithstanding, we had an Opening Night, our Young Artist Ensembles are starting their year and we are starting to get out and see all the theatre that is happening around the city. My six-year-old nephew highly recommends Frozen even though he can’t figure out how they did the magical ice, a trip to the gorgeous Princess Theatre to see The Wider Earth must be on the list, and I am looking forward to both the wildness of 7 Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner and a little bit of Sherlock Holmes with The Mystery of the Valkyrie! What is great is the range of experience between all these different works.
What is not great is that there are no school excursions this term (COVID!!!!!!!!! AAAARGH!!!!!). All the students who would have been coming to the theatre with teachers are no longer able to!! So. Pivot! We would like to encourage students to come to the theatre themselves. Please contact us and we will organise tickets for students so that cancelled excursions don’t mean theatre is cancelled. Tell all the high school students you know!
Also, get in touch with all your friends who are healthcare workers. In appreciation of their hard work and service to keep our communities safe, particularly in this strenuous start to 2022, Queensland Theatre would like to thank them and acknowledge their tireless dedication by giving back. We extend an offer to frontline healthcare workers for complimentary tickets to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If you have a night off and would like to see a play that I promise has nothing to do with COVID-19, please contact us. You care for us: we would like to take care of you for a night.
OK! That’s it! Enjoy the show!
Love, Lee
These storms!!!! Unbelievable but so appropriate. The ‘storm’ of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is starting onstage next week in the Playhouse at QPAC. It will be a big night in the theatre! Seeing the great American plays at full tilt is always special. The big Americans – Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee – their language, their craft and their critique of American society is so fascinating to engage with even as we watch that empire crumble. So get your ‘big theatre’ pants on and come and thrill to the emotional rollercoaster that Edward Albee and Margaret Harvey will create for us. And a little personal theatre rule I’ll share… always take the chance to see Jimi Bani onstage – he is a homegrown national treasure.
The Covid storm continues. We have made the difficult decision to postpone First Casualty until later in the year. It is a big, bold new Australian play that needs everyone in the room working at full capacity if we are going to create magic – I don’t think it would survive a rehearsal process compromised by infection and isolation. I don’t want to push through and risk giving you a play under-rehearsed or not fully formed. The story is too important in the scheme of the nation, and we have a responsibility not only to artists but to you as an audience to give you the play in its best form. And no, understudies are not an option, in this case, thank you for asking – the play has five different languages, a lot of physical action, big choreography and guns. So, apologies for the disruption but I promise it will be worth the wait! To make room for First Casualty to happen in November, we've had to postpone Vietgone. But don't worry! It will be ready and waiting for you in 2023.
But the sun is making appearances in the theatre in different ways. Our Young Artists' Ensembles start next week, A Girl’s Guide to War is on at the Powerhouse, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner will be onstage at La Boite at the end of February, Merlynn Tong’s Blue Bones is happening at Metro Arts with Playlab, and Frozen is arriving at QPAC…. lots of different types of theatre to fill our nights.
Good luck to all the families starting the school year. A reminder to everyone that the traffic is going to get a lot worse suddenly and we are definitely not traffic jam ‘fit’ so get your podcasts downloaded, your water bottles filled and your healthy snacks ready.
See you in the foyer for Virginia Woolf!
Love, Lee
This is not how I imagined 2022. For some reason I thought things would be easier/less stressful than the last couple of years. Surprise! That naïveté seems comic to me now as we move into a year which will ask all of us to pivot-sashay-pirouette-iso-lean in-reach out-distance-boost-live with-pas de chat and somehow stay together as a community. Whatever challenges we may face in the theatre, our thanks and support goes out to all health workers. You are giving so much right now in ways that can never be repaid (definitely should be better paid), but can be acknowledged. Full disclosure, my three extraordinary sisters-in-law all trained as nurses who have worked all their lives in healthcare and my admiration for them knows no bounds. It was glorious getting to see them all at Christmas even with all the PCR/RAT stresses.
Things to look forward to:
1. Having the borders open!
2. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? onstage at the Playhouse. Albee’s writing is so great you want to write the lines down for the next yelling match you get into. Although I hope you never need to use that script in real life!
3. School going back! I know it’s going to be complicated for parents and teachers but it means our new Young Artists will be starting soon and we can’t wait to welcome them into the building.
4. A croissant from Lune bakery
5. Getting past the peak of this variant so we can all come back into the office. We were so lucky last year to be able to have so many of our shows on, to be in the office and enjoy the craziness of working together. I miss the energy of the full office working together to pull off the impossible.
I hope you have all had a break that has given you time with people you care about. I hope if you have been struck down, that your symptoms have been mild and your recovery swift. And I hope to see you in the theatre soon, masked and ready for a great story told by talented actors to sweep you away from your daily cares and let your imagination have fun.
Here we go into 2022!
Love, Lee
As the country slowly opens up again it is wonderful to hear stories of families reuniting and all the Christmas plans. Greetings from Melbourne! I have ducked down south to see some plays as this city’s artistic life comes back into existence. Last night I sat in the new outdoor theatre at Malthouse watching a silly/sad cabaret about a ship - the S.S. Metaphor - sailing towards the Pacific Trash Vortex (which is now the size of Queensland!!!). This afternoon I’m seeing Simon Phillips’ As You Like It at MTC. I’m doing this in three layers plus a jacket and scarf because it is still quite cold and grey…. big love to you all up there hanging by the pool. I am missing the sunshine!
Everywhere I look I am reminded of how lucky we have been this year at Queensland Theatre to have enjoyed a year full of plays while other parts of the country have been hunkered down. I know there is a lot of trepidation about opening up and what it will mean to live with Covid in the foreseeable future. But that just makes me more thankful for the joys of this year.
Thank you to all the artists who made theatre with us this year - you have been such an important source of inspiration for us all. Thank you to all our audiences who braved the ups and (lock)downs, and ticket changes and QR codes and mask wearing and… well… everything. We do all this for you so thank you for loving theatre as much as we do and for bringing us back to life after last year. Thank you to all our young artists and school students who have been such a vital part of the Company this year - we know it has been a tough time to keep focused and learning but you have all been wonderful. Thank you to all the teachers - you are my personal heroes.
And speaking of personal, a huge thank you to the Queensland Theatre team. What a ride it has been this year. You have been champions. The late night/early morning/weekend brainstorms about how to solve the next mini-crisis have been made (I’m not going to say fun because that would be weird), more than bearable, because you are all such great people. I have the best job in the country because you are the best people to work with.
We are closing the office for a whole week between Christmas and New Year so everyone can have a proper rest and come back fresh in the New Year for the 2022 Season. Which is still a great gift as a Season Ticket to all sorts of people in your life…. Co-workers, friends, nieces, Uncle Bob… have a look at the plays because single tickets are now available for the first four plays and you won’t have any shipping problems!
Thank you for all the conversations in 2021. When I think back to this time last year we had no idea if any of the season would happen. I am looking forward to next year with much more hope, a pocketful of excitement, and a bucket of readiness to face all the challenges because of what we have managed to achieve this year. Thank you.
Love, Lee
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How is it December?!? The Christmas tree from Return to the Dirt is sitting smack bang in the middle of the office reminding us all of the looming festive season. But maybe because it was a prop in the show I haven’t been taking its real Christmas function seriously.
Everyone is flat out in the race to the finish line so this is a fast one. Here are the top ten things on my to-do list right now:
1. Celebrate the public reading of the 2021 Young Playwright’s Award winner Paradise Dreaming by Sandra Miller – it’s a wonderful play and well worth going to see this Monday 6 December in the Bille Brown Theatre.
2. Finish Christmas cards (who am I kidding, by the time they arrive they will be New Year cards… adjust message inside accordingly).
3. See Shock Therapy Production’s Locked In. It’s performing in the Diane Cilento Studio right now until 11 December and it is beautiful.
4. Start to think about Christmas shopping.
5. Organise subscriptions to Queensland Theatre’s 2022 Season for everyone in my family… my brother will love First Casualty, my sister-in-law will love The Sunshine Club, Mum will love Angie Milliken in Bernhardt/Hamlet and Dad will love everything! Simple, and no international shipping problems!
6. Avoid cleaning up my desk… weeks to go still!
7. Check out the new season of Bluey.
8. Congratulate the Education and Youth team for exceeding their highest number of Young Artist auditionees by over 100 applicants. The building is filled with theatre-loving young people and it’s such a perfect way to end the year.
9. Continue to work my way through the pile of scripts I’m considering for the 2023 Season.
10. Rest.
Love, Lee
Last Saturday night in Cairns a full house of very happy people enjoyed the magnificent performance of Jimi Bani in Othello. There was much cheering, singing and dancing — and water splashing — in what was our last performance of the year. Brisbane audiences will all get to see it on stage during Brisbane Festival next year, but it was really important to start Othello up north with the community the story belongs to. Jimi and Jason’s adaptation was a beautiful merging of Shakespeare’s story with the history of WW2 in the Torres Strait. Something to look forward to in 2022!
But we’re not done yet! Our Education and Youth team are farewelling this year’s Young Artists’ Ensembles and starting auditions for next year. Shock Therapy will be performing their beautiful intimate play Locked In downstairs in the Diane Cilento Studio. The Queensland Premier’s Drama Award finalists are being selected. Belloo Collective is doing development for a work they will be presenting in 2022. The production team are planning the build of First Casualty so it can be ready to start rehearsals in February. And the ticketing team are making sure that all of you who have bought subscriptions as Christmas gifts will have them to put under the tree. Hint… hint…
We are putting the finishing touches on the filmed version of Steve Pirie’s Return to the Dirt so anyone who couldn’t see its live season in the Bille Brown Theatre can watch this wonderful new play. Or if you really loved it you can watch it again! Thank you to RACQ for supporting this digital season so all Queenslanders can have access to the best work of Queensland Theatre. And thank you for telling us how much you want to see our digital initiatives continue. We will try. We know how important access to great Australian theatre is for everyone.
So, like everyone we are all rushing to get everything done before we all fall in a heap for the holidays. I’m pretty sure people in the office are laying bets about whether I will clear my desk before Christmas… the odds are not good.
Love, Lee
Sadly, Return to the Dirt closes on Saturday night having brought so much joy to the Bille Brown stage. Steve Pirie’s beautiful writing is so warm and delightful that it is the perfect way to finish up the year… Deputy Stage Manager, Yanni Dubler’s star performance as a wrapped Christmas present is a must see. Thank you Toowoomba, for being the source of such a great story! If you didn’t manage to nab a ticket to be there live, tonight we are filming the performance and you will be able to watch it from the comfort of the best seat in your house from 29 November – 5 December! The thrill of being able to capture this great new Australian story for everyone around the country to see is huge. Tell your friends, go online and book a digital ticket!
But there are so many other works on offer for you to enjoy. If you want more live theatre before the end of the year, I had a great time at Shake and Stir’s Fourthcoming at QPAC last week, I am looking forward to Dan Evans’ production of Away at La Boite tomorrow night and I am heading up to Cairns to see Othello next Thursday... (squeezing in the Griffith University production of Grease before I go north). I would suggest you head down to Tassie to see Ben Winspear’s magnificent production of Genet’s The Maids (best version I have ever seen!), but I believe it is sold out. Coming to our Diane Cilento Studio in December is Shock Therapy’s work LOCKED IN, which will be a real gift. It is wonderful feeling all the theatres around the country coming back to life and the genuine optimism people have for next year thanks to the ever-increasing numbers of fully vaccinated people. Thank you for your part in making it possible to reopen our theatres. Because… life is better with theatre.
Take a look at the 2022 Season — there will be something in there that will make your heart sing.
I hope to cross paths with you in at least one of the foyers!
Love, Lee.
Steve Pirie’s play Return to the Dirt opens in the Bille Brown Theatre tonight. Last year, in the middle of lockdown, the play won the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award 2020–21 guaranteeing it a production. When we programmed it for the end of this year it felt like October 21 was so far into the Covid-uncertain future, I could not imagine ever getting there.
But here we are, having overcome all the obstacles of the year, having enjoyed the extraordinary luck of making it through Boy Swallows Universe with no shutdown!!! And while we miss that beautiful cast of actors who gave us so much joy, a new cast is in the building, ready to step into the light and take us all into a new tale. Playwright Steve Pirie (brave) will be on stage each night, leading a cast including Chris Baz, Mitchell Bourke, Sophie Cox, Jeanette Cronin, Miyuki Lotz and Aara Afraz and Cleo Davis. All these actors are making their debut on the Queensland Theatre stage!
We're all enjoying the thrill of creating something out of nothing, a brand-new Australian play. This is a story written by one of us, for all of us, about things that matter deeply to us, right now. And as we slowly emerge from the restrictions of the last two years and learn how to live with Covid, it is fascinating to feel how new stories rise up to capture our attention.
What is remarkable about Return to the Dirt is the hope it inspires. In a time that has seen chaos and anxiety and despair, this is the story of a young person learning how to build a better version of himself. At the heart of the play is friendship. And a deep gentleness. This is surprising in an artform that so often relies on spectacle and the rhythms of conflict.
Also surprisingly, this is a story about a young man that is not about violence. There was a row of young men, high school students, in front of me in last night’s preview, absolutely mesmerised by the journey created on stage in front of them. I could literally see the impact Steve Pirie’s story was having on them, moment by moment, on their faces. Magic. Thank you to the teacher who brought them to the theatre – I hope the play inspires rich conversations.
A teacher of mine told me I was crazy for loving new plays so much (he is a director who mostly makes adaptations of Greek classics). “You never know what the play is until the audience sees it!” he would often exclaim with horror. Strangely I love that. We discover the truth of the play together. And what I am learning from the audience for Return to the Dirt is that Steve Pirie's story is essential. A young man moves back home to Toowoomba to save up money to pay for his wedding, and in the process learns how to live. Simple. But so hard. And so funny. And so sad. And so hopeful.
Absolutely ordinary inspiration with which to finish the year. Thank you Steve.
You can thank him yourself in the foyer afterwards.
See you there.
Love, Lee.
Here we are, the fourth week of rehearsal for Return to the Dirt!
The fourth week is often the time when the play is lying in pieces on the floor of the rehearsal room, when the actors are all wrestling with the impossibility of animating the hardest moments, and when I feel like I will never be able to put it all back together again in time for opening.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this play. When I first read Return to the Dirt in the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award, I was deeply moved and quietly thrilled by the theatrical voice conjuring the story of a young man’s ‘getting of wisdom’. Reading it in 2020, in the height of the first phase of Covid, the words on the page offered warmth and perfectly ordinary hope, reminding me of all the reasons we need to see our own original stories on our stages. Australian hope is very different to American or British hope. And I knew that if we were to make it to the end of a risky 2021 Season, we would need a big bucket of Australian playwriting hope to look forward to.
And here it is, one week to go until first preview. From the streets of Toowoomba, a story to remind us that in the hardest of times, we can find strength and inspiration in the people around us, if we listen. Steve Pirie has woven a story of small-town care and love and humour from some threads in his own life, but the cloth he has created dresses the characters of every town in Australia. I didn’t grow up in Toowoomba, but I grew up with these characters. This play is a remarkable reminder of the knowledge and labour and resilience that is hived in communities around the country. This play is a love letter to hometowns. They are where we can go back to when we need to rebuild — they are a source of strength.
Steve Pirie is our contemporary Australian answer to Thornton Wilder’s very American vision of hope with which we started the year at Queensland Theatre. Thank you for being on the journey with us this year. I hope this final play of the 2021 Season offers you complex and uplifting thoughts to see the year out… It could offer some very interesting conversations to every family at Christmas!
I hope to see you in the foyer soon.
Love, Lee.
It’s open! Finally! Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe is on the stage. Tim McGarry's adaptation is bursting with life and colour and character and laughter and tears and poetry and stubbies and thongs and Eli Bell’s smile… it is a joy to finally be sharing it with Brisbane! We will never know what it would have been like to do this play last year – in a world without Covid – but I do know that this is a story we need to experience now. It is hope in a bottle. Seeing 800 people a night walk out of a theatre happy…. Well that’s why we do what we do.
Back home on the Bille Brown Theatre stage, there are a lot of happy high school students performing their versions of Matt Whittet’s We Are the Mutable each day as part of The Scene Project. Thank you to all the spectacular teachers who have worked with their students to create these performances despite the obstacles of the year. Your commitment to giving students access to the arts in their education is deeply moving, and in the long term, invaluable. Big shout out to the Youth and Education team who are leading this project around the state, and to the team of actors performing the show each day.
Believe it or not, we are gearing up for the 2022 Season Launch, we are starting rehearsals on Steve Pirie’s Return to the Dirt on Monday, and we are crossing every finger and toe that we all stay healthy so we can stay open. We are so lucky to be able to enjoy Brisbane Festival. Big love to all our theatre family and friends down south – please know that we are not taking these moments for granted. The best thing we can do with the freedom we have at the moment is to not waste a minute of it. Get out and see something in the Festival – music, dance, theatre… it doesn’t have to be Boy Swallows Universe! See Dead Puppet Society’s work Ishmael, see Weredingo from Karul Projects at Metro, enjoy Camerata’s The Conference of the Birds. Just see something LIVE on a stage while we have the chance.
Wear masks, use QR codes, wash hands, get vaccinated, and stay healthy so I can see you in a foyer!
Love, Lee.
Believe it or not… Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe adapted for the stage by Tim McGarry starts tech today! Tech is shorthand for Technical Rehearsal which is when we put the play on the set in the theatre and add all the lights and sound and video design and costume elements. It is a frantic time as everything finally comes together.
The enormous set has been standing in our workshop for a year ready to go. On Saturday they packed it in a truck and took it over to the Playhouse, QPAC where it is now reassembled. Brilliant Video Designer Craig Wilkinson finally has walls up to play with his projection creations at scale. Movement Director Nerida Mattaei is at last able to see her in intricate formations in situ. Wonderful Lighting Designer Ben Hughes is focusing lights. Nathalie Ryner and the wardrobe team are backstage doing last minute alterations to costumes and wigs (shout out to Michael Green!) while Designer Renee Mulder can finally see all her sketches walking around on the bodies of the actors as they take to the stage… LIVE! And the sounds of this universe!!! Hearing the music and effects (thanks to Composer/Sound Designer Steve Francis and Associate Sound Designer Matt Erskine) coming through the big theatre speakers rather than the little tinny ones in rehearsal…. This great big beast of a show is starting to stand up and walk.
This Monday night (Covid-willing) it will take its first steps with an audience. It’s a new play. And the magic of a new play is that we really don’t know how it is going to work until it meets its first audience. As a director, this is the best of weeks and the hardest of weeks, as you see everything you have planned come together. There is never enough time, but with Director Sam Strong at the steering wheel, you know you will get to your destination. The preview audiences next week will tell the team how to sculpt the play into its best shape. For those of you coming to previews, thank you for being on the ride with us. Know that your laughter, your breath, your surprise and your applause will feed in to the making of this extraordinary story.
And it is extraordinary. A story like this doesn’t come along very often. We have all been waiting so long for it. There have been so many obstacles thrown in its way – borders, quarantine, lockdown, masks. But the bigger story is a celebration of how it is storytelling, live storytelling, that is bringing us all back together as a community. Our arts will rebuild our communities show by show.
So, we are crossing our fingers that the theatre stays open, that there is no outbreak that shuts us down. If there is, we will figure it out. Thank you to everyone this year who has been so gracious and flexible with all the emails and phone calls to re-schedule the shows we have had to cancel. Thank you for dealing with the QR codes, thank you for wearing masks, thank you for getting vaccinated. Thank you for loving theatre as much as we do.
See you in the foyer!
Love, Lee.
Did you know that firefighting was one of the sports in the Paris Olympics of 1900? Professional and volunteer firefighters competed and won medals. I think that would be a great discipline to bring back in Brisbane ’32! Our great Aussie firefighters travel around the world assisting other nations in fighting the increasingly fierce infernos we face these days, so I think we would have a fair shot at winning gold.
I am spoiled for metaphor choice this week as we get back into the rehearsal room after the lockdown. It feels like we have successfully fought off a Covid spot fire before it turned into a huge blaze. The fact that we have to keep wearing masks everywhere seems fine to me, as long as we can get Prima Facie back onstage and Boy Swallows Universe can open Brisbane Festival. Sure, it’s a bit uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as being shut down or catching Covid.
We have lost some property to the conflagration… Othello won’t be performing in Cairns next week and we are sending our love up to our friends re-organising the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair — we hope to see you in November! And, of course, around the country the fire is still raging – big love to our Sydney and Melbourne theatre family.
But seriously, I feel like Brisbane deserves a gold medal for managing to lockdown and control the latest outbreak (see what I mean… too many metaphors… I am not a good writer, just an enthusiastic one!). I know we must keep being careful and follow the government restrictions but the thought of losing Boy Swallows Universe again was a bit overwhelming, so thank you Brisbane.
And thank you to all the Olympic athletes for bringing us such inspiration in these difficult times. I watch these amazing sportspeople and wonder how to catch their stories in a bottle to put them on a stage — it is so hard. We have never had ‘the great Australian swimming play’ despite the way the sport dominates our psychology. I’ve directed a rugby play once which was great fun, but it was hard to find actors who could convincingly throw a rugby ball around the stage. I have to say though, looking at the Bille Brown stage we could totally build a BMX ramp and put the story of Logan from Logan on it…. Come on playwrights, entries to the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award close next month!
Despite The Scene Project not being able to head out west last week because of the lockdown (sorry to all the schools who have done so much work!), we will soon be announcing the winner of the Queensland Theatre Young Playwright’s Award. The shortlisted plays are a great collection of stories, from the smartest and most innovative creative young writers from around Queensland. As our young sports people play for Australia, our young artists are making plays for Australia. Look out for the announcement.
Thank you for staying with us through all the ups and downs. Rebook your tickets to Prima Facie and I will see you in the foyer!
Big love,
Lee.
So you can’t go to Tokyo to see the Olympics, but you can come to the Bille Brown Theatre to see an Olympic-sized performance by Sheridan Harbridge in Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie. She is the only actor on the stage but you will see a whole world in her work. Or you can head up the coast to Cairns to catch Jimi Bani and Jason Klarwein’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello — they have one more week in rehearsal here before they travel to premiere their production at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair. This week, The Scene Project has been to Rockhampton and Mackay, and next, the team travels to Charleville. And of course Boy Swallows Universe is in the middle of rehearsals…. It feels like we have our own theatre Olympics happening at Queensland Theatre at the moment!
As all the athletes keep reminding us, we are lucky to be performing at all and we send our love down south to the Triple X team who have had their season postponed again by Covid to 2022. Love too to the White Pearl cast, we hope your Sydney season happens. And to our friends at Griffin, thank you for working so hard to make sure Prima Facie made it up to Brisbane — our audiences are so happy to have the chance to see such an extraordinary piece of writing.
Thank you to everyone who is contributing to keeping our theatre open. Thank you for your patience with all the QR codes everywhere, thank you for continuing to use buckets of hand sanitiser, thank you for wearing masks in the theatre, and thank you for vaccinating. Eventually we will get back to a more relaxed theatre-going experience, but until then we are happy to be able to keep ‘playing’ for Australia… just like our athletes are.
See you in the foyer, even though it’s hard to recognise people in masks!
Love, Lee.
I am writing this late on Wednesday night following the first preview of Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie.
It’s the latest show in our COVID-bedevilled year, and we are so aware
of how lucky we are to be playing to full houses (and so thankful that
everyone is willing to wear masks in the theatre to make this possible)!
The theatre for a first preview is filled with people who like to feel
the electricity of a play coming to life before an audience for the
first time. They are curious people, drawn to the unknown. They are
risk-takers. They are brave. It could be terrible. No one ever knows how
a first preview is going to go. Lines are often forgotten, entrances
missed, rhythms might be all over the place or stage machinery fails —
the glue holding things together is often not quite dry. “Why would you go to a show that is not yet ready?” I hear the loyal fourth-week attendees cry. “Aaaah! To be the first. To boldly go where…”
You get the drift. No one has told them yet what to think of the show.
They make up their own minds. They can be the ones to pick up the phone
in the morning to friends with knowledge to share. And sometimes they
experience a unique alchemy of an actor landing the play for the first
time. It can be truly special.
But for a director, it’s always petrifying. I am useless from about 5.30pm until the lights go down. I will often just hide in the bathroom until the last minute. I barely breathe throughout the whole show, so I end up with terrible pins and needles at the end. I frantically write notes in the dark about all the things that need to be fixed, and then spend the rest of the night trying to decipher my scrawl. I scan the faces of audience members, trying to feel if the story is reaching through the space and catching them. Years’ worth of work is tested on this night.
First preview audiences are my most feared and most favourite people. The work may not be finished yet, but you can feel whether the production will ultimately work or not. The end of the first preview is a moment of truth.
Tonight, the lights came up at the end of Prima Facie for Sheridan Harbridge to take a bow… and people started to applaud, and then stand and applaud, to thank her for what they had seen. It’s going to work —the audience told me. There is still a bit of work to do — some tightening, some relaxing, some rhythm — but when the show opens this Friday it will be built on the generous responses of that brilliant first preview audience.
I want to thank them for taking a leap of faith and seeing the first preview of this new Australian play. I need them. The theatre will always need them. I hope one of them calls you and tells you about the new play at Queensland Theatre that you must see.
I hope to see you in the foyer really soon.
Love, Lee.
OK, so lockdown. Not great. Triple X in Sydney has delayed Opening Night by a week — big love to you Glace. The wonderful White Pearl actors are on hold here in Brisbane, hoping that they can be back onstage on Friday night. Our Young Artists’ Ensembles are hoping to perform their show Metamorphoses next weekend before school goes back.
Thinking back to this time last year, we are all so much more used to the processes of cancellation and rescheduling now. No one likes it. It’s horrible for businesses. But every person we have talked to has been so calm about it all. Thank you to everyone who has been so nice to our Ticketing team on the phone. Thank you for all the supportive emails. We will get through this. Safely.
Thank you too for all the donations to our 2021 Workshop and Wardrobe Appeal, including on our first Giving Day last week. Queensland Theatre is supported by the Queensland Government, by sponsors, by ticket sales, and by generous donors who help us dream bigger each year. Thank you for helping us to build our dreams with solid materials!!
It’s been rainy for the last couple of days and from my window at home, I see the huge dark clouds moving in. I try not to read anything into it. But at the end of each day, beautifully, the sky has opened up enough to let the most gorgeous sunsets happen. And I am more than willing to take that as a message!
Even with this lockdown, things are so much better than they were at this time last year. Then, there was no vaccine and no idea of when there would be one. We didn’t know when, or even if, the theatre would be able to open up again. Now we know we will work our way towards living with Covid. It is complicated, and we will always be washing our hands a lot (really that’s a good thing anyway!), but scientists around the world have actually pulled off an enormous feat in creating vaccines! I’ve had my shots and there is an amazing relief in knowing that while it is not 100% effective, it will help keep me out of hospital. If you haven’t had yours yet, I hope you have made an appointment so that you can enjoy that same relief
I am looking forward to a night in the theatre, with no masks, when everyone can truly relax into the play and not worry. Last year that seemed an impossible hope…. Now, just my slightly optimistic vision for the 2022 Season.
Keep washing your hands and crossing your fingers, and I look forward to seeing you in the foyer for White Pearl from tomorrow night…
Hopefully.
Love, Lee.
Thursday 17 June 2021
This week has been the start of Queensland Theatre At Home. Partnering with Australian Theatre Live, we captured a live performance of Taming of the Shrew
for you to watch at home. So now everyone around the country gets to
see the great performances we enjoy here in the Bille Brown Theatre. We
are hoping to capture two or three shows from each season for you. Over
time, this will build up a library of great recordings of Queensland
Theatre’s productions. I wish I could see some of the great shows from
the past that people talk about — and I know that if you can’t make it
to the theatre, being able to catch it later on screen can be a pretty
good consolation. Over the years I have really enjoyed NT Live
productions (much cheaper than a flight to London obviously!) but I have
always wanted to be able to share great Australian work with them,
rather than just seeing what they are producing. So here we go!! One of
the silver linings from Covid is that we have taken our first big steps
in this regular digital program. You have until Sunday to check out Shrew, and then later this year we will be capturing Steve Pirie’s Return to the Dirt and Robyn Archer’s show. Please let me know what you think of them!
I know a recording will never replace the live experience, but for
people who can’t make it to the theatre it can help fill the gap. This
is why we are making it available to residents of community care
facilities free of charge this year. If you know someone in care who may
enjoy a digital visit to the Bille Brown Theatre please get in touch with our team and we can make it happen.
Of course in the live space, we are very much alive with the new season of White Pearl
opening on Saturday. A comedy about the train smash of office politics
by Anchuli Felicia King, there should be plenty of heat in there to warm
you up through these winter weeks.
And we are all gearing up for the arrival of the teams working on so many shows: Othello (preparing for performances as part of the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair in August), Boy Swallows Universe and The Scene Project. There is one weekend where we will have over 50
artists in the building. Keep washing your hands, get your vaccines so that you can enjoy that same relief and
keep our theatres open!!
Enjoy Taming of the Shrew from the comfort of your couch and I will see you in the foyer for White Pearl!
Stay warm, Lee.
This is the last week of Taming of the Shrew. Thank you all for being such great audiences. The cast has enjoyed you all enormously!
We will miss them, but are looking forward to welcoming the cast of White Pearl — an office comedy set in Singapore! While we are not taking it for granted (big love to our friends in Melbourne enduring the current lockdown), being back in the office is not always a joy for everyone, and the intricacies of office politics in Anchuli Felicia King’s play provide close-to-the-bone comic moments we will all recognise.
Away from the office though, if you are looking for a fictional space to escape into can I recommend a collection of short stories curated by Ellen van Neerven. Titled Flock, she has gathered 19 First Nations stories from the last 25 years from around the country. I read the first short story by Tara June Winch, called Cloud Busting, standing in the bookstore and it made me smile so much I had to buy the book! I am a sucker for a good short story.
From the contemporary to the classics, a big thank you to Queensland Symphony Orchestra for their Mozart and Brahms concert on the weekend. I don’t go often, but the feeling of immersing yourself in the sound of an orchestra playing live is extraordinary! How good is live music? Seeing all the parents there with little kids made me thrilled. Babies hearing Brahms!
I guess I have the same thank you to Shakespeare, Tara June Winch, and to Brahms this week for sweeping us away from daily life for a few minutes and filling our minds, ears, eyes with ideas and beauty. Our artists help us to breathe through all the mess of daily life. Whereas I hope White Pearl will help us laugh at it!
See you at the LUMINOUS Lantern Parade on Friday.
Love, Lee.
Thank you for all your responses to Taming of the Shrew. The conversations have been passionate and thrilling. The season is nearly sold out, so if you want to see for yourself, hurry up and make sure you grab a seat. We will be filming this production as the first play in our digital series, Queensland Theatre at Home. The play will be available to stream online for one week in June, so if you liked it and want to share it with friends, you can invite them all over to your place and watch it again. Later this year we will be filming Steve Pirie’s Return to the Dirt and Robyn Archer: An Australian Songbook. People around the city, the state and the country who can’t make it to Brisbane can share in some of the magic created in the Bille Brown Theatre this year.
Speaking of Steve Pirie, he is currently in Charters Towers working with students there on The Scene Project. Every year we work with students and teachers from about a hundred schools across the state to make a new Australian play. A play is commissioned, then each school creates their own version of it. We gather local schools together in their regions to share their versions and we also share a professional version made by Queensland Theatre. It is an extraordinary project that really celebrates the talents of young people and teachers across the state. At the moment all the students are rehearsing We are the Mutable by Matthew Whittet and we have teaching artists goingout to schools to work with them. So hi Steve, we hope you are having a great time in Charters Towers!
A little piece of inspiration — the best book I read this week was Africola by Duncan Welgemoed and James Brown. It’s a cookbook. Great recipes and great writing. It’s about the food he cooks in his restaurant in Adelaide. I haven’t ever been to the restaurant, but I will now that I’ve seen his book. I’m hoping that our digital series will work a little bit like this book – that someone on the other side of the country will take a look and decide to visit Queensland Theatre.
Oh, and if you have any family from out of town who want to see Boy Swallows Universe tell them to book soon as it is selling very quickly. A great problem for us to have, but a terrible problem if you have promised your sister-in-law and her five friends who all loved the book so much….
Have a great week and stay warm!
Love, Lee.
Full tilt. I love it. Upwards of 60 artists in the building every day. Twenty in the Taming of the Shrew team, over 20 young artists each night in the Ensembles (92 each week), 18 Griffith University students in rehearsals, and all the talented new hands on deck in Wardrobe and Workshop building imaginary worlds for you. The Scene Project has begun in schools, with teaching artists now out on the road connecting with teachers and students around the state. The buzz is electric. A lot of coffee is being drunk, and not a lot of sleep is being had. Hats off to the team who got up at 4am yesterday to film a Tiger Moth plane for Shrew.... you are just going to have to come and see it to make sense of that sentence. We are getting ready for our first preview on Saturday night! Kimberley and the team are stocking up the bar and I am sure the whole Company is looking forward to cracking open a cold Newstead (one of our great sponsors!) late on Saturday night to celebrate the beginning of the season. But there is a lot to do before then.
I know it is the same for everyone — we are all in the thick of the year. I got to visit St Patrick’s College in Shorncliffe on Tuesday to present an award for the Performing Arts Student of the Year to Jackson Hughesman in Year 11. The Australian Performing Arts Teachers Association selected him for their national awards program from nominations are the country. He had time to accept it before going onstage to perform the role of Gomez in their production of The Addams Family musical. I was able to see the opening number and I was blown away by all the work, creative energy and talent up on that stage... to say nothing of the extraordinary makeup! In schools around the state, teachers are putting in so many extra hours to give their students the opportunity to come together and make shows. I just want to say thank you to all of the teachers who make theatre in schools possible. You are laying the foundations for a lifelong love of the arts for all your students. I know Term 2 is impossibly busy for you, but after no school shows last year I think we all appreciate the joy you bring a lot more. (OK my Mum is a teacher so I I have big love for teachers especially this close to Mother's Day. Speaking of, have you considered a digital ticket to Taming of the Shrew for your Mum as a last minute Mother's Day gift? She can be anywhere in Australia and enjoy a night in the Bille Brown.... yes Mum, your ticket is in your inbox! Happy Mother's Day.)
So a big shout out to everyone getting a show onstage this week! Stay safe, keep washing your hands, you can catch up on sleep when the show closes, and I hope to see you in the foyer!
Love, Lee.
So NASA flew a baby helicopter called Ingenuity on Mars! People are still managing to work and create and invent despite the pandemic obstacles. As the world continues to focus on the challenges of re-opening, we are in the middle of rehearsing Taming of the Shrew. The feeling in the room is delightful… the thrill of working with a big and talented cast to bring a classic play to life. There is some connection I am reaching for between the feeling of flying a helicopter on Mars and the magic of animating Shakespeare’s words centuries later — the ancient and the future all colliding in my head this week. Trust me, this play is going to be awesome!
Queensland Theatre is humming with energy. The workshop is full with the Shrew build, the costume department is all hands on deck, single tickets to Boy Swallows Universe are going on sale to the general public next week, Play Club is reaching new audiences around the state and around the world, the Young Artist’s Ensembles are buzzing. Our Artistic Associates are all immersed in different projects: Isaac Drandic is working away up in Cairns on new stories and new plays, Dan Evans is having dog auditions downstairs, Steve Pirie is cooking up plans for The Scene Project to go around the state, and Renee Mulder has been overseeing the launch of the Boy Swallows Universe campaign. And of course, we are reading plays, plays, plays!
Taming of the Shrew is rehearsing downstairs in the Diane Cilento Studio which last year was renovated so that it can be a functional, small blackbox theatre. It has lights and a sound system and seats 80 people. It is the home for our work with young artists and it will also be a new space for small shows… even more intimate than the Bille Brown Theatre. It has been wonderful hearing all your feedback about how much you are enjoying watching plays on the Bille Brown stage. It is brilliant to be so close to the actors, isn’t it? Of course, I love a big play on a big stage as much as you do and honestly I can’t wait to be at QPAC with Boy Swallows Universe — but I love that the Bille Brown is proving to be a terrific theatre for the kind of stories where you really want to be right in the room with the action. And the new Diane Cilento Studio will be the perfect container for those little jewels of plays that work best in miniature.
Thank you again to all the people who supported the creation of these new spaces. We are dedicated and thrilled to be making great shows to fill these special spaces.
See you in the foyer soon!
Love, Lee.
Thursday 8 April 2021
So it has been a full on couple of weeks since I last wrote to you! If you were one of the people who missed out on the final week of Triple X because of the shutdown I am so sorry. The beautiful cast did not get to have their closing night goodbye, but they did want to thank Brisbane for being such a great audience for this play. I have no doubt Triple X will go on to have a great season in Sydney later this year at STC and that its future is bright. Glace Chase’s play has already been nominated for a number of awards nationally and internationally, but the first audience for a new work is special. Brisbane gave this play its first home, its first laughs, its first assurance that this is a story that matters, and now we get to send it out to the rest of the world. I hope you got to see it — are you part of the club that will never look at avocado oil the same way again?
The Covid times continue, and we are very grateful that we can keep working and that the lockdown ended and we could begin rehearsals for Taming of the Shrew. We have a great big bunch of beautiful actors in the building rehearsing safely (much hand sanitiser!). The set is being built, there are costumes galore, not nearly enough days in the week or hours in the day, but a bucket of happiness that we get to make a new production. And as audiences around the country are getting back to seeing great shows — Come From Away, Hamilton — I think we can all start to see the light at the end of what has been a very dark tunnel.
I hope your house is dry, that you didn’t eat too much chocolate and that you have booked your tickets to Taming of the Shrew — it’s going to be a corker!
Love, Lee.
Well today the sky is blue and hopefully water is starting to go down and people will be able to go back to their homes. My house flooded last year and it was horrible, so my heart goes out to all the people who are facing sodden wreckage and weeks of cleaning and insurance forms. Be careful, be safe and watch out for all the bugs and animals that have migrated to the high ground of your laundry cupboard. That’s a story for another time.
Luckily we stayed dry in the Bille Brown Theatre where Triple X is enjoying a great run. Thank you to all of you who have been in touch with us sharing your responses to the play. From the grandparents of young trans kids, to all the friends and allies, and to the members of the trans community who are engaging in the complexity of the story — thank you for respecting Glace’s play and for celebrating the quality of the writing. Triple X has been shortlisted for the Nick Enright Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Cross your fingers for Glace!
But this is not about ‘Yay! Isn’t the play great, aren’t we great!’ We do plays like this to generate discussion about ideas in the city and across the state. And so I want to thank, particularly, the few people who have approached us to discuss the difficulties they have had with the play. We welcome the critical dialogue and have been heartened by the capacity people have to articulate opposing arguments in respectful and considered ways. In these increasingly polarised times, we must keep talking, and listening to people. Continuing to exchange ideas and opinions is the only way to navigate out of disagreement. And if that sounds a little Pollyanna to you, it may be that I have just been so grateful for the complex responses to this play, as evidence that the theatre-going community is hungry for challenging writing that engages with today’s world. So onward!
As the theatres around the country are getting back on track and people are getting back on planes, we hope you will take the chance to visit other theatre companies on your travels. Belvoir is opening Sally Sara’s Stop Girl, Wesley Enoch is directing Appropriate at STC, and MTC has the new Joanna Murray Smith play Berlin opening in a couple of weeks. We are off and running! But you should also take a look at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre — they have a virtual membership, because like theatres everywhere outside Australia, they are a long way away from being properly open again. There is a new play they have on called Duchess! Duchess! Duchess! which sounds pretty cool — I haven’t seen it yet, but I am planning on taking a peek and I will let you know.
I know there are people outside Australia who are continue to join in our Play Club readings, so I feel a bit globally-obliged to return the favour and sign up to digital offerings from other countries — a silver lining of Covid!
Come and see Triple X before it closes next week. Enjoy Easter. You can never have too many hot cross buns… my favourites are the Baker’s Delight ones.
See you in the foyer, or at the post-Easter gym,
Love, Lee.
Did you know that Broadway producers hire ‘standing ovation consultants’ to help ensure the audience feels like standing up to applaud at the end of a show? We don’t do that here in Australia, so when it happens you know it’s the real deal.
On Opening Night of Triple X in the Bille Brown Theatre, the room stood up as one in a glorious cheering standing ovation to celebrate the arrival of a great new Australian play. There is nothing like that feeling of being there for the beginning of something special. Someone in the audience said, “I now know how they felt at the opening night of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll”.
Glace Chase has written a love story for the ages. Yes, it is the first trans love story to grace the stage of an Australian state theatre company. Yes, it’s great that it is happening first in Queensland. But most importantly, it is a great play. Elegantly written by a playwright of breathtaking talent, staged by one of the best directors of new work in the country, with performances so good they will make you weep.
This is the kind of new play that makes you have to come back to the theatre!!
When we had to shut Triple X down last year it was the worst moment in my life as an Artistic Director. Seeing it come to glorious life on Opening Night a year later, after the worst of years, counts as one of the best moments.
We are of course making this play in partnership with Sydney Theatre Company. And once the play has enjoyed a fabulous season here, it will be traveling down the coast to Sydney, giving our friends down south the chance to share it. Co-productions have been nigh on impossible with all the border closures of the last year, and are still really challenging to plan. But I am reminded that Bille Brown was a huge champion of interstate co-productions as our greatest tool for building our national theatre. In Australia we don’t need a building called The National Theatre, but we do need to share stories across the country so that we have a national imagination. After a year that has divided us so literally, more than ever we need to ensure we share our stories across borders. Stories like Triple X will help bring the country back together. Stories like Triple X will also help us to make that future country a better place for all of us to live in. Thank you Glace for writing us towards a new Australia. And a huge thank you to Suncorp, King & Wood Mallesons, Carter Newell Lawyers and Principal Partner RACQ for their continued commitment to making sure this extraordinary work reached the stage.
I will see you in the foyer!
Love, Lee.
Thank you to every audience member who embraced Our Town and made it such a successful beginning to the year. Thank you for all the letters and emails of support. Thank you for loving the beautiful cast as much as we did! What a start to 2021!
You’d think that with 16 actors leaving the building that the place would feel empty… but the cast of Triple X is back in the house! It feels like welcoming family back home. When we shut this play down last year, we left the set in place for months because we didn’t know what the plan for coming back would be. Over time it became kind of like our living room. Well now it is back in place and strangely if feels like we have come full circle. The cast are ready to go into the theatre next week, and the whole Company is thrilled to have director Paige Rattray back for a while. There is a little bit of a difference to last year. Last year we were nervous about the play — you never know whether a new play will work until it meets the audience. Essentially you decide whether it is a play that works… it is incredibly nerve-wracking. But I’m not nervous this year because I got to see two previews in 2020 and I know you are going to love it. For all its new world politics, audacious one-liners and racy title, at its heart, Triple X is an old fashioned rom-com with a heart of gold.
We may not be out of Covid times yet, but the building is definitely coming back to life. The Young Artists’ Ensembles are working every night, developments of new work are starting and conversations about possibilities in 2022 are starting. I walked past one meeting that was trying to figure out ‘which room would be best for the dogs’. I don’t know what that was about but I will find out tomorrow. It feels like the beautiful vibrant company I arrived in last year. I got to enjoy it for six weeks before everything shut down and we dismantled the year. There were moments there when we truly didn’t know when or how we would be open again. But here we are. With our fingers crossed that we remain open at 100% capacity, but with great big smiles on our faces to be making theatre again.
If you haven’t got a ticket for Triple X yet, call up a friend, make a date, get here early and sit under the tree in the courtyard, have a drink and catch up. If you really don’t think Triple X is the play for you, check out the new play at La Boite or over at Metro Arts, or see what is happening at QPAC — theatre is coming back all over this beautiful city. I’ll see you in one of the foyers!
Love, Lee.
How great are strawberry ice-cream sodas? Ask Lucy Heathcote and Jayden Popik who get to have one every night onstage in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Not credited in the program but bringing much laughter to the stage is Anthony Standish’s chicken and Andrew Buchanan’s duck! There are little moments of complete joy in this play that are sending people out into the night with big smiles on their faces. There are fantastic performances from the many loved and talented actors bringing this classic work to life and making it feel like our town. But at the heart of this show is the must-see performance of Jimi Bani. One of this country’s greatest storytellers in one of the great theatrical roles on the planet… please don’t miss the magic he is weaving each night. You have one more week to see it, to tell your friends to see it or to see it again. And then it will vanish, leaving a trail of starry moments in our memories.
Next week the Triple X team arrives, and we will have the strangely wonderful job of bringing back the show that nearly opened last year. It was almost a year ago I stood on the Bille Brown stage and had to break the news to Glace Chase that we were shutting down the theatre and her beautiful show would not be going on. I will never forget her face in that moment. I am looking forward to a champagne with her in the foyer when she finally gets to share her play with the world. It’s a love story… exactly what we all need.
But here we are, right now, with full houses and a freedom to walk around the city that is so precious. Our Young Artist’s Ensembles have started up again and we love having their energy in the building. I know how lucky we are… I keep knocking on wood, avoiding black cats, washing my hands and thanking our government for managing to keep the virus at bay so far. The words of Thornton Wilder keep reminding me to cherish every moment, to take the time to really look at the people we love, and to enjoy every mouthful of an ice-cream soda! We should be selling them at interval.
See you in the foyer.
Love, Lee.
Tucked in a freezing cold pocket of the Southern Highlands is the little town I grew up in, Goulburn, my Grover’s Corners. Funnily enough, in the first week of rehearsal we spent a lot of time talking about where we all find our own Grover’s Corners: Ipswich, Grafton, Tewantin, Thursday Island were just a few communities we recognised through Thornton Wilder’s lens. He wasn’t writing for America — he was writing for a sense of humanity. He was writing for people who need to take a moment and recognise the importance of family, community and the familiar. He was writing for times like the one he found himself in, —1938 — when the world knew it was heading towards another global conflict, and fear, anxiety and denial drove all conversations.
So back in June last year, when we were trying to imagine what stories people could possibly want to see in a seemingly impossible 2021, my heart reached out to Thornton Wilder’s story. And gathering this beautiful group of actors together in the days after a difficult Christmas, his words started to work their magic on all of us. His scenes and sentences remind us to cherish every moment we have with those we love. This was a voice coming to us from another difficult time — proof that we have survived difficult times before and will again. This playwright had lived through a World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic and the Depression. He gathered bits of wisdom and distilled them into a play we can use over 80 years later, on the other side of the planet when we need to hear those thoughts again. I am always in awe of the power of the playwright!
We are hearing his words in our own voice — I hope you don’t mind. Sometimes we want to travel through a play and sometimes we want to find the play in us. Maybe because the geography of Goulburn is so like the geography of Grover’s Corners, I have always heard this play in Australian voices. And what a collection of voices it is. I want to thank each and every one of the actors for all the life they have poured into the making of this play. It has been such a joy being back in a rehearsal room and I feel incredibly grateful to them all for the leap of faith they have taken in making this play with me. They are our artists. They are our town. Please join me in cherishing what they have created.
Love, Lee.
Happy New Year from the Our Town rehearsal room! We started work just after Christmas and Thornton Wilder’s glorious writing has wound its way around our hearts and carried us through all the disruptions of these Covid times. The first day of rehearsal with 16 actors in the same room was a joy like no other. Every day the room is overflowing with ideas and talent and stories and leftover holiday chocolates and a huge bucket of relief to be back creating theatre for you.
We had a few days of rehearsing with masks on… lots of ‘eye acting’! Fortunately, we are allowed to do scenes now without masks and we will be able to perform without them! Keep your fingers crossed, keep your distance, keep washing your hands, and at the end of the month you will be able to come to the Bille Brown Theatre and share in the story that is weaving its way into existence out of the imaginations of this beautiful cast.
I can’t wait to share this play with you — it reaches across time and space, speaking to us from the early 20th century in America about things that will always matter to us… family, love, compassion and community. Welcome to 2021!
Love, Lee.
A strange and particular joy is rippling around the country as we welcome home so many artists who moved overseas to work. Awful circumstances have forced you to uproot yourselves yet again, but I can’t help feeling the relief and happiness of families reuniting for a time. Mums and Dads are so relieved their kids and grandkids are back safely for a while. And you can feel the relief in those who have returned.
I was talking to a composer yesterday who has come back home from New York. He and his husband cannot believe the feeling of being able to walk around outside without masks. So you can imagine what a shock to the system Christmas on the Sunshine Coast is going to be for them! There are a lot of families feeling a bit of guilt about how happy they are to get to be together. We are incredibly lucky at the moment here in Queensland.
We are lucky to be able to have the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award play onstage in the Bille Brown Theatre. We are lucky to be finishing up your Young Artists’ Ensembles Program with public performances this weekend. We are lucky to be looking forward to a whole season of stories next year. We hope you are looking forward to 2021 with more hope and that you have found some plays to tempt you away from Netflix... I’m sure you will enjoy the opportunity to get out of your yoga pants and into the theatre foyer!
We need to keep being careful I know, and keep hand washing and distancing. But we also have to grab the moments of joy with both sanitised hands and hold fast for the time that we can. The borders are open. Christmas is coming. And families are finding a window of together time that they never dreamed would be possible. Grab the joy!
Love, Lee.
We have all been on a wild ride in 2020 and 2021 promises to be challenging in ways we cannot imagine. But imagine we will. Together. Because we have all learned how much we need theatre.
We need to see great big stories that fill us with inspiration.
We need laughter and love and ideas and provocations and magic.
We need to have our artists back at work breathing life into the national imagination.
We need to talk to friends about the play we all saw last night and disagree with them about what it really meant.
We need Australian voices speaking to us about what matters to us right now.
We need voices from other lands and times showing us worlds far and past as we work to plan our futures.
We need our great actors to move us deeply.
We need to be in rooms with other people and share these experiences.
We need the buzz of a foyer.
We need dates in our calendars to look forward to.
We need our culture to come back to life.
None of us imagine it will be easy.
But we have to try.
Because we have lived a time without theatre, and I don’t know about you but I don’t want to imagine a future without it. Thank you for staying with us through this dark age.
We hope you are excited to be with us as we turn the lights back on in your theatre. 2021. Let’s go.
Love, Lee.
2021 Season Ticket Packages
My introduction to Queensland Theatre started many years ago when Wesley Enoch invited me to be on the selection panel for the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award. I was blown away by the process of this award.
The fact that the winning play receives a full production sets this award apart from any other award in the country. This partnership between the Queensland Government and Queensland Theatre to invest in Australian storytelling is as unique as it is inspiring. It is so much better than just a literary award for a work already made, it is a leap of faith that demonstrates this government’s understanding that theatre is always about looking forward.
Making new Australian plays is the most important thing we do as a theatre company, and it is the hardest. To create a new and original story on our stage adds to the bookshelf filled with Australian plays. It is a way of ensuring that the ideas and voices of our time are preserved for future generations. This award sits at the beating heart of this Company and we could not do it without government support.
In the 20 years this Queensland Premier’s Drama Award has existed, it has created the plays of Sven Swenson, Adam Grosetti, David Brown, Richard Jordan, Marcel Dorney, Maxine Mellor, Daniel Evans, Michele Lee and the playwright whose work is onstage at the Bille Brown Theatre right now, David Megarrity. As we mark 20 years of this award and the celebrate 50 Seasons of Stories at Queensland Theatre — ad despite the devastating disruption of COVID-19 in our industry and in our society — it is a real thrill to end this dark year with a new Australian play.
Wrapped around the production like a big bow is an exhibition of photographs from the last 50 years of the Company. After you have done your COVID check in, grab a glass of something and have a wander through the glorious images of theatre legends. At the end of the production we will put the exhibition on our website, so don’t worry if you can’t get here — it is an inspiring reminder of some of the great stories and great actors who are carved into the cultural memory of this great city. Enjoy!
Love, Lee.
Welcome back to theatre — to the magic of great actors in a great play happening right in front of you!
It is SOOOOOOO much better than Zoom, or Netflix, or reality TV. Living, breathing, rich language about things that matter to us right now! Honestly, the first day of rehearsal on Mouthpiece was like breathing fresh air outside for the first time after spending months in a stale cramped room.
I feel really lucky to have the chance to put this play on our stage at this time. The only reason we can is because of the extraordinary job our government has done to keep us safe. Talking to playwright Kieran Hurley, as London goes into another lockdown, has driven home how we should not take this for granted. When you come, you can sit in the audience in the gorgeous Playhouse and enjoy our freedom.
You can let his beautiful play get under your skin, the way it got under mine when I first read it. It is theatre magic for me that a Scottish playwright on the other side of the world can conjure a story that can reach across the globe in such a visceral way. It is theatre magic that brings together two great talents in Christen and Jayden — two language acrobats who will fly through the air above the structures the playwright has given to them.
I cannot thank the Queensland Government and QPAC enough for partnering with us to make this play. As I sit in the audience each night and feel everyone drinking in the experience, I feel hopeful that this dark time has taught us never to take the magic of theatre for granted. I look forward to seeing you back in 2021 at Queensland Theatre for more great stories brought to life for you by great actors.
Love, Lee.
We move into the theatre next week! We will be backstage at QPAC powering up lights and setting up dressing rooms and having tech week in readiness for our first performance of Kieran Hurley’s Mouthpiece next Saturday night. The chance to gather around the campfire in the dark and share a story — that is essentially what we get to do again. And I can’t wait.
The power of great story to move us never ceases to amaze me. Even in its shortest form. There is that legendary short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
For years I have kept an eye on Larry Smith’s Six Word Memoir website for inspiration. This year, the stories have been a way for people around the world to share their experiences of pandemic dislocation and isolation. One of my favourites is:
“Can’t smell the campfire on Zoom.”
— Melanie Abrams
And I definitely lived this one,
“Social distancing myself from the fridge.”
— Maria Leopoldo
Our first performance of Mouthpiece will be on election night – Saturday 31 October – and then we will launch our 2021 season the following day on Sunday 1 November. Even as I write these dates, I am stunned that we are up to November.
“This is what time looks like.”
— Sylvia Sichel
As we carefully come back to the full sensory experience of theatre in Brisbane I have never been more aware of how lucky we are to have our world start to open up again because in this time:
“The world has never felt smaller.”
— Maggie Smith
Six words: so simple and so complex. Good storytelling: so powerful. There are a lot more than six words in Mouthpiece obviously. It has been a complete pleasure to put myself back into the hands of a great playwright who has shaped his thoughts into words on a page. To watch those words be absorbed into the body and minds of two great actors. And to anticipate seeing those words go out into the audience, transforming into the conversations you will have leaving the theatre and going out into the world.
I can’t wait to share these words with you.
Love, Lee.
Just near Wanaka in New Zealand is a mountain called Roy’s Peak. There’s a track up it that zig zags steeply to a ridge and a summit with spectacular views. Within the first half hour of the walk I knew I was not fit enough to be attempting it, let alone enjoying it. But turning back? Don’t be silly! I love walking. I’d done it before… I could do it again! That was last year.
This is my first week back in the rehearsal room. It feels amazing — like breathing in all that New Zealand fresh air in the first five minutes of the walk. At the end of the first day I got home exhausted. I am so not show-fit! But every part of me is thrilled to be back in that space with two great actors and a creative team making a play for you.
The whole Company is relieved to be slowly and carefully beginning the process of returning to making theatre. The set is being built, the costumes are being sourced, tickets are being sold, and soon you will be able to sit in the Playhouse enjoying Mouthpiece by Kieran Hurley. It is a big step in the direction of bringing back the cultural life of this city.
So bring on the exhaustion I say! We are so lucky in the scheme of the world to have this chance. I am not going to waste a minute of it, even if my legs are killing me, because I know the view from the summit will be amazing.
Love, Lee.
Surprise! A new show! We are joining forces with all the home companies to bring everyone back to QPAC and celebrate the arts in this shiny city. The dancers will be dancing, arias will be sung, the orchestra will thrill us, the acrobats will be breathtaking, and we will be doing a play. A beautiful, rich, clever, funny play! It’s called Mouthpiece. It’s written by the brilliant Kieran Hurley, a Scottish writer of immense talent and deep heart. It will be performed by the magnificent Christen O’Leary (small confession here — big moment of wish fulfilment getting to work with her for the first time) and the captivating Jayden Popik making his Queensland Theatre debut (he is going to blow you away). And I get to direct it!!!!!!!!!!!
OK so I’m a bit nervous — first play at QPAC and all that. But getting back into the rehearsal room and piecing together this remarkable story for you is a real thrill, in a year that has not had a lot of real thrills.
We are going to be able to perform to audiences of 50 per cent of the house size. Everyone will be spread out, there will be new rules for arriving and leaving, and tickets and drinks and bathrooms and we can’t have parties in the foyer, and there will be so much hand sanitiser. So it’s going to feel a little different but it’s still going to be LIVE THEATRE! As much as I have loved all the screen work from around the world over the last months, there is nothing like seeing real live story played out in front of us by talented actors. It does something to us as humans that I find irresistible.
I want to say a huge thanks to the Queensland Government for working so closely and rigorously with us to make this happen, and to make it happen safely. Bringing all the home companies together with a collective mission of lighting up our nights again at QPAC has been an inspiration to all of us, and we hope will be exciting for you. So don’t just come and see Mouthpiece, grab a ticket to see the awesomeness of circus, the magic of the symphony, the marvels of operatic voice, and the beautifulness of the ballet. Sit back in your seat and wonder at the talents of this city, and the magic that lives in great art. Welcome back!
Love, Lee.
Writing original stories is hard. Writing a play is nearly impossible. A lot of writers try. They have a few scenes in a drawer. They have probably dug them out in the last six months and tried to work on them in the last six months. A very small number of writers in the world manage to finish a whole play. An even smaller number go on to write a second.
Every time a new play lands on my desk I am thrilled that the playwright has managed to get the play this far. Every time I start reading a new play I am hoping to find the next great Australian play or hear a voice saying something that matters in a way I have not heard before in theatre form.
Reading the plays of young playwrights is especially exciting. Because if you can see evidence of writing talent on the page and they have had the discipline to complete the whole play, to wrestle their ideas into paper form, you start to imagine how far this capacity will take them in their lives. Because if they have managed to find their thing early, the possibilities are huge. We need our young people to be writing their ideas down so that their ideas can reach out to the wider world. We need their young voices and young perspectives to be speaking to us about the futures they will have to lead. And when they can do that with a play? Wow! It is a win for theatre! Not that it’s a competition. Except sometimes it is.
Like the Queensland Theatre Young Playwright’s Award. I would like to introduce you to the joint winners of the 2020 award. Two extraordinary young playwrights who have each created original stories which show distinctive instinct towards theatre storytelling and the craft to capture voices of the world around them in vibrant dialogue.
Milena Barraclough Nesic and Suki Wallace are two young playwrights to watch. Milena’s play is a sophisticated weave of politics and poetry as she explores the power and the fragility of young love in a violent world. The working title is A play about a play and love and war and other stuff . Suki’s work Carnies is a brutal and funny story about the extreme measures one family employs to survive the predatory banking practices exposed by the Royal Commission. Both playwrights will receive dramaturgical support from Queensland Theatre and will hear their plays read by professional actors. Look out world here they come! Not only have they written full plays, but they have done it in the hardest of times. Now if that doesn’t give you a bucket of hope for the future of theatre in this country I don’t know what will!
Stay safe!
Love, Lee.