A LEGACY TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING

In this special feature, we farewell MTC Artistic Director Brett Sheehy. Keep scrolling to learn more about his decade at the helm.

By Melanie Sheridan

After 10 programs, Brett Sheehy is hanging up his hat as Artistic Director of MTC. He leaves the Company with a legacy of incredible work and innovative initiatives.

As the Company’s first non-directing Artistic Director, Sheehy has enjoyed leading with a big-picture perspective that he believes has given him both advantages and challenges. The advantages include having ‘no ego in the game and being free to appoint the best possible director to each production’ while the challenges involve ‘people being suspicious of a non-artist’s curatorial oversight of an artistic vision.’

Now, as he prepares to hand the reins over to Anne-Louise Sarks, he says his proudest achievement has been ‘shifting the landscape, and changing the way we approach work, the kind of work we do, and how we function as part of the overall cultural ecology. That’s what I’ve loved doing in this job.’

‘I wanted a legacy – if that’s not too arrogant a word.’

Although he had started his career in theatre with a decade at Sydney Theatre Company, Sheehy’s return to the fold came after almost two decades working in the international festival landscape. Indeed, he was the artistic director at Melbourne International Arts Festival when he was hired by the MTC Board in February 2011 (but as his contract with the festival had him booked for another two, he spent 2012 working across both roles as he programmed his first MTC season for 2013).

‘Maybe it’s a complete fluke that 10 seems to be a number that kind of works for me,’ he says, explaining that he was at Sydney Theatre Company for 10 years, followed by another 10 years at Sydney Festival. He was then at the helm of the Adelaide and Melbourne festivals for another 10 years combined, and across all three cities the total number of festivals he directed works out at – you guessed it: 10. ‘So every 10 years or so I do get this kind of itch to move on and try something different,’ he concludes.

Maths and itchy feet aside, he says that a large part of his decision was simply that he missed theatre, and more specifically he missed ‘making work from the ground up’. In festivals, he explains, ‘you get to present the most astonishing work, but you actually create very little work from scratch. You co-commission a few things, but that’s usually another company taking the lead. So I was missing the making of work.’

That said, he admits that having been back in theatre land again for 10 years, he now misses some of the other art forms such as opera, classical and contemporary music, dance and visual arts. And he acknowledges that it was his festival-gained ‘connoisseurship across each of those forms’ that drove a lot of the cross-artform and collaborative works he programmed for MTC, especially earlier in his tenure. ‘I had a real passion for doing collaborative works,’ he says.

But Sheehy learned the hard way that not all MTC audiences would be on board with some of the collaborations. By way of example he points to 2014’s Complexity of Belonging, ‘a complete meshing of text theatre and pure dance with Chunky Move. I adored it but unfortunately, our audiences didn’t go for it.’

^{Complexity of Belonging photo by Jeff Busby}

Complexity of Belonging photo by Jeff Busby

^{Complexity of Belonging photo by Jeff Busby}

Complexity of Belonging photo by Jeff Busby

^{Complexity of Belonging photo by Jeff Busby}

Complexity of Belonging photo by Jeff Busby

While realising this could have dampened his spirit, Sheehy instead embraced it. 'It wasn’t in any way disheartening’ he explains, ‘because we always had enough variety in the menu of works each year. And because of that, we’ve happily been incredibly successful. As well, I felt skilled through my previous jobs in balancing the more commercial work with the more challenging and adventurous. Finding that balance is key to being a successful artistic director.’

Regardless of box-office success or not, Sheehy is justifiably proud of the risks and the sure-fire hits. ‘I wanted a legacy – if that’s not too arrogant a word – that was a bit more than just a list of 100 or so productions,’ he says. Indeed, long before he started thinking about shows or plays, the primary thing Sheehy thought about was breaking down barriers: barriers for women directors and theatre makers, and for Australian writers; as well as barriers between independent and state theatre companies, and the local and international scenes.

‘I wanted to establish a really good new writing program, and a women directors program,’ he says. ‘And because I’d been so in contact with the independent artists’ landscape in all the festivals that I worked with, I was really keen to open the doors of mainstream companies to that landscape and, most critically, to voices and artists in the First Nations and culturally diverse communities. Finally, because I’d been travelling so much, I was interested in touring shows. I’d been bringing other people’s work to Australia for so many years, and seen the great advantages to our own artists in being exposed to international artists’ visions; and I was also interested in the possibility of taking our work to the world. That was really appealing.’

That legacy, now cemented, includes bringing the NEON Festival of Independent Theatre to MTC audiences, establishing the NEXT STAGE Writers’ Program and the Women in Theatre program, a suite of cross-artform collaborations like Complexity of Belonging, and a strong link from Melbourne to the world.

Beginning in 2013 and running for three years, the NEON Festival of Independent Theatre stemmed from then fledgling MTC Artistic Director Brett Sheehy’s desire to increase opportunities for and collaboration with independent artists and theatre-makers.

That desire had its origins in Sheehy’s festival life, he explains, when the Harold Mitchell Foundation offered him ‘a bit of money to give a scholarship every year to an independent, emerging artist’. The first scholarship went to Adena Jacobs, founder and artistic director of Melbourne-based independent theatre company Fraught Outfit. ‘It was a mentorship opportunity, so I started mentoring Adena and really quickly – as often happens in these situations – I started to realise I was learning so much more from her than she was from me.’

This experience made Sheehy think that there ‘had to be a place for this kind of artist, and this kind of artistic vision, on mainstages or with flagship companies’. So while he was still working on his final Melbourne Festival, Sheehy was also having extensive discussions with both Jacobs and MTC’s artistic administrator Martina Murray (now the Company’s director of artistic operations and senior producer) about how this could be achieved. The result was the NEON Festival of Independent Theatre.

_{Dee & Cornelius's 2015 NEON show SHIT. Photo: Sebastian Bourges}

_{Nicola Gunn's 2014 NEON show Green Screen. Photo: Pier Cathew}

_{Fraught Outfit's 2013 NEON show On the Bodily Education of Young Girls. Photo: Lachlan Woods}

With the MTC Board behind them, they threw the net open to the city’s independent theatre companies with the promise that MTC would give each company money to produce a show, offer them the Lawler Studio stage and in-kind marketing and promotional support, and let them take the entire box office. Significantly, part of the deal was also that Sheehy and MTC would have zero curatorial control. ‘We gave them the Lawler, and said “that’s your venue, here’s some money and all of the box office is yours: go and do as you wish.” So they did.’

‘As long as it’s not illegal, you can do it.’

It was ‘fabulously risky’, Sheehy notes. ‘Up until that first run of each play, I had no idea what I was going to be faced with! All I said to each of them was “as long as it’s not illegal, you can do it.” There was massive risk in that because I had no idea what they were going to come up with, and indeed at least one or two of them during those three years did satirical works really having a go at MTC, which were very, very clever, and in my view very, very funny. But probably an unusual thing to be doing on our own stage.’

In spite of it being a risk for the flagship company, it was ‘just so exciting’, Sheehy says. Over the festival’s three years, it staged 15 productions plus additional readings, talks and events. ‘The best outcome was that so many of those artists then moved into being part of our regular suite of artists whom we work with; there’s a whole host of writers, designers, actors and directors who have all continued on with us, doing work in the mainstream. That was indeed the ultimate goal: to try to tear down the perceived wall between the flagships and the independent landscapes.’

Indeed, after the three festivals NEON evolved into NEON NEXT – an incubator for commissioning, developing and producing independent works for MTC's stage. Through this phase of the initiative, works by Sisters Grimm and Nicola Gunn were produced and presented with full investment by MTC as part of Company’s 2016 and 2018 seasons.

‘What was then called a playwright development initiative – a purely unsexy title – was in my first pitch to the Board to get the job,’ Sheehy says of the beginnings of the NEXT STAGE Writers’ Program. It took around three and a half years to figure out, but by 2017 his dream was a reality.

‘It took that long to do the business plan, to settle on the right model – after a lot of interrogation of models around the world, such as the Royal Court, the UK’s National Theatre, Signature Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons in New York, and so on. It also took time to raise the money, for something that didn’t exist, had never existed, and wasn’t tangible; it was just an idea of what might be. But happily those extraordinary donors and foundations came on board and supported it, fully funded for five years.’

Now, as Sheehy departs the Company, NEXT STAGE is exactly where he wanted it to be. Heading into its fifth year, the program has seen eight NEXT STAGE works either produced or programmed, 11 writers in residence, 27 commissioned works and 33 Australian writers supported. ‘If you take COVID out of the equation, we’re totally on track,’ he says. ‘Launching from scratch in mid-17, you don’t really expect to have finished final drafts on your desk until at least two years after that, at which point you can start to program.’

Anchuli Felicia King’s Golden Shield was the first NEXT STAGE original play to have a mainstage debut, in 2019. Sheehy recalls the exhilaration of its opening night: ‘To have the inaugural NEXT STAGE production be a work of such sweeping ambition, tackling global themes and geo-politics, and featuring Chinese, Australian and American characters was a dream come true. When the lights went down at the end of the show and I felt the applause mounting I heard myself shout “Yes!” in involuntary recognition of a six-year mission coming to fruition.’

Benjamin Law’s Torch the Place and Joanna Murray-Smith’s Berlin followed, while Declan Furber Gillick’s Jacky was scheduled to open in late 2021 but was unfortunately cancelled due to the COVID-19 restrictions.’

He’s especially proud of next year’s slate, and hopeful for the future. ‘There will be four NEXT STAGE world premieres in 2022. And I hope it goes on, with Australian works featuring so strongly on our stages every year from now on. That would be wonderful.’

A feminist since adolescence, Sheehy says that a women directors program was also in his original pitch to the MTC Board, alongside a writers’ program. Partly inspired by the now infamous 2009 Belvoir launch that resulted in widespread accusations of a boy’s club, Sheehy says the visual from that event, which went viral around the country, ‘was a shocking and stunning thing, but that was the line-up at most theatre companies around the nation. And it was even worse in some other art forms, frankly. So that’s when I thought “there’s something wrong here”.’

Because he’d been working so closely with many incredible women here and internationally in festivals, he knew it wasn’t because of a lack of talent. ‘So it was just the lack of opportunity, or lack of a structure which can support it.’ Happily, the Board were receptive to the idea and the Women Directors Program, as it was then known, came to fruition in 2014. ‘The idea was to have 10 or 12 women directors who were associated with us, and who were mentored within the structure of Melbourne Theatre Company so they could get to know the company, the kind of work we do, how a company like ours functions.’

The Women Directors Program was incredibly successful, and has since expanded into the Women in Theatre program, which in recent years has welcomed women from disciplines including dramaturgy, design (sound, lighting, set and costume), playwriting, producing and programming, arts education and more. The program as it now stands provides professional insight and helps create practical pathways for women pursuing careers in the creative industries.

Sheehy was also determined to have gender parity in his associate directors and associate artistic directors. Indeed, those roles have now been held by more women than men. ‘By having Sam Strong and Leticia Cáceres and Dean Bryant and Sarah Goodes and Petra Kalive – an incredible suite of wonderfully different and unique directors, every single one of them – I think that has been really helpful to the company.’

He is also genuinely elated to be handing over leadership of the Company to its first ever woman artistic director, Anne-Louise Sarks. ‘It’s just terrific,’ he says. ‘I’m thrilled that Anne-Louise is following me into this job. That meant a lot to me. I’m happy to be able to say: this is yours now, and I hope the Company has created a space for you to dream as big as you possibly can, and to realise your own vision as unencumbered as possible.’

Coming to MTC from the multi-disciplinary, multi-artform world of festivals, Sheehy was keen to keep that collaborative spirit alive. He announced these intentions with a bang early in his first program with 2013’s Other Desert Cities, featuring a stage design by internationally acclaimed visual artist Callum Morton. ‘That had never happened before,’ he says, ‘that kind of major Venice Biennale-featured visual artist actually designing for one of our state theatre companies.’

This was followed later that year by Eddie Perfect’s The Beast. ‘Eddie hadn’t written a play before The Beast. He’d done cabaret, and he’d done musical work but that was his first play.’ In 2014, Sheehy programmed the first ever play from the Working Dog team, The Speechmaker. Soon after, there were collaborations with musicians Missy Higgins (composing for Cock) and Tim Rogers (appearing in and musical directing What Rhymes with Cars and Girls). Sheehy also includes Kip Williams’ cinematic Miss Julie in this company.

‘I felt a lot of our mainstream companies – and not just theatre – were a little siloed in whatever art form they were specialists in.’

Perhaps the most significant cross-artform work Sheehy programmed was Complexity of Belonging, co-produced with dance company Chunky Move and the Melbourne Festival. ‘I would have loved Complexity of Belonging to have been more embraced by our audiences,’ he says. ‘It has gone on with Chunky Move to play in multiple cities across the world and still tours in their repertoire. I loved it so much.'

If he had his time over again, Sheehy would have liked to give more time to works such as these. He says that visual art has really led the field here and the thrill he’d had ‘in festival land watching all of them breaking down those silos’ had been so exciting. ‘I would love to see us do that at some stage as a next step, to start to genuinely pull down the text-based barriers more often, and make work that’s genre-defying, that refuses pigeonholing.’

Following the world premiere of David Williamson’s Rupert at Southbank Theatre in 2013, it toured with the original cast to America’s John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington DC. As far as Sheehy recalls, it’s one of the first MTC productions the Company has toured overseas since Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

‘When I first sat down with David [Williamson] after I got the job, I remember saying to him: “round your dinner table at night, what is the thing that has got the most blood pressure?” And he said “oh my god, Rupert Murdoch.” So Rupert came from that, and I realised we had a work which could have appeal in America. And when our co-CEO Virginia Lovett started a conversation with the Kennedy Center, that was the one they said yes to.’

Other shows from Sheehy’s tenure have toured overseas, mostly collaborations that have lived on in tours with co-producing companies or artists. Chunky Move has toured Complexity of Belonging to Europe (multiple times), Taiwan and New Zealand over the years; Kay & McLean Productions picked up MTC’s production of North by Northwest for an international tour; Lillith the Jungle Girl headed to Edinburgh with Sisters Grimm; and Nicola Gunn took her NEON NEXT show Working with Children to the UK and Europe, evolving the work in the process.

On the opposite side of the coin are the international shows that toured to Melbourne as part of an MTC season: the original West End production of National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors and, later, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Both shows were ‘phenomenal hits’, Sheehy recalls. ‘There was risk there, but they’d been such international hits that I felt zero nervousness about bringing them in.’

While acknowledging that he could have programmed local productions of both shows, and that ‘we have a responsibility to our local artists and to our national artists’, he is adamant that we also ‘have a responsibility to those artists, and our audiences, to show what’s happening elsewhere in the world in our art form. You learn that in festivals – that’s one of the key reasons to bring work in.’

Elaborating, he says ‘I know for example that the great Australian director Simon Stone had significant exposure to international work as he developed his own directorial practice. While his is a totally original voice, I think his production of The Cherry Orchard for us in my first year displayed such a mature, global sensibility and aesthetic I am quite sure it was honed by his experience of some of the world’s finest theatre minds.’

Sheehy was also keen to build a relationship with the National Theatre, which he says is now very strong. ‘I have complete confidence that there’s going to be reciprocity there for years to come with our work ending up on The National’s stage and more National productions ending up on our stage.’

Summing up his tenure, Sheehy is humble. ‘Anything we have achieved over these years is because of the exceptional calibre and extraordinary support and talents of my co-CEO Virginia Lovett and the entire MTC team – a group of skilled artisans, theatre professionals and creative thinkers the likes of which I’ve never encountered en masse in my career before. It is they who have made MTC be and look so good over the past nine years. And my thanks are to them and to a truly rare cohort of Board members, led successively by Derek Young, Terry Moran and Jane Hansen.

‘They all have embraced so many left-field initiatives, from NEON to NEXT STAGE, Women in Theatre to international tours; from fairly green artists – and even some completely new to the theatre space – to bringing in and staging those grand productions from the National Theatre in London; to making from the ground up and presenting more than 100 splendid productions of our own. Their grace, support and incredibly hard work on all these endeavours has been phenomenal. No artistic director on the planet could ever hope for more. And on a note of great optimism, we could not have a better leadership team now than Virginia and Anne-Louise.’

SELECTED SHOW HIGHTLIGHTS

‘Obviously I have too many favourites to mention them all, but some that stand out are works that are political or subversive, such as Straight White Men and The Sublime.

And of course those for which, were I to put on my old festival director hat, I would with full confidence pick up the phone to my colleagues in Sao Paolo or London, Shanghai, Johannesburg or Toronto and say: this show warrants being picked up and put on stage anywhere in the world. In this category just a few are The Cherry Orchard; Kip Williams’ ground-breaking multi-media Miss Julie; Golden Shield; Birdland … and now I’m doing the impossible – trying to pick “favourites” from a such a rich banquet of works!’

‘I loved Complexity of Belonging so much; I felt it was one of the most original undertakings ever by MTC. If I had my time over again, I might push hard for more works such as this cross-artform collaboration, tearing down the silos between artforms.’

‘Kip Williams’ ground-breaking multi-media Miss Julie was very special. Kip had already embarked on fusions of the cinematic with the theatrical, but he pushed it to the limit in Miss Julie and the result was magnificent.’

‘The Architect was the second last play by a great artist and friend of MTC, the late Aidan Fennessy. It tackled the theme of assisted dying at the exact same time the issue was being debated in the Victorian parliament, and did so with impeccable warmth, humour, compassion and, yes, extremely confronting honesty. It was everything theatre at its best can be: vitally relevant and deeply connected to our own time, place and lives, forcing us to ask questions about our world and the world of those around us.’

‘The Sublime by Brendan Cowell, was one of the first two MTC commissions I embarked on, and it brilliantly peeled back the sexism and abuse women were suffering in the orbit of male sports. Much of the commentary around The Sublime completely missed the point of the play – its brutality was putting a spotlight on the horrors it was exposing, yet some critics thought it was in some way condoning it. But such is art and its subjective interpretation.’

‘Simon Stone’s production of The Cherry Orchard in my first year displayed such a mature, global sensibility and aesthetic. I am quite sure it was honed by his exposure to the work of some of the world’s finest theatre minds, which unquestionably enhances our own theatre landscape.’

‘Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee, a Korean-American artist I had presented in festivals, pilloried the privilege of straight, white men years before identifying such privilege became part of the daily newsfeed.’

‘Putting on my old festival director hat, I would with full confidence have picked up the phone to my colleagues in Sao Paolo or London, Shanghai, Johannesburg or Toronto and said: Birdland warrants being picked up and put on stage anywhere in the world. Leticia Cáceres showed in her direction of that work an understanding of performance few can boast. Her career since then has borne this out with a growing CV of stellar film, stage and television productions.’

‘Kiss of the Spider Woman had not had a professional production in Australia in its 30-year life, despite being a Tony Award-winning Best Musical written by the legendary Kander & Ebb of Cabaret and Chicago fame. Why? Because of its deeply political and dark subject matter – the brutal dictatorships of South America in the ‘70s. But we were determined to give it life in an era of new dictatorships across the world, and Dean Bryant took the bull by the horns and found that delicate balance between the bleakest of themes and ‘entertainment’ to create a terrific work of art.’

‘Golden Shield was the first NEXT STAGE play to have a mainstage debut, in 2019. To have the inaugural NEXT STAGE production be a work of such sweeping ambition, tackling global themes and geo-politics, and featuring Chinese, Australian and American characters was a dream come true. When the lights went down at the end of the show on opening night and I felt the applause mounting, I heard myself shout “Yes!” in involuntary recognition of a six-year mission coming to fruition.’

‘Maybe it is a bit perverse of me, but works that have wildly divergent interpretations by audiences and critics are very appealing to me. It tells me we are opening and exposing deep social and interpretive divisions. Such was the case with Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. It was not a hammeringly didactic work, but a seductive and subversive take on the abuse exposed by #MeToo, which enabled audiences to grapple with the intersection of so-called consent and the imbalance of power. It was written by a woman and directed by a woman, yet its opponents were predominantly men, believing they knew better about the play’s themes and where its sympathies lay.’