The peaks and troughs of theatre in Sydney

It meant that, as well as paying my first-ever visit to the inside of the Opera Theatre at Sydney Opera House and seeing the Australian production of Love Never Dies, both of which I have already reported on, I was able to visit three of the most important resident companies in town, Sydney Theatre Company at their Wharf Theatre HQ; the Griffin at their upstairs warehouse Stables Theatre in King’s Cross; and the Belvoir at their two-theatre home in Surry Hills, a building partly funded by none other than Russell Crowe.

These are, of course, year-round operations, but each had productions in the Sydney Festival to showcase themselves with. For STC, it was Never Did Me Any Harm, a striking new cross-genre theatre/physical movement piece by Kate Champion, a protegee of DV8’s Lloyd Newson, developed with dramaturgical input from STC joint artistic director Andrew Upton, based on interviews about parenting.

Continuing the verbatim link, at Belvoir I saw I’m Your Man, a show based around stories about boxers and boxing, set in a training gym, that uses the recording techniques that we’re familiar with in Britain thanks to Alecky Blythe’s work in which actors wear headphones, on which they hear the interview subjects that they then repeat with exactly the same rhythms and inflections as their original speakers.

I can’t say that either show provided much in the way of new insight to either of their subjects, but both were highly accomplished distillations of them, presented with an acute and compelling physicality that beautifully complemented the stories being told. I’m Your Man also, coincidentally, provides a neat link to one of the signature imports of the festival for Frantic Assembly and the National Theatre of Scotland’s Beautiful Burnout, posters for which are everywhere in town and is a bracing physicalisation of the drive to succeed in the boxing ring — and the cost of it.

Another big import is Cheek by Jowl’s latest classic revival, ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, that begins its run at Sydney Theatre tonight, before coming to the Barbican next month. That Jacobean play’s incendiary story of a deadly sibling attraction would be interesting to set beside Griffin Theatre Company’s revival of a more modern Australian classic, The Boys, which the company originally premiered 21 years ago and a film was subsequently made of, and is a fictionalised imagination of the family background and motives of a real-life murder case of three brothers who raped and killed a woman, told from the perspective of the women — their mother and partners — that are further victims of their crime. It’s graphic, gruesome and gripping.

It was also interesting to find all three shows I saw in the festival packed, albeit in relatively small auditoria. No doubt the marketing drive of a festival helps, but I suspect that each theatre has a strong and loyal local following, too. By contrast, commercial theatre in Sydney is in a bit of a crisis; there are a couple of large musical houses — the gorgeous old Capitol (home to Love Never Dies) and the sterile modern Lyric at the Star (home to Annie) — but the third main commercial house in town, the Theatre Royal, is currently dark, after the transfer of Rock of Ages from Melbourne was cancelled owing to poor ticket sales, amidst suggestions that the theatre itself may now be lost as the site gets redeveloped. 



There simply isn’t a big enough theatregoing audience to sustain three big musicals at once — or to book open-ended runs for any of them. Both Annie and Love Never Dies are specifically booked on limited runs, with Annie also already announced to tour elsewhere.

But here’s the contrast, too, and source of the problem — as in London, regular theatregoers are simply being priced out of the commercial offerings. Tickets for Annie run to $135 and for Love Never Dies to $145. By contrast, tickets for The Boys at the Griffin are just $49. In other words, you can see three plays there for the price of one ticket to Love Never Dies.