21 Years in the Spotlight of Melbourne Theatre

Joanna Murray Smith is a much loved Melbourne playwright, screenwriter, novelist, librettist and newspaper columnist. Her work has been staged all around the world, including productions on Broadway and at the National Theatre in London. She has written three world premieres for Red Stitch (Fury, DayOne.Hotel.Evening and American Song) and kindly joined us for our 21st birthday celebrations in October. There, she delivered a passionate speech about the value of Red Stitch to the small to medium theatre sector. The complete text of her speech is shown below:

RED STITCH 21st
THURSDAY OCTOBER 28th 2022

Joanna Murray-Smith at the 2023 launch.

Welcome to all lovers and family members of Red Stitch. In the spirit of diversity, I was going to say welcome people but as Tom Stoppard said in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people”.

Here is a sample of dialogue from a play about a couple going to the theatre, when the theatre is NOT Red Stitch;

Don’t forget we have the thing tonight
The what?
The thing, the show that Millie’s in, that Johnny directed.
Shit. What is it again?
It’s by that writer. The one who wrote that play, the one with the giant flapping sea bird
Fuck! Do we have to go? It’s a whole night. We only have three more decades!
And we’re up to the last episode of the show.
We can’t not watch the last episode tonight!... What are we watching again?
The Irish Danish show.
The… ah… just remind me?
The one set in the Icelandic village, the guy with the beard… the lake.. the woman police chief…
Oh Yeah! Fuck! But Millie did come to my show… even though she hated it.
How long is it?...

Red Stitch founder, Vincent Miller and current Artistic Director, Ella Caldwell.

In 2001, Red Stitch was found by Vincent Miller (1st AD) with 12 founding ensemble members and this conversation became redundant. A Red Stitch show is always a reason to get excited. A year later in 2002, Red Stitch presented its first season of shows with 12 productions in a 30 seat venue on Inkerman St. A year later it moved here and a year after that David Whiteley was appointed AD.

Since then, there have been national tours, commissioning programs, educational programs engaging with over 2000 theatre makers of one kind or another and commissioning (to this point) 19 new Australian plays starting with Red Sky Morning by Tom Holloway in 2006.

In 2009, the seating capacity increased to 81 seats, making it literally the perfect sized theatre for everything. Yes, even Hamilton. Since 2013, Ella Caldwell has been at the helm, steering what has become one of the best loved theatre companies in the country through the full fucking twin tempests of Australia Council funding cuts and Covid.

The entire endeavour has depended on the generosity of humans: rich humans giving money, poor humans giving time, energy, skills and passion. There have been board-members and donors, the Myer Foundation and Cybec, the good-cop/bad-cop engagement of the Oz Council and most of all the actors, writers, directors, designers, stage managers and back-stage crews of the hundreds of plays that have turned a five metre square playing space into a genie’s bottle of joy, surprise, wonder, inventiveness and resilience.

My own plays: Day One, A Hotel, Evening, Fury, and American Song had brilliant productions here, a reminder of the great democratic truism of theatre that greater resources are no greater guarantee of good theatre.

Over and over again I have witnessed in the productions of my work and in those of others’, that give a bunch of good actors and designers a financial void and they will fill it with splendour. They will match every absent dollar with a hundred dollars’ worth of inventiveness. Every fibre of their dexterity, ferocity and imagination on stage is a giant Fuck You to the lazy, good for nothing Gods of Artistic Prosperity who lie around in the heavens saying things like “They can use icy pole sticks to make the helicopter” or “Nothing that a bunch of coloured cellophane can’t fix”.

Longtime Red Stitch supporter, Rosemary Walls & her daughter Christina McLachlan.

Sixty core members of the ensemble and countless guest artists have drawn us time and again back to Red Stitch (and I should say that remarkably, many of the original ensemble members are still here 21 years later) -- with something that eludes us when we go to many of the biggest companies in the country: faith that when we get to the theatre, we’ll find something particular and expertly made and when we leave the theatre, we won’t want the time back. Apart from the National in London, I’ve had more good theatre experiences here than any other venue in the world.

At a time when very few companies were mining the best contemporary Western plays, Red Stitch found them and did them with as much flair as their home productions. I’ve seen a lot of plays on Broadway followed by at Red Stitch: The Realistic Jones amongst them. Writers like Neil Labute, Jez Butterworth, Annie Baker, Will Eno, Abi Morgan, Joe Penhall… brilliant playwrights of our time who would rarely be seen and heard in this country if not for Red Stitch – and always chosen with an expert curatorial eye by the ensemble.

Sarah Sutherland & playwright Emily Sheehan presenting Monument as part of the 2023 season at Red Stitch.

A lot of emphasis rightly goes on building our own Australian repertoire of playwriting, something that Red Stitch is now applying itself to with dedication and in full disregard of Stella Adler’s observation that for directors and actors: “The best author is a dead author”. I’m thrilled to see Emily Sheehan’s terrific play Monument in the next season, alongside Mary Anne Butler’s Wittenoom. But I want to also recognise the profound value of seeing contemporary work from around the world. Our playwrights can’t develop in a vacuum, isolated by a tyranny of distance that remains truer for theatre-makers than for those in almost any other area of modern life.

Khisraw Jones-Shukoor of Selling Kabul in the 2023 season.

Most experiences can now be shared via technology to bridge the divide of hemispheres, but not live performance, not even with NT live and its ilk. Audiences and artists need to see the global stories of an increasingly global world. Exposure to writing in the States and the UK and beyond, helps us to define our own voices, both in response to and in reaction against.

A subscription to Red Stitch has been a vital connection to the theatre of the Englishspeaking world, not just to the Australian world or Melbourne world, and it is seeing ourselves in a bigger context that allows us to actually recognise our own characteristics, our temperament, our taste and our idiosyncracies as Australian artists.

2022 Red Stitch Garduates Kevin Hojerslev, Ibrahim Halacoglu and Akhilesh Jain.

And the value of art is, in part, not just telling our own stories and hearing them, also identifying the shared humanity of all theatre, regardless of time, culture or origin. Then there is the sheer joy of having seasons chosen by those who understand what is entertaining, stimulating, provoking, funny, devastating not intellectually, but viscerally. Ask an actor to choose a play and they will invariably choose a play that has theatrical lift-off. I’m sure it’s been a nightmare. The intricacies of the ensemble- dynamic are a mystery to most of us, no doubt a hotbed of gaslighting, saboutaging, bed-swapping, internecine Machiavellian horror as these fantastic but savage actors fight tooth and nail for the best plays to showcase their own qualities.

Artistic Director, Ella Caldwell announcing some of the 2023 plays.

The truth is that as we take our seats in this astonishing little theatre, we are sometimes more focussed on the story behind the set than on it, knowing that no democratic arts organisation has succeeded without a full-blown narrative of violence simmering beneath the smiling facades of the ensemble members.

But that play is yet to be written. And not to blow my own trumpet but frankly, I’m the playwright to do it. So stay tuned for it, appearing sometime in the next 21 years. Thank you for everything you’ve given us, Red Stitch, and Happy Birthday.

Joanna Murray-Smith