PRACTICE, PROFESSION & PREMIERES

These four productions are created at a lively nexus. It’s where NIDA students, studying many disciplines, meet leading professional artists to create under industry conditions. It’s where deep training meets concentrated practice. It’s where idea meets reality.

Remarkably, three of the four productions are premieres.

Kindness is a world premiere, the first outing for Matthew Whittet’s big hearted, finely observed story of five young people negotiating grief and friendship. Matt is a NIDA Acting graduate and has shaped a terrific career as actor and writer across stage and screen. He’s lately been writing for Netflix’s Heartbreak High. It’s been a joy to have Matt back at NIDA, teaming up with director Jessica Arthur, fresh from her four-year stint as Resident Director at Sydney Theatre Company.

Scenes with Girls is the Australian premiere of UK writer Miriam Battye’s incisive look at millennial female friendship. Like Kindness, it reveals the challenges of negotiating friendship in a complex world, in this instance a world acutely aware of the politics of gender. Battye was Story Editor on Season 4 of HBO’s TV series Succession, and her 2020 play reflects the sharpness of that great TV writing. Imara Savage returns to NIDA to direct a production of elan and eloquence.

The Writer is the Australian premiere of a play that brutally lays bare the necessary reckonings that have shaken the theatre profession, and not just that profession. Patriarchy is put on trial. Ella Hickson’s play is an almost cubist construction, and director Zoë Hollyoak and her team have negotiated the terrain with courage and clarity.

And then Sweeney Todd! If The Writer puts patriarchy on trial, then this meaty masterpiece puts capitalism on trial – the demon barber’s chair is the literal instrument of social revolution. But this insanely brilliant work is always more than any one thing, and in the hands of Constantine Costi, a director in tune with the thrill of the epic, joined by music director Andrew Worboys and choreographer Shannon Burns, we are gifted a production that stretches the students in ways that will surely prime them for the profession.

It’s worth noting that all four of the directors in this season are graduates of NIDA’s directing course. That was not by design, but does demonstrate the deep impact of NIDA’s education and training on the development of Australian storytelling.

It’s a complete inspiration to witness these students step up to the challenges of these works. I hope you feel that buzz too. I also hope that you will return to see their work in October, when a new suite of productions will take us to the intersection of film and theatre, vaudevillian geopolitics, renovated opera, and to the vision of one of the world’s great directors.

David Berthold — NIDA Artistic Director in Residence