The Australian THE BOOK OF KATE

November 8, 2019 suddenly in 1986. “It was like her life stopped when my father died,” says Cherry, 53. “The last conversation that we had, a few years ago, she said to me: ‘I’m just waiting for your father.’ We were talking on the phone. She said: ‘Do you want to talk to him when he comes home?’ I said: ‘Yes, have him give me a ring.’ What else can you say?”

Other fragments of conversations she has had with her mother crop up in this interview. I wonder if, for Cherry, they are verbal touchstones: memories of a loved one’s voice that help us navigate the present. During the past year, she has been going through the family archive of posters, plays and books — the accumulation of several lifetimes immersed in literature and theatre. Most of all, she says, she has been reclaiming some time for herself and regathering the threads of her creative practice. She uses the word practice often, almost as something fundamental to her being. She means the daily application of her creative mind and muscle, the thinking and doing of theatre.

The day we meet, she’s in Sydney for social visits, just before rehearsals for Madama Butterfly are due to start in Adelaide. She’s wearing top-to-toe black, as she often does, with a slash of red lipstick. As she sips her latte and the noise in the cafe grows louder, we find ourselves shuffling around to the same side of the table, for a candid conversation about work, life and family.

When Cherry won the top job at NIDA three years ago, she moved to Sydney from Perth with her husband, US-born actor Kenneth Ransom, and their school-age son Orlando. She stayed less than two years. In a media release in October last year, NIDA announced that Cherry was leaving, and its chairwoman Jennifer Bott was stepping in as head until a new leader could be found.

Cherry says she is proud of her work at NIDA, having pushed it up the rankings into the world’s top 10 drama schools, along with the likes of Juilliard in New York and London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Another of her achievements was to establish a conservatoire system that reaches across four artistic and technical disciplines. It ensured that NIDA had a “practice-led” model at its heart and that resources were allocated to it. She brought in Australian stars such as Margot Robbie, Judy Davis and Mel Gibson, and Game of Thrones designer Deborah Reilly, to encourage a dialogue between students and industry leaders.

I get the feeling Cherry would much rather have been mucking in with students in the rehearsal room than poring over paperwork and KPIs. She directed a student production of Venus in Fur, but this was not enough to satisfy her. “I couldn’t see how I could be practice-leading and not practise,” she says. “And it was becoming increasingly clear that I would have to give up my own practice … Then I wouldn’t have what makes me special.”

Cherry opted to resign — she says she wasn’t pushed — and an invitation the same week from State Opera South Australia to direct Madama Butterfly sealed her decision. NIDA has since restructured its leadership, splitting Cherry’s former role into artistic director and chief executive.

She is well known as a theatre director, having brought to the stage Hannie Rayson’s Life After George, Winton’s playwriting debut Rising Water and the Australian premiere of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? She has worked less often in opera but steadily has been building her repertoire, with The Turn of the Screw and The Coronation of Poppea for Victorian Opera, and Madama Butterfly and La Traviata for New Zealand Opera. It’s the Auckland production of Butterfly that she’s now bringing to Adelaide.

Cherry is well versed in the politics of Madama Butterfly: the colonialist attitudes embodied in the character of Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, the stereotypes of Japanese culture and society, and the gender inequality at play in the story of a betrayed woman who sacrifices herself on love’s altar. Her conception of the piece was stylised, rather than naturalistic, with a perspective that resisted a wallow in Puccinian sentimentality.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of the women who wait — Penelope, CioCio San,” she says of the heroines of the Odyssey and Madama Butterfly. “We have Butterfly just waiting for Pinkerton, waiting and waiting. And that to me says it all.

“This man turns up when he feels like it, and the woman waits for him with their child, Sorrow … She is a geisha girl, but she is the one with honour, and stoicism, and love. Her patience and command of the stage just diminishes him. I think of Pinkerton as a man utterly without imagination.”

Aidan Lang, who commissioned the Auckland production in 2013, says Cherry’s clear-eyed vision of the opera made its emotional impact all the more devastating. When, five years later, Lang took Cherry’s production to Seattle, these qualities helped it withstand a critical onslaught about cultural appropriation. Seattle has a large Asian-American population and, while productions of Madama Butterfly are hardly rare — it’s regularly in the top 10 of most-performed operas — the 2018 season nevertheless stirred a vigorous debate about white male composers and sopranos in “yellowface”. Lang says Cherry’s production shifted the focus on to the bigger picture of US imperialism and “showed that there is more to the piece than the objectors thought”.

When the opera opens in Adelaide on Thursday, Butterfly will be sung by KoreanAustralian soprano Mariana Hong (formerly known as Hyeseoung Kwon). And in a clever move, State Opera artistic director Stuart Maunder has programmed Butterfly alongside Gilbert and Sullivan’s Japanese romp The Mikado. Critics of cultural appropriation will have a field day.

Cherry says the debate about casting, and who gets to tell whose stories, has been through several permutations since she was a student at the University of California in Los Angeles, a “racially politicised” campus where progressive talk in the early 90s was about colourblind casting. One of her lecturers there, Oskar Eustis, who would later help bring Angels in America and Hamilton to the stage, remembers her as being “out of the box impressive” and ferociously tenacious in fighting for her work.

She’d met Ransom, her future husband, a few years before, during a production of The Tempest at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. Ransom has AfricanAmerican heritage, and Cherry points out that, at the time they met in 1989, vestiges of miscegenation laws remained in some US states.

In a program note for Madama Butterfly, she explains why this particular opera is so important to her. “My husband and I share a child who is half Anglo-Australian, half African-American. It is my greatest hope that as my son becomes a man he can integrate the two cultures that have loved and moulded him, and it is my greatest fear, that as the world becomes increasingly dominated by tribal instincts, we will lose our sense of curiosity and empathy and the Sorrows of the world” — children like the boy in Madama Butterfly — “will once again be displaced.”

Post-NIDA, Cherry is again stretching her wings artistically. She has an idea of doing Britten’s ghost opera, The Turn of the Screw, in haunted houses around the country, and would love to do Terrence McNally’s play about Maria Callas, Master Class, with her original Butterfly, Antoinette Halloran. She’s open to the idea of again running a theatre company. Asked about the vacancy at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre, whose artistic director, Lee Lewis, is leaving for Queensland Theatre in Brisbane, Cherry is circumspect. “Everything’s up for grabs,” she says.

Part of the reason opera is attractive to her is that it’s an art form in which she can make her own mark. Her father, Wal, left a substantial legacy in the Australian theatre, being one of the founders of the Union Theatre Repertory Company, forerunner of the Melbourne Theatre Company. His influence is one of the reasons she has not yet directed, although she would love to, The Threepenny Opera — father and daughter both being Brechtians to the core. “As soon as I do Threepenny Opera,” she says, “I’m going to be compared.”

The experience of watching her mother lose her mind to Alzheimer’s has given Cherry reason to think about memory and how precious it is — the memories that belong to a family, and those that form the connective tissue of a culture. She recalls a line from Deborah Mailman and Wesley Enoch’s play The 7 Stages of Grieving about broken songlines and the need she feels to nurture and protect our artists and storytellers.

She is aware of the passing of generations, and the memories that are lost unless they are cherished and handed on. A family can have broken songlines too, “stories that can’t be finished, answers that can’t be given”.

She recalls a conversation with her mother six years ago, before Alzheimer’s stole the last of her ability to communicate coherently.

“She is still alive, but she babbles — Alzheimer’s is a dreadful affliction, punctuated by a series of little deaths,” Cherry says. “When we first found out she had Alzheimer’s, she turned to me and said: Well, now I don’t have any …’

“She was going to say ‘words’, but she lost it.

“She said, ‘It’s all going to be …’ But she couldn’t finish. Then she said, ‘It’s up to you now.’ ”

Madama Butterfly is at the Adelaide Festival Theatre from Thursday until November 23.

Michaela

Boland

April 24, 2017