The first play Anne-Louise Sarks will helm as artistic director and co-CEO of Melbourne Theatre Company is Bernhardt/Hamlet: a comedy about an actress living in turn-of-the-century Paris who decides, in her 50s, to cast herself in drama's most famous role.
"It's a piece about gender, and the stories that we tell, and about envisioning a new way," Sarks says of the play, written by American Theresa Rebeck (best known for musical TV series Smash).
It's not a stretch to say that Sarks sees herself in the character of Sarah Bernhardt, based on the French actor and theatre owner.
"It's a woman making theatre who decides that the theatre as it is doesn't serve her. And she has a desire to tell a story in a new way," says Sarks.
Sarks has been thinking deeply about the stories that we tell about ourselves — and how to tell those stories in new and provocative ways — since she took on the role at Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) at the end of 2021.
She is the first solo woman to hold the position of artistic director at MTC, Australia's oldest professional theatre company, in its almost-70-year history (Robyn Nevin, Pamela Rabe and Aidan Fennessy collectively programmed the 2012 season, between the tenures of Simon Phillips and outgoing artistic director Brett Sheehy).
In some ways, Bernhardt's trajectory, from ingenue to middle-aged woman striving to tell a classic story from a different perspective, echoes Sarks's.
She began her career as an actor and director in her 20s with the celebrated Melbourne independent theatre company The Hayloft Project, which became known for its bold and inventive takes on the classics. She went on to in-house directing roles at Belvoir in Sydney, Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, Melbourne Theatre Company, and the Lyric Hammersmith in London.
Now, aged 41, she has launched her first season as the head of MTC.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it's a season dominated by stories by and about women.
The 2023 season boasts five premieres of new Australian work. These include a new Australian musical set in an aged care home, written by Tom Gleisner; the latest work from award-winning playwright Patricia Cornelius, adapting her novel about a family in 60s Melbourne grappling with their father's postwar mental illness; and a reinterpretation of A Christmas Carol where Scrooge is a Jewish woman, written by two of MTC's writers-in-residence, Elise Esther Hearst and Phillip Kavanagh.
The season also features two plays that were originally scheduled to premiere in 2021 under Sheehy: Declan Furber Gillick's play Jacky, about an urban Aboriginal man whose little brother follows him to the city; and Anthony Weigh's Sunday, inspired by the bohemian life of arts patron Sunday Reed, the co-founder of the Heide Museum of Modern Art.
These works are joined by Suzie Miller's Prima Facie, a powerhouse one-woman show about sexual assault and the law; Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, with comedian Judith Lucy starring as Winnie, buried up to her waist (and then her neck) but hoping for the best; and Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, a glimpse into the life of Billie Holiday.
Sarks will also direct two short Caryl Churchill plays as part of a double bill: one where a woman grieves for her late partner, and the other where four older women talk together in a backyard against a background of global catastrophe.
Another play that centres on the lives of women is Aleshea Harris's Is God Is, about two sisters tasked by their mother with killing their abusive father.
Is God Is, which won three Off-Broadway Theater Awards (OBIEs) in 2018, is one of a number of lauded international works in the season, along with London poet Zia Ahmed's 2019 debut I Wanna Be Yours. Both of these works are directed by emerging women directors: Zindzi Okenyo and Shari Sebbens (Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner), and new MTC resident director Tasnim Hossain (Yellow Face), respectively.
They are two of 10 plays that are also directed by women. The encouragement of emerging artists such as Okenyo, Sebbens and Hossain is fundamental to Sarks's ethos as artistic director, she says.
"It is about giving them a platform first, and championing those emerging artists," she says.
"This season is really all about new perspectives … [about] who is telling the story and what story they want to tell."
The thrill of going backstage
Sarks grew up in Strathfield, in Sydney's Inner West. Her parents were involved in the Genesian Theatre, an amateur theatre company in the Sydney CBD.
She recalls seeing the theatre's production of Charley's Aunt, an 1892 farce by English playwright Brandon Thomas, when she was in primary school.
But what sticks out in her memory is the feeling of going backstage.
"I loved being backstage more than I loved the show. There were all these feather boas. I remember just feathers flying around the dressing room. It seemed like such a cramped, special, special place," she says.
Sarks attributes some of her passion for the theatre to that formative experience, where she was exposed to both the work and what was going on behind the scenes.
"I still feel that thrill when I walk backstage at Melbourne Theatre Company," she says.
As a child, she learned ballet and tap dancing, and she performed in plays such as Alice in Wonderland and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie throughout primary and high school.
At university in Sydney, she studied arts and social work and joined the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS), where she started making theatre as an actor and director.
"It [theatre] went from something that was a bit dazzling to something that was really central to who I was," she says.
"I really started to think about the stories I wanted to tell and the impact I wanted them to have on an audience."
The Hayloft era
Sarks moved to Melbourne after she graduated from the University of Sydney, to study acting at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).
A year after she graduated from the VCA, she joined Melbourne-based independent theatre company The Hayloft Project.
The company was known for taking classic texts and reinterpreting them for contemporary Australia — with noted productions including Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening and Chekhov's Platonov. Their collaborative, do-it-yourself approach to theatre making shaped Sarks's practice.
"It really formed who I am," says Sarks.
"It was so bold. It really was like: we had an idea, we had the energy and the time and we just made things happen — in a way that blows my mind now."
Initially she worked as an actor on productions such as Chekhov adaptation 3XSisters, and The Only Child, which was inspired by Ibsen's Little Eyolf. In 2010, she became co-artistic director with founder Simon Stone.
That year, she and actor/writer Benedict Hardie co-wrote The Nest, an adaptation of Maxim Gorky's 1902 play The Philistines in which all 10 actors were on stage at all times.
"That's when I really understood I was properly a director," she says.
"I feel right at the centre of myself when I'm directing work, and holding a room, and really listening to the artists in that room and figuring out where the story is gonna go."
Sarks and Hardie collaborated again, this time as co-writers, co-directors and co-stars, for By Their Own Hands: a retelling of the Oedipus myth that centred on Jocasta, Oedipus's mother and wife. The show was staged at MTC's NEON independent theatre festival in 2013, with audience members playing minor characters.
Sarks says: "I got to test all these aspects of myself, to learn about theatre from every angle, but also to really find my voice."
Speaking to ABC Arts earlier this year, actor Eryn Jean Norvill said that in her experience with The Hayloft Project "there was not a huge amount of conversation about the dynamic of the making in the room".
"There was no sense of consent or boundaries … There was still a real sense of hierarchy," she said.
Sarks says that her experience of being an actor in the company informed her approach to the role of director: "It really taught me about the kind of process I wanted to create for artists.
"There's been a really big conversation over the last five years about the way we make work and whose voices we amplify in that process. I'm really committed and passionate about that."
Sarks's work with The Hayloft Project exemplified not only how she re-imagines familiar stories, but also how she changed the perspective from which they were told.
It's a way of theatre making that she has carried into her first MTC program.
"It's taking the stories that we know, but changing our entry point into them, or asking: what don't we know about that story that we want to know."
She points to Lanie Robertson's play Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, about Billie Holiday, which will star Zahra Newman.
"Billie Holiday [is] this woman who we all know and recognise, but actually how much do we really know about Billie Holiday as an artist and as a human? It digs into that — and it's right in my wheelhouse," says Sarks.
Freedom to experiment
Sarks's breakthrough as a director was the 2012 production of Medea, which she developed while she was associate artist at Belvoir, in collaboration with playwright and actor Kate Mulvany.
"I wanted to bring a new perspective to Medea, to this woman that people had closed the book on [by saying] 'she's evil', 'she's crazy' — ways to name her that stopped a deeper conversation," says Sarks.
She and Mulvany radically interpreted the Ancient Greek drama about a mother who murders her children, to frame it through the eyes of her children.
"I'm really proud of that work because it was a genuine theatrical experiment about what kids can do on stage as storytellers," says Sarks.
Medea won five Sydney Theatre Awards, including for Best Mainstage Production, and was nominated at the Helpmann Awards. Sarks directed new productions of the play in London in 2015 and Switzerland in 2018.
"It's the play that really began my career as I know it now," she says.
But none of that would have been possible without being given the freedom, by Belvoir, to experiment.
That space for artists to explore is something that she plans to bring to MTC.
"I think about that [experience working on Medea] a lot now, as I'm in conversations with artists about the stories they want to tell, the way they want to tell them and how we can support that," she says.
Sarks is effusive when describing the opportunities she received as a fledgling director at major theatre companies, such as Belvoir, Melbourne Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre.
As an emerging resident director at MTC in 2010, she was paired with a playwright, and they worked together for five months on a new work that would be presented as a play reading.
A year later, she was hired by the company to direct her first mainstage production: The Seed by Kate Mulvany, which premiered in 2012.
She had also approached then-artistic director of Malthouse Theatre Marion Potts about undertaking a mentorship, becoming director in residence in 2011.
"I was ambitious, I was really hungry. I couldn't see the pathway for myself, and so I decided to make my own," says Sarks.
In her role as artistic director at MTC, she hopes to extend those same kinds of opportunities to early career artists.
"I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for those opportunities, [and] the chance to be inside an organisation and understand how it works; for someone to take that chance on me," she says.
"I want to be sure that I am nurturing those artists of the future to make the work they want to make and have the conversations they want to have."
Distinctly Australian stories
In 2015, Sarks directed Seventeen by Matthew Whittet at Belvoir (where she was resident director), a play where 70-year-old actors are cast as teenagers.
To get the rights to use Taylor Swift's Shake It Off in the show, Sarks tweeted at the pop star, using the hashtag #greygrey4taytay. The production was given permission by Swift on opening day.
She took the work to London in 2017, where it was remounted at the Lyric Hammersmith with a British cast, and described in reviews as a "striking portrait of youth".
The success of that production led to her becoming the artistic director of the company's Lyric Ensemble, which offers mentorship and performance opportunities to emerging actors aged between 18 and 25, the following year.
In 2019, Sarks premiered an adaptation of Australian author Julia Leigh's memoir about IVF treatment, Avalanche: A Love Story, at the Barbican in London, which toured to Sydney Theatre Company later that year.
Then at the start of 2020, Sarks was working with Swiss and German artists on a radical reinterpretation of 1938 play Our Town by Thornton Wilder for Theater Basel in Switzerland, as COVID-19 swept through Europe.
"The show got shut down two days before opening," Sarks says.
Due to return to Australia to direct Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone at Belvoir in May 2020, she and her partner, journalist Sean Kelly, decided to head back early in case they needed to isolate.
They flew back to London and on to Australia, thinking that one day they would return.
"I literally packed a suitcase, one jumper, and flew to Australia … I never went back to that apartment. I kept thinking I'd go back, and then I was pregnant. In a way, life took over here," Sarks says.
What Sarks took away from her time working overseas was a sense of excitement about the work being made in Australia: "[I realised] we were really at the top of our game."
Grounded in Australia by international travel restrictions, she found fresh motivation in the prospect of bringing distinctly Australian stories to the stage.
"I was on the other side of the world with these extraordinary opportunities, working in these amazing venues, but missing my collaborators, and really felt like there was something else I had to give [to Australian theatre].
"I really wanted to come home and have that conversation about who we are, and the myths of our society, and where we are going."
Those new Australian stories include Stop Girl by Sally Sara, about a foreign correspondent returning home, which Sarks directed for Belvoir in 2021, and My Sister Jill by Patricia Cornelius, which will premiere at MTC in 2023, directed by the playwright's longtime collaborator Susie Dee.
"I think she [Cornelius] is our greatest living Australian playwright, and she's been largely ignored by the major theatre companies," says Sarks.
My Sister Jill, adapted from Cornelius's novel of the same name, is about a family in Melbourne in the 60s whose patriarch suffers from PTSD.
"It's about really all of those kids, but particularly those young women, coming of age in that family; about the kind of wars you fight in yourself, but also within your family, and more broadly.
"It's a really important piece about who we were, and about who we are now."
