On a small, kite-shaped stage in the heart of Sydney’s Kings Cross sits a theatre of first chances. A crucible for playwrights and actors for nearly 54 years, this space has elevated an Australian voice and vernacular and launched hundreds of new Australian stories.
Each night about 100 audience members squeeze into the historic Stables theatre, so close they can almost mop the sweat off the actors. These performers must duck down rutty stairs into a tiny dressing room; they make a pact not to flush the adjoining toilet during shows.
Rough edges yield rich foundations. David Wenham’s first star turn, as a dead-in-the-eyes sadist in 1991’s The Boys; Jacqueline McKenzie’s stage debut as a teen bride the same year, in Child Dancing; Sarah Snook as a “serial slag” in 2010’s Crestfall; and Cate Blanchett in 1993 as Franz Kafka’s first fiancee, Felice Bauer, dancing across the boards to win best newcomer at the Sydney theatre awards.
Home of the Griffin Theatre Company for 44 years, the Stables is about to enter a new era, with the venue soon to shut its doors for a massive $11m rebuild. The Kings Cross resident playwright Louis Nowra has the honour of farewelling the creaky stage and surrounds with a new production of The Lewis Trilogy: three plays about misfits and love, which span five decades from 1962. The show opens on Friday.
The actor and playwright Kate Mulvany remembers being put to the test at the Stables. It’s long been her favourite place to perform but the most distracting, given that audiences hem in actors on two sides. “When you first step on that stage it feels tiny,” she says, “and yet it can encapsulate whole universes.”
Mulvany recalls playing Therese alongside Martin Vaughan in Debra Oswald’s Mr Bailey’s Minder in 2004: “There were so many times I’d be cradling Martin and you could feel both sides just weeping; everyone was in the room together.” Another highlight was her role as Amanda in Justin Fleming’s Molière in 2016. “God, I fucked a chair on The Literati revolving stage,” she says with a laugh. “There’s absolutely no escape once you’re in there – nor would you want to.”
The venue began life as a stables in the 1890s, a brick building topped with iron and owned by a butcher and mutton exporter. It was 1970 when the pioneering – but now defunct – Nimrod Theatre Company established itself there, fundraising to fix big holes in the decrepit roof.
In 1980 Griffin moved in. The playwright Michael Gow remembers premiering his play Away there in 1986 – “a relentlessly hot summer; the programs became fans”. The play has since performed in almost 100 seasons across Australia, including a 20th-anniversary production directed by Gow at the Stables. “There used to be a red pole [on stage] that held the roof up in the middle. You had to [act around] the red pole, there was no way around it.”
In 1992 Ros Horin became the company’s first female artistic director and since then Griffin has exclusively staged Australian plays – more than 400 to date – championing women, queer and racially diverse voices among them.
When she began the job, Griffin had been bankrupt and close to collapse. “They said, ‘The good news is we’d like to offer you the position,’” Horin says. “‘The bad news is we’ve only got funding for you for six months – your first job is to fundraise.” Horin instituted a rigorous development period for new plays and secured triennial government funding, constantly refreshing her creative teams. She ran the company for 12 years.
Horin recalls casting Blanchett, then fresh from Nida, in a 1993 production of Kafka Dances. She was “very self-effacing, giving off an ‘am I good enough?’ unconfident image”, Horin says. “Cate was very funny, marvellous in the role.”
Griffin has premiered many blueprints for Australian screen classics, too. Wenham took violent Brett Sprague from Gordon Graham’s play to the film adaptation of The Boys; Andrew Bovell’s play Speaking in Tongues, which Horin helped develop, became Lantana; Tommy Murphy’s play of Timothy Conigrave’s memoir Holding the Man became a feature film; and Richard Barrett’s play The Heartbreak Kid is better known to TV viewers as Heartbreak High.
Next, Suzie Miller’s feminist play Prima Facie – which premiered at the Stables in 2019, directed by Lee Lewis – will become a British feature film starring Cynthia Erivo, after Jodie Comer and the play won Olivier awards on the West End and Comer took a Tony on Broadway.
Speaking to the Guardian from Los Angeles, Miller says artists’ “tears and sweat have bled into the bones of the building”. She continues to premiere work there because Griffin “is akin to the Royal Court theatre in London: the home of playwrights and they know how to develop and create work and support writers”.
When Miller began submitting plays to Australian theatres in the early 2000s, women weren’t getting much of a look-in, so she moved to the UK. “Overseas I got traction, whereas in Australia … the women playwrights in the generation above me suddenly weren’t in the theatre any more.”
Mulvany remembers it similarly as a time of tokenism: “We used to say, ‘Does anyone know which female playwright so-and-so company has chosen for next year?’”
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Through April, Nowra’s classic semi-autobiographical Lewis Trilogy is being staged in new versions updated for their Stables season. The first play is set on a housing commission estate, the second in an asylum, the third at a theatrical version of the Old Fitz Hotel in Woolloomooloo, where Nowra is a resident. The same ensemble of actors are deployed in all three works, including Paul Capsis as Roy in Così – the second play in the trilogy.
The current Griffin artistic director, Declan Greene, says the Stables “makes you a better playwright because it forces you to watch an audience watching your play”. When we meet outside a Darlinghurst cafe, Nowra says: “Yes, it’s one of the most hateful things, to actually feel the audience around you going, ‘Oh no. He used to be good.’ It forces the playwright to be honest.” Nowra says Griffin provides an important learning curve “where people can fail, without too much spotlight being on them”.
The Stables will close for the rebuild in May. A $5m Neilson Foundation donation made in 2023 allowed the theatre company to finally buy the Stables as well as the neighbouring terrace house at 12 Nimrod Street, which will be demolished. Bringing the sites together will cost a further $11m: $5m pledged by the New South Wales government, $6m more being fundraised. It will allow for a slightly bigger stage, more seats (from 105 to 140) and a new lift and on-site rehearsal space.
Greene and the co-chief executive, Julieanne Campbell, have promised it won’t be too polished when it reopens in late 2025 or early 2026. They hope to retain Griffin’s spirit in line with its “little bit chaotic” work. Gow will be pleased if they can pull that off. “I’m slightly ambivalent about all this renovation,” he says. “It’s the slow march of gentrification. There’s something about [a] raw [theatre space] I find terribly appealing, even though it’s on the edge of unsafe and unhygienic.”
Times move on, new voices rise. The Wongutha-Yamatji actor and playwright Meyne Wyatt turned in a scorching performance at the Stables in his first play, 2019’s City of Gold – a monologue from which went viral when he performed it on Q&A. The playwright Merlynn Tong, whose play Golden Blood premiered there in 2022 and will be restaged for two major theatre companies in 2024, says Griffin gave her the freedom to experiment.
“I’m female, I’m Asian … so I had a big worry of ‘are my stories even relevant to this place?’,” she recalls. “Having Griffin program me … validated my legitimacy as a person who lives in this country and as a woman, as a person of colour.”
Between being a stables and a theatre, the space has served as a garage, Sunday school, gymnasium, taxi company office and a silk screen printing studio – and may have also been a “whorehouse”, the actor Sacha Horler said in a 2020 Griffin podcast (her late father Ken Horler rented the Stables for Nimrod in 1970 for $17 a week).
Mulvany laughs when discovering the Stables’ earliest shows may have been on the more erotic side. “I’ve had many meetings with people over the years in that foyer that have turned into first dates, turned into relationships,” she says. “It’s got that beautiful, positive, domino effect. So it wouldn’t surprise me it was a place of exaltation before it was a theatre.”
• Griffin Theatre Company’s production of Louis Nowra’s Lewis Trilogy runs at the Stables until April, before the theatre closes for refurbishment
