Cate Blanchett has directed plays during her tenure as co-artistic director and co-CEO at the Sydney Theatre Company (2008-2013).

“What has been fascinating has not just been the artistic directorship – we’re also CEOs so we’re responsible for the company’s financial health and balancing those things has been a real challenge.” (The Telegraph, April 2012)

 

A Kind of Alaska (2006-07)

Directed by: Cate Blanchett
Written by: Harold Pinter
Play run: 25 November 2006 – 20 January 2007 (opened on 1 December 2006)
Venue: The Wharf at Sydney Theatre Company

A one-act play of a woman, Deborah, coming to grips with the world upon waking from a 30-year coma.

Quotes from Cate Blanchett

• “I loved the different muscles that I used. I loved not having to dredge it up myself, but to help facilitate the dredging up in other people. But … [She draws her shoulders back and then collapses them forward.] I was so relieved not to have to get up and do it. I’ve always love the play. I was lucky because I read a footnote in the book that Oliver Sacks had actually made a documentary about it and I thought ‘I’ll never find it.’ Then I thought, ‘I’ll call [Martin’ Scorsese’s archivist] because he found something for me before, and he found it. It was incredible.” (Sunday Herald, December 2006)
• “I’ve always been interested in the emergent consciousness—that point between wakefulness and slumber, that place where the sense of one’s self is extremely malleable. She’s a broken person who’s trying to reassemble herself.” (The New Yorker, February 2007)
• “I have a clear memory of opening night when the actors walked left, backstage, and I walked out into the foyer. I had no desire to follow them. I was so relieved that I was not going out there. [Then she shrugs, laughs.] It was like watching a car crash, actually! Not that the actors weren’t wonderful, and I knew they were going to be alright, but I mean it in the sense that I was totally out of control at that point.” (Vogue Australia, August 2007)

Selected Reviews

Excerpts from selected reviews.

• Sydney Morning Herald — “Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton reveal much in their directing efforts to suggest that the planned collaboration between wife and husband, actor and playwright will be a success.
  Their vision to program in ideal order these particular one-act plays by the distinctly American David Mamet ( Reunion) and the very British Harold Pinter ( A Kind of Alaska) bodes well for their appointment (from 2008) as co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.
  Their directorial confidence to avoid the use of accents, denying the actors the safety net of each playwright’s acute sensitivity to dialect, speaks itself of a bold trust to find and amplify for Australian audiences the universal in foreign plays.
  That the most lasting impression of the double bill is the consistent excellence of texts, actors’ performances and the design team’s creativity suggests both directors are more concerned with theatrical substance than celebrity.
  Perfection is, of course, yet to be attained. These are deceptively challenging, theatrically complex short plays. In Reunion (written 1979) Caroline (Justine Clarke) goes in search of her father, Bernie (Robert Menzies). After 20 years of separation, Mamet charts a reunion of delicate negotiation, compromised by generational difference as much as habits of individual loneliness. Upton confirms a playwright’s ear for dialogue, his sensitivity to spoken rhythm matched by a bold sense of placing actors for symbolic effect. Timing on blackouts, and slightly self-conscious repositioning of actors therein, suggest tentativeness in directorial emphasis not evident within scenes as big emotions push actors to the edge of their tiny playing space.
  In A Kind of Alaska (1982) Deborah (Caroline Lee) wakes after nearly three decades in a sleep-like state induced by encephalitis lethargica. In her mind she is still 16 and her doctor (Menzies) and sister Pauline (Clarke) attempt to connect her with a reality her mental state finds alien.
  Blanchett’s directorial achievement is so sure as to defy her debut status. Her sense of visual imagery is consistently powerful and her equal confidence with elliptical dialogue and agonised silence is striking.
  Like Upton she is aided by performances and design of the highest quality. Lee’s inhabitation of a 45-year-old body by a girl of 16 is disturbingly convincing. Menzies creates greater intensity as the verbally restrained but emotionally suffering doctor than with his impressive Bernie in Reunion. Clarke finds power in Pinter’s Pauline beyond the hard-shelled vulnerability of Mamet’s Caroline.
  The set (Ralph Myers) is brilliant. Its oil-black waters provide a dark mirror into which no character dare peer. Sound design (Sherre Delys) and composer (Chris Abrahams) create a sound-scape equally unnerving and Nick Schlieper’s lighting reinforces the sensory duality of the double bill, accentuating black and white contrast in the inhospitable set and highlighting stabs of colour in Jo Briscoe’s humanising costumes. Blanchett’s seamless integration of these elements suggests a directorial talent to be reckoned with.
  If Upton’s Reunion is less precise than Blanchett’s razor-sharp A Kind of Alaska, it may be that their collaboration will continue to be all the more rich for its difference in emphasis.”
• StageNoise — “…Blanchett’s direction is equally clear and sure. It would be easy for Lee’s bewildered Deborah to descend into bathos, or for the obscurity of the situation to overwhelm Menzies’ angrily passive doctor and then, inevitably, to overwhelm the audience. It doesn’t happen. Instead there are shocking and pitiful moments of comprehension as Deborah struggles to come to grips with her predicament. A Kind of Alaska is an absorbing hour spent in the world of an exceptional playwright in his prime (Pinter was 52 when he wrote it) brought to life by a fine cast and confident, intelligent director.”

Trivia & Facts

• Cate Blanchett’s theatrical directorial debut.
• The play is a double-bill with Reunion by David Mamet, directed by Andrew Upton, also his directorial debut.

 

Blackbird (2007-08)

Directed by: Cate Blanchett
Written by: David Harrower
Play run: 15 December 2007 – 26 January 2008 (opened on 20 December 2007)
Venue: The Wharf at Sydney Theatre Company

Una confronts Ray at the cafeteria of a factory where he’s a middling executive. He is now 56, she 27. Fifteen years ago, they had an affair. A sexual relationship. She was 12. Is she seeking vengeance? No – she is after something else.

“Blackbird” is a brilliant, unnerving and controversial play that taunts us with the limits of our own language, our taboos and our conceptions of love, abuse and that much-abused neologism ‘closure’.

Harrower’s play is written with extraordinary economy and an enthralling poetry.

Related Images

View more images at the gallery.

Rehearsals; Q&ASelected Reviews

Excerpts from selected reviews.

• Variety — “In Harrower’s play, fiftysomething manager Ray (Peter Kowitz) is visited at his pharmaceutical supplies workplace by smoldering 27-year-old Una (Paula Arundell). The connection between them is initially unclear, but as she aggressively strides around the debris-strewn company lunchroom, Una resembles a resentful hooker visiting a john who has developed cold feet.
  Stalking a meek but occasionally defiant Ray and disassembling his denials, Una forcefully demystifies the origins of their previous sexual association: He was 40. She was 12.
  From this point, the wisdom of Blanchett’s choice to stage the play in the round is apparent. The characters’ physical dilemma resembles their psychological one — both are encircled and entrapped by what transpired between them more than a decade before. Ray’s insistence that the door remain open only highlights the narrowness of the set’s three exits, which offer no escape, but still leave him susceptible to ambush from police or worse.
  Blanchett opts to finish proceedings with a cinematic flourish, locking the pair in a “freeze-frame” tussle, somewhere between fight and dance, before a sudden cutting of the lights fleetingly leaves a ghostly after-image of their still unresolved struggle.”
• StageNoise — “Blackbird is a bold and fascinating choice for Cate Blanchett’s full-length, directorial debut. It’s a difficult undertaking in every aspect: the subject matter, staging and eventual realisation of the text are fraught with complexity and there’s plenty of room for disaster. Happily, her ambition and courage – so evident in her own acting work – are also obvious here and the result is two terrific performances from Paula Arundell and Peter Kowitz in an absorbing, disconcerting and ultimately satisfying 90-odd minutes of serious and seriously good theatre.”
• Sydney Morning Herald — “The director Cate Blanchett’s assured production draws strong and gripping performances from Arundell and Kowitz, the playing arena at Wharf 1 has rarely been this intimate or focused, and the spatial arrangement immediately lends the work a dual sense of sanctuary and inescapability. The designers Ralph Myers (set), Nick Schlieper (lighting) and Max Lyandvert (music, sound) have created a scheme evoking Harold Pinter’s enigmatic bunkers of memory, desire and menace in which Harrower is clearly well versed given Blackbird’s tension and mix of affection and fear.”

Trivia & Facts

• The play toured New Zealand from 23 February to 2 March 2008 as part of New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Opening night, 20 December 2007 

The Year of Magical Thinking (2008)

Directed by: Cate Blanchett
Written by: Joan Didion
Play run: 25 March 2008 – 4 May 2008 (opened on 31 March 2008)
Venue: The Wharf at Sydney Theatre Company

Over the course of one brutal year a woman loses her soul-mate suddenly and then their only child (a young mother herself) slowly.

The woman at the centre of this terrible series of events is Joan Didion – one of the great American essayists and novelists of the past fifty years.

Quotes from Others

• Robyn Nevin:
  — On Cate Blanchett directing: “She knows how to do it and she knows what I need better than any other director I can name… she has all the right kind of intuitive understanding that the piece needs”

Selected Reviews

Excerpts from selected reviews.

• Sydney Morning Herald — “As director, Cate Blanchett creates an abiding sense of logic becoming clouded; of orderly schemes morphing into a maze of murky depths. In the strangely objectifying process of “magical thinking”, the mind darts back and forward in time, as much diverted by some droll fascination as overloaded by a determination to get to the heart of things.
  Robyn Nevin is ideally cast as the meticulous, driven, inquisitive and doubting Didion. It is a skilful, mesmerising performance, not only of the “cool customer” demeanour but the soft, apprehensive touches that reveal the writer of imaginary people and plots has lost her way in the fog of memories or, “the vortex where they are strategically avoided”.
  The book better illustrates Didion’s relationship with her writer husband and their shared rituals, but the whimsy and hunger for knowledge remains intact. The densely-worded monologue largely concerns itself with her daughter’s combat, and the terror and loss spurring the writer on.
  Despite the play’s shortcomings, Nevin’s storytelling command achieves delicacy and force in the drift between meaninglessness and purpose. Blanchett’s well-orchestrated production is impeccably lit by Nick Schlieper, and Natasha Anderson’s sound design, especially the popping light globes and sparks, underscores the fractured reality and shocks.”

Trivia & Facts

• Giorgio Armani designed the costumes for this production.
• Robyn Nevin directed Cate Blanchett in Hedda Gabler (2004 & 2006).

Opening night, March 2008Source: AusStage