Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky: Two Innovative Australian Directors

One of the great attractions of writing about the performing arts is its impossibility; the greater the impact of a work, the more difficult it is to convey accurately what that experience was. The experience is translated from the immediate present, where it lives and exists, into a past tense, which makes it what it never was-a complete and finite object, now preserved in the distorting aspic of memory. Theatre is not a recordable experience; its repetition is, even in its crudest forms, not a reproduction so much as an imitation of its earlier performances. Even filming a performance is unsatisfactory: however artfully done, the most essential aspect of the performance, its elusive present-ness, its quality of being created in the moment before an audience, is irretrievably lost. Every artform expresses this tension between the present moment and past memory, between now and then, the unfixed and the fixed, the open and the closed. I suspect that one of the reasons why theatre remains fascinating is because it's an artform that by its very nature baldly articulates these contradictions. Its various disciplines unite into something which is at once a product and more than a product: it's a commodity that eludes possession, that can't be confined, that escapes our best efforts at definition. In writing about theatre, every attempt only reveals, as Eliot said of poetry, a different kind of failure. As a temporal art form, theatre enacts a condition central to the experience of living itself. Raw experience is continuously mediated and shaped in ways of which, most of the time, we are hardly aware-by language, by memory, by consciousness itself. In its more interesting forms, theatre brings this mediation to the foreground; and ideally, by doing so, it makes its audience more aware of the things that shape them and their lives. The pursuit of this kind of awareness is an abiding obsession of innovative theatre, from Brecht's theory of Verfremdungseffekt to the disorienting stage images of Romeo Castellucci. Much exploratory theatre plays with ideas of aesthetic alienation, a foregrounding of artifice that at once refuses an easy articulation of feeling and, paradoxically, intensifies its experience. This has been the case with much of the innovative theatre made in Australia over the past decade, and is particularly clear in the work of two of the most influential auteur directors, Barrie Kosky and Benedict Andrews. Both bring to Australian theatre a distinctly European awareness, which hybridizes with local practice to generate oeuvres of particular interest. They work regularly in Germany as well as in Australia. Andrews is an associate with Berlin's Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, where he developed a relationship with Marius von Mayenburg that resulted in notable Australian productions, and Kosky was the director of the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and, beginning in 2012, will be chief director of the Komische Oper in Berlin. Their cross-cultural careers are not unusual in Australia, where the smallness and undeniable provincialism of much of the culture has paradoxically sparked a wave of artists who situate themselves aggressively as local artists participating in a global culture. The poet John Kinsella, who works as an academic and poet between England, the US, and Australia, coined the phrase international regionalism to describe this kind of locally-centered art that, while celebrating its particular locale and tradition, refuses to confine itself in nationalist borders. Kosky and Andrews are both very different directors, but their work is irrevocably linked. It is seen to epitomize-for better or worse-Australian auteur theatre. They have many collaborators in common-both were often produced at the Sydney Theatre Company under the artistic directorship of Robyn Nevin, who ran the company before it was taken over in 2010 by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton. Both have also had significant collaborations with the writer Tom Wright, who both scripted Kosky's spectacular adaptations of Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Lost Echo, and The Women of Troy, and for Andrews dramaturged the adaptation of Shakespeare's history plays that became The War of the Roses. …

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