by On a small kite-shaped stage in the heart of Sydney’s Kings Cross sits the theater of first chances. A crucible for playwrights and actors for almost 54 years, this space has raised the voice and innateness of Australia, launching hundreds of new Australian stories.
Each night, around 100 members of the audience enter the historic Stables theatre, so close they can wipe the sweat off the actors. These performers have to duck down a rutty staircase into a small dressing room; they make an agreement not to flush the adjoining toilet during shows.
Rough edges give rich foundations here. David Wenham’s first star turn, as a dead-eyed sadist in The Boys in 1991; Jacqueline McKenzie’s stage debut as a teenage 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 friend, Felice Bauer, dancing across the table to win best newcomer at the Sydney theater awards.
Home of the Griffin Theater Company for 44 years, the Stables is about to enter a new era, and the venue will soon close its doors for a massive $11m rebuild. Kings Cross resident playwright Louis Nowra is honored to say goodbye to the creaky stage and surrounds with a new production of The Lewis Trilogy: three plays about misfits and love, spanning five decades from 1962 and opening on February 9.
Actress and playwright Kate Mulvany remembers being tested at the Stables. It’s by far her favorite place to perform, but it’s the one that draws the most attention, since the audience becomes actors on two sides. “When you first step on that stage it feels tiny,” she says, “and yet it can encompass whole universes.”
Mulvany remembers playing Martin Vaughan’s Therese in Debra Oswald’s Mr Bailey’s Minder in 2004: “Many times I would cry for Martin and you could feel both sides crying; everyone was in the room together.” Another highlight was her role as Amanda in Justin Fleming’s Molière in 2016. “Oh my God, I grabbed a chair on the revolving stage of The Literati,” she says with a laugh. “There’s no escaping it when you’re there – and you wouldn’t want to.”
The center began as stables in the 1890s, an iron-clad brick building owned by a butcher and sheep exporter. It was 1970 when the pioneering – but now defunct – Nimrod Theater Company formed itself, raising money to fix large holes in the weak roof.
In 1980, Griffin moved in. Playwright Michael Gow remembers performing his play Away for the first time there in 1986 – “a relentlessly hot summer; fans flocked to the boards”. The play has performed almost 100 seasons across Australia, including a 20th anniversary production directed by Gow at the Stables. “There was a red pole [on stage] which 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 staged exclusively Australian plays – more than 400 to date – promoting women, queer voices and racial diversity. amongst.
When she started the job, Griffin was bankrupt and was on the verge of collapse. “They said, ‘The good news is we’d like to offer you the job,'” says Horin. “‘The bad news is we only have funding for you for six months – your first job is fundraising.” Horin began an intense period of development for new plays and received three-year government funding, constantly renewing her creative team; 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, getting out of the ‘am I good enough?’ a distrustful image,” says Horin. “Cáit was very funny, great in the role.”
Griffin has also produced many blueprints for Australian screen classics. Wenham took a violent Brett Sprague from Gordon Graham’s play to the film adaptation 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 was made into a feature film; and Richard Barrett’s drama The Heartbreak Kid is better known to TV viewers as Heartbreak High.
Next, Suzie Miller’s feminist drama Prima Facie – which premiered at the Stables in 2019, directed by Lee Lewis – will become a British feature starring Cynthia Erivo, following Jodie Comer and the Olivier award-winning play on the West End and Comer accepted Tony. on Broadway.
Speaking to the Guardian from Los Angeles, Miller says that “the tears and sweat of artists have fallen into the bones of the building”. She continues the work there because Griffin is “like the Royal Court Theater in London: the home of playwrights and they know how to develop and create work and support writers”.
When Miller started bringing plays to Australian theaters in the early 2000s, there were few looks for women, so she moved to the UK. “Overseas I got traction, but in Australia … suddenly the women playwrights in the generation above me were no longer in the theatre.”
Mulvany similarly remembers it as a symbolic moment: “We used to say, ‘Does anyone know what company so-and-so has picked up a female playwright for next year?'”
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Through April, Nowra’s classic semi-autobiographical Lewis Trilogy is being staged in new, specially updated versions for its Stables season. The first play is set on a housing commission estate, the second in an asylum, the third at a theater version of the Old Fitz Hotel in Woolloomooloo, where Nowra lives. The same ensemble of actors is used in all three works, including Paul Capsis as Roy in Così – the second play in the trilogy.
Griffin’s current 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 hated things, to feel the audience around you going, ‘Oh no. It 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 of a spotlight”.
The Stables will be closed for rebuilding in May. A $5m donation from the Neilson Foundation in 2023 allowed the theater company to finally buy the Stables as well as the neighboring terraced house at 12 Nimrod Street, which was demolished. It will cost an additional $11m to bring the sites together: $5m committed by the New South Wales government, an additional $6m being raised. It will allow for a slightly larger stage, more seats (from 105 to 140) and a new lift and practice space on site.
Greene and 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 keep Griffin’s spirit in line with his “slightly chaotic” work. Gow will be happy if they can pull that off. “I’m a bit ambivalent about all this reform,” he says. “It is the slow march of nobility. There is something about it [a] raw [theatre space] I find it extremely attractive, even though it borders on unsafe and unhealthy.”
Times go on, new voices rise. Actor and playwright Wongutha-Yamatji Meyne Wyatt gave a scorching performance at the Stables in his first play, City of Gold 2019 – a monologue from which he went viral when he did it on Q&A. Playwright Merlynn Tong, whose play Golden Blood premiered in 2022 and will be relaunched for two major theater companies in 2024, says Griffin gave her the freedom to experiment.
“I’m a woman, I’m Asian … so I was really worried about ‘do my stories even belong here’,” she recalls. “With the Griffin program for me … it validated my legitimacy as a person living in this country and as a woman, as a person of color.”
Between being stables and a theatre, the space served as a garage, Sunday school, gymnasium, taxi company office and silk screen printing studio – and may also have been a “score house”, said the actor Sacha Horler in Griffin’s podcast in 2020. (Her father, the late Ken Horler, rented the Stables to Nimrod in 1970 for $17 a week).
Mulvany laughs when he realizes that the earliest shows at the Stables may have been on the more erotic side. “I’ve had many meetings with people over the years in that foyer that turned into relationships at first. It has that beautiful, positive domino effect,” she says. “So it wouldn’t surprise me that it was an elevated place before it was a theater.”
• Griffin Theater Company’s production of Louis Nowra’s Lewis Trilogy will run at the Stables until April, before the theater closes for renovations.
