Neil Armfield
Sometime in the mid 1950s I was conceived, and so was the idea of an opera house on Bennelong Point. I was born in April 1955, and nine months later Premier Joe Cahill announced the international design competition which Jørn Utzon won a year later.
As I grew up, so, it seemed, did it. At first it was a weird set of curves in an artist’s impression on the front page of The Sun. Then it was a roiling mess of a controversy trumpeted by adversaries as an unrealistic futuristic fantasy as unlikely to happen as a man landing on the moon.
But happen it did. And Uncle Sid Painter, our next door neighbour, became a local celebrity when he won the Opera House Lottery.
Through the 1960s, every school holidays, my grandma would come over on the 461 bus from Homebush to Concord and I’d join her on the corner of Salt and Zoeller St and we‘d go on into Circular Quay and catch the ferry to Manly. And I would watch as we rounded the building site at Bennelong Point as the cranes painstakingly erected the grey concrete ribs. It all seemed as slow as my childhood.
I wondered if I would ever get to step inside.
As the 60s turned to the 70s I was in the senior school at Homebush Boys’ High and it all started to get closer. In 1972 I directed my first show and won a New South Wales State High School Drama Award and the ceremony was high up in Ken Woolley’s State Office Block – The Black Stump - with views down to the almost completed Opera House, its white tiles gleaming with promise. Someone said maybe I’d work there one day. It was inconceivable.
It opened a year later, and I was, by this stage, in my first year of Arts at Sydney University, surrounded by those who bemoaned the travesty of the interiors, especially when set against the unbelievable beauty of the exterior. I started going regularly – I had a youth subscription to the Opera and the SSO. I enjoyed the magenta seats of the concert hall and its fabulous vaulted spaces above the stage and I adored the dramatic black interior of the Opera Theatre and the two amazing northern foyers.
And within a year, I was working there, albeit as a supernumerary in successive grand operas. The Australian Opera had put an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald asking for extras for Aida, the first time an opera had been staged in the Concert Hall - ironically the space that Utzon had conceived for opera. Anyway, I lined up with dozens of other hopefuls in a cattle call audition in the Loading Dock under the two main shells and Stephen Hall the director walked along and chose the ones he liked the look of. And I was one of them. I had to smother myself in Leichner No 10 (Dark Egyptian), put on my tunic of gold kid lame, hold my scimitar aloft, and process on in time to the Triumphal March. Sometimes as I rushed in late for rehearsals, I spotted my university friend Dennis Watkins as he assembled his morning’s group for his increasingly popular tours of this amazing building. Two years later I was back for John Copley’s Madame Butterfly with Leona Mitchell in the Opera Theatre, this time swaggering on as a Samurai warrior.
Another two years passed and I was directing professionally, and within a decade I had directed in all four of the major halls of the Opera House – in the Drama Theatre (The Country Wife for STC), in the Playhouse (David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross) in the Opera Theatre (Britten’s The Turn of the Screw) and finally the Concert Hall (Tristan und Isolde).
Before my first production in the Opera House, I directed Alan John‘s first opera Frankie (with libretto by David Holman) for Come Out – Adelaide‘s youth arts festival – in April 1987. I’d known Alan for 17 years, since we met at Homebush Boys’ in 1970. We have been constant collaborators from 1971 until now. Frankie was like a little Puccini opera about a young boy in a housing commission community who is bullied by a gang of teenage thugs and finally becomes a hero when he confronts the gang as they try to bully a young black girl. It’s a glorious piece and it was my first production of an opera.
Across the next 10 years I worked regularly with Alan he composed a beautiful score for our Tempest at Belvoir in 1990 and the following year Alan’s music for Diary of a Madman from our 1989 Belvoir production with Geoffrey Rush toured to Russia, and 22 years later to New York. In 1991 I directed a revival of Alan’s musical Jonah (book and lyrics by John Romeril) in Adelaide and some time around then Alan gave me a cassette of himself singing all the parts in the opera he was writing for The Australian Opera, The Eighth Wonder. I listened to it as I was driving home to Sydney across the Hay Plain. It was only the second work of Alan’s that I wasn’t meant to direct (the other, Orlando Rourke, written with Nick Enright, was also the result of Jim Sharman‘s energetic inspiration). But I took a keen interest. When I was in rehearsal for a revival of Tristan und Isolde in 1993, I remember conductor Carlo Felice Cillario coming very excited into the studio one day having just heard some of Alan’s score being rehearsed by Richard Gill with the AOBO, and announced he wanted to study the whole score!
1995, the year when The Eighth Wonder premiered, was a particularly busy time for me. We had formed an acting ensemble at Belvoir around our Hamlet company in 1994 and I’d taken on the role of Artistic Director. I directed a revival of my Tempest with that ensemble (music Alan John) as well as a new production of Stephen Sewell‘s brilliant The Blind Giant is Dancing (music, Paul Charlier). We did a tour of Hamlet to Melbourne and Adelaide, and The Tempest to Tasmania and Adelaide. In addition to that I directed a production of Katya Kabanova for The Australian Opera which opened in January, and I directed two films in the ABC’s Naked: Stories of Men (one by Nick Enright: Coral Island, music Alan John; one by Andrew Bovell: The Fisherman’s Wake, music Stephen Rae). When I got the call that Jim Sharman had withdrawn from The Eighth Wonder due to ill-health, I was with Richard Roxburgh, Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush about to open the Melbourne revival of our Hamlet. I left Hamlet in the hands of Peter Evans (the Director, not the lunatic) and returned to Sydney and quickly boned up! Brian Thomson’s beautiful epic set had been built and Angus Strathie’s costumes almost completed - I had meetings with Brian where we simplified some of the uses of the set and plunged in.
Having had a somewhat tricky time with the Australian Opera chorus earlier that year on Katya Kabanova (an opera notoriously unsatisfying for chorus, and my first chorus opera) - (indeed, Artistic Director Moffatt Oxenbould, I’m told, had argued against my being given Eighth Wonder to direct because of dissatisfaction amongst the chorus with me) - there was some trepidation. But what Alan and Dennis had written was a great chorus opera – it’s the story of the company itself - full of humour and life and brilliant cameos, as well as the story of our city, our country. We worked swiftly and wonderfully together.
I had the great honour and privilege on a grand stage of telling a story that I knew in my bones, in my heart. Alexandra’s family that we meet at the barbecue and later so proudly in her dressing room is my family. And Alan’s. The compromises brought by politicians on beauty and ambition is something we readily recognise (really it was the corrupt Liberal Premier of NSW Sir Robert Askin who, through Davis Hughes, had compromised the legacy of his Labor predecessor Joe Cahill and the incompletely realised vision of Jørn Utzon). It was a struggle and a defeat we’d all lived through. It was a compromise we see repeated over and over in this nation’s history: that suspicion of the artist. The story of a country that has never known what to do with or how to support its artists. So much easier to celebrate sporting heroes – they don’t question, they don’t say things that embarrass the orthodoxies of the powerful (unless they’re Nicky Winmar or Adam Goodes). This is an opera that comes from the heart and speaks to the heart of our story.
I sat in the theatre on opening night and as the ghost of Utzon returned, as he does in this version, I wept for what might have been, but also for the beauty, the courage of what was achieved.
At a subsequent performance in the revival season during the Olympic Arts Festival in 2000, I sat in the stalls taking notes after the curtain call and as the theatre was clearing, a woman came bustling purposefully along the row to me. “Now that’s what I call an opera!”