Belvoir theatre has announced that associate director Eamon Flack will lead the company from 2016, taking over from departing artistic director Ralph Myers.
The Helpmann award-winning Flack, who has been with the Sydney theatre for nine years as a writer, dramaturg and director, is excited but said that his new job will be business as usual in many ways.
“I have such a strong sense of continuing to do what I’ve been doing in the company,” he told Guardian Australia, after receiving the news on Monday night. Flack admits, with a laugh, that he was quietly confident “because I liked my own ideas”.
His most recent Belvoir show was the sold-out The Glass Menagerie. This followed his critically-acclaimed production of Angels in America in 2013, and other popular runs of Once in Royal David’s City, As You Like It and Babyteeth
Outgoing director Ralph Myers, who will have led Belvoir for five years, said Flack was an excellent choice as a proven champion of new talent who combines artistic empathy with a drive to get things done as a director.
“He’s got a lovely nurturing quality that makes him a great dramaturg and a developer of new works,” said Myers. “He’s always got his ear to the ground, sniffing around for new writers and new directors; finding people and bringing them into the fold in a really great way, and I have great confidence that he will continue doing that.”
Flack credits Belvoir as the place where he discovered theatre, after he saw The Judas Kiss in 1999 and The Marriage of Figaro in 2000.
“It was the work of this company that hauled me out of a painful, inchoate, complete sense of purposelessness when I was in my late teens,” he said, adding: “the idea of joining in on that great big adventure that this company has always been felt like the best you could wish for.”
Although he hadn’t originally imagined himself as an artistic director, Flack said it seemed like the best way to pursue his “wild dreams” as a theatre maker. And while he isn’t giving away the specifics of his plans, he said: “I would love to see this most nimble of companies in Australia become the company that learns how to really embrace the full variety and diversity of life in this country.”
With projects like Beautiful One Day and Don’t Take Your Love to Town under his belt, he will continue his focus on Indigenous theatre. “Much of the work that I’ve found the most rewarding in my time here has been with people like Leah Purcell and Jada Albert and that brilliant bunch of young Indigenous artists that seem to have come out of the Northern Territory.”
Flack, who grew up in Darwin, hopes to develop more Territorian theatre generally. “I think it’s one of the most dramatic and theatrical places on the planet and it happens to have all of the great themes that the world is wrestling with, clashing side by side in one half-forgotten massive slab of this country.”
Issues ripe for theatrical exploration include “local concerns rubbing up against global concerns, big money alongside small money, economic forces alongside natural forces”, said Flack, adding: “frankly they need a lot more attention than I think they are being given politically, culturally and artistically.”
He will continue to direct. “I don’t think you can just become a manager,” he said. “Personally I couldn’t do that because I love being in rehearsal rooms and the theatre itself and I think staying in touch with that is really crucial.”
Flack will have a busy year in 2015, directing Robyn Nevin in Mother Courage and her Children and Ewen Leslie in Ivanov.
He will take the reins after an artistically successful but financially challenging 2013 for Belvoir, and mixed audience responses to the first half of its 2014 programme. Flack said that he’s inheriting a company with a renewed sense of the future, thanks to Myers.
“In the last five years of Ralph’s time, the fecund explosive mess of change has seen so many new artists come to Belvoir,” he said. “For all that there has been great change, I really think that the fundamental project of Belvoir has always remained in place. The sense that this company still has work to do but that there is still an adventure to be had is, as far as I’m concerned, very strong.”
Those who think they know what to expect from him may be surprised, he said. “I’m not looking to shock, but I certainly am looking to enliven and I would definitely like us to present work that opens people’s eyes. I don’t mean that in a conceited ‘we’ve-got-the-answers-to-the-world’ way but just by inviting more on to that stage.”
Myers, meanwhile, said he will return to freelance work as a set designer. “I’m very much looking forward to doing projects on a bigger scale than I’ve had the opportunity to do recently [and] projects overseas,” he said. “But yes, back at the mercy of directors, hoping they will employ me.”
