Jumping into his first year as the new Artistic Director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, and out of his last year as the Artistic Director of the Melbourne Festival, Brett Sheehy chats to Eleanor Howlett from Australian Stage about memorable moments, some challenging bits,  and a new light.

Belated congratulations on your appointment as the new MTC Artistic Director! What (apart from the job being advertised)

As well, I have always championed epic, international, contemporary opera, and our big opening event is a work I believe only Melbourne Festival alone in the nation would ever present. It is called After Life and in my view no one interested in contemporary culture – of any genre – should miss it. It’s only one hour and forty minutes long, and I can’t top the London Financial Times description of it, which has been echoed across Europe: “After Life is the all-embracing art form of the future – five stars!”.

What is the best thing about the arts in Australia?
The openness of the Australian personality translates to an openness of art making, where we are at the forefront of dissolving silos and barriers around artforms, making them more accessible and more holistically ‘celebrations of artistic pursuit’ – period.   

I also love the increasing institutional collaborations within the arts (a necessity as artists dissolve those silos), I love our art still reflecting our irreverence and larrikin distrust of authority and rules, and I love that especially our younger generation of artists and producers eschews pretension, obfuscation and elitism, and in so doing is opening artistic doors to millions more Australians who in the past felt alienated, unwelcome and suspicious of the closed doors of some of our more arch and snobbish predecessors.

What is the worst thing about the arts in Australia?
Ironically, the first two negatives are sort of diametrically opposed. On the one hand we are obsessed with telling ourselves that we have the right to fail. To me this is something every artist worth their salt knows only too well. But if I read one more forum or discussion paper or supposedly encouraging speech titled “The Right to Fail”, I’ll scream.  Let’s start telling our young artists they have the right to succeed, let’s start mentoring them in the ways to artistic success and leave the oppressive and ubiquitous language of failure at the door for a few years.

On the other hand, we still fear speaking to others honestly about our own weaknesses, feeling that our vulnerability to extreme anti-artistic and right-wing commentators will see them swoop on any hint of fracture in our ‘united front’. I don’t think a refusal to ever openly and robustly criticise ourselves or our artistic brothers and sisters leads to society unconditionally embracing us – I think it leads to a society believing we have no self-judgment or are simply dishonest. I also think we are timid in terms of speaking plainly and passionately about what we believe. We still face a fundamentalist right-wing agenda which demonises “elite artists” and the so-called “intellectual elite”, while “elite athletes” is a term of absolute deification and worship. How did we let this happen? We need to fight back and fight hard whenever those darker forces of political fundamentalism, extremism or censorship threaten us with their language of fear or trying to carve us away from our society as “the other”.

What attracted you to this type of work?
A love of being able to help enrich lives through art – who could want for more? And no one I know has been given more opportunities to do that than I – through a writer's festival (way back in my Brisbane days), through three capital city international arts festivals, and through two state theatre companies – sometimes I think I’m the luckiest guy alive.

What is one of your most memorable personal artistic moments?
I have to go back to production one of festival number one – the opening of my first Sydney Festival with Theatre du Soleil’s The Flood Drummers. I had been told all my working life, by so many people, that this was the greatest theatre company in the world yet they had never been to Australia, despite having been invited, I think, 19 times. I had also been told that they would never, ever tour all this way. When I finally tracked down Theatre du Soleil’s founder and artistic director Ariane Mnouchkine in Basel where she was touring, I sat down with her after the show and she said: “Brett, I think we can make this happen”. I went back to my hotel room and burst into tears. Still not quite believing it, when we opened the show at Fox Studios in Sydney that hot January night in 2002, I thought to myself – if this is possible, anything is possible.  And so it’s been since.