Susie Dee’s first work at Melbourne’s La Mama theatre was as a student in the 1970s, acting in a piece called Mangoes and Grapes. Those were the only words in the script, and the play was staged in the car park.
It was a heady time for Melbourne theatre. In a scene long dominated by works from the United States and the UK, a new generation of artists were bringing an Australian sensibility and vernacular to the stage. La Mama was based on the New York institution of the same name, and out of it came the Pram Factory: a hot-bed of artistic experimentation, and a home to young artists including David Williamson, Max Gillies and Helen Garner.
Dee has now accrued a 40 odd-year career as one of Australia’s most respected theatre directors. Her work has travelled Australia and the world, but she has always returned to her home town. She has a particular affinity with the city’s playwrights, and she is in the final stages of rehearsals of a new Melbourne play, #NoExemptions. Looking back at her first experiences, she remembers the time as “bold and Australian and crude”.
After graduating, Dee became part of the 1980s alternative cabaret scene. With her peers (“hundreds of us” she says), she would go around to now-lost venues like Last Laugh. The shows were political and dark, with “a touch of the European clown”. She worked with the then burgeoning Circus Oz, and was interested in bringing a “darker” aesthetic to her work.
But it was a role in a 1986 production that would shape Australian theatre for decades to come: Lilly and May, a new show at La Mama by the young playwright Patricia Cornelius, who starred with Dee in the two-hander.
Today, Dee and Cornelius are nearly synonymous as a theatre-making duo, making urgent productions which highlight Australia’s working class, giving voice to characters rarely highlighted on Australian stages. Savages, which won four 2013 Green Room awards, looked at the violent masculinity among four men on a cruise ship; writing about 2016’s Animal, the Age called their partnership “ferocious, urgent and strikingly original”. In 2019, they were the first Australians to ever be programmed in the Venice Biennale’s theatre program, with two productions: Shit and Love.
But back in 1986, Dee remembers, “it was raw”.
“[Lilly and May] was just the two of us with a pram and a cassette player and one lighting state,” she says. “And that little play at La Mama, it ended up travelling the world,” with seasons in Ireland, New York, Canada, and at Edinburgh fringe, where it was named one of the “top shows” of 1988.
“If we didn’t do [Lilly and May], our careers would be very different to this day,” Dee says. “Our relationship, our bond, was formed.”
It was Cornelius who first suggested Dee should direct one of her plays a few years later. It was also Cornelius who invited Dee to work at Melbourne Workers Theatre, a company originally focused on performing Australian stories in workplaces during lunch hours, “not just in theatres for middle-class people”.
“Suddenly I wanted to tell different stories; I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the Australian psyche,” Dee says.
Cornelius says Dee makes work that “takes your breath away. Never sentimental. Only vital, full of an amazing life force.”
But Dee’s creative network extends far beyond this one relationship. “When you get older, you build a coterie of artists that you connect with,” the director says of her frequent collaborators, which also include Brian Lipson, Angus Cerini and Nicci Wilks. “You have a similar language, a similar politic. We’re never complacent with each other. We can speak our minds; you can be honest.”
It is difficult to define Dee’s output. She has worked with dozens of playwrights and hundreds of artists, shifting between theatre spaces and site-specific works; between tiny, independent spaces like La Mama and TheatreWorks, and big stages like Arts Centre Melbourne’s Playhouse, where she directed Anthem in 2019.
But there are constants. There is a simmering anger at the state of the world; there is the power of the actor’s body – “a bold, vital production [with] the actor at the core”, as she describes it; and there is the passion for new Australian plays. The writers she works with, Dee says, “have something to say about the world. They’re passionate, they’re political, they want to shake things up.”
#NoExemptions is from Melbourne playwright Angela Buckingham. Set in a dystopian near-future where the climate emergency has led to a militarised state, it imagines the anger a young generation holds against their parents who didn’t act when they could.
“We think we’re all doing our little bit for the world and society,” Dee says. “We sign our petitions. We might go to a rally. But I think it’s about trying to activate an audience a little bit more to take something on.”
The idea that theatre can achieve this is “why I’m an artist and why I still keep working” she says. “I still feel theatre can shift consciousness.”
Melbourne Workers Theatre closed in 2012. “They were brave,” Dee says. Her most ambitious work for the company, 1999’s Tower of Light, was a response to the opening of Melbourne’s casino. It had a cast of more than 100, and was staged in the cattle pavilion at Melbourne Showgrounds.
It seems hard to imagine an independent company staging that work today. Federal arts funding was falling even before the pandemic, and with small – or even no – audiences, independent theatre companies have found themselves struggling to survive. “These companies now have been decimated,” Dee says. “Where are the smaller companies now?”
“There are gorgeous little companies. Always, voices will emerge and companies will emerge. But I feel that we’re in a bit of a dire strait.” #NoExemptions, she says, is run off the “smell of an oily rag”.
While there is a sense of pessimism around the state of arts funding – and, more broadly, “this horrific time that we’re in”, she says – there is a bold optimism when it comes to Dee’s own future. With “10 or 12” shows in various stages of development, Dee says she feels “really blessed”.
“They’re not happy works,” she says. “I think most of them are along the darker side of life. But they’re important works. Important works that say something about the world we’re in right now.”
And regardless of where they are staged – at big festivals or in tiny spaces – she has no intention of stopping working at La Mama.
“Until I fucking die, hopefully,” she says, “I’ll still be doing shows at La Mama.”
#NoExemptions is on at La Mama Courthouse theatre in Melbourne until 8 May
