Stephen Jeffreys: guiding Sydney's stages

As published in ArtsHub Australia

by Nicholas Pickard
Thursday, June 07, 2007

The Sydney Theatre Company headquarters is one of the most beautiful places during the day. On a long finger wharf that’s nestled in the heart of Port Jackson, the view pans out to the east, with the Harbour Bridge arching over the waters that glides from the river out to the Pacific Ocean.

At 10am, I am introduced to Stephen Jeffreys, a tall and amiable Englishman who has one of those rich home county voices that has that quiet and respectable authority to it.

The two of us are decked out in our fair skin and we cover for shade on one of the beautiful decks that takes in the harbour. In no less than one minute, a waitress swiftly announces that we are in the way of preparations for lunch and shuffles us down to the blaring sun of the morning. Welcome to Sydney.

Jeffreys is synonymous with the rise of new theatre writing that hit the British stages during the late 80’s and 90’s. As resident literary manager of the Royal Court, he implemented a revolutionary programme that put new British playwriting at the centre of the rich platter of theatrical delights that that little island has to offer.

Names such as Sarah Kane, Jez Butterworth, Mark Ravenhill, Conor McPherson and Marius von Mayenburg were tried and tested as part of one of the most aggressive playwriting programmes ever introduced in the theatrical world. And it was the rise and rise of Jeffreys programme that has made him one of the most well known writers in the United Kingdom. It was his play The Libertine that caught the attention of actor John Malkovich and was then presented at the Steppenwolf and then turned into a feature film.

It was the British summer of last year that STC Artistic Director, Robyn Nevin flew to the UK to meet with Jeffreys wife, Annabel Arden who is a director most notably known through her work at Theatre de Complicite. Approaching Arden with the idea of directing something down at the Wharf, it was suggested that the play they should produce be one written by Jeffreys.

The collaboration was agreed on by the party of three and the result is The Art of War now showing at the Sydney Theatre Company. Jeffreys explains that The Art of War “is part of a trilogy… although it didn’t start out like that.”

“I did a play in 2001 with Annabel in California called Wind Interruptions and the idea behind it was to do a political play in a post modernist way to find a new style for that kind of work. The style of was an imaginary coup with little bits of 20th century history from all over the place and it out of chronological time - and I said to her at the time that I think that there are another couple of plays that will belong to this one.

“And I described a very sketchy idea to Robyn which was called The Art of War which was about warfare and Sun Tzu’s ideas of warfare. And she thought immediately that this was the right idea to do”.

Immediately Jeffreys set about writing the third part of the trilogy, before he had even finished the second. The result, after intense collaboration with Arden and the STC’s Actors Company is what he calls “an unsual play.”

“This meat of the play,” he says, “is in the Iraq scenes which I became very interested in researching. And I discovered that when the Americans were planning to invade that there were some dissident voices in the US army who were essentially saying they can win a conventional war against the Iraqis. But what will happen when they get to Baghdad, is that instead of fighting the US directly, if they have got any sense at all, they will take the Sun Tzu theory and not oppose the initial invasion. What they will do is they will take all of the key guys out of uniform and keep them in the background for six months and fight an insurrection – which is precisely what happened.

“The Americans have got themselves in a classic situation that Sun Tzu would have avoided. To be embroiled in an endless conflict without any clear strategy, where you are just bleeding resources the whole time”.

Jeffreys has framed the present conflict onto Sun Tzu’s theories with three different strands in the story. There first is the story set in Iraq in 2003, the second a series of love affairs and the final part is a business story centring around an Australian company. All twelve actors from the company are on stage almost the entire time and the result is what Jeffreys describes as “a free flow between the chorus part of the work and the more naturalistic play which is going on around them”.

Jeffreys couldn’t be a more qualified literary influence for Sydney’s performing arts.

He spent nearly 11 years as literary associate of the Royal Court and he holds workshops in the UK and often travels to countries to work with emerging writers. While he has been here, he held workshops with a young group including Hilary Bell, Greg Woodland, Nick Simpson-Deeks, Patrick Carr, Jack Douglas, Jane Harrison & Nicki Bloom.

While researching this article and looking at his website, I noticed one of the major selling points of his workshops is – What Theatres Want. “I will tell you exactly what they want,” he says. “They want the writer to speak with their own voice. I always start from the point of view that you can’t actually teach someone to be a writer unless they have got something to say, some urge to put it out there. And they either have that or they haven’t got that.

“I am really against the word ‘develop’”, he explains. “I don’t think that plays nor films are ‘developed’ actually. When a producer tells you that they are ‘developing’ something – you think, actually you are not. The writer is sitting there writing it and every couple of weeks you meet this guy for a coffee and you think it is work. But it’s not. The work is done. It’s the person sitting alone in a room.

“What they want is your own voice. A lot of writers seem to think that you have to fulfil a lot of prescriptions of what a play is or how a play is constructed. Really, when a literary manager is reading between ten and twenty plays a week, they want to open it and think - there is something original here, they don’t want to hear imitations of people.

“Its amazing! When we did a play by Jez Butterworth called Mojo, which is about gangsters, six months later you get a whole bunch of scripts with severed heads in the fridge and stuff like that. Or The Weir, suddenly there was a bunch of plays set in an Irish pub. You think, well if we just had a big hit with a play set in an Irish pub, why would we want to do that? It’s incredible how imitative people become”.

The Art of War plays at the Sydney Theatre Company till Saturday 30 June.

For tickets and more info, visit www.sydneytheatre.com.au