![]() ![]() Yet Armfield had a professional life outside Belvoir. In rehearsal, Brown says, ''you virtually lived with him''. Season launches were often held at his Leichhardt house. ''It's true to say more particularly of Neil than any other director I know in Australia that the theatre - and Belvoir - has been his entire life.'' ''He doesn't have a relationship,'' Nevin says. When Armfield first signalled his intention to leave Belvoir, in May last year, it was hard to imagine the place without him. ''He used to stick them up on the walls in the corridor outside the dressing rooms and they'd go on for miles and miles,'' Nevin says. Armfield is known for the reams of notes he gives actors. This attention to detail continues throughout the life of a play and beyond. The close reading of text and dissection of every phrase can go on for ''an infuriatingly, frighteningly long time'', Roxburgh says. For all his vagueness, people who have worked with him say how maniacally focused on detail he is. This clowning, anarchic quality became a signature of Armfield's work. ''The difference between the comedy and the tragedy became somehow more vivid.'' And we found that the more we pushed the extremes of the clowning, of the design, of the music, of the lighting, the more we found a rhythm that was very individual and extreme. ''It was the first time where we kind of closed the rehearsal room doors and did something completely to please ourselves. ''It was Scott seeing Geoffrey in Diary that led him to hold out for Geoffrey for Shine ,'' Armfield says. It was, Armfield says, a production that defined his and Rush's future, in a way. We meet in the Belvoir offices as he's about to start rehearsals for his valedictory show, fittingly a revival of one of his great triumphs: Gogol's The Diary of a Madman, with Geoffrey Rush, first staged 21 years ago then toured to Russia. He is a quiet, shambling, famously vague figure, with a fondness for crumpled Hawaiian shirts. Yet Armfield, 55, has nothing of the flash and imperiousness of the younger man. ''He is a uniquely Australian artist - like Patrick White or Dobell or Drysdale, his autograph is distinctive in his work,'' Brown says.Īrmfield is, says actor and director Robyn Nevin, our only true auteur now that Barrie Kosky has gone to Berlin. Rooted in suburban 1950s Australia, in lino and ceramic ashtrays, it was fed by an inclusive modernity - the barely sketched world of his plays was at once familiar and magically strange.īrown once said Armfield directed his productions by the light of the open fridge door. With them, he developed a style of theatre that was uniquely Australian but never jingoistic. He is known for the intimacy with which he engages with actors and he has nurtured some of our finest: Roxburgh, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Bille Brown, Jacqueline McKenzie and, particularly, Geoffrey Rush. Yet, in his 16-year tenure, now coming to its long-drawn-out end, Armfield made it the city's most exciting and beloved theatre. Founded on generosity, when 600 people gave enough money to save the old tomato sauce factory on Belvoir Street, in Surry Hills, the Belvoir was cursed (or blessed) with a peculiar corner stage and an idealistic pay structure where stagehands were paid the same as the artistic director. There is a limit of two tickets per person with valid ID and they are based on availability.This quality has come in very handy over Armfield's long career as artistic director of a theatre as improbable as the plays it puts on. Student rush tickets will be sold for $26.50 each on the day of the performance when the box office opens. That’s not because you’re worried that the 400-year-old Berenger might come after you in your dreams, Freddy Krueger style it’s because you know that the seedy, power-addled egomaniac onstage - who’s working overtime to dodge his own mortality - is, quite simply, you.” ![]() Rush is not only more entertaining than the usual never-say-die bogeyman but also more frightening. Despite the efforts of Queen Marguerite (Sarandon) and the other members of the court to convince the King he has only 90 minutes left to live, he refuses to relinquish any control.īen Brantley, in The New York Times raves that “in Neil Armfield’s brutally funny revival, Mr. The play is about a megalomaniacal ruler, King Berenger (Rush) whose incompetence has left his country in near ruin. The cast also includes Lauren Ambrose, Andrea Martin, William Sadler, and Brian Hutchison. Nominated for 4 Tony Awards including Best Performance for Geoffrey Rush.Īcademy Award-winners Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon star in Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, translated by Rush and director Neil Armfield. ![]()
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