By John Bailey
Not so long ago, Ian Michael was working in the Malthouse Theatre box office. He was doling out tickets, taking phone enquiries or just sweeping up cigarette butts outside while the parade of theatre makers ascended to the hallowed rehearsal rooms.
“I used to sit in the box office and watch all those amazing artists walk up those stairs and go, ‘I’ll get there. I’ll get there, I’ll get there’.”
He got there. Right now, he’s back at Malthouse to direct the world premiere of Tom Wright’s Troy. The show’s original director, Malthouse artistic director Matt Lutton, had to give the project up after securing a new role as Adelaide Festival AD, and Michael was handpicked by Wright to take over the production.
Director Ian Michael on the set of Troy.Credit: Eugene Hyland
The 35-year-old is currently resident director at Sydney Theatre Company. His production of Wright’s adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock earlier this year drew rave reviews, and two days after it opened he got the call. “The process was so wild. It all happened so fast.” At STC he’s previously directed hit productions of large-scale shows such as Stolen and Constellations, but he’s never faced anything on the scale of Troy.
One of the big challenges he confronted when taking on the play was inheriting an ensemble of seven actors that he hadn’t cast himself: “Part of the process has been building that relationship, building that trust.”
Michael with the cast for his adaptation of Tom Wright’s adaptation of the famous work.Credit: Eugene Hyland
Luckily, the director began his own career as an actor. In 2019 he performed in Cloud Street on the same stage he’s directing for today: “It’s a beautiful kind of homecoming.”
Then there’s Wright’s writing, which is famous for the research and erudition he brings to plays including other Greek adaptions like Medea, The Odyssey and Oresteia.
Before coming onboard for Troy, however, Michael had never spent much time with the Greeks. “I never even studied them at school. I come from a town that has 7500 people in it, one set of traffic lights. We didn’t have any arts after year eight. There was no drama, there was no visual art or anything like that.”
The director thinks there are synergies between his own work and that of Wright’s. A proud Noongar man, Michael’s directing emphasises connections between culture and Country. “With work like Picnic and Troy, Tom’s very much talking about land. He’s talking about Country. What it means to want to own it, to control it, to have power over it,” he says.
Michael also has a refreshing drive to make theatre that is generous to its audience. “I make theatre that I really want to watch. When I think about images on stage, I’m like, ‘what would get me excited?’”
Troy gives us the tropes we might be expecting – Helen, the horse, those childish bloody gods – but it also offers revelations that might be surprising given we’ve had millennia to get past the spoiler warnings. One is how the “war” looked nothing like Hollywood’s version of events. When the outright violence wasn’t taking place, the opposing sides co-existed over long periods. The siege of Troy looks more like what we’d call a culture war today, in which a group of people attempts to undermine the languages, customs, beliefs and history of another.
“So thinking about the genocide of a place, of people, the assimilation, the desecration, the massacre, I understand that over a long period of time because the genocide of this country and the destruction of culture and the assimilation and all of that didn’t happen 237 years ago. It’s continuous.”
Troy isn’t a simple makeover of the story Homer or Euripides left for us. Wright draws on a vast range of retellings of the same events, which often differ in significant ways. This process of layering speaks to the way a story, a culture or a city can build on what came before, sometimes excavating the past, sometimes burying it.
“With theatre, every production is like breathing new life into a story that may have been told for thousands and thousands of years. I really get that as a blackfella. All the black stories that we put on stage, they’re deeply connected to something that is 65,000-plus years old. So in a way I’m like, ‘I kind of get the Greeks a bit more than I thought’.”
The show juggles the mythic with the specific, weaving a dreamlike spell before moments of sharp, immediate clarity bring us back to a very recognisable here and now. It’s also demanding for both its audience and cast. There’s a sequence the makers have taken to calling the “ballet of deaths” that “feels like the machine of violence, the machine of war”, Michael says. “When that meets the machine of theatre, when that starts to absolutely take over scenes, it feels incredibly confronting. And that’s kind of what the world is right now. It is confronting, but we shouldn’t look away from it. We should want it to stop.”
It’s a strong statement at a time in which much of the Australian arts world has quietly retreated from overtly political work. Protests, boycotts, withdrawals of funding and social media smear campaigns from all points along the political spectrum have left both artists and institutions wary of attracting the wrong sort of attention.
But Troy is something different. Wright’s script doesn’t make explicit connections to events of our own era, but it resonates with the state of the world today at a seismic level. It’s testament to the strength of the writing that different viewers could read its metaphors in very different ways, even opposing ones.
“The times of the ancient Greeks and the time of Troy were deeply political,” says Michael. “The people who were making the decisions don’t feel too far away from people that are in power today. We’re very aware of the world that we’re making this in. Without us telling you that we are basing certain images or moments off what is happening around the world right now, I think people will read into it.”
Part of theatre’s beauty, the playwright says, is how we all interpret what we see through the lens of our own experience. Of course Ian Michael’s Troy will be political, for that same reason.
“I come from a people who have survived genocide. I can’t not bring that with me.”
Troy is at Malthouse Theatre from September 4.