Cents and sensibility: The new certainty playing out in theatres

Matthew Lutton knows how to weather a storm.

The Malthouse Theatre’s co-CEO and artistic director has been in the game for more than two decades, forming his own company in Perth in 2002. He’s directed theatre and opera, big shows and small, endured the global financial crisis and came through COVID lockdowns.

Malthouse Theatre director Matthew Lutton at Embla.Credit: Justin McManus

So what does he think of the current theatrical environment?

“I do think it’s probably the hardest time I’ve ever seen to make theatre right now,” he says. “Every part of what you do, from the logistical to the creative and imaginative, is in flux.”

We’ve met at Embla – on the recommendation of Lutton’s partner (Lutton himself has never been but was eager to try it) – to delve deeply into the past, present and future of Melbourne’s performing arts scene.

Embla is a sharing sort of place, with much of its menu cooked over fire in the open kitchen. The best spots in the house are at the bar watching the alchemical masters work their magic, but today we’ve opted for a quiet booth better suited for conversation (and photography).

We leave our culinary future in the hands of our experienced server, who selects an assortment of snacks and larger dishes: fried polenta with pine nuts and sage; chicken skin crisps with whipped anchovy; the restaurant’s signature quinoa and thyme sourdough with fennel seed butter; blue eye tartare with hazelnuts and sliced mushrooms; a whole yellow belly flounder; and sprouting broccoli with rice and mint.

Fried polenta with pine nuts and sage at Embla.Credit: Justin McManus

Lutton has a board subcommittee meeting directly after our lunch, so we stick with sparkling water, eschewing Embla’s famed wine list.

Lutton has been at Malthouse since 2011, and he’s seen a lot of changes in the industry throughout his tenure. But he says with the cost-of-living crunch cutting into people’s discretionary spending, the theatre has had to adapt and push its programming in a more marketable direction, with adaptations of known stories and an ambitious, escapist season planned for 2025.

“Audiences are unpredictable,” he says. “At the moment, they’re not responding in the way they used to, in that there’s a sense of wanting more certainty from what they’re seeing. So adaptations, shows that have been proven for 50 years are really attractive because you know what you’re going to get for your ticket price.”

Some small dishes arrive, chicken skin flutes that we hold and eat like tacos, if tacos were crisp, perfectly briny, creamy marvels. The blue eye is almost too pretty to dig into, a spiral of overlapping petals of charred fish and perfect mushroom slices.

Chicken skin crisps with whipped anchovy and chicory at Embla.Credit: Justin McManus

Lutton points to recent successful Melbourne runs of commercial drama like The Mousetrap, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Woman in Black as evidence of what is selling well in Melbourne’s current theatrical scene.

“At the same time, I was talking to a producer recently, and he was saying if he needed to make money, he would put on My Fair Lady. But they did it recently in London, and it was 50 per cent houses because people weren’t coming. I think it means that everyone who is making theatre and putting on shows is sort of leaping into the unknown, going, ‘the touchstones being made at the moment, as opposed to existing’.”

Not that Lutton would put on My Fair Lady at Malthouse anyway, at least not without some kind of radical reimagining. “Malthouse was set up when it was the Playbox, initially, as the sort of anti-establishment company,” he explains as our golden polenta cubes arrive. “[Founder] Carrillo Gantner, when he first created the company, famously stood outside the MTC [Melbourne Theatre Company] with a flyer going ‘tired of your boring, overpriced subscription? Come on down to the Playbox.’ It came from a place of knowing that it’s important to have multiple theatrical voice in a city. We are very collegiate with MTC, we don’t do that, but it comes from the spirit of difference.”

Tartare of charred blue eye and mushrooms at EmblaCredit: Justin McManus

Lutton tries to avoid what he calls “domestic drama”, the middlebrow, middle-class fare that often dominates main stages in Australia. “I’m always going, is there something in the content that feels like it’s brave, whether that’s because it’s divisive material or taboo material? Is it exploring form? Is how it’s told got adventurousness in it?”

How does an artistic director with a commitment to championing the new, taboo and difference reach an audience who are seeking certainty? The answer, he says, is “loudness”, a point of difference that will make people sit up and take notice of a show and go tell their friends about boundary-pushing theatre.

“What’s in my mind is, do I think it’s going to have that immediate connection for audiences that will make them want to see the show? Is it unique to the Malthouse? Is it something that I feel that you’re not going to see elsewhere, which actually is really important … And are we actually going to be able to realise this in a way that is going to blow people’s brains?”

Lutton and the theatre have a history of blowing people’s brains, including flooding the stage during an ambitious and widely praised production of Cloudstreet – though that bit of theatrical magic required a fair bit of technical scrambling.

“There was a reservoir of water sitting underneath the stage the whole time, under the floorboards, and then we would pump water and lift the water level above the floorboards and then lower it... The first time it did it, the whole stage floated. The floorboards, which were sitting on a plastic sealer, lifted. It’s like a car when it goes across a creek, it floats. And then we got everyone standing on the stage and it still floated up with all this weight, we couldn’t make it heavy enough.”

Benjamin Oakes in the MTC production Cloudstreet.Credit: Pia Johnson

They eventually figured out a way to solve the problem, and the resulting indoor flood was one of the moments of ‘loudness’ that captivated audiences (for mine, being given vanilla ice-cream during the middle of the show was another).

But figuring out a way to work within strict government crowd limits while the COVID-19 pandemic raged led to perhaps Malthouse’s loudest theatrical pivot to date. Instead of using the existing infrastructure, Lutton and the team ripped out the theatre’s seats and stages, reimagining the entirety of the space as an open-world immersive experience to cater for 60 patrons at a time, exactly the number the government would allow to gather at once.

“We tried to come up with, well, what can we do with 60 people that is conceived for 60 people when that’s the asset? And that led us to immersive theatre. It was really ambitious, as I sort of thought that if we’re going to do this, part of the joy of it is that you get lost, that it has to be able to scale where you feel like you don’t know where you are. It’s an open world that you’re exploring.”

That show was Because the Night, an immersive reimagining of Hamlet set in a 1980s Australian logging town. Audiences could follow any actor they wished, or get lost in the intricate set. They were encouraged to open drawers, pick up papers, look behind furniture – all things that would be verboten during a traditional show.

Artemis Ioannides and Keegan Joyce in the labyrinth of Because The Night.Credit: Pia Johnson

It was the first time an Australian theatre company had tackled immersive – the only example in the country until then was Underground Cinema’s immersive shows, which led into film screenings – and audiences, starved for live theatre and desperate for something new, loved it.

“We saw the joy that it created an audience,” Lutton says, spearing some fish from the herb-encrusted whole flounder that has just appeared. “Something about the agency of it, to take control of the story, to move and explore, brought out like a childlike imagination in audiences. And I didn’t want to stop that invitation to audiences.”

Emily Milledge in Hour of the Wolf.Credit: Pia Johnson.

Last year, despite being able to operate at full capacity, Malthouse brought out another immersive show, Hour of the Wolf. An original story that Lutton co-created, it used headsets and an unseen narrator to direct audiences through the space and from scene to scene.

“Hour of the Wolf was trying to guide a little bit more and also trying to maybe weave more sophistication into the narrative,” Lutton says.

So, is there more immersive in Malthouse’s future? Perhaps, but at least in the short term, it’s just too damn expensive.

“I’m really frustrated that our electricity and gas bill has doubled in six years, and so that means we’re going to do less shows because we have to pay that bill. It’s the worst reason. But it’s about how to achieve really ambitious ideas in an economical way.”

If money were no object, is there a show Lutton would love to do that he has never had the chance to?

It turns out there is: Eugene O’Neil’s 1922 expressionist work The Hairy Ape. Lutton excitedly describes the plot (no spoilers, but it is not a comedy) and says despite its problematic gender politics, there’s something about the scale that he would love to attempt.

“What I love about it is it’s like Metropolis or something. There’s a huge industrial imagery where people are very small in the bowels of ships or on Fifth Avenue, but you need a chorus of 40 people on stage create everything.”

At the moment a chorus of 40 is unlikely on Malthouse’s stages, but Lutton wants his legacy at the theatre to be one of sustainable, wildly creative artistry.

The bill for lunch for two at EmblaCredit: Cassidy Knowlton

“It’s about being sustainable to be endlessly imaginative,” he says. “It’s about being feeling like that core season of theatre isn’t feeling like it has to reduce any of its ideas because of money ... If someone says this show has eight actors in it, we can go, yes, as opposed to, at the moment, going, can you rewrite it for five?

“I’d love to leave the company feeling like that more and more people in Melbourne know the Malthouse. It’s us being louder … to really connect with first-time theatre goers.”

Malthouse’s 2025 season launches October 9.