Australian theatre director Kip Williams is taking on Broadway. What next?
As the youngest artistic director in Sydney Theatre Company history, he revolutionised the Australian theatre landscape and took over London’s West End. Now, he’s aiming higher – and taking Succession’s breakout star, Sarah Snook, with him.
When Kip Williams was a student at NIDA, guest lecturers would ask the gathered pupils the moment they realised they had found their vocation as a director. “All of my classmates had their well-rehearsed speech of the lightning bolt moment when they knew, and I felt like a total fraud because I was like, I don’t have one,” Williams admits. The truth is that it was always there. As a child, he not only joined his siblings and cousins play-acting together, but he orchestrated every production. “My grandmother was an actor,” says Williams. “She had this amazing wardrobe of costumes and we would go off for a few hours, dream up a play and stage it in the living room for my grandmother, who was delighted. And I ended up being the one who would drive the creating of the story and marshal all the performances.” In short, he was the director.
Today, Williams is known for his one-woman shows: Sarah Snook is currently starring in his acclaimed adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway and Zahra Newman played 23 characters in his production of Dracula at the Sydney Theatre Company last year. But at NIDA, Williams made his name with the reverse, when he translated a Samuel Beckett monologue into a vehicle for 20 different performers as his graduation showcase. When Williams was 25, Andrew Upton, then the Sydney Theatre Company artistic director, handed him the reins to his first professional production, a staging of Under Milk Wood starring “the legend” Jack Thompson. “I had six weeks to design it and conceive the whole show, and that was petrifying,” Williams admits, “but life-changing.”
In 2016, after three years as resident director, Williams was appointed the Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director. At 30 years old, he was the youngest in the organisation’s history, a position he held until the end of last year. His tenure was full of highlights, such as directing Kate Mulvany in a two-part, seven-hour epic adaptation of the Australian classic, The Harp in the South, “one of the happiest experiences I’ve had in the theatre”.
In 2017, he revisited Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, having first read it as a teenager, and discovered within its pages a timeless – and timely – story about the perils of an image-obsessed world. In 2020, he premiered his one-woman adaptation, starring the actor Eryn Jean Norvill, the first in a gothic trilogy that would come to include Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 2022 and Dracula in 2024. All three productions experiment with technology, using projections and prerecorded footage to expand the meaning and impact of live theatre.
Williams would be the first to admit he enjoys a challenge. Looking forward, those challenges include directing his first film and staging an opera in one of Europe’s grandest theatres. “I’d love to do an Olympic ceremony,” he adds. “I am really drawn to that operatic scale of the creative endeavour and the incredible narrative canvas that they offer to artists.” But his immediate challenge is the one right in front of him: taking the most successful Sydney Theatre Company production of all time to the most important theatre city in the world. If anyone can handle that particular blend of nerves, it’s Williams; Dorian Gray has been a challenge since its inception. “I always have to pursue the unknown, which I think is part of the artist’s role to keep turning over rocks to try to find new ways of thinking about things we haven’t seen before,” he reflects. “When it came time to take the leap to do Dorian Gray, it was a big one. It took a lot of courage. Thankfully, it worked.”
This story is from the April issue of Vogue Australia. On sale now.
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