07.08.26
By Sheridan Harbridge
Presented 13 July 2026
Photo by Teniola Komolafe
Listen to Sheridan Harbridge’s Keynote above or read the transcript below.
I vividly remember the first time theatre knocked my little socks off. It was 2002, I was 17, all my mates were drama kids and auditioning for this place called “VCA”, so I decided to check this theatre thing out and see a show. I got on the VLINE train to Melbourne from my hometown, Traralgon, in country Victoria, and found my way to a multi-storeyed car park in Carlton. It was a production of Le Balcon (The Balcony) by Jean Genet, performed by the third-year students, in the middle of a brutalist, dank and dark carpark off Swanston St. I was ushered to a bean bag in the middle of an enormous concrete space, after purchasing a glass of cask wine, poured by a contemptuous second year acting student. An audience of barely twenty, we huddled on the beanbags in jackets and beanies, confused but excited. Before us was a two-story canvas structure with a balcony, built over the greasy oil slicks on the car park floor. This was “The Grand Balcony,” the brothel setting of Genets 1956 play.
Anne-Louise Sarks, Artistic Director of Melbourne Theatre Company, gives a wonderful speech in the dressing room before every opening night—I’ve gotten to hear it several times. She says something to the effect of “no matter what happens out there on stage, the performance tonight might be someone’s very first time in the theatre, and it might be someone’s last.” It’s a reminder; ignore the opening night flotsam and jetsam, ignore the playwright crying in the corner giving last minute rewrites (that’s me), ignore the reviewer from the Sydney Morning Herald scowling over an arancini ball in the foyer, and honour that this act could be a sacred passage for someone.
Well, there, that night, in that car park, I had my own sacred transformative passage to the magic of play. A young Luke Mullins played Irma, the madame of a brothel. Outside the brothel a revolutionary army with an unnamed cause stormed the unnamed city. While that battle raged, the leaders of the city, The Judge, The General, The Bishop, and The Chief of Police turn up at Irma’s house of illusions to play out fantasies with Irma’s girls. Whilst strange acts of S&M played out in the brothel’s rooms, steel bollards were dropped onto the carpark floor above us—the sonic boom of raging war outside. One of Irma’s girls plays a horse for her client’s fantasy; in this production, it was a near naked boy stretched out backwards and upside down over a BMX bike riding circles round the audience, a demented sexy cyclops. There were whips, chains, self-castrations; nations fell, whores were crowned queens—I barely sipped my plastic cup of Coolabah Fruity Lexia.
I barely understood what was happening, Genet’s florid and unnerving text was mostly beyond me. It was a phantasm, a ghost play, drifting real and unreal on the stage – but that night I met both the worst of mankind and the abundance of Genet’s gift: to both expose and obscure politic in a play. I was 17, from a farm. I had never been exposed to such darkness—though if anyone here has caught the VLINE train from Traralgon to Melbourne, there’s some dark shit going on there.
It was not my very first night in the theatre—I’d seen a sumptuous American musical or two. My high school had once organised an excursion to a production of Romeo & Juliet, and I am horrified to say, us country bogans made paper airplanes of our programs and sent them off the dress circle into the stalls. I researched it prepping for this keynote and I was devastated to discover it was Wesley Enoch’s 1996 production for Bell Shakespeare. This is my formal apology. We were ferals from farms; we could barely speak English let alone “iambic the pentameter.” It was an adaptation by Nick Enright, and the star-crossed lovers were played by Ben Graetz and Bojana Novakovic—a Blak Romeo and a white Juliet. It had not been done before. I was seeing a landmark political production, but I was too young, dumb, and stinky to yet know it. Wesley I am sorry, I was not ready to receive your work.
That car park with Jean Genet was the ritual act of theatre that opened my soul to the power of storytelling. It was a play about the illusion and performance of power. The revolutionaries succeeded in overthrowing the powerful figures of the city, but by the play’s end, rather than changing the structures that had oppressed them, they simply crowned new icons. Irma became queen. The revolutionaries couldn’t remember why they had revolted in the first place. A burst of machine-gun fire in the distance. A new revolution had re-commenced; the cycle of order and disorder had resumed.
It provoked me, shocked me, and left me with great unease in my tummy. Genet was one of the great avant-garde playwrights influenced by Theatre of the Absurd, a movement born in France in the late 1940s, as humanity was grappling with the chaotic fallout of World War Two. It sought to capture the anxiety, the dread, the existential pointlessness of Europe’s newly disjointed reality.
Genet had lived a life of chaos and survival, in and out of prison and on the run. His works were often banned, labelled immoral—treasonous in the way they dared to speak truth to power. In his craft he was wily and unrelenting, uncomfortable, insisting that we face the cycle of order and disorder we create.
Perhaps what made this play linger in my consciousness, was the context—it was 2002, we were only six or so months past the events of 9/11, and though we were some years away from “alternative facts” and “fake news”, the post-truth era had already begun. Truth in politics and the media became a mere inconvenience in front of my eyes. This was new and unnerving, we had always seemed far away from geopolitics, but now I was swimming in propaganda and fear coming out of the United States as it invaded Iraq. Local mosques we being attacked. The power broking men of Genet’s brothel weren’t the distant ghosts of war-torn Europe; they were live flesh characters I saw every day on my tv.
The order that that naive 17-year-old had known had begun its cycle into disorder. And Genet, some fifty years before, had put it all there on the page—messy, wicked, fantastical, pointless, bloody. The horrible nuance of war behind the gauzy veil of surreal play. The Balcony posed ill-formed questions, uneasy questions, and gave slippery, uneasy answers. It provided no certain truths and that felt like the truest thing I had ever seen. I was enamoured by the power, the possibilities, the bravery of the playwright’s pen.
When I was invited to present this keynote, I absolutely withered. I really should have said no, I really should be in bed, I should be drunk, in Greece, in the Blue Mountains, in the gutter, but I was in the middle of performing Prima Facie and very weak of sensible choices. Every playwright feels both supremely confident and unconfident to speak to the state of playwriting. No group hates themselves as much as playwrights do, the swings from supreme ego to self-loathing happen line by line on the page. Parking Inspectors have a better sense of self-love than a playwright.
I do not fully know why it’s such a terrifying craft—perhaps it’s the fact that the work does not stop with you. You write your dreams on the page, with all the abundance of yourself that you can offer—to create something out of nothing is such an abundant act – and that spill, your open dreaming, has to be met by the abundant flow of a director, the actors, a very un-abundant budget that will never be enough, and an abundant audience to receive it. We are vulnerable sponges to dream the story up, then hand it over to a troupe of mad actors. It’s fragile, it’s brave, it’s a terrible gig. Don’t do it.
Perhaps this terror and loathing lay in the responsibility of the playwright. What do we say theatre is for? “…to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” No one demands that high standard of film, of books, or paintings – those forms can do it, and do, but it’s not considered a core pillar of their purpose, a core pillar to their funding. This guy, this William Shakespeare, this guy wearing his neck ruff thing, wrote that line five-hundred years ago and we still demand it. Every culture, centuries before that guy, relied on theatre as its mirror. It was the vessel to hand down essential knowledge and values, to test those values. Theatre, in ancient Athens, birthed the shape of democracy itself.
Photo by Teniola Komolafe
In playwright Michael Gow’s keynote speech for the 2016 National Play Festival, he discussed the Athenian concept of Agon. Originally it described an athletic contest, a chariot race or a wrestling match, athletes of equal skill pitted against each other. Agon—the intense struggle, which leads to agonist—the antagonist, the protagonist, words we still use in theatre today. Agon was an imperative element of Greek theatre, it was used to stage an intense contest of ideas, of moral & intellectual struggles. It was considered a civic duty to attend the theatre so a citizen could engage in debate that would shape political ideas and call leaders to account. How incredible we gather here for an ancient art form that is still needed as our everything—our entertainer, our catalogue of remembrances, our legislator, our truth-teller. No wonder playwrights are insane. Well, I am.
In being asked to write this keynote, there was only one thing I wanted to speak to: in this already delicate and pressured craft, what it is to be a playwright in the post-truth era, this era of constant disorder and disruption. Where chaos is the new normal. What is it to attempt to speak to truth in a time of perpetual crisis, living as we do in a parade of unprecedented events. My god if I ever hear that phrase again.
One-hundred-and-thirty armed conflicts rage today, twice as many as fifteen years ago, according to the International Red Cross, and as many as the height of World War Two. Climate change events are smashing lives and livelihoods. Paris, as I speak, is figuratively burning. Playwright Angus Cerini, inaugural keynote speaker for the Griffin Award in 2024, lost his farm last year to bushfire. Pandemics (yay). Politics of division is de rigueur, our journalists are silenced for the needs of the institutions they work for, propaganda and misinformation machines now so very clever. They don’t shout at us—they caress us, or worse, amuse us. Chaos is the new normal, and order is not cycling round any time soon. We wait for it, like Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot.
Theatre has felt this disorder quite keenly. When I first graduated from NIDA (I didn’t even get into VCA, the pretentious c**ts ), whilst the landscape of theatre wasn’t rich with cash, it felt large, it felt valued, it felt confident to be bold. Of course these weren’t halcyon days for all artists, Sydney Theatre Company had an ensemble that was famously as diverse as a packet of Teddy Bear biscuits, female directors and writers were as scarce in the field as the audience of a Monster Truck event, but it felt like theatre and festivals had its place in the centre of our cities.
Here we are now, twenty years on, a much leaner, frailer machine. Scarcity of funding, we’re shunted down the ladder of national importance. There are deep bruises of Covid we haven’t managed to heal. She is thin. And she’s not on Ozempic, no, she’s not doing it the fun way—she is doing it the old-fashioned way us actresses were taught. Coffee, cigarettes, boiled eggs, no money, and a terrible crisis of confidence. Not a year goes by without a show cancelled, a festival boycotted, and the media gleefully reporting on the rifts, the missteps, the fragility of our community. Playwrights. Delicate little sea sponges, clinging to rocks. Taking all this in. Trying to make heads or tail of it.
I in no way draw true comparison to the actual experience of the wars and climate change raging overseas, our bodies here are mostly safe, but no one in this country is not touched familially, politically, or economically by the tendrils of the chaos. The artists who we look to define our reality feel undeniably locked in a spiritual war, a cultural war; a feeling we’re losing the battle for a national consciousness we can be proud of.
Playwrights feel so keenly the responsibility to hold up that mirror, to make sense of the maelstrom, but in a nation so divided, there is possibly only one thing the collective agrees on, and that is that we don’t really want to see our reflection in the mirror right now. What we will see is too painful, the answers too impossible to wrap up in a neat, palatable, safe bundle. If it’s the playwright’s job to represent or challenge our conceptions of reality, we’d have to define what reality is, and no one is ever going to agree on that.
Playwrights dance with incredible anxiety around this idea. It is an anxious time to be a playwright. Answer the call to be bold and risky, but never incendiary. Pose challenges but never alienate. A culture in which to be offended, is to shutdown debate. I dance with this keynote itself, there are taboos, debates I cannot point to, in politics, culture, gender—I would never work again. I feel taboo saying our playwrights have taboos. No go areas. Our audience needs us to do a very delicate dance to hold our fragile image of “togetherness.”
A playwright’s purpose has been titled off its axis; any argument they pose, we ascribe to them, personally. This has happened in all our cultural institutions—to university lecturers, journos, writers. Every question must align with the company’s values, a festival’s values, the funding body’s, the audience’s—it’s a gentle but pervasive censorship of the pen. The values in our plays must seemingly be something we can all agree upon before the play has even begun. However the best place for argument is within a play, so it can be battled with shifting nuance, altering perspectives, weighing out choice and cost and moral. A long-nuanced debate from beginning middle to end. Not the shouting of a comments section, or a pithy op-ed. In his speech, Michael Gow stated without a struggle, without agon, the scene is dead.
In all the disorder around us—instead of allowing the playwright to capture our unease, chronicle our fractures—we ask that they make clean order out of it, make neat bundles of moral clarity, clear heroes, and villains. Likeable protagonists. It is a note I’ve received repeatedly – can you make her more likeable? I’m afraid to pose uneasy, and ill-formed questions with messy answers, have my protagonist make bad choices. But ill-formed questions with messy answers is what it is to be human. Theatre is drifting towards being a “safe space;” safe from difficult ideas and arguments. We play to the middle of who we are, so as not to offend. Theatre’s place now is not to hold the mirror, is to shield us from chaos, and to not question it. But without the struggle, our scene is dead.
Maybe this is an ok thing. Because what else is theatre? Beautiful, sweet escapism. I make musicals. Big, lovely, ridiculous musicals. I am the biggest criminal at playing to the middle, I just made a musical about Phar lap! He tap-danced his way over the finish line at the Melbourne Cup before being (maybe) poisoned to death. I’m the scared, anxious little criminal here, I am the problem. Where do I get the gall to stand here with my words? Theatre as balm from the tempest, a defiant act of joy—that’s necessary stuff. Theatre as a safe harbour, that band aids our divisions—that is the state of playwriting at this moment. But I would like to name it as a moment, just a moment, and not let our baseline shift for good. “Shifting baselines” is a phrase used in climate change discourse, to describe how easily overwhelming issues like climate change, or a pandemic, can become normalised, Humans often do not remember what we’ve lost, or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got. I don’t want to adjust to losing bold and demanding theatre, theatre that takes me by throat and demands an intense debate of my values. I want it to catalogue this uncomfortable time.
Photo by Teniola Komolafe
So, playwrights, what do we do? What is the uneasy answer to this ill-formed question? I am going to say the worst thing an Australian playwright can say—look overseas. Look to the past, look to playwrights who have weathered anxious societies, weathered cycles of disorder and taboo before—the absurdist, struggling to grasp at sense in broken Paris, using riddles, obfuscation and play to sneakily mirror the anxieties of their broken city. Arthur Miller placing the McCarthy trials in pilgrim hats in Salem. There is a whole canon of disruption to be studied. Theatre is so clever, and it has always weathered the maelstrom it seeks to define; we can adapt and innovate their revolutionary acts. Don’t despair, use the wily form of play to speak to truth. Let’s go to the car park with Genet and get freaky, because if we don’t find a way to write the argument, the scene is dead. Griffin Award-winning play, Prima Facie, posed uneasy questions for the justice system. People complained (trust me), and we wavered in the pursuit, but the argument got to play out and resonate beyond the stage.
There is a play to write now that cannot be seen yet—write it anyway. Catalogue this moment, it’s time might come. There is a play, Birds of a Kind (Tous des oiseaux), written by Lebanese Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad. It’s based on Romeo & Juliet with an Arabic Romeo and Jewish Juliet. It’s been picketed and shut down, by all sides, all over the world. We can’t have that play here yet; Artistic Directors’ toes are curling at the thought—the arguments it poses are too incendiary to be yet had. No one is yet ready for those star-crossed lovers to find each other through centuries of pain, but one day we might. Wesley Enoch’s & Nick Enright’s Blak Romeo and white Juliet couldn’t have played here decades earlier either; it landed when we were ready. In his program notes, Wesley wrote “Romeo & Juliet is the story of two outsiders seeking union, rejecting the way ‘it is’ for the ‘could be.’ It is a story of true reconciliation, not brokered for or legislated, but agreed upon person to person.”
What an excellent argument.
The 2026 Griffin Award & Keynote was generously supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
