12.12.24
Dear Grif-friend,
The other day our Executive Director Julieanne Campbell was visiting the still-standing SBW Stables Theatre. She told me she pulled up one of the hatches we installed in the stage for The Lewis Trilogy—the one Nikki Vivica opened up to dig in her tiny square of barren garden in Summer of the Aliens.
Inside the trapdoor she found jacaranda petals that had rained down during the final moments of This Much Is True. They had somehow worked their way through the cracks of the floorboards, down into the trap. Still sitting there, six months later, waiting patiently.
At that time back in April, we imagined that, within weeks, all of it would be gone… That trapdoor, the floorboards, the walls, the roof… To be rebuilt into a new era of Griffin and Australian theatre. But then, it didn’t happen. A month passed. Longer. Dramatically inflated construction costs meant we couldn’t start building. Emergency meetings were taken. Donors rallied around us with offers of support. The City of Sydney made a remarkable donation to help move us closer to the new goal. But for the first time, a dark cloud loomed over this project, and the decades of toil that had brought us up to this point.
If you saw the article in the Australian Financial Review last week, you already know of the miraculous thing that’s happened—Griffin has been awarded nearly $5 million by the federal Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts. The grant we received is part of Thriving Suburbs—a new initiative to deliver investment in community infrastructure projects. This feels particularly special to us, recognising the role Griffin plays in its local community and the importance of our connection with our neighbours, with local business and local not-for-profits and support organisations with whom we have partnered for years.
With this new support we can now announce that construction will begin in early 2025!
But this is not our only cause for celebration, here at the end of 2024. Just a couple of weeks ago Golden Blood by Merlynn Tong closed in Melbourne. This capped off remarkable seasons at both Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company—introducing Merlynn’s ferocious, funny, idiosyncratic voice to new waves of theatre audiences (of course, you all saw it first in 2022, so you get to drag on your vape pen and mumble to your normie theatre friends: ‘Yeah, I knew Merlynn before she was even famous’).
And, in November, our Associate Artistic Director Andrea James received the Creative Australia Award for Theatre for her decades of work, “honour[ing] a visionary theatre-maker whose contributions have transformed the Australian theatre scene.” This is the second legacy award Andrea has received during her time at Griffin (she also received the biannual Mona Brand Award for Playwriting in 2022!), and reminds me to once again pinch myself, remembering how lucky I am to work with an artist of Andrea’s talent, her vision and her leadership every day here in the Griffin office.
Most of us in the Griffin office are winding down over the next couple of weeks… That is, of course, excepting our small but hard-working box office team! They will be standing by over the coming fortnight to book you in for Alana Valentine’s Nucleus, either as a standalone show or as part of a discounted subscription package—bundle up Nucleus with Michelle Lim Davidson’s Koreaboo and Ang Collins’ Naturism, and give your family what they truly want for Christmas: nudity and K-Pop (NB: not at the same time).
Have a wonderful holiday break, and I’ll see you all in 2025!
Much love,
Declan
