06.03.25
Dear Grif-friend,
I visited my old hometown of Melbourne last week and experienced one of those strange, unexpected synchronicities of life. I was in town to say hello to my baby niece, for the first time. This was planned. But while I was there, I also said goodbye to my grandmother, for the last time. This was unplanned.
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother, as I sit at my desk back at Griffin, looking at the hopeful stacks of unproduced plays. She was, in a few unexpected ways, the reason I found theatre as my life’s passion. When I was a kid, my parents often had to do evening shifts at work, so my sister and I spent days and nights at my grandmother’s house. She was from Irish farming stock, so I can’t imagine what she thought of her chaotic, effeminate grandson who loved pretending he was the Wicked Witch of the West. But if it bothered her, she never showed it and when I found theatre as a place to channel my overactive imagination, she decided it was something she wanted to encourage.
When I was in high school, every year for Christmas she would buy the two of us a concession subscription to the Melbourne Theatre Company. And a handful of times each year we would catch the V/Line train two hours into the city to see a Saturday matinee. The audience for these performances was full of grandmothers and their immaculately behaved gay grandsons, most of whom were, like me, having their first-ever experiences of professional theatre.
I’ve spent countless hours in every kind of theatre these days and—to be honest—I can sometimes be a difficult audience member to impress. But these were blessedly uncynical years. We would see a show, love it, and spend the whole way home on the train whispering about the performances we’d seen… Pamela Rabe in Blithe Spirit, Zoe Caldwell in The Visit, Peter Carroll in The Christian Brothers. All these plays, all these performances remain with me as the purest experiences I’ve ever had of theatre. And I think, in a way, they represent something I’m still trying to re-experience decades later.
One of the plays my grandmother and I saw was Copenhagen by Michael Frayn starring John Gaden, Jane Harders and Robert Menzies. It’s a production I still think about every time I watch Alana Valentine’s Nucleus. In construction, Alana’s play is nothing like Copenhagen. But there are resonances: enormous, unwieldy scientific and ethical quandaries delivered by impossibly talented performers. And I know that, on some level, my thrill at the combustion of Alana’s play is the same thrill I felt at 15 years old, sitting in a theatre with my grandmother.
This Saturday, our 2025 Griffin Ambassadors have their first group outing to see a show. These are a cohort of high-school students—years 10, 11 and 12—who the Robertson Foundation support to spend time with Griffin, undertaking workshops and seeing most of the shows in our 2025 season. On Saturday they will see a special matinee performance of Nucleus, which is being put on just for them, and afterwards will have their own Q&A with two theatre greats: Paula Arundell and Peter Kowitz. I can’t begin to imagine what this would have meant to me at this age, and god knows what insane, hyperactive questions I would have asked. But I know what this moment will create in the lives of some of these young people. And I feel beyond grateful to my grandmother—Lil—for giving me this too.
Much love,
Declan xx
Artistic Director
