'i Don't Think Of It As A Career, It's An Obsession.'

Sun Herald

Sunday March 16, 2008

Erin O'Dwyer

Director Kate Gaul is far more comfortable behind the scenes, writes ERIN O'DWYER. 'I'm making theatre, that's the important thing.'

It would be dead wrong to describe Kate Gaul as "up-and-coming". In fact it's been years since that peculiarly effacing term has been used in conjunction with the spunky platinum-blonde theatre director. And the stellar reviews just keep coming.

"Kate Gaul's assured production immediately evokes a dreamy, deserted golden landscape," wrote Bryce Hallett in The Sydney Morning Herald's review of The Gates Of Egypt at Belvoir St Theatre last year.

"Kate Gaul's fine and clear production finds what is real in these sometimes wild characters' tortured introspection," wrote John McCallum, reviewing the same play for The Australian.

But perhaps it is Gaul's reluctance to engage in self-promotion that has seen the brilliant 40-something director still work frequently on the fringe of Sydney's theatre scene, and remain little known outside the live arts.

"I'm not talking about my age," says Gaul from the outset. "Biographical, not interesting. I don't want to disappoint you but I really don't like talking about myself."

Gaul has just emerged from watching a matinee of Twelfth Night, which she directed for the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP). It is only the second time she has tussled with the Bard and her second time directing for ATYP. The play closed yesterday, and her next production, Phaedra's Love - a modern adaptation of Seneca's Phaedra, also for ATYP - opens next month.

"Sitting in a show that I have directed is really exciting for me," says Gaul. "To share it with an audience that has not seen it is a pulse-quickening experience. Each time the curtain lifts I feel that my horizons have been immediately broadened. I feel, 'OK, I've achieved that, now I can do something better'. You can only have that experience with an audience, which is why I go."

Gaul has sent through a brief bio - 186 words all up - but the low-key blurb does little to account for the serious splash she has made since moving to Sydney from her home town of Hobart in 1995.

She graduated from the director's course at NIDA in 1996 and, after a few gigs downstairs at Belvoir St, climbed the stairs to direct The Laramie Project for Company B in 2001. The production received rave reviews, with her direction described as "fine", "capable" and spot-on".

She went on to receive more praise for her direction of Brendan Cowell's dark comedy, Rabbit, at the Stables Theatre, Alma de Groen's Wicked Sisters for Griffin Theatre, and Lobby Hero for the Ensemble Theatre.

"The art of directing is the art of listening," says Gaul, reluctant to single out any of these as her best work. "You listen to the text, to the actors, to the architecture of the building, to your colleagues and to your own instincts. The audience completes that process. They have to receive the gift."

In 2002, Gaul returned to Company B to direct Sacha Horler in Svetlana In Slingbacks, described by this newspaper's then reviewer Colin Rose as "superb". Since then, the self-confessed workaholic has found time to attend an intensive summer course with acclaimed American director Anne Bogart in New York and direct work for the Melbourne Theatre Company, Oz Opera and Merrigong Theatre Co.

And still each year, she schedules something with Siren, the independent theatre company she founded in 1997 as a new graduate to help her "create a body of work".

Theatre is clearly Gaul's great love. It is her business and her pleasure. As well as directing several productions annually, and sitting in at least once a week to benchmark her own work (and that of her actors), Gaul attends the theatre as an audience member four or five nights a week. A holiday means a week at a festival somewhere and this weekend she is off to the Adelaide Festival to see Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

"I remember the first play I saw that made an impression on me," she says. "I was 13 and it was at the Theatre Royal in Hobart. We sat in third row of the stalls and saw a local theatre production of a play about Dracula. It was so real - he disappeared through a wall and blood appeared on the girl's neck. It was utterly captivating."

When she was 14, an inspired drama teacher took Gaul and her classmates to see their first Adelaide Festival. She went once more at school and has been back countless times since.

"They were exceptional experiences for me," says Gaul. "It got me passionately interested in drama and then I regularly went through my early twenties."

Leaving school, Gaul realised she missed drama and began working full-time in the theatre. She has done everything from ushering to stage managing to play reading. "That's basically all I've ever done," she says. "I never thought of it in terms of a career. It's more of an obsession. I'm driven to do it."

In the early 1990s, she was stage managing in Hobart when the local Gilbert and Sullivan society asked her to direct their double bill of Trial By Jury and HMS Pinafore. It was her first directing gig and she seized the opportunity with both hands.

"I've never done anything like it since," she laughs. "I think what they wanted was someone to organise them but I took the role of director extremely seriously. It was life changing for me. All those people galvanised on stage in one moment . . . it's great to be leading that, and inspiring them to be better than they think they can be."

So rapt was Gaul that the following year she arrived in Sydney to study directing at NIDA. She admits the move was as much about getting out of Hobart as going to drama school, but says NIDA and Sydney provided her with an essential introduction to the industry.

"I wanted to be challenged," she recalls. "I'd lived in a very small town in a very small state and I thought that to work as a director I would need to be in an environment that was much more stimulating. You need to be in creative conversations."

There is no doubt Gaul is now an integral voice in those conversations. Her name was bandied about as a possible successor to Griffin Theatre's Ros Horin in 2003, and she served a 12-month apprenticeship as an associate director at the Ensemble Theatre. Despite that, she remains a freelance director.

She has not hit the "big name" status afforded to only a handful of Australian directors, nor has she ventured into cinema. ("I've made two short films, but hasn't everybody?" Gaul quips.)

"It's difficult as a director to get work," says Ensemble Theatre's artistic director Sandra Bates. "It's hard enough as an actor but at least there is more than one actor in a play. There is an oversupply of directors and there aren't many theatre companies."

But Bates is quick to point out that Gaul is exceptionally successful and exceptionally talented.

"She has done a lot of work for Belvoir and a lot of work for us and that's hardly fringe," she says. "People like working with her and that makes a huge difference. She is such a positive person."

For Gaul, wondering whether she has "made it" is as uninteresting as talking about herself. All that matters is that she loves her job.

"I'm not cynical, jaded or depressed by the notion or the realities of the business," she says. "I'm making theatre, that's the most important thing."

© 2008 Sun Herald

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