Adam O’Brien is a 29-year-old actor, director and writer for theatre who has started his own independent theatre company known as the Dire Theatre Company. The company’s motto is to “incite change without fear” and to approach issues of social importance; produce shows that inspire discussion and change; and not works which are just funny or enjoyable; which is what O’Brien believes sets Dire apart from other Illawarra theatre companies and other independent theatres that he is aware of. The first full production the company put on was a play O’Brien wrote entitled Our Neighbourhood, which was based on what happened after the invasion of Australia by the Europeans and was staged at Wollongong Workshop Theatre in January 2015 and later at the Sydney Fring Festival in September 2015. Dire’s next show Albert & Jameson: A Play with Vampires, also penned by O’Brien, was not as focused. Our Neighbourhood had a clear vision, whereas Albert & Jameson was more about human life, relationships and the main theme of the pointlessness of life; how nothing is constructed for us; and what’s different is what humans do in that nothingness and why we make our own lives important. It played at Wollongong Workshop Theatre in April 2016 and then Sydney Fringe Festival in September 2016.
The idea for Dire Theatre began in 2014 when O’Brien was in Western Sydney, working for Mindblank, an organisation which focuses solely on mental health issues. Mindblank works with Augusto Boal, who invented O’Brien’s theatrical specialty “Theatre of the Oppressed”. This gave O’Brien many experiences, such as having breakfast with ex-Prime Minister of Australia John Howard one morning and being sent to London where he worked with and learned from Adrian Jackson for a while. O’Brien believes it is important to work with youth mental health issues, so he wanted to learn from these methods and incite change. However, he had to break away from focusing on youth because there are certain things you can and can’t say in front of a younger audience. In Our Neighbourhood, he could use words like “Abbo” and not be afraid because he knew he was doing work for the purpose of good. He believes that where he now lives, the Illawarra, there’s no challenge. He has no interest in looking pretty and singing. He wants his art to incite thought and feelings which he doesn’t believe is very present in Illawarra theatre. He then started doing independent forum theatre work with Western Sydney Suicide Prevention Group. He started writing essays and manuals on how to perform in Australia. He started trading under his own name and became a business himself. Then he was invited with his girlfriend, Emma Suttle, to an Indigenous cultural centre where they were having a special day. He met an elder of an Indigenous language nation who told O’Brien the tragic story of his life in which he grew up in the bush until he was taken, forced into missions and had horrible things happen to him. The elder said he wasn’t angry, that he was too old to be angry and that he just wanted to make sure something like the extermination of his people never happened again. This made O’Brien realise that as an artist, he could help this. This inspired him to write Our Neighbourhood and it became Dire’s first professional production.
Within the next few years, O’Brien hopes for Dire Theatre to remain Illawarra based but also to expand up into Sydney, not because of the profitability, which it has, but also because of its accessibility (only being one and a half hours away), it being a different class (but not in a manner of sophistication) and there being different types of audiences. “What affects us down here doesn’t necessarily affect them up there and vice versa. All humans are capable of experiencing art. Nobody turns away from art. The way you see art is the way you were brought up by your family” O’Brien says. He points out a major difference between Illawarra and Sydney. Our Neighbourhood did receive positive reviews in the Illawarra, but during rehearsals, O’Brien was branded as a race traitor and a friend he had at the time even saw O’Brien as turning his back on his own race, which O’Brien didn’t at all agree with. O’Brien liked the positive feedback but lamented the fact that the feedback didn’t include the themes of the play. He found that Sydney was more impressed with the meat of the play, as well as the fun of it. He also found that Albert & Jameson was a rude shock in Sydney. He found that his younger fellow cast members assumed that Sydney was more sophisticated and that made them intrinsically complacent so they assumed that Sydney audiences would understand what they were selling. However, three audience members fell asleep in the first act. On the other hand, the Illawarra audiences loved it. One audience member, Izzy Fredericks, went to see it three times and many people offered money to have it done at Sydney, raising $1300 with a campaign on the website Pozible. He also found that Illawarra audiences understood the core message of the play, making it inversed to Our Neighbourhood’s response between locations. One Illawarra woman likened Albert & Jameson to Waiting for Godot, so Our Neighbourhood was better received in Sydney while Albert & Jameson was better received in Wollongong.
Since creating Dire, O’Brien has faced many boundaries and hardships such as issues of legitimacy. “People attempt to not take you seriously if you are an artist, especially one who is ambitious and independent” he says. After several years of studying in Sydney, he returned to his hometown of the Illawarra and it took him a long time for somebody to accept his work, with Wollongong Workshop Theatre being the only local company that would accept his works. Finance has been a huge issue. “Having to invest so much of your time in a play also means you have to work and pay for it. Finding money or justifying to myself how I spend money is hard. Another issue is people not wanting you to succeed if you’re doing things differently. People don’t want independent works with strange themes like strange people going up against them”. There were a lot of racial attacks on Our Neighbourhood by other theatre groups. O’Brien believes they didn’t want him to be doing alternative types of works. But the biggest problem he’s faced was finding his own place in the theatre community. “There are the kings when it comes to our theatre scene, and it’s hard for independents to pick up the scraps”. Dire doesn’t have the luxury for a building, costumes or sets. The talent and audiences are hard to source and he is only just now getting a reputation.
O’Brien also recounts the funny stories he has from doing Dire productions. For example, on opening night of Albert & Jameson for Sydney, him and his two fellow actors, David Rienits and Sam Sweeting, were on their way to the Sydney Theatre and had stopped at Heathcote McDonalds where their car had broken down. O’Brien and Rienits were already in costume as vampires and the panic caused O’Brien to, as he puts it “constantly swear my ass off”. After having to call a taxi, the driver thought they were murderers before he drove them to the theatre, which was a $120 fare. They made it to the theatre with 20 minutes to spare. On the second night of the show, O’Brien exited a scene via the balcony. However, someone had unfortunately locked the doors on him to get back into the theatre. O’Brien had to rush downstairs to a restaurant area in his costume, which consisted of only denim shorts, a leather jacket and being covered with fake blood. A man had approached O’Brien to tell him that he couldn’t be there but O’Brien just kept asking how to get back into the theatre. The man, however, couldn’t understand O’Brien’s frantic words. A woman saw the blood all over him and asked if he was okay and everyone in the restaurant was staring at him. O’Brien had to run around the entire block, run through the front of the theatre, run through the side entrance and made it with seconds to spare for his next scene.
One of his best memories of Dire was taking thirteen young people to perform in Sydney for Our Neighbourhood which is heart-warming to him. He’s loved conceiving his company, meeting great people and even being interviewed for this article, which affirms to him that he is doing good things.
Poster for Our Neighbourhood at the Sydney Fringe Festival, featuring O'Brien and Arthur Tamer
When it came to writing Our Neighbourhood, it was hard in that he had to study. He had to know what he was talking about. His personal motto is to always know what you’re speaking about. When it came to something so raw about the invasion of this country and the ongoing deprivation and about of Australia and its culture, he had to know what he was talking about. The script took two years to write; not because of laziness but because he needed to know what he was writing about. He met with Indigenous elders of different nations, studied the history and the actual black history of this country (not just the things taught in schools). He says it was an exercise in learning and an exercise in moral growth as much as it was an exercise in writing a play. But after he was confident that he knew what he was talking about, it was a joy to write. The content in Our Neighbourhood was atrocious. The audience saw people being kidnapped (the stolen generation), seeing a black man get shit, constant death and the horrible history involved; but there were also silly jokes. They were about the broadband network and a spider who ran the web, blogging meaning “big logging”, Twitter being what birds were saying, a finding something on Gumtree was said in a much more literal sense, once again showing how comedy is a tool in communicating these issues. Because Our Neighbourhood was a fictitious story (based on an actual event), O’Brien could play around with it. He takes pride in the relationships forged in that show between characters because even though they weren’t human (the characters were Australian animals such as a dingo, emu, bilby, kangaroo, spider, dog, etc.), he made them. He birthed these characters; they became friends, lovers and enemies and he’s really proud of that.
Albert & Jameson was harder in some respects to write. He started writing that in 2004 and had just finished studying Waiting for Godot in high school so he was full of “wank and no actual knowledge”. He wrote most of the first act and then he left it for years and one day he was going through his books, when he thought he’d give it another shot after studying at uni. So the actual writing process took two and a half years. The hard part was making the comedy rapid fire in an absurdist piece because nobody wants to hear that their life is meaningless. Audiences don’t want to hear “if you weren’t here, it wouldn’t matter”, so the comedy had to be thick and fast, and the sincere moments had to be genuine – of course, disguised under fart jokes, gay jokes and penis jokes. O’Brien believes that you can’t have comedy without drama; and you can’t have drama without comedy. He says it was fun writing for vampires as they were initially just a dramatic device due to the fact that they live forever and he needed that aspect of eternity, and he came to love them, thinking their relationship is one of the most beautiful because it endures forever. He believes that the fact that vampires are made to last forever is what makes them beautiful and that what we make matter can mean the world. Albert & Jameson’s love for each other trumps the fact that their love for each other doesn’t matter.
O'Brien and Rienits in character as Albert & Jameson
O’Brien remembers the rehearsal processes for both shows as nightmarish, horrid and very trying – probably because he was so involved with the creation of the work. “When you make it, you have such high standards”. At the time, he saw the actors not doing what he wanted, but he had to realise that he didn’t have the last word, that he wasn’t God and that the actors had just as much say as he did, which made both plays turn out better. He also found the rehearsal periods enlightening. He insisted on speaking about whatever was on the cast’s minds before rehearsals. They’d always relate to the work but they were quite deep. O’Brien realised that his perspective was only one perspective, especially when there were thirteen cast members in Our Neighbourhood and none of them had the exact same idea.
O’Brien considers the talent of the actors he’s worked with thus far in both shows as varied. The pool of performers that he casts in his shows are generally idealistic, which is a common staple among youth actors. He says that they are enthusiastic but are not very well trained, but he considers this a good thing. A lot of his previous actors are university performance students so they have their fundamentals down but “they’re not going to win Oscars in the next year”
Another project Dire has produced was Dire TV (or DTV), which will be making a comeback in the next two years. It will be a live onstage interactive political satire. Phoenix Theatre was generous enough to give him their space at the end of 2014. It as a successful night of satire and all the media is on the Dire Theatre’s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaK_7LoBEj9JqHgOrFRrcAw/videos?shelf_id=0&sort=dd&view=0
Dire also organised a trivia night fundraiser for a local stage production of Red vs Blue in May 2016, which will now be an annual event. Their next plans are also to put on a one woman show featuring Katie Morgan. Dire will be supporting her to do her interesting concept which involves singing, monologues and magic. Dire is also expanding on its absurdist universe, which it started with Albert & Jameson. They’ll be adding another facet with the vampiric duo, as well as producing a series of short plays written by Dire “Alphas” and also aim to perform at Sydney Fringe again in 2017. O’Brien hopes that a consistent feature of Dire will be to give as many Illawarra actors as possible the opportunity to perform in Sydney. As an artist, however, he believes that he needs to be as independent as need be.
