Spending a few moments with Ann and Andrew Coates is a pleasure better suited to a gentler time. In an old-fashioned way that each of them might appreciate, were it embodied by anyone but themselves, talking to them about theatre is like leaning in to listen to a wiser voice. It is to be offered something that's even further away from the ordinary, a kind of humble insight that only decades of creative accomplishment can bring.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Just don't tell Ann that I said that.
A few weeks before talking to these two, the co-founders of the Maitland-based Upstage Youth Theatre Company, Ann almost made me promise that I wouldn't write about her at all. It's only about the students and the show Ann told me.
Humble? Let's go with saintly.
The 39 Steps
The play that has nothing to do with Ann is The 39 Steps, a production that her and Andrew have characteristically insisted should have nothing to do with theatrical conventions. It's a notoriously challenging production in any theatre. It's a story that entangles around itself, eventually strangling a premise that has already satirised the necessity of one. The ensemble is enormous until you realise, or perhaps forget, that a huge trickery has been set upon you by the smallest of casts. Or at least that's how all the other theatre companies have done it.
"It's a very technical show that we're doing without much technicality," Ann admits.
"The premise is that you've got these players, these clowns of sorts, who play a gazillion different characters. But rather than observing conventions, or trying to hide their character and costume changes by making the actors go backstage, we've decided to keep it completely open. The audience will be able to see them the whole time," Ann says.
Yet, it's not just the backstage that Ann and Andrew have dispensed with. The rest of the stage has disappeared along with it. The audience at The 39 Steps won't be seated in a theatre at all. They'll be amid the summer murmurs of Tulloch Wines, warmed by the sun setting over the Pokolbin vineyards. The only rows aligned before this performance will be laden with grapes, heavy and awaiting their harvest.
If all of that sounds a little distracting, or has you imagining other indulgences, then that's probably how the Coates would prefer it. After their own interpretations of theatre-making came to question the barrier between actor and audience, their commitment to experimenting with space arrived to flourish in its absence.
"The link between us and our shows is that we tell all of our stories in unusual spaces," Ann says.
"We don't ever tell stories in a theatre. So that theatricality that you rely on in a theatre space, where everything is finite and known, instead becomes something completely unknown. We have to problem solve on the run and create our own sense of theatricality."
The link between us and our shows is that we tell all of our stories in unusual spaces.
- Upstage Theatre director and co-founder Ann Coates
Innovative sets
So while other theatre companies solve their problems with elaborate lighting rigs, Upstage makes do with torches. Long before larger theatres marketed extravagant musicals from the other side of the world, Andrew was advertising on hand-built A-frame signs and borrowing props from his neighbours.
"We've just always made do with whatever we've had at the time," Andrew says.
"For our first production we had some garden lights lying around so we thought we'd use them. We backlit our little sign and stood it out on the road so that locals could walk past and see it."
"During one performance we blew all the lights. While all the adults ran to try and work out where the fuse box was, a couple of the stage hands turned on their torches. We just lit the rest of the scene that way and kept on going and the audience loved it."
Without ever anchoring their imagination to any one space, this idiosyncratic and improvisational philosophy has come to designate their theatre-making style. It's also come to underlie the singularity of their accomplishment - an enviable artistic reputation that has been steadily, painstakingly built one show at a time.
As much as each of these shows have incorporated the rustic, bucolic surrounds of Maitland and Bolwarra, they have also celebrated the things that the Coates' value much more - their young students, their families and their local audiences.
Community first
"The community always comes first," Ann says. "Someone once told me that a show is only as good as the person who shows you to your seat. I truly believe that. It's what I tell my students. Everyone involved in the show is equally important. The whole team at Upstage is nurtured and really looked after. In a way, the actors are sometimes secondary because they already get the applause."
"The support of the parents over the years had been so important as well," Andrew says.
"We once did a show at a local school where we had to stick gaffer tape to the floor. When we came to remove it, this glue was left behind that we had to remove. One of the parents of one of our students, an anaesthetist, got down on her hands and knees and helped us scrape it off of the floor.
"For other shows, there have been dads who have come in with their trailers and asked us what we need. It astounds me sometimes. But it's always been a grassroots community thing at Upstage."
Ann says: "Andrew and I always said that if we were going to produce shows, or if we were going to work with kids, then we'd only do it with a team that we love to be with.
"Like any job there will always be so much to work through. There's so much to think about and to do. But at the same time it shouldn't ever feel like work. There always needs to be joy."
