Stored Honey
A week ago I arrived home after nearly a month in Europe watching the film shoot of my screenplay adaptation of my play Switzerland. Switzerland is a fictional story about the real writer, Patricia Highsmith set in 1995. In its theatrical version, premiering in the Opera House a decade ago, it is a thriller with a metaphorical trump card. Ostensibly about a young man who travels to a small Swiss town, where the 70 something Highsmith has bunkered down in the last phase of her almost permanent exile from America, he has been sent from his NY publishing house to persuade her to write one last novel featuring her famous serial killer protagonist, Tom Ripley. The Talented Mr Ripley was her masterpiece and one more will, according to him, not only make her and the publishers a lot of money but cement herself in the pantheon of the great 20th century writers, after a very uneven career.
So ensues a cat and mouse over three days, which turn out to be her last three days. But to use a common word now, it was just a bit more “meta” than that. Since the play is really about how writers fall so deeply in love with their characters, even their serial killers, that they become more real than real life ever could.
A car arrived early the morning after arriving in Rome and took me and my son Charlie, who is at film school but has never been on a film set and for whom I’ve shouted this trip, to a grand palazzo in the middle of Rome. It’s two weeks into an 8 week shoot and today the room they are shooting in has been dressed, it feels, not by an expert production designer, but by my own imagination. A fancy Roman apartment owned by a rich elderly American man, it is a perfectly curated assembly of muted wall frescoes, low lamps, velvet canapes, sterling silver cocktail shakers, priceless rugs. It is being shot, it seems by my own imagination rather than Robbie Ryan, the multiple Oscar nominee cinematographer, because when Charlie and I watch the actors through the monitors in the room next door, along with the director, producers and all the other departments, it looks exactly as I want it to look.
My imagination has also dressed everyone perfectly, in this case the young female star, Olivia Cooke, who turns out to be both adorable and perfect, is wearing exactly the kind of Armani cocktail dress she was wearing in my head. And her interaction with my Ripley, a brilliant young actor called Alden Ehrenreich, goes exactly as it should, the right intonation, the subtle suggestions, while the licks of light from the fire-place illuminate their faces, just the way they have been illuminated in my head since I wrote the first draft.
Caroline Lee & Peter Houghton in Honour
Photo by James Reiser
All this is magical, of course. But what is most magical is that around me are a hundred Italian professionals: camera operators, hair and makeup artists, prop specialists, sound guys, continuity people, light movers and shakers, guys whose job it is, it seems, to constantly move cables as the camera sets up for the next take, or the next shot. When I go out to the coffee cart and snack bar for the crew, itself a masterpiece being Italy, I can see more guys clambering up the exterior of the palazzo to shift sheer light screens according to what the director or cinematographer are asking for over the headsets.
The next day’s schedule is a night shoot and Charlie and I stand out of the way, behind the director’s monitor with one of the producers, turning our heads from the action on the street in front of us to the monitor where we see it framed by the screen. An extras choreographer is busy moving around twenty or so passers by, young women with shopping bags, an old man with a dog and so on, each of these extras dressed to be 1995 not 2025, a difference that is subtle but significant: no Extra, for example, can be on their iPhone.
The real magic is standing there watching the controlled chaos. This team has been assembled from all over Italy and the UK. They are the best at what they do. They have been here since 7 this morning and it’s zero degrees. The guy driving the car past has to back up and drive it again and then reverse and then drive it again and then reverse about 20 times, to a chorus of “Cut!” and “Silencio!” as each take is ended and then followed by another. This incredible orchestra of talents, each with a specific role in the music they're making, are here because a few years ago I had a whisper of an idea of a story that never happened.
Artists, and by this I include those who make the art that artists want to be made, like that film crew and me, are unusual people. We know that to be the best that we can be we have to believe in the importance of what we do: manifesting dreams, actively worshipping at the altar of invention. We don’t stop and say: “It’s not real, so who cares?” Somewhere, even if it’s buried beneath the anxieties of actually paying the bills, everyone who contributes lives inside the belief that art, as Theodore Dreiser said, is “the stored honey of the human soul.”
When Helen Mirren says to me quietly on set how much better she feels when I tell her what a brilliant Highsmith she is, she sighs with relief. “That makes me feel so much better!”. Helen Mirren. Feeling that same risk, the same danger, the same vulnerability, the same belief in the point as all good actors do, as Caroline Lee does tonight. Why do they put themselves through it? Helen Mirren, at least, doesn’t need the dough. Because they know this business is the stored honey of our souls. It’s worth the risk.
And the crazier the world around us gets, the more difficult to process, the harder it is to make sense of our feelings or find a way forward, to get out of bed, to know what to tell your children, to juggle your own fear or equanimity in the face of wars and dictators, the more we need stories to help us find sense, but maybe, even, sometimes plain joy. In that space of the theatre, or the cinema or the art gallery or the dance show or the symphony, we find companionship in the state of being human.
Thirty years ago, or so, I had a scholarship to go to the Writing Unit at Columbia University in New York. Between winning the scholarship and leaving for New York, I had an unexpected baby. I wasn’t sure I could really take it up, but Ray insisted. He took a year’s leave, we borrowed money and took a three month old baby with us, whom most days Ray tended to while I went to classes. I had a play that I was working on, commissioned by Carrillo Gantner at Playbox Theatre, then a unique operation only producing new Australian work. I had a couple of plays behind me, one a failure. Carrillo said to me words to the effect of: “We don’t care what anyone else says or thinks, we know you’re a writer and we’re backing you long term”.
What that means to a young writer, who is struggling with an almost certain predestination towards failure, is hard to overestimate. That external faith hitches its wagon to the far more ephemeral and fragile faith inside yourself that you are a writer. It sures it up. And so when I was at Columbia, I used the things I was learning from the fantastic teachers and students there to write the play that became Honour. And one night, as I was going to an informal writers group that met midtown to read work and have dinner, and to which I was a very new ring-in, Ray rolled up the draft of the play and stuck it in my bag and said… Just in case. That night the writer who was supposed to read failed to show. The head of the group, John Patrick Shanley whose play Doubt many of you will have seen, asked who had something to read. In the awkward silence I somehow found a way to pull out the draft, which was read and within hours a producer sent a courier to my house to pick up it and everything else I’d ever written, within a year, I had a reading of Honour with Meryl Streep and within another year or two, a production on Broadway. That production was the only production I know of, not to have been a success but its production on Broadway meant that it was picked up for productions all over the world that continue to this day. Perhaps the most memorable was the first production, at Playbox, on my return from that magical year in New York, with the incredible Julia Blake, as well as Belinda McClory, Natasha Herbert and John Gregg, directed by Ariette Taylor.
Red Stitch’s brilliant, lovely Ella Caldwell asked me if the company could produce it for its 30th anniversary. My first thought…. How many people are still alive to know I’m lying if I say it’s only the 20th anniversary? Unfortunately, too many! Thirty years! Now some might think that surely the play is dated by now. I mean, come on, how relevant can it be? It’s about infidelity! It’s about fear of mortality! Lust! The war between desire for desire and desire for deep love. It’s about anxious kids: how relevant can it be? Enough said on that. But my thanks go to Ella, the company, the wonderful crew and cast and director Sam Strong and more, perhaps, as they should go, to Carrillo. Because Carillo did more than anyone else except my dear parents to conjure me, the playwright, and it was because of him that I conjured this play.
Red Stitch has been (shhhhh) my favourite theatre company in the world for a long time. It’s because of that I did something I really really really didn’t want to do: join the board. (I can’t take meetings, I don’t know one end of a spread sheet from another, just ask Eric Beecher who chaired the Wheeler Centre Board while I was on it).
Almost every single time Ray and I see a show here, we are astonished by the quality of the work achieved on the smell of an oily rag and a group of astute, dedicated, funny, ambitious actors who believe in something all actors must believe in: Suffering. Oh sorry… I misread, story-telling. Showing us back to ourselves, making us laugh at ourselves, judging ourselves and our world and sometimes delivering us from our world for 100 minutes of superbly acted fantasy. Every visitor from abroad, I bring to Red Stitch, because it delivers more reliably than any small theatre I’ve been to across the globe. It does it without any song and dance… well, maybe occasional song and dance… but with incredible modesty and quiet pleasure in what it gives this city.
Getting back to that Italian crew standing there in the cold (after Rome, in the South Tyrol and from there to London).
When Ella became AD ten years ago, the company members were making $4.20 an hour.
I think we pay around $150 an hour for the tiler currently tiling our bathroom when he’s not on Ice.
Currently, for productions like Honour, the actors are making $18.60 an hour. Plus superannuation.
Red Stitch as an Actors Ensemble is the only company of its kind in the country.
Inheriting a cultural ambition that almost certainly had its roots in Carrillo’s Playbox, it has developed and premiered 19 full length Australian plays to date, almost a third of which have toured nationally or internationally. It has presented a full season of work for 20 years and attracts a similar amount of awards for its productions as the mainstages. A Red Stitch set is built for two and a half thousand dollars. The MTC’s are on average, between $70,00 and $130,000. Now I love the MTC but that figure does not represent the difference in satisfaction between a night there and a night here.
The company is trying to move to a new location with a bigger stage (when you see Honour you’ll know why they’re not doing Hamilton). They want to keep the ticket prices accessible by growing bigger audiences who can reap the rewards of an artist-lead company which projects incredible rigour and at least in public, the illusion of unified joy! And it wants to pay its actors a full award wage, instead of half of it.
By the end of 2026, the company wants to raise $2 million for these endeavours. At the moment, it receives over $200,000 a year from its fantastic philanthropic supporters, some of whom are here tonight.
I’m here because I know that Australian artists are made in companies starved of money and resources. They are trained by them, fed by them, given faith by them the way that Carrillo gave me faith to pick up the pen over and over again, in the face of emotional and financial peril. We all know how important the Arts are. And if you can afford it, please show Red Stitch that it and its future matters to you. Anything will help keep this beautiful company going and its actors paid a fair wage for their astonishing work.
In any case, thank you so much for coming tonight and supporting Australian theatre and the best little company in town.
Joanna Murray-Smith
March 14th 2025
