By Elissa Blake
Wesley Enoch and I have a bit of shared history: a mutual friend from our respective Brisbane childhoods. ''I think you might know my high school boyfriend,'' I say, naming him. Enoch laughs.
''He was almost my high school boyfriend, too! At one time, there was so much tension between us I didn't know whether to seduce him or hit him.''
Wesley Enoch: "I don’t think theatre is about drinking and eating little mushroom rice balls.’’Credit: Harrison Saragossi
In the end, he decided to attempt the former. That's news to me, I tell him, a bit shocked. It's all right, he shrugs. The chemistry was all one-sided. That was half a lifetime ago. We can laugh about it now.
Back then, Enoch was a Brisbane theatre wunderkind, a handsome, impish and precocious 17-year-old who won just about every theatre prize in town. Now, at almost 45, and one of the first indigenous artistic directors of a state theatre company, he is one of the most acclaimed theatre-makers in the country, ''and I'm tired, fat and old'', he laughs, before adding, ''and a party pooper!''
Black Diggers.
Enoch says he tried alcohol once, just to taste it, about eight years ago during what he calls ''my year of adventure'', but doesn't touch the stuff now. ''I am a party pooper in theatre foyers. I look at how much the Queensland Theatre Company might spend on an opening night, and go 'That's ridiculous, I could employ an actor with that.' Why do people drink so much in the foyer? It's 11 o'clock, people, just go home! Go somewhere else and drink.''
He doesn't mean to be a theatre Grinch. ''It's just my personal values,'' he says. ''I'm not against celebrating and being hospitable, but I don't think theatre is about drinking and eating little mushroom rice balls.''
Enoch, the outspoken artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company, says he's tired of being portrayed in the media as ''charming and intelligent'' and instructs me to call his friends and colleagues and ask them to reveal ''the ugly side'' of his nature.
''Tell them I give them permission! I don't want this nice-guy narrative around me any more.''
It takes a little bit of coaxing to get much in the way of dirt, however. Enoch's friends and colleagues tell me he is indeed charming - often to a fault - and ferociously intelligent. He can also be cranky, argumentative, and, some say, a bit of a bitch.
''He can get nasty,'' confides Stephen Page, artistic director of Bangarra Dance Company. ''But that's just his love for storytelling and his energy and the way he works with his actors. He's directed every black actor in the country and that's amazing. He's waved his little black wand over so many great actors that people call him 'Nanna'.''
Those actors include Deborah Mailman, Ursula Yovich, Leah Purcell, Roxanne McDonald, Wayne Blair, Luke Carroll, Rachel Maza and David Page - all of whom have gone on to have major careers in theatre, television and film.
Blair, who got a career break in Enoch's 1999 musical play The Sunshine Club, says the director used to be ''a bit of a school teacher'' with the actors on tour. ''He used to tell the actors to go to bed early. He was big on that. I'd just smile. You can't tell adults to go to bed,'' he says. ''He's softened a bit since then.''
Enoch can be ''off-putting'' when you first meet him, Blair says. ''He can be dismissive of people. But if you can give him as much as he gives you, that's when you can engage in a friendship and he starts listening.''
I'm speaking to Enoch over a bowl of warmed up lasagne in the ABC cafeteria in Ultimo, ahead of the Sydney debut of Black Diggers, one of the cornerstone productions of this year's Sydney Festival.
Reflecting on his career, he says he has ''never felt more powerful'', although he has regrets. ''There are things I am letting go. I will never have children. But I can focus on the things life has brought me.''
Chief among them is his six-year relationship with David McAllister, the artistic director of The Australian Ballet. The couple live separately - in Brisbane and Melbourne - but they talk on the phone twice a day and have a rule of not spending more than three weeks apart.
''We're allowed to be cranky with each other,'' Enoch says, smiling. ''Half the time we get on the phone and say, 'no, you were cranky yesterday. I have to be cranky today, just take it.' Sometimes we have simple answers to complex questions for each other.''
McAllister jokes: ''We act like [the sleeping pill] Mogadon on each other. Whenever we get together we just want to fall asleep. But his tiredness never stops him from doing something, he gets bored easily.''
McAllister says he's more of the homebody while Enoch is constantly driven and more outgoing. ''His strengths are his passion and loyalty but his two weaknesses are his need to argue and spar with people and not looking after himself properly. Sugar is his enemy.''
Enoch admits to a four-chocolate-bar-a-day habit.
''I reward myself with chocolate when I'm busy at work,'' he says. ''Health is my big thing. I've never been able to think of my life beyond 60. But, how do you say this … the statistics are true for a lot of Aboriginal people and you go, OK, I want to make sure I don't get diabetes, I want to make sure that I don't die at 60 or, if I do, I've achieved all the things I need to achieve.''
Written by Tom Wright and directed by Enoch, Black Diggers tells the stories of the Aboriginal soldiers who served in World War I, including at Gallipoli, through 50 to 60 short scenes. Nine indigenous male actors play young men, old men, women and boys. They even play Austrians. ''They play everybody, all ages, all races,'' Enoch says. ''It's about enacting those stories that are forgotten. World War I levelled everything. Those volunteer soldiers were treated as equals during the war but they came home as second-class citizens, and we proceeded to write them out of the story. That's when the expression 'smooth the pillow' started, meaning that Aboriginal people are dying out and we should smooth the pillow so they can go peacefully.''
Having achieved almost everything possible in terms of a theatre career in Australia, Enoch wonders what is on the horizon personally and for indigenous theatre makers.
''I think we're on the cusp of change. For the past 20 years, the main narrative has been the Stolen Generation because it humanised us in a really beautiful way and everyone could feel connected to stories about family and children. But now we have generational change. Around 70 per cent of Aboriginal people live in urban centres and there are growing black middle classes. The definition of Aboriginality is shifting and young people are demanding a whole range of new things. We might start seeing the first divisive narratives among Aboriginal people.''
Enoch says he wants to explore different forms of theatre and move away from ''the storytelling and the charm''.
''God knows we can charm the pants off everyone all the time,'' he says, rolling his eyes. ''But I think it's holding us back. There are white gatekeepers in theatre that require you to take into account that the audience is predominantly white and that we shouldn't alienate them or push them away. Instead, we coax them in, kind of seduce them and still get the message across.
''But I've started defining indigenous theatre by its benefit to indigenous people. I'm asking, 'who is benefiting from this the most?'
''So when Leah Purcell plays Condoleezza Rice in Stuff Happens at Belvoir, you can ask, was that an indigenous piece of theatre? Maybe not, but the benefit to her was huge as an indigenous artist. She got to redefine things and she's not turning her back on her blackness.''
I ask Enoch about the impact of the TV show Redfern Now. Isn't its portrayal of contemporary indigenous lives breaking the mould to some extent? Its success among a predominantly white audience seems to suggest there is a hunger for new kinds of story.
''But [Redfern Now] is still caught in a particular narrative in the disadvantaged paradigm,'' Enoch says. ''Here are a group of people on the edge of the inner city but they're not middle class, you know.
''There's this sense of not doing as well as they could be, and that needs to shift, I think.''
Aboriginal people have a vested interest in keeping up the disadvantage narrative, Enoch believes. ''Once that's gone, the Andrew Bolts of the world are going to have a field day. Once Aboriginal people are equal in incarceration rates, education levels, home ownership, all of that, then what will define Aboriginality? It will be amazing to see what the argument's going to be. It might be another 20 years away, but it's coming.''
Despite mixed feelings, Enoch says Black Diggers will be ''charming'' and ''fun'' in its theatrical style. ''We can't escape that. That's what we do,'' he smiles. ''Charming. Playful. But that's going to change.''
Black Diggers opens at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Sydney Festival on January 18.