How Kip Williams is transforming theatre for the digital generation
The whole world's a stage...
By 
KIP WILLIAMS’ CAREER started in the family living room. Instead of a stage, furniture was pushed together. Instead of actors, puppets appeared. Occasionally, friends or cousins were roped in. Parents were asked to sit down and pay attention. The show would start whether they were ready or not.
“There are so many childhood photos of various weird puppet shows and made-up stories and invented universes with bits of furniture pushed together,” Williams tells me over Zoom from his apartment in London. “I even made a theatre company with two of my friends at school when I was 11 years old.”
Looking back, these private puppetry performances now read as portentous.
In 2016, the then 30-year-old Williams was appointed artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, becoming the youngest ever in the institution’s history. But having made his directorial debut four years earlier, with his interpretation of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, starring Jack Thompson, followed by critically acclaimed adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Children of the Sun, Williams had more than proved he was up for the role’s demands. The creativity was there, clearly. Williams’ biggest concern? How to turn the art form into something that was dynamic and contemporary and would secure a new generation of theatre lovers.
Williams had stepped into one of the country’s most influential cultural roles at a moment when theatre was grappling with its identity within a digital-first culture. Rather than reflect on the past, Williams opted to look to the future and bring the audience’s familiar tools of technology with them.
Williams is often described as a director who uses technology, but that framing feels reductive to the purpose it serves. The screens, cameras and live feeds that define his recent work are structural. They exist because the lives his work interrogates are already mediated, already split between physical presence and digital projection. To exclude that from contemporary theatre would feel, to him, like a kind of denial.
“How can we be living these lives that are so enmeshed within technology and not want to interrogate that and critique it and make sense of it in the artworks that we’re making?” he asks.
That question sits at the core of his adaptations of Victorian Gothic literature, most famously The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Williams’ staging, the theatre becomes a live editing suite. An actor moves between cameras and marks with near-surgical precision. Characters fracture and multiply. Identity becomes something assembled in real time, rather than something fixed. For the play’s Australian run, it was Williams’ close friend Eryn-Jean Norvill who took on the titular (and supporting) roles. Globally, Williams tapped the talents of Succession star Sarah Snook, who earned herself Tony and Laurence Olivier Awards for her efforts.
What interests Williams is the way technology exposes something older and more human. “I’m always obsessed with exploring the very notion of life being one grand act of theatre where people are caught within acts of performing different iterations of their identity,” he says. “Either to reveal or conceal something about themselves, or sometimes simultaneously do both.”
Today, Williams is about as far away from those childhood puppet shows behind a sofa as an ambitious, burgeoning theatre kid could dream of being. Currently living in London, he’s busy with rehearsals for his latest production, Bram Stoker’s Dracula starring Wicked’s vocal powerhouse Cynthia Erivo. In Dracula, Erivo will play all 23 characters – a Herculean effort and one that comes with equally enormous challenges for both Williams and Erivo.
“The challenge for Cynthia in Dracula is that, in comparison to Dorian, where there were four shots that had characters interlaced in a very complex cinematic form, now there are 49,” explains Williams. “So, the scale of difficulty has gone through the roof on this production. But this is the other reason why I was drawn to her in the first place. She has an amazing chameleonic capacity as an actor, but she’s also a virtuoso. She has these technical gifts that are really hard to come by in an actor: a musicality, a precision, a detail, a dexterity, an alacrity that can turn on a dime.”
For all the precision involved, Williams’ process remains deeply physical. He prefers to discover ideas in motion rather than theory, and he tailors his approach to each performer. “There’s no directorial one-size-fits-all approach,” he says. “My job is to try and figure out and dance with the very specific music of the performer that I’m working with.”
And despite increasing international recognition, Williams remains clear about his centre of gravity. “I’m fundamentally an Australian artist,” he says. His collaborators, designers and creative language are rooted here, even as his work travels. He’s adamant about the quality of Australian theatre, describing it as world-leading, and about audiences who are open to formal risk.
That risk is not taken lightly. It requires investment, trust and a willingness to move beyond safe repetition. “The stories that really get audiences in are those that are either formally inventive,” he says, “or they are stories that we just haven’t seen yet.”
Related:
