What the Brutalist Building Knows
- glenn63work
- Apr 17
- 58 min read
Updated: Apr 19
by Glenn Hayden
Think about the last show you saw that genuinely moved you. Now think about the last show that genuinely dazzled you. Chances are they are not the same show.
I have been looking at the distance between the two these past few months. I have also been working on a new script with a playwright for a year — a piece that potentially has the ability to close the distance. Which explains why this gap has been so much on my mind. I don't need to resolve it and I'm not sure it should be. But i'm enjoying holding it up to the light to see what it reveals about where theatre is heading — all of it, the work that fills the big rooms, the independent work that happens in the smaller venues, and my own work in both arenas— and what questions that movement raises. What follows comes from a middle place. It's me writing ideas, not solutions. I do not want to arrive with any answers, only questions, and I am hoping they spark something — agreement, debate, recognition, resistance.
Less is more. It was said to us at WAAPA repeatedly in the years of our training and I've never stopped hearing it, even forty years on — not as a rule, but as a reminder I keep coming back to. I have been revelling in it again, re-exploring Grotowski's via negativa, Brook's empty space, and the approaches to training the actor. Strip away what is not essential. Find what remains. And for goodness sakes, trust it. I have just started reading Declan Donnellan's long, long awaited follow up to The Actor and the Target, The Actor and the Space, and it has already given me some keys - as he calls them - to open more doors.
All of this has led me to ponder brutalism in respect to our industry. Not the word people use as an insult — Be gone, you brute! The architecture movement. The buildings made of raw concrete, with structures exposed, and their load-bearing bones visible with generally no cladding, or decorated facade and no other non functional beautification. In a nut shell, no pretending to be something they weren't.
Many of those buildings were pulled down. They were called ugly and uninviting. This interpretation did real damage — buildings were demolished and a movement was dismissed before anyone looked carefully at what it was actually trying to do. For me, what those buildings express is something to be trusted, authority through structure, something democratic, and an exposure of process. I've always liked them. Maybe the building that doesn't lie about what it is is the building that actually lets you in. I grew up in Perth and later found myself performing at the Perth Concert Hall and all through my years of study, I walked past and often entered the WA Art Gallery. Both Brutalist in nature.
There are two versions of this essay. For fun and in line with the theme - Brutalism. The one you're reading now is the decorated version. The full argument, the personal stories, the practice, the thought experiments - present in every paragraph. At the end you'll find the brutalist version — the same essay stripped to its irreducible minimum, everything removed that isn't load-bearing. You can read this one first and then that one. Or that one first and then this one. Or just one or the other. The choice is yours.
I am not someone who has stood in front of the National Theatre in London and felt something move in their soul. For a start, Iv'e never been there and I've only seen photographs. My attraction to the image of the building is conceptual and oddly familier. I've always liked the art of Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, and Art Brut. Even the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey gave me goosebumps — like it did for so many others.
I've also always loved black and white photography, especially street. I don't remember where I read it but I've always liked the idea that colour is fashion and black and white is the soul.
What these artists and forms share is a refusal to soften the material for the viewer's comfort. It's just being what it is. Brutalism is the same in architecture and I recognise it.
My first encounter with this principle of brutalism in practice was as a student actor at WAAPA. We did Ionesco's Here Comes a Chopper as a promenade piece across the university grounds — directed by Simon Phillips, who went on to become one of Australia's most significant theatre directors. Ionesco's subject — the mechanisation of language, the violence and absurdity lurking beneath the surface of polite social systems — demanded exactly this kind of exposure that Simon wanted. Single actors observed through doorways of rehearsal studios like animals in a zoo. Actors leaping from one floor of the foyer to the lower floor. Actors leaping into ponds. A large portion of the university was the stage - and wee didn't enter the theatre once. We all wore blacks and each character we played was represented by a single handkerchief-sized piece of coloured material — nothing else. There was no set or anything that could be considered a theatrical frame. The design had been reduced to its irreducible minimum and what remained was not an emptiness...It successfully represented everything. There was no separation between the audience and the players., just the actor in the space and the audience choosing where to look.
I've already mentioned the National Theatre on London's South Bank. Denys Lasdun, the architect designed it from the inside out — the structure is honest about what it is, the load-bearing elements are visible, and nothing is clad to make the building more palatable. Prince Charles — King Charles, I should say — called it a nuclear power station.
There is an irony however. maybe on purpose, I like to think so. A structure that completely embodies the brutalist principle regularly houses productions that are the opposite of brutalist in practice. They all have 'The Promise Moment' - (thank you internet), star casting and a pre-sold world of epic theatre and famous actors.
It's apt to mention where this essay is being written. It feels like part of the journey. It began several weeks ago in Mumbai, where I live near Aram Nagar and for a few days now I have been in Delhi — on my way to a community theatre project in Arunachal Pradesh - and I find myself surrounded by buildings with a brutalist influence. The Shri Ram Centre sits not far from where I'm writing at the moment, its raw concrete shielding the performance spaces within. A brutalist building housing theatre. Even the view from the terrace outside my room takes in an almost brutalist building - The Statesman House — it's close enough .
I find the idea of brutalism genuinely exciting when I hold it up against theatre. Not as a verdict on what theatre has become. As a question about what it could be. But, I should admit: I do also enjoy spectacle - the decorated theatre - and I have been thrilled by it. I remember watching the barricade scene in Les Misérables — which I saw on its Australian opening — and feeling the awe of the moment in my chest. At that period of theatre design it was spectacle working at a high level — not decorating the story but carrying it, not substituting for the drama but becoming it. The discussion im having here is not against spectacle. it's a question about what happens when spectacle stops knowing what it is doing. When it becomes the norm, rather than the choice.
The problem is not that spectacle is replacing theatre. It's that spectacle is becoming indistinguishable from it.
The Greeks built their theatres for ten to fifteen thousand people — and it's easy, looking at that scale, to assume spectacle was the point. It wasn't. Vast, open, integrated into the landscape, with minimal scenery and limited technical effects. The actor was at the centre. Scale served the human act. Greek theatre asked: what does this mean? Roman theatre began to ask: what can we show? The scaenae frons — the elaborate, multi-storey, highly decorated stage facade — arrived before anyone had walked in front of it. The building itself became the spectacle. Violence, which the Greeks reported through messengers, moved onstage. Drama increasingly served spectacle rather than the other way around. The gladiatorial games tell the same story in a different arena. They began in 264 BC as a funeral rite — death honouring death, a private brutalist occasion. Within a century the state had claimed them. The funeral rite became public entertainment. The honest occasion became the Promise Moment. The form stopped serving the function and started serving the crowd. We are living inside the latest version of that shift. Greek theatre repeated stories and renewed meaning. Spectacle theatre repeats effects and confirms expectation. The Greeks built large theatres so the actor could be seen and we build large productions so the design can be.
I was part of creating the Blue Room Theatre in Perth in the eighties - back then it was called the WA Actors Centre which housed the Blue Room. The history of the Blue Room beginnings that are recorded don't start till much later when the official name was registered. Its a shame really. There were many people that helped the WA Actors Centre get started.
The origin story is pretty straightforward — we were drunk in someone's living room, young, hungry for work, and restless about theatre. Someone said: wouldn't it be great if we had a bar for members where we could talk about this stuff, and someone could overhear us and say, I can help with that. We weren't anti-commercial. We didn't have a drunk-in-a-loungeroom-manifesto. We, and many of our colleagues, just had the desire for another option.
With a lot of fundraising, advocating and hard slog, we opened a bar, a studio, and a theatre in an empty building appropriately called Arts House. Our occupancy was basic and built from necessity. When I look at what the Blue Room has become, my heart is full. I've spent enough years in both large rooms and small ones to know that the small room is generally where the future of our art-form lives.
In Mumbai, the neighbourhood of Aram Nagar has become an extraordinary artists home. It's not the Blue Room. It doesn't have their funding history, their institutional identity, or their curatorial operations. What it has is something different and in many ways more interesting. It's an independent theatre ecosystem that has grown organically inside an audition culture, through necessity rather than design. Artists who came to Aram Nagar to wait for casting calls began making work instead.
The work being made across Aram Nagar is alive and honest...and largely unseen beyond its own community. That's the issue — not the quality of the work, not the commitment of the artists, but the invisibility of it all.
When a theatre ecosystem performs only for its inner circle the standard risks being stagnated. The outside audience — the one with no investment in the play — simply responds to what is in front of them and that honest response is the most useful thing a developing theatre culture can receive. The audience, after all, is the bread and butter. if the work does not resonate beyond pleasing the inner circle, the play no longer has a reason to exist apart from its own self promotion and the self promotion of the projects creatives.
All of which raises a question — and I think is worth the asking.
What if audience development is the wrong frame entirely? What if the audience doesn't need to be developed — it needs to be trusted? Audience development, at its least honest, is a euphemism for teaching people to like what we've already decided to make. It places the problem with the audience rather than with the work. The brutalist counter-argument is this: the onus is on the theatre maker to earn the audience through honest work. But here is where the provocation complicates itself and it's because the argument falls down on a very practical reality. The audience that goes to theatre already knows theatre is happening. The real mission is the person who doesn't go. Not because they wouldn't love it. Not because the work isn't for them. But because nobody told them in a language they recognised, or because the ticket price required a household budget decision rather than a whimsical impulse, or because theatre has never felt — in its venues, its marketing, its pricing, its programming — like it was made for them. That is not a taste problem. That is an access problem. And access is not solved by making better work alone. It's solved by making the invitation honest, the price real, and the welcome genuinely meant. The brutalist theatre doesn't just ask what is the work for. It asks who is the work for.
I once connected with a young guy who was trying to sell me his postcards and then tried to sell me something quite inappropriate. But, I liked his energy and I stopped, rolled us a cigarette and we chatted. I gave him my thoughts on how he might take better care of himself and at the end of the conversation I gave him two tickets to the opening of a play I had just directed. He and his friend came and they watched and at the end I asked what he thought. He said it changed his life.
Now, whether theatre is so powerful that it literally changed his life in that single night — I genuinely don't know but what I do know is that here was a young guy with his buddy, who had never stepped foot inside a live theatre, who walked out of one and felt something strong enough to make a bold statement about his own experience. That is enough. In fact, that is more than enough. Not for the people who already come but for the young man selling postcards on the street - the person the work was never supposed to reach. And it was enough for me. I have never felt better about an opening night. The brutalist theatre doesn't just ask what is the work for. It asks who is the work for. And then it goes and finds them.
In brutalist terms, and like with most skilled projects, we begin with the play. We agree that the text is the concrete. That the playwright has already made the structural decisions before anyone else enters the room — what the characters want, what stands in their way, the weight and span of the thing. Samuel Beckett understood this so completely that his late works remove almost everything. The more you remove, the more exact the experience becomes. In his 'Not I', there is just a mouth in darkness.
David Mamet puts it more bluntly: the play is in the action, not in the atmosphere. Not in how it looks. Not in the world built around it but In what people want, what they do, and what gets in the way. Any concept imposed before the text has been properly heard is a premature interpretation. It's closing down what the writer has deliberately left open.
And then there is Sławomir Mrożek and Out at Sea — a play I directed in both Australia and India. Three characters on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Hungry. That's it basically, nothing else. The dramatic situation is the set. The raft is both the literal condition and the complete design solution. There is nowhere to hide — for the characters or for the actors. The hunger is the brutalist load-bearing. The empty stage is the honest building.
Mrożek strips situation the way Beckett strips existence and Pinter strips language. His play Striptease is a great example — two men systematically stripped, physically and psychologically, by an unseen authority represented by a giant hand pointing and prodding our two very confused gents. Arguably, the mechanism of power is exposed without any real decoration but it feels epic. The title says everything the set doesn't need to. The text is law-The rehearsal is practice-The performance is proof.
Now to the director. The director's job, before the room opens, is to build the playpen. The vision, the language of the production - the conceptual frame. All this work happens in collaboration with the designers, with the writer where possible, in the long hours of reading, researching and thinking before rehearsals begin. The actors need these walls in place when they arrive. Not to limit them, but to give them something to play inside. A safety net that defines the space without predetermining what happens, through them and their own set of homework, in it. This is the brutalist principle applied to directing. The walls are load-bearing. They are honest about what this production is and what it's for. The structure creates the conditions for play. And inside those walls, and because of those walls, genuine freedom is possible.
The best playpen I've ever built was for Prayer to an Iron God by Caroline Reid. I directed three productions in total. The first when the play was still a play with music — the songs doing work that, in retrospect, the text didn't need them to do. The music was spectacle in the purest sense: decoration over a structure that was already load-bearing. Shedding it was its own brutalist process. Not failure — discovery. The play found its bones by removing what was covering them. By the time we brought it to Deckchair Theatre in Perth it had found its form — the production earning Oliver Cooney nominations for both Best Newcomer and Best Supporting Actor, and the production celebrated by audiences and peers alike. Then Urban Myth Theatre Company in Adelaide, where the production was recognised by the Critics Circle Award SA for Best Youth Production, nominated for Best Drama and Best Actor at the Curtain Call Awards, and won the Messenger Award for Best Actress — Kate Roxby taking that award in 2007.
The play had gone through several drafts across those productions and I am grateful that had lived inside all of them. We were also blessed that the writer, Caroline, was in the room throughout each rehearsal process. The research was impeccable. A psychologist reviewed the script for factual accuracy and emotional content. The casting was precise. The working language in the room was open and empathetic. The playpen's walls were built long before rehearsals began — through the drafting process, through the research, through every conversation about what the play was actually for. By the time the actors arrived, the playpen was complete. The structure created the conditions and the actors did the rest and what happened inside it was some of the freest, most honest work I have witnessed in a rehearsal room.
I have also experienced the opposite — and this was my fault. As director, everything is your fault. That's as it should be. On another production — a dense and difficult text — I rushed my usual ensemble building process for too much. There were personality clashes in the cast that were difficult to navigate, and healthy ensemble-work was exactly what would have put us on track for the journey. Instead I moved too quickly into the material and the room was fractured from the start. Genuine play requires trust and trust requires time.
Budgets aside, it's worth looking at Simon Stone's production of Phèdra through the brutalist lens. The set was a glass box that the audience looked into. Characters speaking in a hyper-realistic, overlapping, naturalistic style. The glass box isolating them like specimens in a laboratory or a museum. The design making the argument that the characters are being observed rather than experienced — the voyeurism is built into the structure. The concrete exposed. The load-bearing bones visible. Nothing decorative. Nothing explanatory. The building honest about what it was. I confess I saw it on National Theatre Live rather than in the theatre, but It's a wonderful production.
But even through the screen, the sense of the microscope came through. Not just isolation. Magnification. The glass box didn't separate the characters from the audience so much as enlarge them. Every gesture, every silence, every fractured sentence seemed enormous by the frame. The set has been criticised as overbearing and the blackouts too long but I didn't find them so. Stone's music and sound choices held those dark moments rather than filling them — acoustic architecture, doing for the ear what the glass box was doing for the eye. Stone has talked about wanting his actors to feel like they're living rather than performing - avoiding anything theatrical for its own sake. That's via negativa without the term being utilised. He arrived at the brutalist principle from a completely different direction.
I think scene change are a test and every production either passes or fails. A scene change handled with theatrical intelligence is the brutalist principle in action. The actors carrying the transition, the lighting doing the work, the audience's imagination trusted to bridge the gap. The form serving the function and nothing added that isn't necessary. A scene change handled badly is its precise opposite - A crew in the dark moving tables and chairs while the audience waits. Sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. Thiks is not part of the production and it should be. The audience, watching this, is not experiencing theatre, they are watching logistics. It's the production admitting it can't sustain itself. Achieving a realistic set is the root of it. Realistic furniture requires scene changes. Scene changes require a crew. But the chain of consequences is avoidable if the director asks at the start what this space actually needs to be, rather than what it needs to look like. This kind of intelligence does not need a budget. so, come on directors, be cleverer than that. Its theatre.
In brutalist terms this is a precise failure — not of ambition but of honesty. Think of the realistic set is cladding. It pretends to be the world of the play rather than admitting it's a construction in service of the play. And when the cladding requires too many logistics to maintain the illusion, the illusion collapses entirely. The audience is no longer inside the world, they are watching the machanisms of the pretence and unless this is part of moving the play forward, its horrible. The brutalist director asks: what does this space actually need to be? Not what does it need to look like.
There is a current production of Death of a Salesman - unfortunately one that many of us will never get to see live. The set design by Chloe Lamford is a radical departure from the domestic environment the play usually lives in — a massive, decaying industrial warehouse, crumbling tiled columns, mounds of dirt and ash on the floor, a towering triple-height metal garage door. No house. No kitchen. No bedroom. Critics have noted that it functions as a visual representation of the inside of Willy Loman's head — a purgatorial space where memory and reality collide without the architecture of domesticity to separate them. (Nice review to receive) That is not a design illustrating the play. That is a design being the play. Lamford didn't ask what Willy's world looks like. She asked what it feels like to be inside it and the answer was an industrial ruin. The brutalist principle applied with complete conviction — function determining form, the honest material doing the emotional work the set decoration would have softened. I would love to sit and witness this show.
I directed a season of five short commissioned plays on the theme of Underground — a four-performance season grown out of a workshop program called Actor in the Play. The budget was near to nothing and I needed to build an environment for five plays to live in. My solve was to source several refrigerator-sized packing boxes and place them on the edges of the stage. At the opening of the performance the actors emerged from them to the soundtrack of a city. Not as an overly performed event — just done, plainly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Forty seconds. One image, one sound, one action — and everything the audience needed to understand where they were and what kind of evening this was going to be. The audience comments were generous. I was secretly very chuffed with my instinct. The constraint hadn't defeated the ambition. It had produced the solution. Via negativa and the brutalist principle arriving at the same place simultaneously and a little bit of happy accident — remove what isn't needed, trust what remains, let the material do the work.
Theatre doesn't need to look real. It needs to feel true. Spectacular is one way of achieving that. Stripped back is another. A smaller budget may limit what the creative team can achieve in materials and mechanisms, but it should never be the excuse to abandon the play. The brutalist director knows the difference and chooses accordingly. The right question is always: what does this moment actually need? The wrong question and the one that leads to the crew in the dark moving furniture — is: what does this moment need to look like?
All of this — the text, the direction, the design — arrives at the same place eventually. The performer in the space. Now it's the actors turn under brutalism.
I have been thinking about brutalism as a lens for acting practice for some time. Not as a methodology, not as a prescription, but as a way of asking the same question the architects were asking: what is actually here, and what have we added that isn't?
Of all the practitioners I keep returning to, Grotowski sits closest to this question.
Via negativa — this term that I currently keep returning to — it's not about doing less. It's about removing what is false. The actor doesn't chase the emotion. They get out of its way.
Grotowski's Poor Theatre is the brutalist building applied to performance — stripped of everything non-essential until what remains is the encounter, the irreducible encountyer. The actor's body. The audience's presence. The charged space between them. He called what was left 'poor' not as a criticism but as a description. This is what theatre actually is when you stop adding things to it. Not all of Grotowski's ideas sit comfortably with me. But his thoughts on the elimination of illusionism, the actor as the primary medium, and via negativa — these keep proving themselves in the work.
I'm not a fan of saying never but I'm very close to saying I never want to do another large-scale production. A black box, a great script, and hungry actors — that sounds about right for this stage of my career. Though, if there's a willing funder with a bucket full of money, I'm sure I could spend it wisely. Maybe it's a very expensive black box.
Beckett arrives at the same place as Grotowski from a different direction. Grotowski strips the theatrical apparatus back to the honest instrument. Beckett strips existence itself. Time, repetition, decay. Language collapsing toward silence. Action reducing toward stillness. In Rough for Theatre II, two figures assess a third — slumped, silent, possibly already gone — in a bare space under precise, unforgiving light. Beckett specifies exactly when the lamps are switched on and off. Not atmosphere. Not mood. A switch. The light is structural — it does what it does and nothing more. That's not theatrical minimalism as a style. That's bareness as a condition of being. Tadeusz Kantor takes it further still — and darker. Where Beckett's concrete is ideally structural, Kantor's is already crumbling. The mechanism rusts. The ghost stays. The truth is found inside the deterioration rather than despite it. His Theatre of Death exposes the machinery of memory and mortality without restoring or beautifying any of it. Brook sits differently in this company. He refines where brutalism confronts. He removes excess with an elegance that brutalism doesn't quite share. Brutalism exposes. Brook distils. Both strip back. The arrival points are different rooms.
I am not a disciple of Grotowski. Like any methodology, I take what is useful and leave the rest — and what is useful changes depending on the work. But via negativa keeps proving itself to me at this stage of my life as a theatre maker. Which is why I designed the monthly gathering — experienced actors coming to a studio with nothing to perform and nowhere to hide. Not a workshop. Not a class. A space for stripping back. The first one happened recently. No teaching. No demonstration. Only the work of removing — and then finding out what was left. It felt exactly like what it was: a building designed from the inside out. No facade. Nothing decorative. The load-bearing element exposed. What remained was not austere. It was warm. More alive in the room than anything I had watched on a stage recently.
Meisner called it living truthfully — strip away self-consciousness, strip away the performing of feeling, and what remains is behaviour generated by genuine contact. Donnellan's target is the same principle stated spatially — the thing outside the actor that is real and alive and demands a genuine response. His new book pushes that into the physical world itself. The actor who truly sees the space has found the brutalist principle without necessarily naming it. Not all methodologies sit as comfortably inside the framework. Chekhov's rich imaginative world and Laban's effort qualities complicate the argument and push back against it. And I find that interesting rather than troubling. Methods are supposed to argue with each other. Viewpoints is a more interesting case. I ran my own version of the grid exercise at the gathering and found it sat directly inside the brutalist thinking — the actor made acutely aware of what is actually present in space and time, responding to what is genuinely there rather than to a predetermined idea of what should be there. Not decoration. Structure. Across all of these methodologies, something keeps pointing in the same direction. Maybe I'll just call it brutalist acting, make the term my own, and write a best seller. At the moment, it fits with my trust in working across methods rather than within any single one — and stripped back to the foundations.
My ideal brutalist actor is not defined by which tradition they trained in. They are defined by what they remove rather than what they add. The single biggest obstacle is the actor who fills silence because they don't trust it. The silence that is held, trusted, inhabited is often where the most honest work lives. The audience leans forward into that silence. They rarely lean forward into noise. Pinter understood this completely. His pauses and silences are not just dramatic devices — they are structural. The silence is what is actually happening between people: an unspoken negotiation, power shifting, the thing that cannot be said precisely because saying it would change everything...too much. He specifies them in his text with absolute precision — the difference between a pause and a silence in his stage directions is deliberate and significant. That level of exactness about what is not said is the most brutalist instruction a playwright can give a performer. Do not fill this with 'stuff'. Trust what is here. The actor who learns to inhabit a silence has found the brutalist principle in the most practical way possible — through the text demanding it of them. And if a brutalist actor loses their way in performance — starts decorating, starts performing — there is one thing they can return to.
Listen.
The actor doesn't perform what they think should happen, they receive what is actually happening. The moment tells them what to do next. The most complete expression of brutalist acting is the moment an actor finds a stillness so complete that the entire space changes quality - on the stage and in the audience. Not because something spectacular has happened but because something true has been witnessed.
I'll tell you about a moment I witnessed twice. Two different productions of Prayer to an Iron God. Two different actresses. Two different cities. The closing moment of the play has the protagonist — TB (Tits and Balls) - alone on stage after she has finally found the strength to say no to her long-term and abusive partner. He has just threatened to shoot her and has just left the stage. She is alone. The song Prayer to an Iron God - written for the play - plays. Three to four minutes. No dialogue. No action. Just a woman present with everything that has happened to her and everything that is now possible. In both productions, at a certain point in the rehearsal process, the moment landed. The first time you witness it, it is devastating. The actress not performing grief or relief or survival — but inhabiting all of it simultaneously, without decoration, without signal, without asking us to feel anything specific. Just present and honest. The room changed its quality. Everyone in it felt it simultaneously. That is what I mean when I say the most complete expression of brutalist acting is the moment an actor finds a stillness so complete that the room changes quality. Not because something spectacular has happened. I have seen it twice now. Same play. Same moment. Different actors. Different cities.
Let's consider the audition process under brutalist theory — because if there's fun in seeing if this framework holds, it should hold here. The conventional audition is a showcase. Prepared material, polished choices, a performance designed to demonstrate range and appeal. The panel or director sits on one side of the room, often behind a table. The actor performs. Everything is organised around the display of what the actor can do.
Now apply the brutalist principle. Bare room. Neutral light. Panel in the space, not hidden. No prepared material — or if it is brought, it's interrupted, destabilised. The subtraction begins. Gesture removed. Vocal modulation removed. Emotional colouring removed. The actor asked to repeat the same action without intention, to stand still for longer than is comfortable, to move an object across the room while speaking — not to perform the action, but to do it. The question is not what can this actor do? It is what is left when everything is taken away?
Via negativa applied to casting — not adding to assess, but removing to reveal. But the calibration matters. Push too far and it becomes harsh and dogmatic. Get it right and it becomes the most precise evaluation of presence available. I have used this subtraction approach and it has worked nearly every time. It is generally when I can see that an actor is trying to please rather than take up the invitation to give me what they have. Which raises something worth saying directly to any actor reading this: there is something in the brutalist principle for the way you prepare an audition speech. Less is more. Strip back the performance. A director just wants your truth. We rarely see it when it's buried under everything you've added to make sure we don't miss it. An audition is your invitation to act, not get a job and the irony is, its what gives you the best chance of getting the job.
A small digression that is not a digression at all. Consider the brutalist joke. Setup stripped to the function — only the minimum information required to establish expectation. The audience allowed to feel the construction of it and the waiting becoming part of the content. The punchline delivered plainly, without performance flourish, without the twinkle that signals this is funny. No emotional lubrication. Laughter, if it comes, comes from recognition rather than persuasion. The conventional version is like this: a man walks into a bar. Ouch. The brutalist version is: a man walks into a bar. (Pause.) He hits it. (Long pause.) That's the joke. No performance. No signal. In my younger and more adventurous years I ran a comedy agency — Comedy Ink — with Linda Martin. Some of our comedians worked exactly this way — no performance cushioning, no signalling, the joke delivered as a plain fact and the audience left alone with it. They weren't always the easiest sell. But when they worked, the laughter was deafening. The room didn't just laugh. It was recognising something. Samuel Beckett understood this completely — Waiting for Godot is essentially a brutalist joke that runs for two hours. The punchline never arrives. The mechanism is all there is.
Andy Kaufman took it into live performance by removing the contract of comedy entirely — no guarantee of laughter, no cushioning, the audience's confusion and at times, hostility treated as material rather than problems to be solved. Hannah Gadsby in Nanette went further still — using the comedy structure and then deliberately denying its release, turning tension into confrontation, refusing the punchline because the punchline would have been dishonest about what the story held.
A brutalist joke is a joke with the performance removed, leaving only the structure — and the audience alone with it. Which could be a reasonable description of what we ask of the actor.
Now design. Before I trained as an actor at WAAPA I had two years to wait - it was a new course starting. I found a set design course, talked my way into it without wanting to be a designer and I studied it to learn about theatre. My instinct served me well. That training prepared me for things that my career has given me without me knowing it was what i wanted. As a director, it has informed every design conversation I've had. I know what a good designer is trying to do. I know the difference between a design that serves the text and one that's quietly tries to replace it.
The best design collaborations I've had were with the late Kerry Reid — one of my favourite designers to work with, and one of the most honest people I've encountered in a rehearsal room and in process. Kerry was also an actor, which meant she came to a text the way an actor does — not looking for images, but looking for structure. The bones. What the play was actually doing. We'd meet at least seven times before any final sketches were presented. I'd talk through my vision - and give some very shonky drawings I'd done during my research. She'd listen, question, push back, translate. She didn't impose a world on the play or my vision. She found the world the play already contained and she interpreted vision. Our working relationship had one governing principle — the sole desire to make good theatre, regardless of budget or where we were playing. What came out of our process together was always more honest than anything either of us would have arrived at alone.
That's the brutalist design process - Not a style. A discipline.
Katie Mitchell — one of the most rigorous directors working in British theatre — applies a simple test to every design decision: if you can remove it and nothing changes, it shouldn't be there. Sondheim put it from the writer's position: when design starts telling the story, it usually means the story isn't being told. What if you applied the brutalist principle to every design department simultaneously — set, lighting, costume, sound, video — and asked of each one: is this load-bearing or is it cladding? Brutalist theatre design is not about what you add. It's about what survives removal.
I saw a production of James and the Giant Peach at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai. There was a moment where the peach grows in front of the audience. It was a giant balloon being blown up with an air tank and it was obvious. And it was magical. The children in the audience loved it — not despite the obviousness of the balloon and the air tank, but because of them. think of the puppet show where the puppeteer is in plain sight, manipulating a stuffed inanimate object and giving it a voice. The theatre is not fooling anyone. Just asking everyone to lean in. That's the brutalist principle at its most joyful. The honest mechanism and the theatrical magic coexisting completely. No contradiction. The balloon was the most load-bearing peach imaginable.
This is why I love exposing light sources — a reminder to the audience that they are in a theatre, that we are asking them to join us for a ride, that we are not fooling them into believing but inviting them to imagine. Theatre is illusion — but the illusion can be weakened, not strengthened, when we try to hide it completely and unnecessarily. The audience knows they are in a theatre. They came because they are in a theatre. The honest production says: here is what we have, here is what we are doing with it, here is what we are asking of you. The decorated production says: look away from the mechanism, pretend this is real. One trusts the audience. The other doesn't.
Brecht understood this — his alienation effect deliberately broke the illusion, made the machinery visible, refused to let the audience forget they were watching a performance. Visible lighting rigs. Musicians in plain sight. Actors stepping outside the fiction to address the room directly. Sign-posting scenes. In that sense Brecht is a brutalist avant la lettre (before the name existed). The structure exposed, the bones honest, nothing hidden behind a comfortable facade. The difference is intent. Brecht exposed the mechanism to make the audience think rather than feel — a political instrument as much as an aesthetic one.
What I am describing is something quieter. Not alienation but acknowledgement. The exposed light source doesn't distance the audience from the work. It says we are all in this together, and we all know it. That is closer to the brutalist principle than to Brecht — though both arrive at the same visible rig.
I miss the big red curtain. The Grand Drape. The Main Rag. The House Curtain. I know that's most likely not a fashionable thing to say in this age of Metamodernism, but the curtain was a welcome sign — an honest announcement that theatre was about to happen...We're ready. So are you. And it held a secret. Behind it, something existed that you hadn't seen yet and it didn't pretend the stage wasn't there. It acknowledged the frame completely and then said the stage is in there, and when the time is right, we will show it to you. And it's not deception, it's an invitation.
And then it opened. That moment — the curtain parting and the world behind it revealed — I think it's the closest thing theatre has to a time machine or teleportation. One second you are in a seat in a building in a city, the next second you are somewhere else entirely. Not because you have been fooled, but because you have allowed yourslef to be transported. The curtain made that possible by insisting on a threshold.
I was there when the Playhouse Theatre in Perth was demolished. A much more senior actor, Ivan King, was also there — thermos of tea in hand. When the roof was lifted off and the sunlight hit the stage for the first time, Ivan gasped. A death happened. He stood quietly for a moment and then said that stage was Antarctica. It was London in the 1800s. It was an apartment in New York. And many other locations and times. Now it is burnt away. A stage should never see the sunlight. I have never forgotten that. The sun came in and found nothing but a wooden floor that had been Antarctica and London and New York. The threshold was gone. A very sad experience.
A stage is a secret kept from the world outside. The curtain was the thing that kept it. When the curtain opened, the secret was shared — but only in the dark, only on the terms of the theatre, only for as long as the play lasted. Then the curtain closed and the secret was safe again.
Ivan's stage had no curtain left.
In the absence of curtains, which is mostly the situation, I spend a great deal of time on the lighting preset — trying to replicate that welcome, to create the same sense of arrival and invitation through light rather than fabric. I'm always disappointed when I go to the theatre and the director hasn't thought about this. Not the preset specifically — but the question behind it. What does the audience experience in the moment before the performance begins? That transition from the street to the stage, from the world outside to the world inside is the most brutalist moment in any performance. It happens before a single actor appears. Before a word is spoken. The preset is the building's first honest statement about what kind of theatre this is going to be. Get it right and the audience leans in before the show begins. To not think about it at all — I start to wonder whether the director is truly creating theatre or simply putting a show on a stage. Amateur theatre often gives us that - seeing actors in costume before and after a show, stage crew running on stage or sound sound checks being completed when the audience is already in. Before the first cue, the play has lost a part of me that arrived to enter their world.
The welcome sign doesn't begin when the curtain - metaphoric or real - opens. It begins with the decision to come to the theatre. And if the experience is honest — if the work is load-bearing, if the form served the function, if the audience was trusted rather than fooled — then it doesn't end when the curtain falls either. The production that is still working on you on the train home, the image that arrives uninvited three weeks later, the conversation that continues long after the house lights came up, the audience member still asking themselves what they think. That is what the honest building produces. Not a night out. An experience that lasts.
One of my favourite things to do at the end of a rehearsal period, and it feels like a secret gift to myelf, is to decide the pre-show music track list and I may be the only person in the room who fully understands the subliminals in it — the connections between each track, the emotional world being built before the audience has sat down, the sonic welcome sign that precedes the visual one. But I believe it works. The audience arrives into a world that is already doing something to them — preparing them, orienting them, opening them — without their knowing it. The pre-show track list is the curtain before the curtain (that metaphoric one again). It's the first honest statement the production makes. Function at its most invisible. And after a season closes, those track lists often become something else entirely — private memory albums, each one a fingerprint of a particular play in a particular room at a particular time. The music that held the world of the production before the production began.
If an audience member ever asks me what happens at the end of an open-ended play, I always answer with a question. What do you think? That is not evasion. That is the point. And I always back it up with, once they have told me what they think, that they are right. And that's a truth. It is not the buildings job to tell them what to think after they have left its shelter.
Someone told us during our WAAPA training that the experience of going to the theatre begins the minute an audience member decides they are going. From that moment — the booking, the anticipation, the journey to the venue, the foyer, the programme, finding the seat, the preset, the curtain rising or not rising — all of it is part of the same continuous experience that the production either honours or ignores. I have never forgotten that.
Push the thought experiment further — into musical theatre - i'm talking broadway here. The BIG shows. It's the form most associated with the Promise Moment. Every device in the musical exists to ensure the audience feels what the score tells them to feel, when the score tells them to feel it. It's the most efficiently decorated building in theatre. And yet. What would it mean to strip it back? The voice under strain, time made audible, repetition as endurance rather than variation. The brutalist musical doesn't yet exist as a pure form — but productions have approached the principle.
The Melbourne Theatre Company's My Brilliant Career — currently touring Australia — is perhaps the most complete recent example. Directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, the production uses no curtains, no large set pieces. The ten-strong band are the cast. They perform on a hay-covered stage with a handful of props. In her program notes, Sarks was explicit about the intention: with the most minimal design, using only what was necessary, she wanted to invite the audience into the act of imagining — allowing a sense of freedom and inventiveness to shape the entire production. That's the brutalist principle stated as an artistic decision by a director of a large-scale, critically acclaimed musical. Function determining form. The audience's imagination doing the work the design refused to do. It has won five-star reviews not despite the restraint but because of it.
Other productions have approached the principle from different angles. Sunday in the Park with George used the artist Georges Seurat's painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte as the world, the design inseparable from the content. Rent's original production designed by Paul Clay gave us bare industrial space — the set didn't illustrate the environment, it was the environment. Daniel Fish's recent Oklahoma! stripped the show back to fluorescent lighting and exposed the darkness sitting inside the original text that the conventional production had always softened over. In each case the spectacular moment earned its place because it was doing structural work nothing else could do. A brutalist musical is not about feeling through the design and its tricks. It's about confronting what the form can honestly carry.
Spectacle becomes damaging when it functions as ornament — masking weak structure or dictating emotion from the outside. But theatre has also historically deployed scale and excess as structural necessity — not to decorate, but to materialise forces the human body alone can't carry - Gods, storms, oceans, space. I remember the rain box at the Playhouse Theatre where I performed in the eighties — broken glass in a flat wooden box, tilted slowly until the glass shifted and the sound of rain filled the stage. No computerised or powered technology. No pretension. Raw material doing honest work. It was much more magical that a computer.
I'll also confess a production I directed where I wanted a particular effect using cloth covering the entire stage. I couldn't achieve it so I compensated — I had cloth carried across the stage instead. The moment failed abysmally. Not because the idea was wrong but because the execution was a substitute rather than the thing itself. Cladding pretending to be structure. I'm sad the effect I wanted never eventuated. Sometimes the 'darling' is murdered not shot.
The most brutalist set I ever personally stood on as an actor was in a production of Cabaret at the Regal Theatre in Perth. I played Cliff Bradshaw, a rare occasion where I was the romantic lead. An empty stage and a black tunnel. That was it. Everything in the production — the Kit Kat Club, the decadence, the performers, the horror — emerged from that tunnel. Not represented by it. Out of it. The darkness was the design. The tunnel not standing in for Weimar Germany but being the place where the century turned. As Cliff Bradshaw, the outsider, the witness who stands at the edge of things watching what he cannot stop, I spent the production on an empty stage watching everything emerge from that black opening. The design had made one decision and trusted it completely. Nothing decorative. Nothing explanatory. The load-bearing concrete exposed and doing everything.
But the most gut wrenching image in the production wasn't the set. It was the gorilla. In If You Could See Her Through My Eyes, the Emcee dances with a gorilla he's in love with. The number plays as cabaret entertainment — absurdist, comic, and charming in its way - sweet. And then he turns to the audience and delivers the final line of the song: if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn't look Jewish at all. The joke that isn't a joke. The punchline that is a war crime. Every layer of decorative spectacle stripped away in a single sentence. What remains is the load-bearing horror — exposed, unavoidable, and impossible to look away from. That's the brutalist principle at its most devastating. The gorilla costume was the cladding. The antisemitism was the structure. Kander and Ebb removed the decoration in one line and the room stopped.
The distinction is not small versus large, not minimal versus spectacular. Decorative spectacle adds surface but risks reducing tension. Brutalist spectacle carries weight and increases it. The recent production of Evita places the actor on a real balcony of the theatre for Don't Cry for Me Argentina. It sits exactly on the fault line. The case for brutalist: the director has stripped away the proscenium and placed Eva in a real building looking out at a real audience on the street the way Evita looked out from the Casa Rosada, the architecture doing the work. The case against: the audience still in the theatre, watching film knowing the moment was coming. It's a the Promise Moment operating through architecture rather than through a chandelier. The brutalist instinct and the decorated building coexisting in the same moment.
Director, designer, playwright and painter Romeo Castellucci's large images feel closer to architectural imposition than visual pleasure — images that confront rather than seduce. I love looking at images of his productions and find them to be inspiring outside of the work i'm dong in the theatre.
I have sat in enough large commercial productions to feel something shift in the room when the effect arrives — not just in me, but in the audience around me. The collective lean toward the pre-sold image. The applause that belongs to the production rather than the performers. The Promise Moment — the pre-sold effect the audience has already paid to see before they know anything else about the production. The chandelier that falls. The helicopter that lands. The witch who flies. The life-size horse. The giant tiger. Every one of these productions is built around — and marketed through — a single effect. The question in the audience's mind is not what is happening. It is when does it happen? I remember seeing a production of Anna Karenina in a rock stadium and a full-sized train came onto the stage. The audience applauded longer than they had applauded anything the cast had done. The actor has to earn the response. The train just had to arrive.
There is a current trend in the Promised Moments commercial theatre toward blood. It signals punk, I guess, and rawness. But true punk stripped away the decoration because decoration was the enemy. The Broadway blood trend adds the decoration of stripping back. The cladding IS the exposed concrete. The facade IS the honest material. That is not brutalism. That is brutalism as aesthetic — which is its precise opposite. The latest Sunset Boulevard is the clearest example. The collapsed stage, the ruined grandeur — the production was sold on the image before anyone had seen the drama. The punk factor was the marketing. Which may be the most interesting problem the essay has identified. Not spectacle as decoration but the decoration of honesty. The production that looks brutalist and isn't. The concrete that turns out to be painted plaster.
Mark Rylance — actor, director, founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe — has observed that every layer you place between the performer and the audience weakens the live encounter.
Danny Boyle's Frankenstein at the National Theatre with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller swapping the roles of Frankenstein and the Creature on alternate nights was a genuinely ambitious production with a serious directorial idea at its centre. But almost every conversation about it I have had collapsed into the creature's birth sequence and the casting swap. The Promise Moment consumed the production's reputation. What the work was actually attempting got lost inside what it had been sold as. That's the more insidious version of the problem — not the production that is nothing but the effect, but the production that is more than the effect and is never quite seen because of it. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child represents the logical endpoint — a production where the Promise Moment is not one effect among many but the entire reason for the production's existence. Every moment pre-sold. The whole thing a confirmation of what the audience already loves. When the Promise Moment becomes the production itself, what is left for the actor to do?
But the Promise Moment is not always empty. The barricade scene in Les Misérables arrives not to confirm expectation without renewing meaning, but doing both simultaneously. The spectacle earning its place. I saw Ivo van Hove's Roman Tragedies in Adelaide — all three of Shakespeare's Roman plays performed in a single six-hour marathon with screens, live feeds, the audience moving freely through the space, tv in the foyerso you didn't miss anything if you needed a pee and even sign postings of how long before the next death. Every decision earned its place completely. The scale was the argument. The duration was load-bearing. You can't experience the full weight of Rome's political collapse in two hours. The decisions didn't replace the actor. They extended what the actor was doing into a different register simultaneously. Decorative spectacle adds surface and reduces tension. Brutalist spectacle carries weight and increases it. My argument is never against the effect. It's against the effect that substitutes for the work rather than completing it.
Star casting is its own form of Promise Moment. Not a chandelier this time but a face. A name on a poster the audience has already decided to see before they know anything about the play. But, here's a paradox worth touting. When a genuinely talented performer whose profile brings audiences into the room who might not otherwise come — that is the brutalist principle operating through the market rather than against it. The talent is the load-bearing structure. The name on the poster is the mechanism that makes the honest work financially possible. The clearest example I can think of is Daniel Radcliffe in Every Brilliant Thing. His name is the Promise Moment — the face that sells the tickets, the reason the house is full. But the play itself is the opposite of a star vehicle. Intimate, participatory, built around the audience's engagement rather than the performer's stardom. One performer and the audience literally as co-creators. The emotional weight carried entirely by the encounter between actor and audience. Every Brilliant Thing is about as brutalist a piece of theatre as exists in the commercial landscape — and it gets made at scale because of a name that, in another production, might signal the opposite.
The problem is not the famous actor who is right for the role. It's the famous actor cast because the alternative is an empty house. Carrie Coon said it plainly in January 2026, in the middle of her Broadway run in Bug: I was on The White Lotus, and now I can be in a Broadway play. That wasn't true for me five years ago. So now, in order to do a play on Broadway, you have to do The White Lotus, or else you're not allowed. They have to replace you with somebody more famous. She's not complaining. She's describing a structural reality from inside of it. The casting decision has moved from the rehearsal room to the marketing meeting. And when the screen actor arrives, the production often shapes itself around their availability rather than the play's needs. The play accommodates the name. It rarely works the other way around. And what does this tell the emerging artist? That the pipeline from the small room to the large one now has a detour through a screen.
There is yet another paradox that sits alongside the star casting argument. The award system. Meryl Streep is rightly regarded as one of the greatest actors of her generation — the observation is not wrong. But for every Meryl Streep whose infrastructure can support an awards campaign, there are a million others just as talented who never had the right role at the right moment with the right resources behind them. Judi Dench has named it plainly - luck. The luck of the right production, the right director, the right visibility at the right time. The award doesn't measure talent. It measures visibility. And the campaign machine — the screenings, the trade press, the nominations strategy — is the decoration that makes the award possible. The award system is the arts equivalent of the Promise Moment. The pre-sold guarantee of quality. The benchmark measures who was seen. Not who was true. Just look at how the awards dumped young Chalamet. Don't worry, i'm not defending his ludicrous remarks.
I want to be honest about my own relationship with spectacle. Mostly because i'm grateful i've had great employment through them.
My last performance as an actor was in Little City in 1996, a choral political tragedy by Melbourne Workers Theatre, with a fifty-voice community choir. It was about a child's preventable death, about collective indifference, about what happens when communities stop paying attention. It was a spectacular ritual, operatic theatre event, the full weight of massed voices moving through a political argument. I then worked as community director on Tower of Light at the Royal Melbourne Showgrounds — hundreds of community participants, a literal tower of light and it traveled the full length of the show-grounds enormous shed — a large-scale work about gambling and the public complicity that allowed it to flourish. I directed Also a Mirror with Urban Myth Theatre Company — an ensemble work with no protagonist, no linear narrative, built from overlapping testimonies and refracted versions of the same emotional moment - full video art filling the stage and covering the actors. I directed Curfew as the closing production for the International ASSITEJ Festival hosted by Adelaide — eighty-plus performers, integrated performers with disability at the core of the dramaturgy, a choral work about youth surveillance and state control. I directed Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream as Shakespeare in the Park events — picnic baskets, champagne and the Bard under the stars. I directed Exile for DADAA WA at the Fremantle Arts Centre — a promenade performance with around one hundred and fifty performers mapping the history of institutional treatment of patients through bodies moving through rooms of film, sound and visual arts made an environment where that history had happened. The closing image - outside and video mapping cracked the building in half.
None of these were small. All of them were spectacular in scale and not one of them was a mere decoration. In every case the form grew entirely from the function. Little City's massed voices were the collective grief the text required. Tower of Light used the casino's own visual language and turned it back on the audience as a question about their own complicity. Also a Mirror's refusal of narrative was the only honest way to represent how memory actually works. Curfew's large ensemble enacted physically and sang what it means to be surveilled and contained. Shakespeare in the park asked something different — the function was celebration, the form served it, the brutalist principle holding even there. Exile needed the Fremantle Arts Centre because the building was the argument. Remove any of these formal choices and the argument collapses. That's structure. That's load-bearing. The spectacle — wherever it was present — was honest about what it was carrying.
I have also spent a significant part of my career directing large-scale civic and ceremonial events — opening ceremonies, football match pre shows, harbour events, parades, world conferences, international scouting gatherings. The scale is always large. The budget is rarely small. The brutalist question still applies. The opening flag ceremony for Scouts International replaced the usual parade of delegates with contemporary dancers manipulating the flags — the formal ritual made theatrical without losing its dignity. The closing event of the World Book Conference deployed a fake casino and vintage cop cars arriving through the kitchen. Is any of this brutalist? Probably not in any strict sense.
For two of these events I was assistant director — working under Angela Chaplin - one of my significant mentors - who was at the time Artistic Director of Deckchair Theatre, one of the more politically engaged companies in Australia. The closing ceremony of the Johnnie Walker Golf Tournament on the 18th hole. And the ANZAC Day football matches. Lawn mower ballets and dancing Johnnie Walkers on one occasion, and on the orther, helicopters, massed choirs, and 100's of grave stones on a football field. The range tells you something about what a serious theatre maker can do when the occasion requires it — and about the fact that the brutalist question travels with you wherever you go, even to a golf course. The dancing Johnnie Walkers I will not attempt to claim for the brutalist cause. Some occasions simply require dancing whisky bottles. The function was joy. The form was completely unhinged. It was a hoot.
The ANZAC Day matches are a different matter entirely. Helicopters onto the field. Choirs in the stadium seating. Hundreds of upside-down Fremantle Football Club symbols placed on the field representing graves. That one I will not make a joke about. It was brutalist in the most serious sense — the honest material doing the only work that mattered. The upside-down symbol said everything. The function was remembrance. The form carried it completely.
And at the other end of the scale entirely — one performer, one story, a black box in Mumbai. A Solitary Choice, written by Sheila Duncan, performed by Ramneeka Dhillon Lobo, at G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture. The set was one bench and an empty window frame. Two objects. Both load-bearing. The exposed concrete of the brutalist building — raw, honest, carrying everything. And then Sławomir Mrożek's Out at Sea — three characters on a raft. I've directed two productions - Australia and India. One small raft and one terrible question.
Much of the work I have described in this writing happens in purpose-built spaces — black boxes, studio theatres, festival sites, stadiums. But a significant proportion of emerging artists work in a completely different set of conditions. Classrooms. Libraries. Quadrangles. Community halls. No controlled lighting rig. Minimal set. Portable costume. I'm talking about Theatre-in-Education - TIE. In those conditions the brutalist principle arrives not by choice but by necessity — the actor exposed, no design to hide behind, every object justifying its presence because it has to be carried in and out. The lineage with Grotowski's stripping back of theatrical excess is real. But the key distinction is intent versus circumstance. In TIE, minimalism is often logistical in its budget, mobility, and access. In brutalism, minimalism is ideological — a deliberate refusal of mediation. TIE creates the conditions of brutalism by necessity. It only becomes brutalist when the practitioner consciously refuses to add what the circumstances didn't provide or even ask for.
An actor friend of mine performed a one-person Hamlet that toured schools. For the Ophelia scene that he included, he did something I thought was terrific — he had the ten lines of dialogue for Ophelia glued inside the back of a neutral mask. A pre-organised student volunteer held the mask up to her face. She became Ophelia. She was safe inside the lines, safe inside the structure, and the experience was asking nothing of her beyond presence. The mask was the design solution, the dramaturgical solution, and the ethical solution simultaneously. Function determining form. The load-bearing object carrying everything the moment needed. That is TIE becoming brutalist — not by circumstance but by the precise intelligence and artistry of the practitioner.
The first play I ever saw was in my primary school quadrangle. I think I was in grade 3. A cart was the full set. The play was about the British arriving in Australia and the convict culture they brought — heavy subject matter for a seven-year-old. There was a scene where a soldier took a prisoner behind the cart. We only heard the whipping and screams. - more heaviness for a seven-year-old. That was the first time I consciously encountered theatricality — and it was almost spectacle in its effect, even though the production was tiny. The cart protected us from the violence but the sound revealed it. The imagination did what no effect could have done. Brutalism - Restraint as power. Absence as presence. Via negativa - The discipline of what you refuse to add.
A classroom performance can be a functional educational tool, or it seems it can be a brutalist theatrical encounter.
I wonder what a brutalist venue would look like — not architecturally, but structurally. A venue that applied the same principle to its programming that brutalism applied to its buildings: function determines form. What is this space for? What does it need to be? Who does it serve? Every venue — whether it's a converted warehouse in Mumbai, a black box in Johannesburg, a community hall in Manila, or a purpose-built arts centre in London — begins somewhere with someone asking those questions. Or it should. The programme is either honest about what the space is for, or it isn't.
Some venues operate as landlords. Not partners. Not collaborators. Not co-custodians of the art form. Landlords. The room is theirs and the artist pays to be in it. The relationship begins and ends there. The model persists for one reason — not the advancement of craft, not the presentation of quality work, not any genuine commitment to the art form. Money.
The power asymmetry is almost total. The venue holds the room. The artist needs it. And the venue knows this. The model depends on it and when an institution has stopped asking what the space is for, exploitation doesn't creep in — it moves in, unpacks, and makes itself at home. The artist accepts the terms because, quite simply, the alternative is the work not being seen. The conditions in which work is made shape the work itself. Every limitation imposed by the hire agreement is an artistic decision made, and in all likelihood, by someone who has never set foot on a stage and has no intention of doing so.
I have worked in a venue where the hiring process makes it plain from the first conversation that management has no desire to be genuinely part of what happens inside their building. The transaction is everything. The art is incidental. An inconvenience maybe. And yet the people who actually run the building — the crew, the sound tech, the mechanists, the cleaner — have more artistic integrity in their work than the management that sets the terms. Every one of them.
The building earns its place in the creative landscape. The management does not. Nobody can afford more than two days generally, sometimes one — bump-in included. Nobody can use a substantial design and if they try, the entire bump-in is consumed by the set and the rig — not a single actor on stage acclimatising to the space before opening night. This is particularly problematic if it is a premiere season and the show has not had any time to settle. The budget is generally forced to rely on volunteer labour — which means the lifting gets done but not the precision. And beyond the practical sits the ethical. Volunteer labour in a professional context tells every experienced technician working the gig that their skills aren't worth paying for. This venue is honest about neither what things cost nor what it's actually for. The building knows something the management has forgotten. The model depends on nobody saying so out loud.
Venues like these do not allow the work to be presented in its truth. Call me old fashioned — I don't mind the label — but time in the theatre matters. Time for everyone to acclimatise. Time for the bump-in to breathe. Time to refine, to settle, to let the production find its relationship with the space before the audience arrives. Without that time the work is underdressed. The actors are performing in a room they haven't yet inhabited. The design is solving problems rather than telling the story. And there is a very real danger of just doing a show rather than presenting theatre. The two are not the same thing. A show happens. Theatre is made. The brutalist principle demands honesty about what things require — and what they require is time. The venue that won't provide it has made an artistic decision - and it just isn't interested in the art. Venues like this are one of the reasons I find myself increasingly drawn to the small room, the stripped back occasion. The Via Negativa. Not as a compromise. As a relief.
I find it increasingly more enlightening going to see emerging artists work as the years go by. It's not always perfect. It's frequently rough, uncertain, and uneven. But it's raw, and rawness, when it comes from genuine engagement with the material rather than a desire to please, is one of the most exciting things theatre can produce. The emerging artist hasn't yet learned what to protect. They're in the room with the work in a way that years of professional practice can sometimes, quietly, erode. But only when the work is made for the right reasons. The moment the emerging artist starts making work to impress a panel, to please an audience, to signal belonging rather than just belonging — the rawness goes. What remains looks like rawness but it isn't. It's decoration wearing rawness as a costume and often it looks amateur not raw. The question worth asking them is not what did you put in — but what did you leave out? The answer tells you a lot about a theatre maker.
There's a particular danger worth naming — the young theatre maker who is simultaneously writing, directing, producing, stage managing, designing, performing in, making the coffee, and marketing their own work. The ambition is understandable because the resources or lack of are real. But each role requires a completely different relationship to the work, and when one person attempts all of them the roles don't multiply — they collapse into each other. The result is a production designed around one person's vision of themselves rather than around the work's needs. The cladding and the structure become indistinguishable — because the person laying the cladding is also the one deciding what's load-bearing. There are few genuine geniuses who can do more than one thing honestly at the same time. The successful actor-directors who do pull it off almost always have an assistant director who is completely across their vision and methods — a second pair of eyes that can see what the performer inside the work cannot. The brutalist question — what does this work actually need — can only be answered honestly from outside it. The emerging artist needs collaborators, not portfolios.
The brutalist principle applies to training too. The student who arrives already performing their commitment — the right opinions, the right intensity, guessing what the trainer wants to see, needing to be right. This student has missed the point before the first exercise begins. Training gives you the tools. But the brutalist student arrives without deciding in advance which tools they want — empty enough to receive what the training is actually offering rather than what they hoped it would confirm. That distinction is everything. The student who arrives to be confirmed leaves with less than they brought. The student who arrives to be surprised leaves with something they couldn't have predicted. The post-training workshop asks something different: which tools do you actually want to explore, and what happens when you put the rest down? It is not an audition. It is an investigation — a room where something honest might happen through the via negativa, if you let it.
The established, ageing brutalist theatre artist deserves a separate essay — and I intend to write it. But the short version is this. They have stopped performing experience and started having it. They know which tool they need before they pick it up. They are often less impressive in an audition room than they used to be but considerably more useful in a rehearsal room. The down time no longer frightens them — they have worked out that nothing is wasted. And the silence they trust now is a different silence from the one they trusted at twenty-five. I am somewhere in the middle of finding this out. Which is probably why the brutalist building has been on my mind.
There is another thing the established, ageing theatre artist carries that no curriculum can replicate — and it has nothing to do with teaching. Grotowski called it transmission. In the final years of his life he described his relationship with Thomas Richards — key collaborator of Grotowski — not as instruction but as the passing on of something lived — the inner aspect of the work, arrived at through decades of honest practice. Eugenio Barba, who worked alongside Grotowski and went on to found Odin Teatret, has written about the same idea — the older artist as a source rather than an instructor. A presence in the room that changes the quality of what is possible. The younger artists around them don't learn what they say, they absorb how they are. The most brutalist version of mentorship is also the most honest — not the scheduled meeting, not the structured feedback, but the older practitioner simply being in the room, working, and letting years of accumulated honesty do what no workshop can. i did a play once where the youngest cast member was 9 and the eldest was 83. in between were the teenage and middle-age years. It was quite the experience and this cast made a perfect building.
There is another figure in the rehearsal room who deserves to be named in any discussion of how theatre is actually made. The Stage Manager. Not a performer. Not a designer. Not a director. The person who holds the entire process in their hands — who sees everything, who knows before the director does when something isn't working, who carries the production's truth in a prompt book that is more honest about what is actually happening than any rehearsal report or production meeting. The brutalist stage manager is the building inspector. They see the load-bearing elements and they see the cladding. They know which is which and they tell you — quietly, precisely, and without drama. I have worked with a stage manager like this. Jenny. She had absolutely no desire to perform, no artistic agenda of her own beyond the art of SM'ing. She managed the rehearsal room with excellence and accuracy and she was, as my right-hand person in the room, my confidant and truth-sayer. When something wasn't working she told me. When something was, she told me that too. No performance. No cushioning. Just function.
The production manager operates the same principle at the larger scale — and the contrast between a brutalist PM and a decorative one is one of the most instructive things I've witnessed in forty years of making theatre. I have worked with a PM who needed the cast and creatives to know they were working hard. They brought the problems of budget and logistics into the creative space deliberately — the panic visible, the difficulty announced, and the room made aware of how much they were carrying. It was always about them. The creative space contracted around their ego every time they entered it. I have also recently worked with a PM who never entered the creative space outside of necessity. The problems of the production were kept away from the director and the cast. I was brought up to speed at production meetings, or in an emergency that only I could sign off on. The creative space remained intact. The work continued uninterrupted. Most of the time, I had no idea what he was solving or how hard he was working — which is exactly the point. The brutalist PM is not the one who solves the most problems. It's the one whose solutions you never have to think about.
The theatre administrator or at times the producer, or manager completes the picture. The SM holds the room. The PM holds the production. The administrator holds the institution. And the brutalist administrator is the one who keeps the organisation honest about what it's for — who protects the artistic mission from commercial pressure, who tells the board or CEO or the 'money' what the work actually costs, who manages the institution's funding crises without panic entering the rehearsal room. The decorative administrator is the opposite — the one who programmes for the poster, who chases grant language without grant intent, who manages the institution's image rather than its purpose. These three roles —the SM, PM, and Administrator — are the production ecology's load-bearing structure. Invisible when they're working and immediately apparent when they're not.
Everything so far has been about what the practitioner does. But the audience is the other half of the encounter — and the brutalist principle asks something of them too.
Theatre is not a product delivered to an audience. It's a live exchange. Remove the actor and you have no event. Remove the audience and you have a rehearsal. The performance lives in the space between them. The actor initiates and sustains it. The audience completes it. Neither is more important. Both are essential. And both can fail the exchange.
The audience has been trained, by decades of commercial theatre and possibly television and film, to be consumers rather than witnesses. To arrive expecting the Promise Moment. To applaud the effect rather than the truth. But privilege the audience too much and you get pandering — work shaped by approval, laughter, and applause. Privilege the actor too much and you get indulgence. The brutalist exchange asks both sides to be present. The actor works truthfully. The audience receives that truth without a predetermined response. The performance lives in the honest space between them.
The independent theatre audience who arrives with too much intellectual expectation is the mirror image of the commercial audience who arrives expecting the Promise Moment. Both have pre-sold their response. Neither is fully in the space. And then there is the family member at a tiny show in Aram Nagar or Blue Room — there only to support their relative on stage. In their eyes the relative is the star. Their Promise Moment is the moment 'their' person walks on. Which makes them, quite possibly, the most emotionally present audience in the room. But are they engaging with the work? Or are they operating like the Broadway audience member who bought the ticket only because of the star and not for the play? The impulse is identical. Both have pre-bought their response before the curtain rises.
The genuinely brutalist audience — the one who arrives without a predetermined response, who brings their imagination rather than their expectation and who is willing to be surprised by something true — is the rarest thing in any theatre. Commercial or independent. Large or small. Mumbai or Broadway. And that raises an unsettling question: is the brutalist audience something theatre produces — through the honesty of the work, the conditions of the room, the discipline of what is refused — or is it something theatre can only hope for? When the room changes quality, when the collective attention sharpens around something true — did the production make that happen? Or did the right people simply arrive on the right night? I don't have an answer. But the question feels honest.
Imagine a theatre company built entirely on the brutalist principle — stripping theatre to its irreducible elements, pursuing material honesty across every department, resisting spectacle unless it's load-bearing, cultivating an audience experience based on encounter rather than consumption. This company doesn't exist as a pure form.
Would it be, in the end, the warmest theatre you had ever experienced — because it was the most honest? Or would it be a predictable, introverted company that didn't take risks, didn't exist as part of a global industry, and was, when it came down to it, just not that much fun? I don't know. It's an interesting thought.
And when the production is over and the set is struck and the cast has gone and the reviews have been read - or ignored — the most honest question begins with the audience. Not what did they applaud. Not what they talked about in the foyer. But what stayed with them. What arrived to them uninvited three weeks later. What changed that 'something' that they can't name. That is the load-bearing question. And then from that answer, the practitioner's question follows. What held the weight? Not what looked good, or what the audience responded to most, but what actually carried the play into their lives after the house lights came up. What was load-bearing and what was cladding. The honest answer to that question is the most useful thing an artist can take into the thinking of the experience and into their craft.
The brutalist building is a reminder. It's not a lecture and its certainly not a manifesto. It's a reminder that every time a theatre maker walks into a space built on the principle that function determines form — that the honest structure, exposed and load-bearing, is more truthful than the decorated surface. What is this for? Not what will it look like. Not what will it cost. What is it actually for?
The building that was designed around its function, around what it needed to do rather than how it wanted to appear, stands as a quiet instruction to everyone who works inside it. Start here. Start with the function. Let everything else follow from that. The form will find itself. It always does, when the question is honest enough.
When everything is visible, what's left to be discovered?
And now I am leaving Delhi and off to Arunachal Pradesh with my buddy and colleague Jay to work on a community project celebrating local culture and looking at drug issues in the region. No chandelier. No Promise Moment. Just the work, the community, and the questions. Feels like a brutalist project already.
A note from me: AI tools were used only for spelling, grammar, and fact checking where needed— not for shaping the ideas, the language, or the conclusions. Everything here comes from lived professional experience.
What the Brutalist Building Knows
A Question for Theatre — by Glenn Hayden · Brutalist version
Think about the last show that moved you. Now the last that dazzled you. Chances are they are not the same show.
That gap is the question.
Brutalism. Not the insult. The architecture. Raw concrete. Exposed structure. Load-bearing bones visible. No cladding. No facade. Function determines form. Design from the inside out. The building that doesn't lie about what it is lets you in.
The problem is not that spectacle is replacing theatre. It's that spectacle is becoming indistinguishable from it.
The gladiatorial games began as a funeral rite. Death honouring death. A private brutalist occasion. Within a century the state had claimed them. The honest occasion became the Promise Moment. The form stopped serving the function and started serving the crowd. We are living inside the latest version of that shift.
Begin with the play. The text is the concrete. The text is law. The rehearsal is practice. The performance is proof.
The director builds the playpen before the actors arrive. The walls are load-bearing. Inside those walls — because of them — genuine freedom is possible. The structure creates the conditions for play.
The scene change is a test. Every production passes it or fails it. The right question: what does this moment actually need? The wrong question — the one that leads to the crew in the dark moving furniture — is: what does it need to look like? Come on directors. Be cleverer than that.
Via negativa. Not doing less. Removing what is false. The actor doesn't chase the emotion. They get out of its way.
Grotowski's Poor Theatre is the brutalist building applied to performance. The actor's body. The audience's presence. The charged space between them.
My ideal brutalist actor is defined by what they remove rather than what they add.
Listen.
Stop performing what you think should happen and receive what is actually happening. The room will tell you what to do next.
The brutalist designer reads the play before opening a sketchbook. If you can remove it and nothing changes, it shouldn't be there. Brutalist theatre design is not about what you add. It's about what survives removal.
The curtain was a welcome sign. It held a secret. That withholding was not deception. It was invitation. A stage should never see the sunlight.
The Promise Moment. The pre-sold effect the audience has already paid to see. The chandelier. The helicopter. The train. The actor has to earn the response. The train just has to arrive.
Decorative spectacle adds surface and risks reducing tension. Brutalist spectacle carries weight and increases it. My argument is never against the effect. It's against the effect that substitutes for the work rather than completing it.
The award doesn't measure talent. It measures visibility. The benchmark measures who was seen. Not who was true.
Some venues operate as landlords. Not partners. Not collaborators. The model persists for one reason. Money. Every limitation imposed by the hire agreement is an artistic decision made by someone who has never set foot on a stage. A show happens. Theatre is made. The venue that won't provide the time has made an artistic decision. It just isn't interested in the art.
Rawness — when it comes from genuine engagement with the material rather than a desire to please — is one of the most exciting things theatre can produce. The moment the emerging artist starts making work to impress, to please, to signal belonging rather than just belonging — the rawness goes. What remains looks like rawness but isn't. It's decoration wearing rawness as a costume.
The emerging artist needs collaborators, not portfolios.
The student who arrives to be confirmed leaves with less than they brought. The student who arrives to be surprised leaves with something they couldn't have predicted. The workshop is not an audition. It is an investigation — a room where something honest might happen, if you let it.
The established, ageing theatre artist has stopped performing experience and started having it. They know which tool they need before they pick it up. The silence they trust now is a different silence from the one they trusted at twenty-five. I am somewhere in the middle of finding this out. Which is probably why the brutalist building has been on my mind.
Grotowski called it transmission. Not instruction. The passing on of something lived. The younger artists don't learn what they say. They absorb how they are.
The SM holds the room. The PM holds the production. The administrator holds the institution. Invisible when they're working. Immediately apparent when they're not.
Theatre is not a product delivered to an audience. It's a live exchange. Remove the actor and you have no event. Remove the audience and you have a rehearsal. The performance lives in the space between them. Both can fail the exchange.
The genuinely brutalist audience arrives without a predetermined response. It's the rarest thing in any theatre. Is it something theatre produces — or something it can only hope for?
The welcome sign doesn't begin when the curtain opens. It begins with the decision to come. And if the experience is honest it doesn't end when the curtain falls either. The brutalist building is a reminder. Not a lecture. Not a manifesto. What is this for? Not what will it look like. Not what will it cost. What is it actually for? Start with the function.
The form will find itself. It always does, when the question is honest enough.
When everything is visible, what's left to be discovered?
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