Why Emerging Artists Must Put On Plays

Read time: 6–7 minutes.

Early in my directing career, I was asked to direct a play with no money for a venue. Our solution was a strip club. The pub owner was thrilled. We arrived an hour before the show, watched staff dismantle the pole-dancing poles, and set up our stage. Some of the people who had come for the strippers stayed for the theatre. We found a whole new audience that night — and I found out something about what theatre actually needs: not resources, not a proper space, not ideal conditions. Just the willingness to put the work in front of people and let it be tested.

That lesson took years to fully land. But it started there.

Emerging actors and directors spend years preparing — training, assisting, observing, refining technique. Scene studies feel rigorous. Workshops feel productive. Conversations feel intelligent. But preparation has a ceiling, and most artists hit it without realising. Skill without consequence is theory without reality. The only thing that confirms whether your preparation is real is putting it in front of an audience and finding out.

The trap most emerging artists fall into is mistaking preparation for progress. Workshops and masterclasses are genuinely valuable — they let you experiment and sharpen technique. But there is a dangerous inertia when preparation dominates: skills are dissected, rehearsed, discussed, but never tested under real pressure. Development becomes a conversation rather than a lived experience. And I have watched workshop marketing frame the promise of employment as a drawcard, quietly shifting artists away from developing craft and toward chasing exposure. These are different things, and confusing them costs time early-career artists cannot afford.

Work that thrives in a workshop is not automatically ready for the stage. In the studio, imagination fills the gaps. On stage, those gaps are exposed. The question shifts from did this impress in the room? to does this communicate to an audience with no prior investment? That is a harder question, and no workshop teaches you how to answer it. Only production does.

In the 1980s, a few friends and I started Blueroom Theatre — a space where emerging artists could do one thing: make work. Some projects failed, others succeeded. Some disappeared; others were picked up by larger venues. The point was never the outcome. It was the testing. Risk-taking early in a career costs less than it ever will again — reputation, money, and resources are all still manageable — and the learning that comes from real failure is faster and more honest than anything a rehearsal room provides.

The risks worth taking are not careless ones. Devising site-specific work, reimagining a classic, experimenting with form — these are legitimate risks, but they need to be grounded in preparation and taken with full responsibility to your cast, your audience, and the work itself. Some ventures will fail spectacularly. That is precisely the point. Failure in a workshop is absorbed. Failure on stage is information.

Not every opportunity on stage is worth taking. I learned this through a profit-share production among friends early in my career. The idea was strong, intentions were pure, but casting was misaligned — everyone wanted to be in the show, and some were badly suited to their roles. Ego got in the way of the work, and the production suffered. Intentions alone do not make quality work. Alignment between talent, role, and vision is not negotiable.

One of the most honourable things I have witnessed in forty years was a well-known director who told an actor mid-process that she had miscast him. The company paid him out and they parted ways. Her instinct was not only for the good of the production — it was to protect him from failing in public. Both kept their eyes on what mattered: a good production. That kind of clarity is professional care, and it starts with asking honestly whether a role is right rather than simply whether it is available. Emerging directors face exactly the same discipline. Choosing texts that genuinely resonate — especially early on — gives you the clearest line to the work. Passion is not sufficient on its own, but its absence makes everything harder.

Outside a theatre in Fremantle, we handed leftover tickets for Caroline Reid's Pray to an Iron God to passers-by. Most had no knowledge of the subject — male violence and youth suicide — it was simply a free night out. Afterward, a mother and her teenage daughter spoke quietly in the foyer. The mother explained it was the anniversary of her son's suicide, and said how deeply the production's honesty had affected her.

That moment is why audience response matters more than peer response. Colleagues are valuable — their feedback is useful, their presence always a little nerve-wracking in the best way — but the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker tell me more about whether the work is doing what it should. Peer feedback carries experience, taste, and sometimes ego. Audience response carries truth.

I'll be direct about the post-show foyer: be wary of the what you should do conversation right after a curtain call. It usually comes from experience bias, protective instinct, or attachment to a particular method. It rarely serves the work. Those conversations belong in a smaller room, with a trusted few, once the adrenaline has gone. That is where honest thinking lives, and where the next piece of work actually begins.

The question of how you treat the people who make work with you is not separate from the work itself. I got this wrong once, early on — a small production where a designer gave weeks of unpaid work on the understanding that the show would run longer than it did. When it closed early, she had nothing to show for it and no recourse. I had not lied to her, but I had not been honest either about how uncertain the whole thing was. She left the industry not long after. I don't know how much that experience contributed, but I have never forgotten it. Asking for unpaid contribution under the guise of exposure risks trust and damages relationships that, in a small industry, are long. When resources are limited, other forms of exchange matter: mentorship, portfolio development, genuine credit, skill-building with real application. But the question of what participation is worth should be asked and answered honestly. A show that cannot offer fair exchange for the work it asks for should either find the resources or scale down until it can. That is not a constraint on ambition. It is the foundation of a reputation that lasts.

I also learned the hard way that artistry alone does not sustain a production. A show we created was well-directed, well-cast, and had design that punched above its budget — but we cut promotion. Almost no one came. A brilliant production with no audience is a letter no one reads. Every ticketed show, however small, carries real stakes: audiences invest their time, and the work is measured against that. Thinking about marketing, budgeting, and audience experience alongside the creative work is not compromise. It is the job.

My friends Tim and Sandie discovered this early. A production they made from scratch — driven by passion, built on almost nothing — demanded they lead, decide, and adapt under real pressure. That show became the seed of Monkey Baa Theatre Company, now recognised internationally. The discipline of that first production shaped everything that followed. The artists I have watched build lasting careers held both the artistic and practical dimensions in view at the same time, not one after the other. It is a habit worth building early, because the profession will not teach it to you.

Learning does not end when the curtain falls. It begins there. A full production reveals what no preparation can: which choices communicate, which instincts hold under repetition, and where the gaps are that technique has not yet filled. The productions that moved my practice forward most were the ones I examined most honestly afterward — in conversation with a small trusted group, not in the noise of opening night. If structured reflection helps, templates are easy to find online. The format matters less than the habit: stopping to ask what the production taught, and carrying that into the next one.

Looking back over decades as actor, director, producer, and manager, the throughline is simple. Every production has been a proving ground — not just for craft, but for conscience, judgment, and imagination. Workshops prepare you. Production proves you. The gap between those two things is where a career is actually built.

Put on the play. Find the strip club if you have to. You have been preparing for this. Now find out what you were preparing for.

"We can only do what we can do by doing it."

Peter Brook

A note from the author: the ideas, arguments, and experiences in this article are entirely my own — drawn from forty years of working in theatre, film, and actor training. I used AI tools during the writing process to assist with spelling, grammar, and the verification of facts. What it cannot do — and did not do — is think for me, feel for me, or replace the professional experience from which every observation in this article comes.