Last month, Mitchell Butel finished up as Artistic Director of State Theatre Company South Australia (STCSA) and returned to his home town of Sydney, to become Artistic Director of Sydney Theatre Company (STC).
In his final days at STCSA, Butel spoke with ArtsHub about making the transition from actor and director to artistic director (AD), about learning on the job, trusting one’s gut and other lessons from his time at the Company.
Learning on the job
“You can’t really know what it is to be an artistic director until you are an artistic director. There are many people who’ve had similar roles in different arts organisations. Many people have been Associate Directors of many of the larger state theatre companies. But until you’ve actually done it, it’s kind of an unknown beast,” Butel says.
“I was very, very lucky early on when I started [at STCSA] that I had many fantastic mentors and friends who had been artistic directors, to whom I came with many questions. What would you do in this situation? What would you do here? So Kip Williams and Brett Sheehy and Marion Potts and Yaron Lifschitz were all incredibly supportive and helpful.
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“I also found myself buying books like The Art of the Artistic Director [by Christopher Haydon] – and David Lan, who ran the Young Vic, [I bought] his fantastic book, As If By Chance… And as an actor and a director, I’m someone who likes a lot of notes and likes a lot of feedback, so it was important for me early on to have sounding boards to talk things through. And I guess that sense of collaboration and discussion, and seeking counsel and advice and feedback, is something that is pretty much still my MO. I like to talk to people about how we do things and how what best practice is and how we can make things better,” he explains.
Meeting and overcoming challenges
“I started in March 2019 and most theatre companies have to have a pretty fair idea of what they’re doing, program-wise, by May/June. So I had to move very fast. I was lucky that I had a lot of works that I was really interested in doing, so I could put my feet on the pedal and get cracking, but I guess people don’t realise how fast we need to program and the [demands of the programming] cycle. In order to have the brochure in place and to book your actors and your creatives, we have to do things very far in advance of the actual launch date. So that was a big challenge, but I’d been wanting a job like this for some time, so there were a lot of things on my shelf ready to roll, in terms of things I wanted to do. The speed of it was a real challenge.”
Trusting your gut
“I think trusting your gut is really important in terms of what shows you think will hit with audiences. I’m also someone who loves a lot of data, and I love a net promoter score audience survey and seeing what people love. But I also think you can’t second guess an audience, you have to actually go, ‘What works speak to me and to this current moment in history, and do I think that that will resonate?’ And then you have to trust your gut and just kind of go with it.”
The importance of strategic thinking
“[STCSA’s] infrastructure is split over various buildings. We have an office at the Lion Arts Factory. We have workshop and rehearsal rooms that are out at Thebarton in an old envelope factory. And we perform at the Festival Centre, obviously. So that’s been tricky, that’s been one of the challenges [of my tenure]: navigating different spaces and trying to unify the company when they are so split. One of the main things we’ve been doing – and Julian [Hobba, Executive Director] has done the lion’s share of this – for the past few years we’ve been working on trying to find a new home for the Company so that so [everyone] can be together.
“That’s taken a lot of our time, particularly his, but I’m really heartened that the current government here has allocated, in the last State budget, $19 million to explore a possible CBD precinct, a home for State Theatre Company South Australia, State Opera South Australia and Country Arts South Australia. That’s a really wonderful thing. It’s taken a long time, but I do think the wheels are turning in the right direction for that.
“And it’s the trend. It’s transformed Sydney, it’s transformed Brisbane, it’s transformed Melbourne, when you have a kind of permanent home for your flagship State Theatre Company. So I’m really hopeful that the wheels continue to turn in the right direction in that respect.”
Making art takes time
“You have to acknowledge that some projects take longer than anticipated to get up. So, for instance, we commissioned the fabulous South Australian playwright Elena Carapetis to write a show about the Adelaide Central Market, called The Markets, and it will happen and I’m really hopeful that the next AD will pick this one up, because we’ve done a series of fantastic workshops around the show. The Market is this iconic Adelaide place, this centre for so many great migration and crime and love and historical stories, so that hasn’t quite hit the stage yet, but it’s kind of worked out well, because there’s been a redevelopment of that whole area around the Market. So hopefully when that that reopens in mid ‘26, Elena’s play will be ready to go, and hopefully the new AD will program it.
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“And I guess the lesson is that projects have to take the time that they need. And my big thing is, I don’t want to force projects onto the stage that are not ready to go. We had a couple of commissions that have also taken a long time, and some of the artists have said, ‘Oh, just program it and I’ll finish it’, and [I say], ‘No, that’s not my vibe.’ I won’t program stuff until I think it’s really tight and ready for audiences. Because one of my main goals and imperatives is to ensure that what we put on stage is audience-ready. Because my ultimate responsibility is to the audience,” Butel concludes.
Mitchell Butel’s last day with State Theatre Company South Australia was 22 November 2024. He is now three weeks into his tenure as Artistic Director of Sydney Theatre Company.
