Melbourne’s theatre culture is often explained through comparison — more productions per capita than London’s West End, more theatre companies per resident than Sydney — as if quantity were the point. The point is not quantity. The point is that Melbourne has, over several decades, developed two institutions whose mandates are genuinely complementary and whose combined programming describes something larger than either achieves alone. Malthouse Theatre and the Melbourne Theatre Company occupy different buildings, different scales, different relationships to the Australian theatrical tradition, and different ideas about what theatre is for. Together, they make an argument that this city takes the form seriously enough to sustain both its most challenging expressions and its most assured.
The distinction is not as simple as “experimental versus classical,” though it has been lazily described that way. The MTC programmes new Australian work with genuine ambition and presents international text with productions that compare to the best of the English-speaking world. Malthouse programmes work of formal invention that is not always comfortable, but also makes theatre that is funny, urgent, and accessible to anyone willing to meet it on its own terms. The divide, if it exists, is temperamental: a difference in what each institution considers the primary responsibility of theatre-making. The MTC asks whether a play is well told. Malthouse asks whether telling it this way still makes sense.
Malthouse Theatre: The Traverse and What It Does
The Malthouse building on Sturt Street in Southbank was originally a maltings — an industrial structure of brick and mass that the company has occupied since 1990. Within it are three spaces: the Merlyn Theatre, the Beckett Theatre, and The Tower. The Merlyn is the main house — five hundred seats in a traverse configuration that places the audience on both sides of a long central playing area — and it is the traverse configuration that most accurately describes Malthouse’s theatrical philosophy. Traverse staging eliminates the picture-frame relationship between performer and spectator; it makes the audience aware of itself, aware that the people watching from the opposite bank of seats are also being watched. It produces an intimacy that is also a slight discomfort, a sense that theatre is happening in the round of life rather than being projected from a separate world.
The artistic direction of Malthouse has, over successive tenures, maintained a consistent conviction about what the company is for: work that is formally restless, that takes Australian stories seriously without being merely nationalist, that imports international practice without simply borrowing its conclusions. Under Matthew Lutton, who has led the company through a period of genuine ambition, the programming has consistently found the space between theatrical convention and formal experiment — neither purely text-based nor purely physical, but alive to the possibilities of what live performance, in this room, in this city, can do that nothing else can.
Malthouse Theatre, 113 Sturt Street, Southbank. malthousetheatre.com.au
Melbourne Theatre Company: The Case for Excellence
The Melbourne Theatre Company is Australia’s largest theatre company and one of its oldest, and it operates with a confidence in craft — in the detailed, rigorous production of text in performance — that is not always fashionable but is, in fact, extremely hard to achieve. The Southbank Theatre, which MTC built and owns, contains the Sumner — a 559-seat main house with exceptional sight lines and acoustic intelligence — and the Lawler, a more intimate studio space that the company uses for developmental and smaller-scale work.
Under Artistic Director Anne-Louise Sarks, the MTC has been navigating the tension that faces every major subsidised theatre company: between the classical repertoire that anchors its subscription audience and the new work that demonstrates the company’s relevance to a broader cultural conversation. What distinguishes Melbourne’s experience of this tension from Sydney’s is the presence of Malthouse: because the more formally radical work has a serious institutional home, the MTC is freed to pursue excellence in its own mode rather than feeling pressure to be something it is not. The two companies do not compete; they constitute.
The best MTC productions of recent seasons have combined large-scale production values — the kind of set, lighting, and sound design that requires the resources of a major institution — with acting work of genuine individuality. The ensemble culture the company has built, through its residency and development programmes, produces performers who bring specific textural knowledge of the repertoire to each production. This is what classical training in a repertory context produces, and it is something that cannot be imported or assembled quickly.
Melbourne Theatre Company, 140 Southbank Boulevard, Southbank. mtc.com.au
What the Two Institutions Together Represent
The serious Melbourne theatregoer attends both. Not as a dutiful exercise in cultural coverage, but because the experience of the same city’s theatre culture across both registers — Malthouse’s formal questioning, MTC’s assured execution — tells you something about Melbourne’s particular relationship to culture: that it does not require art to be comfortable, but it also does not regard discomfort as sufficient achievement. It asks of its theatres what it asks of its best architecture, its best galleries, its best orchestral programming: rigour, specificity, and the courage of a genuine position.
The conversation about which institution is “better” is, in Melbourne, a conversation that tends to reveal more about the speaker than about either company. Both are operating at the highest level of their respective intentions. That the city has both — with adequate public funding, with audiences that return season after season, with critics who hold them to account — is not a given. It is an achievement, and one that requires continued attention to sustain.
The Arts Precinct, Southbank, is home to both companies, as well as Hamer Hall and the Arts Centre Melbourne. Walking distance from Flinders Street Station.