Damien Ryan And His Player Kings
Australia’s most innovative and rigorous interpreter of Shakespeare is opening his most ambitious adaptation yet. Martin Portus profiles Sport for Jove’s Damien Ryan, who became hooked on Shakespeare whilst working at a service station.
Shakespeare is positively streaming this century, with devotees especially keen on abridged epics forging together his eight most famous history plays.
The fabulous BBC TV seasons of The Hollow Crown swept through a hundred fraught years of English kings and was studded with British theatre royalty; the Sydney Theatre Company hit gold earlier with its own eight-hour epic, The War of the Roses, bookended by the unworldly Richard II, played by Cate Blanchett, and Pamela Rabe as the murderous Richard III.
Image: The Player Kings
Now Damien Ryan, is unveiling his Player Kings. He’s directing his new adaptation of the eight plays to be staged by his company Sport for Jove in two lengthy parts in Sydney’s York Theatre. Ryan’s cast of 17 includes company regulars like Katrina Retallick, Sean O’Shea and Christopher Stollery, but now with others too, like veteran actors John Gaden and Peter Carroll.
Ryan already has had a pretty good go at this. The company marked its 10th anniversary in 2018 with his first time edit of the eight history plays. He stripped out 21 hours, creating the now usual two parts, which 25 actors staged at one of their regular venues outdoors at Bella Vista Farm in Sydney’s Hills district, watched by a rusted-on audience and the usual cockatoos and noisy piper birds. He called them Rose Riots, a droll reference to the War of the Roses, which he often spruiked as the inspiration for Game of Thrones. And he’s always extolling the virtues of taking Shakespeare outdoors.
Image: The Rose Riots - Eloise Winstock & ensemble. Photographer: Seiya Taguchi
“We can see his plays as purely a piece of naturalism, and psychologically-based writing, absolutely, and yet it’s also a poem, a song, a symphony of sonic experiences for an audience,” says Ryan.
“And when you’re outdoors, there’s one thing an actor notices: get on with it, get behind the language. The interior work has been done in rehearsals, you understand what’s motivating you, but your job now is to communicate, to deliver clarity. And I quickly realised, which became anthemic in our company, that your impulse is to speak. You speak in Shakespeare.”
“And the audience are always a character,” he adds. “They can and should always be spoken to. They should always feel involved, with no gauze between. And that’s easier outdoors because it’s immediate. We’ll all in the same lighting state.”
Image: Venus and Adonis. 2023. Photographer: Kate Williams
Ryan spoke Shakespeare even as a teenager. He’d work nights at a highway service station in Seven Hills, then sit on the back deck at home putting his photographic memory to work. By 17 he’d already read the Complete Works of Shakespeare, twice.
“I knew about six or seven plays off by heart, Hamlet and others. I'd run the whole play on my own, speaking all the different characters, all of them, and I learnt over 200 soliloquies and speeches, women and men, and older characters and younger. I didn't care what it was. It was to be inside the language.”
“I remember an older actor had told me the only way is to speak through experience, to say it out loud. You can't dabble in it. You have to absolutely commit to it. He compared it to playing violin, it's just a different sort of instrument. I took that to heart.”
Vital to Ryan, and arguably his whole irreverent, non-academic gusto for Shakespeare, is that he remains a western Sydney bloke, one who swears he’s watched his beloved Liverpool Football Club play every game live since the 1980’s. His Mum was an English teacher politically committed to serving in public schools; his Dad an engineer who could fix anything that ticks or bangs. Ryan started school in Lakemba, then moved to Bidwill in then notorious Mount Druitt (he remembers at aged ten watching the violent school riots of 1983), and finished school in Blacktown.
“I’ve always loved sport, the intensity and competitiveness of it. And football, there’s music and beauty in football. It's the most important of the unimportant things, in that classic kind of Australia.”
He played bass guitar in a Rooty Hill garage band called Bubblegum Thrash Punk, while sporting a long golden rock star mane down his back – women were always asking him how he kept it so spectacular.
In his first years after school Ryan freelanced around western Sydney teaching poetry in local schools and prisons. He met some tough nuts, and a few who broke into tears when discovering how a sonnet can Xray into their hearts.
“I loved that. I've always been electrified by that experience of watching a poem open like a lotus leaf in the eyes of someone, as they realise poets are trying to describe what's indescribable about being a human being.”
Despite being a fluent speaker in Shakespeare, Ryan went on to study and work as a journalist, following the writers and journos from his Mum’s side of the (Lyons) family. She too was passionate about Shakespeare but only as a literary expression. Ryan saw the first and only play of his school years with her – Bedroom Farce at the Riverside. Far more significant was in 1989 when young Ryan sat almost alone in Parramatta’s Westfield cinema, stunned by Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Henry V.
“It was a seminal moment for me which I now remember as a theatre experience not a cinema one. It was extraordinary. I could not get over that. I could not get over Branagh’s performance. I couldn't get over Brian Blessed and Judy Dench and Derek Jacobi. Especially Jacobi’s use of language as the chorus. But they were like aliens to me.”
Image: Cyrano de Bergerac 2017. Photographer: Phil Erbacher.
Much later, in his early 20’s, his first audition was for the Castle Hill Players, for the role of Lysander in Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play he went on to direct more times than any other. Ryan got his first role but his girlfriend, talented and experienced, missed out.
“A real disease in our city is the lack of auditioning, lack of opportunities for people to meet directors,” he says today. “Sometimes I’ll audition 700 or 800 people at a time, and two thirds are women. Two thirds categorically, and there’s so much less roles for them.”
“I saw Fiona Shaw playing Richard II in an extraordinary performance. Why shouldn’t an actor have the opportunity to tackle one of those parts without regard to gender? That’s been important to me. The seeing of something through another gender or another kind of cultural background, it’s just a lens through which you can shine a light in different corners of a well-established character.”
By 2000 Damien Ryan called himself a professional actor and, having never been to a drama school, he auditioned for John Bell. Ryan says he was “totally debilitated by nerves” but Bell, his eyes peeping through his hands, was patient, as Ryan crashed through no less than seven monologues, “as he waited for me to arrive accidentally on a speck of talent.” Finally, he got it, with a speech from Richard II.
Bell was pursuing that old elusive dream of Australia’s theatre-makers to build a fulltime ensemble of actors, a dedication even more vital to performing Shakespeare – an ongoing focus to counter Australia’s usually transient treatment of him. Ryan in turn went on to create his own similar, if informal, group of Shakespearean actors. Nowadays Australian major theatre companies are doing ever fewer plays by Shakespeare – and, it must be said, with less and less critical success and audience applause.
Image: I Hate People or Timon of Athens. Photographer: Kathy Luu
But Ryan had found his home, as one of eight actors in the touring Bell Shakespeare Company, as a skilled post-show speaker to audiences, then later as a BSC director. Plus, he met his wife, and long-time collaborator, Bernadette Ryan; together they played the two lovers in the company’s Romeo and Juliet. Touring continued, son Oliver was born and promptly hitched to the wagon, but after 18 months on the road and with a second child on the way, the family’s exhaustion and frugality was too much, and Ryan pulled the plug on his dream, for now.
Naturally he made a splendid drama teacher at Barker College, a private school in Hornsby. The pinnacle was his startling “teenager” version of Midsummer Night’s Dream staged with many Barker graduates, and about kids learning sexuality and freedom in the Forest. As Ryan says, “written by someone with memory of his teenage years, the clumsy helplessness of desire, the humiliation of devotion and the violent unwillingness of parents and children to see into each other’s worlds.”
He left Barker in 2009 to launch Sport for Jove, reworking this Dream into a striking outdoor production staged in the park opposite his house in Baulkham Hills. The actors furiously painted their bodies – leaving marks still there on the walls of what remains Ryan’s family home – and waited to cross the road. When they did a huge local crowd was waiting.
Image: A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sport for Jove 2009. Photographer: Seiya Taguchi
“The level of learning in that play is Mozartian,” Ryan enthuses. “I cannot comprehend the level of intelligence behind that work and the drawing upon multiple layers of different global mythologies and metaphysical concepts and genuine understandings of wickedness.”
And so was launched a company creating distinctively inventive and articulate productions of Shakespeare staged outdoors and firstly for western Sydney, in Leura, Parramatta and Bella Vista, later also the Seymour Centre. The repertoire expanded to other classical and modern playwrights, all distinguished by a relish of language, like Sophocles, Marlowe, Ibsen, Wilde, and the Americans, Arthur Miller, Herman Melville and John Steinbeck, and just a few Australian plays, but Shakespeare is the main game.
Image: Cyrano de Bergerac 2017. Photographer: Phil Erbacher.
Miraculously Sport for Jove has survived on an oily rag – but without looking like it. Ryan’s astute fashioning and editing of Shakespeare for school audiences, and an applauded education program, brings an income. Somehow he manages to pay full equity to his mainstage actors. Local councils are supportive but there’s no ongoing funding from government. What is still shining is their angel of philanthropy, Gordon Staley from Premier Fire, who came to Ryan in his modest first company space after Staley saw an early Romeo and Juliet.
“I remember, he said, I make widgets that the world has decided are really useful, and they earn a lot of money for the business, whereas you make this art that the world decides isn't worth very much and there's no money in it, and so I'd like to support what you do.”
Damien Ryan has sometimes returned to direct or act with Bell Shakespeare. In 2013 when Bell took on the legendary role of Falstaff as well as directing Henry IV Parts I & II (history plays in the first Part of Player Kings) he wanted Ryan as his assistant director, to keep an eye on his Falstaff. The idea of this sinewy classical actor playing the funny fat guy seems impossible, and at first Ryan thought so.
“But he captured the prose, the danger of Falstaff,” remembers Ryan. “He was a moral licentious mess and looked great in the fat suit and a great big wig. He was maybe 73 when he did it and had such physical stamina, and it was a long tour. And John listens. He lets me be a bit brutal with him sometimes, if I think he’s too musical or the many times I said to him, it’s almost too well enunciated, let’s make it a bit more human...”
Young Prince Harry abandons his wild mate Falstaff on the death of his father Henry IV. Kingship is serious business: Part II of the Player Kings starts with the succession of Henry V and new wars, first in France and Agincourt, then at home with the civil War of the Roses.
“We forget that war so underpins Shakespeare. From his entire cannon, about 31 of his plays are set in war or triggered by war, even in the silliest of comedies. We forget that all his audience were soldiers. They could be conscripted at any moment into the army, impressed as it was called. War was a profound reality to him so he wrote about it.”
“He has an ability to both aggrandise and lean into the glorious adventure of war while at the same time, unnecessarily, adding a scene about the horrors of war and the heavy reckoning ahead for the man who leads us to war.”
Throughout all his work, Shakespeare keeps alive dialectical opposing arguments. Whoever he was, or they were, and even if we speak fluent Shakespeare, we can never really be sure what this Shakespeare truly thinks about anything: he offers us just too many points of view. But that’s surely welcome today in our own age, one so stubborn with opinionated certainties. 
This article draws on an oral history interview with Damien Ryan by Martin Portus now available online at the State Library of NSW.
