A Desire for Family

Director Andrei Schiller-Chan talks to Coral Drouyn about his Sol III Production company and its second production.

Director Andrei Schiller-Chan is nothing if not eclectic. When he started his theatre company several years ago, it had a strong manifesto - “To ask questions and provide truth” - though Andrei is aware that no truths are absolute. He doesn’t see himself as a crusader but there is no doubt that he is an intelligent and spiritual man with a strong social conscience. The company’s first play, The Exonerated, was one of the breakout productions of last year, with Andrei championing the cause of justice for those wrongly convicted on death row in much the same way as The Innocence Project does.

Part of the proceeds from that production went into rehabilitation for released and soon to be released prisoners, and this production is raising money for the Australian Conservation Fund and, in particular, protection of the Great Barrier Reef.

“I do believe we have a duty to look after the planet, our home, and our family, the human race,” he tells me. “That’s not a pretension, it’s common sense. I have such a mixed heritage – Chinese/Malaysian on one side – German, Russian, Jew on the other. How could I not accept that we are all part of the same family.”

“Family” is a constant theme in Andrei’s life and work, fuelled by his estrangement from his father from an early age, due to his father’s overseas work pressures.. He is the first to concede that the need for redemption fuels his commitment to theatre.

“I never got over the feeling of my father being away too much,” he says frankly, “and when he died, when I was 18, I felt responsible for not reaching out. I had to work through my own guilt, which the inner child just didn’t understand. We all have that inner child, even when we are responsible, functioning adults. And if we don’t acknowledge that, deal with it, and nourish that child, we’re in big trouble somewhere along the line.”

That explains the interest in long-term prisoners with The Exonerated, but why turn to a classicist like O’Neill for the second production?

“Precisely because he IS a classicist, and those writers – like Shakespeare, and Sophocles long before him  – tackle universal themes. Sadly, they are as current today as they were 2,000 years ago,” Andrei explains. “It’s family at the core of those stories we know and relate to. Abandonment, dysfunction, obsession, expectation, alienation, love, hate, greed, jealousy, redemption – these are the emotions that drive playwrights to express themselves through stories, and they are the emotions that also drive families.”

I suggest that you can’t tell any story until you put it into the hands of characters, and include family, even if the family is part of the back-story. That’s true whether you’re writing Romeo and Juliet or Home and Away.

“Absolutely,” Andrei agrees, “and the reason we relate is because we ALL have family - we either love them, hate and reject them, seek forgiveness from them or blame them. That’s what Eugene O’Neill explores in his plays, that’s what drives him, and he does so in such an eloquent way that he rightly won the Nobel Prize and not one but four Pulitzer Prizes. In over forty plays he tackled those emotions of family and at least gave us a chance to recognise and acknowledge them.”

But aren’t all these emotions now out in the open and being dealt with?

“Yes and No,” Andrei concedes. “Some of us have more understanding about others, yet can’t face what is in ourselves. Some of us are looking for someone to blame, or someone to fix them without realising the answer lies inside them. ”

Doesn’t that all sound too daunting for the average theatregoer? O’Neill is known as ‘heavy’ writer, depressing and without much joy. That can seem very melodramatic.

“Well he can be,” Andrei concedes, “but it’s my job as director to ensure that the audience isn’t swamped by the darkness. I work with my actors to find the light in the darkness, and it is there, along with hope and redemption. That’s what we focus on and that certainly helps to take away that stigma of Melodrama.”

Desire Under the Elms has a brilliant story of betrayal, lust, dysfunction – all the classic elements for great entertainment.

“Exactly,” Andrei agrees. “It’s a marvellous story with a young wife betraying her husband, a son defying his father, a father seeking vengeance. It’s got it all. “Sophocles said,‘One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.’ But some of us don’t know, even now, where or how to find it.”

Andrei is using many of the highly acclaimed cast from The Exonerated.

“These guys are a part of me - my blood and my conscience. I’ve been hooked on theatre since I was 19, and they share my passion for it,” he explains. “If it’s possible, Sol III will become a full time repertory company; we all want to keep working together.” Meanwhile, you can see Desire Under The Elms at Chapel off Chapel from July 7^th -24^th.

“It may be a classic,” he says, “but I can promise it won’t be boring!”