A love letter to the theatre that also shows its dark side

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Before Allee Richards was an author and theatre lighting technician, she was a dancer. Her love for it stemmed from a callisthenics class she attended at the age of eight, when she was invited by her best friend. “I remember coming home and being like, ‘I have to do this’. I just was completely intoxicated by it,” she says.

A year later, callisthenics turned into regular ballet classes. Richards acknowledges with a laugh that the fundamentals of ballet can be “boring” to learn: “Obviously, the most enjoyable part about it for me was the costumes and the theatre and everything.”

Author and theatre lighting techncian Allee Richards has had plays produced at La Mama Theatre in Melbourne.Credit: Jason South

Ballet was Richards’ first taste of being on stage, and she was hooked. When she got to high school, she performed in school musicals, as an actor or in the dance troupe: Fame, Cabaret, Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease.

“I was an incredibly embarrassed and self-conscious kid. I was always worried that everyone at school hated me or that I wasn’t cool,” Richards says. “But then when I was on stage for the school musical, I would be right out the front with the big face and doing the jazz hands and all of it. I don’t know how I would have survived high school if it hadn’t been for that.”

A Light in the Dark is Melbourne writer Allee Richards’ second novel.Credit: Hachette

An appreciation for the wonder and potential of youth theatre runs through Richards’ second novel, A Light in the Dark.

The book follows Iris, a misfit teenager who lives for her annual school musical and craves the attention and admiration of her unnamed drama teacher. She grows up to become a lightning technician, like her author, but struggles with grief and addiction. When she finds out that her drama teacher had an affair with another student when they were at school, she begins to re-examine her memories of the time.

The book is redolent of issues facing the Australian theatre industry, including sexual harassment and assault. A 2017 survey by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance found that between 40 and 60 per cent of performers had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the industry committed to change, including the implementation of a code of conduct governing sexual harassment and bullying, and the establishment of intimacy guidelines. The federal government’s Creative Workplaces body, announced as part of the National Cultural Policy, was also created earlier this year to ensure that organisations meet minimum workplace safety standards.

Richards knows the issues facing the industry intimately, having worked in theatre in Melbourne over the past decade – as a playwright (her plays have been produced at La Mama), usher, stage doorkeeper and lighting technician.

“There is this really dark side of the industry that I wanted to expose and grapple with,” she says, citing a 2016 Victoria University study that found higher than average levels of substance abuse, suicide and mental illness in the performing arts.

She recalls her anger about comments made by legal professionals during the defamation trials undertaken by Geoffrey Rush and Craig McLachlan.

One was a statement by the judge during the Rush trial, Justice Michael Wigney: “I wouldn’t say ‘yummy’ or ‘scrumptious’ to anybody in my workplace but I’m a boring lawyer, and Mr Rush is an actor in a theatrical workplace where people use florid language.”

Richards explains that she felt “white-hot with rage” hearing those words. “There are so many things that aren’t normal about our job, that are so joyful and so fun and so beautiful, and it’s like that’s being weaponised to excuse [inappropriate language].”

In his judgment, Justice Wigney ultimately said the appropriateness or otherwise of using that kind of language depended on the context of the workplace and relationship in which it was used.

‘I do think that I regret it and I should have pursued it.’

“It’s really hard giving up all your weekends and your evenings, and getting disconnected from your family and friends, and working on New Year’s Eve and over the Christmas holidays, so you need the joy to make it worth it,” says Richards.

It’s not the first time the author has drawn upon her life in theatre in her writing. Small Joys of Real Life, her first novel, is about Eva, a successful actor who gets pregnant after a one-night stand and decides to quit her job and have the baby.

“[She] hates the industry and says a lot of negative things about the monotony and the annoyance of having to perform the same show all the time,” Richards says.

A Light in the Dark is then a kind of course correction. “I had to redeem myself and write everything that I love about theatre,” she says.

It was something Richards was thinking about a lot when she was writing the book over the course of the pandemic, when theatres closed: “I was really missing work and yearning and romanticising [it].”

But while she missed being in the theatre, she never considered going back on stage as an actor. After she finished school, she says she lacked the confidence to admit that she wanted to pursue acting. “I do think that I regret it and I should have pursued it,” she says. “I also pull myself up on that, and I’m like, ‘Well, if you really wanted to do it enough, you would have’.”

Richards points out that writers can develop their craft in private, while actors can’t, and that rejection for an actor feels more personal than receiving a negative book review.

“It hurts, but it’s a rejection of the work,” she says. “If you’re an actor, that rejection is so much more about you … I don’t know if I actually would have been able to do it [be an actor]. You can fail a lot more privately as a writer.”

A Light in the Dark is anything but a failure. It’s a love letter to the theatre, even as it simultaneously shines a light on its issues. “I really hope it’s embraced by theatre nerds,” says Richards. “The theatre, drama groups of the country, they’re my people.”

A Light in the Dark is published by Hachette at $32.99

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