Amadeus dreams and Bathurst St realities: the alchemy behind Everynight

Mr. Squiggle’s SUDS ascendancy 

Image credit: Thomas Hennessy

A few weeks ago, I sat in on one of the rehearsals of Everynight, SUDS’ 2022 major production, and sat down for an interview with its creative leads. As the performers on stage were stepped through a cube-rearranging scene change, co-writer and chief puppeteer Tom Hetherington-Welch emerged from stage left.

“It’s ready.” He whispered, almost inaudibly to me, but spotlight-bright to everyone else.

The transition choreography ground to a halt as excited murmurs spread throughout the Cellar Theatre.

Oliver Durbidge, co-writer and sole director, could barely contain his glee.

“We’re gonna rehearse with the Boss.” He announced, the B distinctly capitalised.

And, a few moments later, that capitalisation was explained. A huge, suited puppet was manoeuvred onto the stage. Almost decapitated by a low-slung rope, deft handling threaded the needle. This was the Boss: part Everynight creation, part leftover puppet-head from an 80s television commercial. There wasn’t a single face that didn’t watch on in humble appreciation, creative imagination, or vacant dissociation as this cardboard and papier-mâché exoskeleton was lowered onto cast member Patrick McKenzie. He can’t see anything while suited up, so, like a grandparent who’d recently had a double hip replacement, man and puppet were led to centre stage by a squadron of attending cast members. 

“How many fingers am I holding up?”, asked Sam Hill-Wade, Dream Cop cast member and apparent production jack-of-all-trades. A sightless McKenzie walks into a nearby wall and the scene cracks on.

This is Everynight.

~-~

Pitching dates aside, the seeds of this show were sown in lockdown 2021, as Durbidge watched The Muppets and listened to Gorillaz. Originally, it was going to be Amadeus with dubstep, then it was going to be a reimagining of the National Theatre’s Chiwetel Ejiofor-led rendition of Everyman. Iteration and evolution are a big feature of this SUDS major — just when you think you’ve pinned it down, Everynight manages to elude you. While SUDS did put on a production of Amadeus, it wasn’t Durbidge that did it (and, by my recollection, dubstep was notably absent). As for Everyman, the closest it’s come to Australia is through live screenings in boutique cinemas and glowing Guardian reviews. It did lend its name to the SUDS major though, with man swapped out for night. It was in this churning crucible of Jim Henson films, virtual alternative-rock bands, and reimagined 15th century English drama, that the essence of Everynight was forged and a vague narrative outline presented itself.

Oliver Durbidge (OD): Then one day, I realised that I wanted puppets in it. And, well, who am I gonna go to if I want puppets?

That’s where co-writer and chief puppeteer Tom Hetherington-Welch came in. The grandson of puppeteer, puppet designer, and television luminary Norman Hetherington, perhaps most well known for his long-running children’s television show Mr.Squiggle, you could say that muppets and marionettes are in Tom’s blood. It was in the late Hetherington’s Mosman puppet workshop that much of Act 1 was pieced together.

OD: It was in Tom’s grandad’s studio, surrounded by all his puppets, that we started talking about what we wanted to accomplish storywise, who are these characters, what’s the plot, what are we trying to say. And then it kind of grew from that.

It’s a space that’s pretty familiar to Tom. Since Norman’s death in late 2010, he’s spent countless school holidays and long weekends holed up in the workshop with his mother Rebecca. It fell to her to organise, categorise, and ultimately archive the brimming studio collection and all its affiliated history. While some of the collection has made its way to museums and special interest organisations, select pieces have been given new life by Everynight.

Tom Hetherington-Welch (THW): Everytime we got to our props list, I’d send it to Mum, and say ‘What do we have?’. We got all sorts of bits and bobs, cause he kept everything. And he was very much a puppet maker focused on recycling, he made everything out of odds and ends, rubbish, just anything. We’ve had the same attitude. And he never fully retired, so there was still stuff he was working on. We had two spare arms, two spare legs, a different body piece, and we just put that all together to make B Jr (Everynight’s marionette manifestation of its human protagonist). But if you look closely, the hands, they’ve been painted because before they were green with red nails — it was for a dragon puppet. But we’ve painted over that for human hands.

OD: If you look extra close, you can see that she still has claws.

That’s not to say that this production is simply riding the puppeted coattails of Norman and his string-and-wire empire. A majority of the show’s puppets were made from scratch by Everynight’s in-house design team and where vintage Hetherington elements have been used, they’ve just been added on to fresh models. More recycling than ransacking. 

Curiously, this isn’t the first time that Hetherington puppetry has graced USyd. In 1968, Smiley's Good Teeth Puppet Theatre, a project funded and propelled by the University of Sydney’s Dental Health Education and Research Foundation and created by none other than Norman Hetherington himself, saw its first performance. Its intention was to promote good dental hygiene and philosophy amongst young children, and the titular Smiley and his nasty toothache were a smash hit amongst the intended primary school demographic. Perhaps a little closer to the tone of Everynight, Hetherington Sr also worked with USyd’s now defunct Department of Indonesian and Malayan Studies (an early victim of cuts and fees) to create a performance of Irwan’s Rabi in the style of traditional Javanese shadow puppet theatre. With Hetherington training eager student performers and contributing to the final script and score, Irwan’s Rabi was staged at the latter end of 1980 in a bombastic profusion of plywood and foam-rubber. Norman even found time to leave his mark on Everynight’s performance space, the Seymour Centre’s Reginald Theatre, with University of Sydney Theatre Workshop productions of Cyclops and Doña Rosita the Spinster both being staged in the much loved black-box studio theatre and featuring the puppetry wonders of Hetherington himself. Talk about continuity! 

But long gone are the halcyon days of University puppeting past. Unlike Norman’s professional USyd theatre experiences, Oliver, Tom, and the Everynight team have had to grapple with the many hostile campus forces that seek to undermine student theatre.

THW: Rehearsal spaces are just not available at USyd. It’s been a big frustration this year, feeling unsupported by the Uni. 

OD: We’re putting this show on in spite of the University.

While student performance societies suffer through this chronic space crisis year-in-year-out, the caravan of puppets that accompanies Everynight rehearsals complicates an already delicate situation.

OD: On Friday we had to find an external venue to rehearse, it was at Town Hall, on Bathurst Street. So, we chucked everything into a Go-Get van — all the blocks, all the puppets, everything. But obviously, we couldn’t afford to have the go-get booking from 4:30pm-11pm. So, at 4:30, we’ve packed the van, we take it to Bathurst St, but Matt’s (Matthew Forbes, Music Director) not there and he has the swipe, so we can’t open the door. 

THW: So we unload onto the streets of Sydney — puppets, and blocks, and all these old-school suitcases.

A classic anecdote for a behind-the-scenes profile like this, but probably rock bottom for the SUDS major team.

But when they’re not piled onto the Bathurst St footpath, it’s easy to get caught up in the show-biz magic of puppeteering, after all, it is the crux of Everynight’s elevator pitch. Yet, beyond the strings and wires, there’s all the hallmarks of excellent, yet conventional student theatre.

THW: Whenever Ollie and I get really stressed, the conversation we always go back to is ‘our cast is amazing’. They’re so good, they’re committed, they understand what the show is from our perspective, and they understand how they can help us achieve that.

And there’s no lie in that. No one involved in the creation of Everynight is only doing just one thing, and that applies to the cast especially. During my brief glimpses of the dream factory behind the Dream Factory, not a single thumb was twiddled or lolly-gagged. When actors weren’t acting, they were painting, or polishing, or panelling, or, yes indeed, puppeting. Along with a dedicated production team of set designers, costume designers, puppet designers, and production assistants, it seemed like this all-hands-on-deck approach was really the only way for a production of Everynight’s magnitude and scale to get out of the harbour.

THW: We wanted it to be this big celebration of creativity, and that extends beyond us. We are just the people who are facilitating other people to be creative as well.

That commitment to creative collaboration isn’t just SUDS pitch buzzwords though — if it takes a village to raise a baby, then it takes the same to raise a SUDS major. According to Tom and Oliver, they started the production process with just Act 1 because they wanted as much cast input as possible. And they got it.

THW: In terms of character, in terms of how they see their own creativity, and then incorporating that into the show. Especially with song lyrics.

OD: Every song has been a collaboration between Matt and Max coming up with music, and then the actors coming up with a lot of lyrics.

If puppets are to be the crowning jewel of Everynight, then its soundtrack has to come in at a close second. Music Director Matthew Forbes was involved with Everynight before it was even Everynight, back during Oliver’s doomed dreams of Amadeus. But, Forbes survived the  back-and-forth backlash to mastermind much of the show’s musical score.

OD: In the script I wrote out when a song would happen, and Matt would create it… I said think of Gorillaz, Talking Heads, Sparks, and The Muppets (specifically ‘Life’s a Happy Song’).

With this eclectic set of ‘vibes’, Forbes, his team, and the actors who contributed lyrics produced something truly special — show-stopping, without being show-stealing.

OD: In the end, the quality of the music is beyond anything we could have imagined. 

Which is something you can say about a lot of Everynight, it's beyond imagination. While the promise and polish makes it hard to believe that this is the product of student theatre, it couldn’t have been imagined in any other space. Like puppetry, student performance is exposed and vulnerable — a fabric facade supported by wires and cords and PVC pipes, begging to be believed by a sceptical, if not forgiving, audience. But Everynight doesn’t shy away from this, it embraces the seams and makes the operators the stars. In a world of dream chasing, it shows you how they’re made — strings and all.

Everynight is on at the Seymour Centre until November 12, tickets available here.