Sophie Henderson, star and writer of Workmates, reflects on the love affair that inspired her new film.
People don’t trust theatre because bad theatre is really bad. I’ve seen it. I’ve made it. And I’m sorry if theatre’s let you down, but I hope you’ll give it another chance because sometimes, magic happens. Sometimes, completely unpredictably, perfection is achieved. Something unimaginably beautiful happens between actors and audience – sometimes only for thirty seconds – and you’re part of it.
Theatre is my favourite thing because of these shared moments. Because you have to be there. Because when that magic’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t have it back. So there’s a little bit of grief in it too. I’ll spend my whole life chasing that magic. Workmates is about how hard and how fun it is to make theatre at the bottom of the world for no money.
Workmates is a memory film. It’s a true story made untrue by exaggeration, based on the time in my twenties when I ran Tāmaki’s Basement Theatre – a tiny, broke, much-loved venue at the back of a carpark. I spent five years running it with my best friend, who I definitely wasn’t in love with.
The film is about all the dodgy (illegal) things we did to keep the doors open. And the intense relationships (showmances) that happen when you give your whole self to a place – making something from nothing, living at work and calling it art. You fall for the theatre and for the people in it because you don’t have anything else.
I play a character based on the worst version of me. She’s me if I’d never left the Basement. Someone who believes it’s necessary to break rules to make magic, who thinks theatre is more important than audience members dying, who wants everything to stay the same forever and would do anything to keep the theatre and keep her friend, who she realises she’s in love with at the exact moment he tries to leave. The film is pretty damning of what I did to make art happen – love makes people reckless … I keep assuring Creative New Zealand and the Silo Theatre Trust that I’m a responsible arts administrator now.
We shot Workmates on location at theatres around Auckland – Basement Theatre, the Kiri Te Kanawa and the crumbly, tragic St James. I promise Basement is legit now, but a lot of the film is from real life. We really did cut a hole in the floor to make a trapdoor. We put ice-cream containers over the smoke detectors because the fire department kept turning up and fining us. Chris Parker did get discovered at Basement. And we did take a lot of money from a bad person to do good things. It was the best job I ever had.
Theatre is my first love and my favourite thing. When I was at drama school, I fell in love with what Silo was making. I remember thinking: if I could just work for that company, I’d be happy. My first acting job was with Silo. It was there that I met love of my life, director of my scripts, father of my children, Curtis Vowell, making a play together.
It’s in the spaces between that theatre comes alive: the way actors look at each other. The way an audience stops breathing. The way the light hits a face. There’s an alchemy when people come together in a room. When an audience meets a performance. Something is made from nothing, and a bunch of strangers pretend together in the dark.
There’s a conversation in Workmates between my character and Chris Parker’s (Pete Harper) where we fight about whether theatre is better than television:
Lucy: TV is the opposite of theatre.
Pete: It is.
Lucy: I mean, it’s not as magic.
Pete: Mmmmm, it’s pretty magic. That’s why they say the magic of television.
Pete is ever-polite and friendly while Lucy tries to pick a fight with him.
Lucy: It’s not live, though.
Pete: Our show’s live.
Lucy: Yeah but you don’t have an audience believing in something together in the dark …
Pete: We have a studio audience.
Lucy: Yeah, but is it a genuine dream space, Pete!?
Lucy’s feelings are coming out sideways at him.
Pete: Are you OK?
I will always choose theatre. I’m in it for the applause. And I will keep fighting to get audiences because they’re the whole point. Audience matters. If people don’t go to theatre, theatre dies. There are no films in cinemas without audiences. I have to believe that audiences will show up. To feel something with others at the same time, to lean in together and laugh and cringe and cry. I’ll always be in love with the stage and the people in front of it.
My character in Workmates would do anything for the theatre, it’s her greatest flaw and her greatest romance. Thank you to everyone who still searches for the shared experience of the movies and theatre – the film and theatre makers and the people keeping the lights on love you for it.
Sophie is the Artistic Director of Silo Theatre, she wrote and acts in Workmates. Workmates is in cinemas now. Silo’s ‘Mother Play: a play in five evictions’ opens at Q Theatre on September 4.
