Director Sarah Goodes: taking career leaps

And so you have directed more than, I think it's 24 plays, but correct me if I'm wrong.

What have been some recent highlights?

I've actually got a play on at the moment that's just about to close on Saturday called Break of Day.

And it's a new Australian work by Stevie Rogers.

And I've loved working on that.

I think, you know, we're living in a time of, you know, IP is king and everyone needs to know what a story is to go and visit it.

But this was a brand new story about us.

Mm-hmm.

in Australia and a subject that's not written about a lot, which is sort of, you know, the working class and what it's like to be working, you know, night shifts and in a warehouse and trying to raise a kid.

And it's written with such... warmth and joy and and depth that I've really loved that and Stevie wrote it and it was it's that great journey of story sometimes they sort of swim around you know waiting to be caught and it was this sort of perfect meeting of times with Cat Stewart in it and um Richard Piper and Chum and just this and all these new young actors uh Sherry Lee Watson who's sort of a big superstar now and Theo Clark so it was sort of that coming together of a great cast as well

Yeah, amazing.

Yeah, I think by the time this is released, it will have closed, finished up its run.

But when you said that it was a brand new story, so you do have a bit of a reputation for bringing new Australian work to the stage.

I think it might be 17 works to the main stage.

Why is this important to you?

Look, it's always been my driving passion and it's the driving passion behind Jacaranda that Diana and I have set up as well.

It's just the importance of having our own stories and seeing our own stories on stage.

I think I know that it sort of sounds obvious, but I think at the moment when we have this sort of streaming services that are this endless tide of people of stories coming from overseas, it's easy to forget the feeling that audiences and people get to see their own lives.

And no matter how much work I've done, I always come back to it.

And even if it's an adaptation of something known, it's done through an Australian writer's very unique perspective of that.

But one of the main ones was I developed a play called Sunday with a Melbourne theatre company with a writer, Anthony Way, And it was about Sunday Reid and Sydney Nolan and Joy Hester.

And it was developed over COVID.

So it took a very long time to come to fruition.

But by the time it opened, it was just Melbourne had just opened after these kind of grinding, soul-destroying lockdowns.

And just seeing the audience being able to hear about the river and the light and their city and the beauty of that countryside, it was extraordinary.