HIGH DRAMA
Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art has produced some of our biggest acting names, but it’s several former design students who are now being hailed as leaders in the entertainment industry.
Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art has produced some of our biggest acting names, including Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson and Hugo Weaving. But it’s several former design students who are now being hailed as leaders in the entertainment industry. As the iconic institution also celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, Vogue explores its legacy.
FOR FIONA CROMBIE, attending the 91st Academy Awards ceremony was completely surreal. The Australian production designer on the multi-award-winning royal satire The Favourite had been nominated for an Oscar for best production design on the 2018 film starring Olivia Colman and Emma Stone.
“It really was an out-of-body experience,” Crombie says from London, where she has been based with her family since 2015. “The lead-up is really long. I had two trips to LA, the nominees’ luncheon and lots of events. But the actual ceremony, you walk in and there are wall-to-wall [stars], it’s like a parallel universe – then you watch Lady Gaga on stage and think: ‘How did I get here? This is pretty funny.’”
Although Crombie wasn’t successful, the extraordinarily detailed world she created for The Favourite did earn her multiple gongs: a BAFTA, British Independent Film Award and Art Directors Guild Award among them. And the Oscar nomination itself catapulted her into a new stratosphere. After The Favourite she went on to design The King, starring Timothée Chalamet with Australian director David Michôd; and she is now working on Disney’s Cruella, starring Stone and Emma Thompson and directed by Australian Craig Gillespie.
In spite of the awards, Crombie is not a household name. In fact, she is just one of a raft of Australian film, television and stage designers achieving international success who share one important trait: they are all graduates of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). Think four-time Emmy Award-winning Game of Thrones production designer Deborah Riley; Australia’s most successful Oscar-winner Catherine Martin, a four-time Oscar winner for her costume and production design work on The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge!; The Matrix costume designer Kym Barrett; or American Hustle and Aladdin costume designer Michael Wilkinson.
Australia’s first professional theatre school is this year celebrating its 60th anniversary. Its acting and directing graduates are more visible and therefore more well-known. Such alumni include dual Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Mel Gibson; Baz Luhrmann, Hugo Weaving; Richard Roxburgh; Miranda Otto; Sam Worthington; and, more recently, Orange is the New Black’s Yael Stone; Succession’s Sarah Snook; Sydney Theatre Company (STC) artistic director Kip Williams; and Top End Wedding and The Sapphires’ Miranda Tapsell.
“For 60 years NIDA has been at the forefront of building Australia’s culture and identity. We educate and train the best of the best,” says Jennifer Bott, NIDA’s former chairman and CEO who will be replaced by the University of New South Wales’s (UNSW) director creative enterprises, Liz Hughes, in December, while an artistic director is expected to be appointed not long after.
NIDA was founded in 1958 under inaugural director and UNSW drama professor Robert Quentin. Its first intake of students was in 1959 and in 1960, 23 students graduated with a diploma in acting. Although it was devised as a theatre acting school, over the decades the school has expanded to include multiple disciplines and mediums, everything from design to technical production and directing, costume, properties, scenery and staging production management, playwriting, voice and movement. During its 60-year history, NIDA has produced 3,000 graduates.
Today the school remains proudly exclusive, with just 305 students accepted into its 15 courses. Acting remains one of the most competitive degrees, with only 24 students accepted by audition from an average 1,000 national applicants each year.
Despite being Australia’s oldest training school, it now exists within a competitive field rivalled by impressive institutions including the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and the Victorian College of the Arts.
Nevertheless, Bott proudly points out NIDA’s inclusion in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2018 top 10 list of drama schools for acting alongside New York’s Julliard School and London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, as the only school in the top 10 outside the US and UK.
“The whole point is we’re a tiny cohort giving extraordinary exposure to teachers and support staff; we’re elite in the best way,” says Bott. She attributes NIDA’s ongoing success to various factors. Students receive intense, hands-on training and are required to put on fully staged and ticketed public productions each year in one of the school’s five theatres. “It’s learning by doing,” says Bott. Professional guest directors are brought in for the showcases, including Golden Globe Award-winning actor-director and NIDA graduate Judy Davis and writer-director Michael Gow.
The collaborative nature of these shows means the students graduate with a broad network of colleagues across various disciplines, be they directors, costume designers or actors; while the majority of the 120 permanent teaching staff and 630 casuals, many of them alumni, work within the industry – multi-award-winning stage and screen designer Stephen Curtis ( The Secret River and Looking for Alibrandi) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert Oscar-winning co-designer Tim Chappel among them.
“It’s not just the odd lecture and bit of reading and writing, this is about 50 to 70 hours a week where you’re exposed in front of
Students graduate with a broad network of colleagues across various disciplines, be they directors, costume designers or actors
audiences, in front of your cohort, and given notes in public,” says Bott. “It’s tough, a very rigorous way of learning.”
Like many NIDA students Crombie didn’t apply to the school until she was in her early 20s after studying (and loathing) a law degree. She grew up in a film family – her film writer-director father Donald is a NIDA graduate and her mother Judith a former CEO of the South Australian Film Corporation – and knew from a young age she wanted to work in film.
“I was raised on Dad’s film sets and was always fascinated by it,” says Crombie. Regardless, her parents suggested she “get something solid” before moving into the unpredictable world of the arts. “I didn’t necessarily want to be a lawyer but thought I should … but I was unhappy, so applied for the NIDA design course.
“I loved it. I learnt really practical skills – model-making, draughting, how to draw. But the biggest thing was learning to work and perform under pressure.” Then head of design Peter Coo, brought in tutors whom Crombie says gave her crucial industry exposure: set designer Brian Thomson, Michael Scott-Mitchell and the late Kristian Fredrikson, whose work bridged opera, ballet, television and film, among them. “Kristian was very gentle but gently pushed and prodded me,” she says.
After a decade in theatre, Crombie began working on short films and music videos before her big break came in the form of director and NIDA graduate Justin Kurzel’s gritty feature film Snowtown in 2010, on which Crombie worked as production designer. “That film had a huge impact on all our careers, people started paying attention to what I did,” she says, adding that through Kurzel’s recommendation she was invited to work with Jane Campion on her 2013 television series Top of the Lake. “And it snowballed from there.”
Campion took her under her wing, giving Crombie a “six-month masterclass” in everything from production for film to her non-hierarchical, inclusive approach to cast and crew, all skills and attitudes Crombie took into successive films including Kurzel’s Macbeth with Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender and Garth Davis’s Mary Magdalene with Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix.
But it was lessons learnt at NIDA that have continued to prove invaluable. “Looking back, one of the things I realised at NIDA was the work ethic, the tenacity to persevere, which in some ways can’t be taught but NIDA forced you to step that up,” she says. “There are constantly hiccups that come up in film, and you have to persevere. The work ethic and not falling apart but to keep fronting up – that’s what I learnt at NIDA.”
While NIDA’s core training methods have remained, there are significant and necessary changes as well. Today’s student body and recent graduates are far more culturally and racially diverse. Crazy Rich Asians starred 2011 NIDA graduate Remy Hii; while Kip Williams’s recent STC production Lord of the Flies included nonbinary NIDA graduate Nyx Calder among his gender-blind cast.
The rapid technological changes within the arts and entertainment industry have seen NIDA’s focus shift from theatre to screen training. “In the early days we were mainly training actors for the stage and a bit of screen work, now 80 per cent of the work they’ll get will be on screen, so that has affected the way we teach,” Bott says. She embraces digital disruption, noting it creates more opportunities for graduates, who are becoming increasingly entrepreneurial in the way they collaborate to create their own digital content they then pitch to market.
The economic pressures on the school – its federal government funding has been slashed from 55 per cent in 2013 to just 34 per cent five years later – have meant it has had to diversify to find new income streams. NIDA has ramped up its public and corporate programs, coaching around 25,000 people each year through kids’ holiday workshops or bespoke corporate programs that help senior management create more effective teams. Another growing area is NIDA’s international program, ‘train the trainer’ courses, which are popular with drama teachers in China and the Middle East.
One of the biggest challenges NIDA faces today is the cost of living in Sydney, now one of the world’s most expensive cities. NIDA has always prided itself on being a national school that includes students of varying ages and backgrounds, but the increasing economic demands of Sydney living mean the school must fund-raise so it can offer financial assistance for students’ rent and food. “The nature of conservatoire training is our kids are there 70 hours a week, so it’s hard to have part-time jobs,” Bott says. “The only way we’ll continue to be truly national is to have lots of money; we need Harvard-style funding pools so we can support people’s living expenses.”
Crombie is up-front about the impact her time at NIDA has had on her career. “The discipline of being able to react quickly and articulate ideas is something I continue to take into my work today,” she says. But it goes deeper than that. “I found my community and some of my best friends at NIDA. I was happy in that environment. I loved it.” ■
“There are constantly hiccups that come up in film. The work ethic and not falling apart but to keep fronting up – that’s what I learnt at NIDA”