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[0:00] Jeff Malone: Welcome to Half Hour with Jeff and Richie.

[0:02] Richie Grasso: I'm Jeff.

[0:02] Richie Grasso: And I'm Richie, and today on our show, we welcome a very special guest, Kip Williams.

[0:06] Kip Williams: Thank you for having me.

[0:08] Richie Grasso: Yay. Kip Williams is a multi-award-winning writer and director known for revolutionizing the stage with his groundbreaking cine-theater productions. His acclaimed gothic trilogy, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula, have captivated audiences worldwide. Kip's adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, starring Sarah Snook, opened on Broadway in March 2025 to huge acclaim and was nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Direction of a Play. He began his career at Sydney Theatre Company, where he became the youngest artistic director in the company's history and championed new Australian writing and gender parity in theater. Kip's innovative work has been hailed as the future of theater by The Economist and has earned him international recognition for pushing the boundaries of live performance.

[0:54] Jeff Malone: Wow, what a bio that is incredible.

[0:56] Richie Grasso: An amazing bio.

[0:58] Jeff Malone: And we'll start before we start. Congratulations on your Tony nomination. That's wonderful.

[1:01] Kip Williams: Thank you.

[1:03] Kip Williams: Thank you. It's very exciting. Very it's sort of um, you know, uh kind of hard to believe it's happened. It's really, really thrilling.

[1:11] Richie Grasso: Amazing. So, Kip, to start things off, can you please first tell us how you first got started in the theater industry? And was there a particular moment that kind of made you go, oh, I want to do directing as my main focus?

[1:25] Kip Williams: Well, um, I'm the grandchild of an actress. Um actually Sarah Snook and I had that in common. Both our grandmothers were actresses. And um mine encouraged her seven grandchildren to sort of gather in her living room and with access to all of her wigs and costumes, put on plays for her. Uh and I think I just happened to be the, you know, the one who would corral it into some sort of shape. Uh so I kind of began directing when I was a very, very small child without even knowing what directing was. Um and then, you know, I was just uh theatre-obsessed my whole life. You know, I always wrote plays, I would always go into the school hall and devise plays with my friends. Um I started my first theatre company when I was 11 years old.

Uh Terrible Productions. Um, it was just always a massive passion for me. And um, and I went and studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, um, the same school that Snook went to as a great, great institution and studied directing there. And yeah, was really, really lucky to get a job at Sydney Theatre Company off the back of my graduation production at NIDA, and um and then my career sort of took off from there.

[2:43] Richie Grasso: It's amazing. And so talking about adapting Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, you know, that's a pretty famous work, and you completely adapted it and directed it. Uh what drew you to that specific title in particular?

[2:56] Kip Williams: Well, I first discovered it when I was about 14, 15 years old. I was in the ninth grade in Sydney, Australia, and I was a, you know, I said like theatre-obsessed little queer kid who had never encountered Oscar Wilde up until that point. And uh I was at an all-boys school. Um, so uh some of my classmates and I were playing the women in the show, and I played Cecily Cardew as an 18-15-year-old. So my entire entry point into Oscar Wilde was framed through the idea of a play, The Importance of Being Earnest, which is about the difference between the private life and the public life, and um this experience of performing gender. Uh and it was sort of like a very defining creative experience for me as a young person, and introduced me to Wilde's writing, and through that I discovered his own novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, never knowing that, you know, however many years later I would come to turn it into a piece of theatre.

But I did return to it over and over again throughout my life because it is this sort of seminal text and an extraordinary piece of writing. But it wasn't until about seven years ago now when I reread it, I was sort of looking at a host of gothic texts, but it really jumped out to me as the one that felt um almost prophetic in the way that it spoke to um the preoccupations of the contemporary world that we're enmeshed in. Um particularly the way in which Wilde envisaged a world that was obsessed with youth and beauty, and where the individual took um primary position in life, and Dorian Gray is entirely a story about that.

[4:39] Richie Grasso: It's pretty amazing. And your work has been described as cine-theater. For listeners who might not be familiar, how would you explain this approach and what excites you most about blending live performance with cinematic techniques?

[4:53] Kip Williams: It's a great question, and um it's a word that I made up about four years ago. I love it, I love it. That has taken on a life of its own. It slightly means different things to different people now. For me, um, you know, I've been using live video and cameras in my practice for about ten years. I also direct a lot of work that doesn't have any screens or anything involved in it as well. But um, when I began using cameras, uh one of my number one principles was that the video all had to be live because theatre is a live art form, takes place in the now, it's transient, it's here and then it's gone. So the video had to reflect that. And even in my very first production, which I did used video, which was a fraction of Suddenly Last Summer, the Tennessee Williams play, who staged at the Sydney Opera House.

In the chase sequence at the end, the actors all ran into the bowels and basement of the Sydney Opera House, and I had my production under saying, pre-record it, and I was like, No, it has to be live, so we're funneling cables into the uh the depths of the Sydney Opera House. Uh but Cine Theatre is somewhat different from just the use of live video, which, you know, has been alive in many practitioners that have influenced me, like Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne and Ivo van Hove, and you know, projection has been used on stages since the 1930s, it's been around for a long time. What's interesting about Cine Theatre is that it is for me, the pure definition is the synthesis of live video, pre-recorded video, and live performance, all in the one moment, and that can manifest in a number of different ways.

And for those who've seen Dorian Gray, you will see a number of the different ways in which it can manifest. Um, but the purest form is when there is a live performer on the stage for the audience, juxtaposed with a screen where they are live on that screen and interacting with a pre-recorded version of themselves in that one moment, and that is an exceptionally difficult thing to pull off, and it took a terrifying creative leap of faith in my own practice to um follow that directorial vision and realize it with the sort of detail and rigor that is required to do that live. Um but uh you know the effect is thrilling and it has this sort of magical um seductive effect on the audience, and it's always deployed in the story at the exact moment where either Dorian is being seduced into a particular perspective by Lord Henry, or then later on in the production where Dorian is seducing the audience back into his pocket.

[7:25] Richie Grasso: It's pretty amazing, and I think you know, not to compare, of course, but other ways we're seeing this is Jamie Lloyd's doing something like this with Sunset Boulevard at the same time, right? We have some things happening like this. So when we see multiple productions doing this on Broadway, I guess my next question would be do you see your work with Dorian Gray as maybe a glimpse into the future of Broadway or of professional theater around the world? I'm maybe not every show doing something like this, but do you see more productions like this coming in future years?

[7:54] Kip Williams: I do, I do, and I think for me, um, you know, uh the only moment that I will ever deploy technology like this is when the story asks for it. And a story like Dorian Gray completely asked for it. In fact, you know, the vision that I had for it directorally was so sort of terrifying for me that I put it in the bottom drawer of my brain and said I'm not doing this, but it sort of crept out became undeniable because it had to be told in this way. Um so, yes, I do as long as the story asks for it. But any, and I suppose you know, I see it as being um, you know, a continuation of a tradition of theater makers and live storytellers using technology. You know, you go back millennia, and human beings were using fire to create shadows in order to we still do use technology in this way in order to tell story and to create imaginative universes for audiences.

So for me, the kind of guiding principle is as long as it is being done in a way that is true to the theatrical form, um, to the fact that it's a live art form, that it's a spatial art form, and that it's an art form that invites an audience's imagination onto the stage in order to make that story real, then I think there will always be a place for technology in theatre, and it continues a, you know, millennia-long tradition of that being the case.

[9:18] Richie Grasso: Totally. It really does. And we're looking at this because we were, we didn't really know what to expect when we went into this play, because we have not seen anything like this. I mean, maybe we talked about seeing something in Disney where it was kind of like um, uh like a video kind of reacting to the audience. So to see this and having an actor now kind of act with themselves. Some audiences are kind of saying, like, this is not uh traditional play, you know, if you want to quote it like that. But how do you kind of respond to them when they say like it needs to be a full cast or like you it needs to have everything else?

[9:57] Kip Williams: I mean, I direct plays with you know 15, 20, 25 people in them, and I adore that experience. I think you want to create uh a variety of experiences for audiences, and it ultimately comes down to the story that you're telling. One of the reasons why, the central reason why this production has one performer in it, is to honor and explore Wilde's notion that, to quote him, a human is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature. This notion that we contain multitudes, and you experience that in watching Sarah split 26 times before your eyes. Wilde himself described the three central characters in the novel as being these three different iterations of himself, that Lord Henry is who people understood him to be publicly, that Dorian is who he fantasized as being, and that Basil Hallward, the painter, was who he was privately.

And I didn't discover that quote from a letter that he wrote until after I'd written my first draft. But when I came across that quote, I was like, okay, I'm on the right path. This is entirely in step with what Wilde is exploring within this piece, this form of the one-person show and this technology that permits it to split. I think for me also, you know, I had this really amazing lunch last week with a brilliant novelist who um who was talking about the way in which contemporary technology has really created a rupture point in storytelling in lots of different media and art forms, and how um, you know, in the novel, um the mobile phone has changed the way in which characters communicate with each other in such a radical way that the structure of drama and the structure of narrative has been completely redefined.

But um, she was also lamenting that so often the new novels that she's reading don't have mobile phones in them. And she said this great thing, which I think is brilliant. She said it would be the equivalent of um of us living in the world that we are right now where there's airplanes but only writing stories about bosses and buggies. Like that that's the equivalent of not acknowledging that there's technology in our life. And I really prescribe to the um Shakespearean philosophy that the role of storytelling is to hold the mirror up to nature, and you know, without wanting to give too much away for the people who haven't seen Dorian yet, but the moment when the mobile phone comes on stage in the production halfway through, you suddenly feel a thousand people go, Oh, this story that I had given myself over to and immersed myself in the sort of Victorian gothic milieu of isn't just a story about 135 years ago, it's a story about now, and this is my life on stage, you know.

And I see young people in the audience when we start using the Snapchat filters and the TikTok filters, go, oh, this is about me, this is about my life. And that motivates me as a storyteller and as a director to want to make the stories that we tell in these spaces feel like they're speaking directly to the moment in which we're living.

[13:04] Richie Grasso: It's such a great point. And I want to kind of dive into a little bit of some of these technical elements, mobile phone as well as the projection. How do you, I mean if you could, I mean this could be a very long question answering question, but maybe a brief version of it. Walk us through some of the process of this. You know, most people are in rehearsal rooms that are just empty spaces with stand-in props, and they don't get to see the full tech into the theater. So is your rehearsal room session shorter because your tech time in the theater is now longer, or is that like a budget issue? Like how do, how much time were you actually in the theater working with these technical elements?

[13:38] Kip Williams: Yeah, that's a really great question. Um, maybe not as much time as we really would love to have, given how technically each the show is. So in a standard piece of theater, obviously is rehearsed in about five weeks. Um we rehearsed this show in five weeks, which includes filming every single second of pre-record within that five weeks.

[14:00] Kip Williams: Wow.

[14:01] Kip Williams: And there's about two hours worth when you put all of the um some of those performances play at the same time, but there's about two hours worth of footage that we have to capture. So it's essentially my like making a feature film and a play in the same amount of time that you just make a play.

[14:19] Kip Williams: Amazing.

[14:20] Kip Williams: So the degree of difficulty is incredibly high, and I have an incredible team who I work with who, you know, work magic to pull it off in that compressed time period. But the other thing for me directorially is that, you know, and this is the benefit of having worked with this technology for 10 years now. I have a very clear process about how I work in the room. I come with a very clear concept for how the video is going to work.

[14:46] Kip Williams: So there's an incredibly clear framework for it. But I also camera block very quickly. So I try to storyboard as little as possible, in the same way that is if I'm working on a theater show without any technology in it. I don't like to do too much, you know, puppet master work in the model box before working on the floor with the performers, because for me the most exciting thing as a director is to witness the truth that's taking place between actors and then figure out how to shape that in response to what's being uncovered organically between the truth that's alive in the room. So when that manifests from a kind of camera perspective of me having to block the cameras and the cinematography very quickly, but that's how I do it, and I love that's that's like pure creativity for me.

You know, that's much more exciting for me. So there's a lot of pre work done in terms of how it's conceived, and I have a great set and costumes designer, Mark Hallwell and composer Clemens Williams and Nick Schlepper the lighting designer, Dave Bergman, the video designer, but the actual camera blocking of it, a lot of it I am doing in those five weeks on the floor to that that's the most pure creative experience for me, and that and you know it's it's really cool. And now Sarah's performance in this show is like out of this world, remarkable.

[16:16] Kip Williams: I and you know, you're now dealing with her with pre-recorded video and directing her on the stage. What was that whole process like with getting her now to interact with herself as other characters, which is like crazy when you talk about it, but it's so cool. So cool, and and really blessed to have an actor who not only is it's a genius chameleon creative acting force, but also has such an incredible sense of dramaturgy as well. Sarah's capacity to understand the micro and the macro is pretty godsmacking. You know, and I was also benefiting from her coming off the back of having worked several years in succession, which you know, if you think about one of the things that's brilliant about that show is that it's really long scenes with dense dialogue, like beautifully written dialogue within them.

And I think it's no surprise that so many of the actors from the show have gone straight out of succession back into the theater because many of them come from the theater, many of the writers come from the theater. It sort of had a spirit of the theatre in it, succession. I think that's part of it, part of its magic source. So she was she was well honed. She had good muscles to do these incredibly long takes because they're most of the performances are single-shot in pre-record long takes, in order for it to be as theatrical as possible, not to be some sort of curated edited thing.

[17:49] Kip Williams: And then when it came to her live performance in responding to those cameras, she had years worth of experience of dancing the steady cam operators, which she literally has to do in this show, dancing at points in time. And so the specificity and detail of the choreography of this piece was very second nature to her. And you know, she's her capacity for detail and rigor is astonishing and all and limitless. You know, and I was literally on the phone to her half an hour before my chat with you both talking about some new ideas that we're gonna be trying in the show tonight because we both share this relentless desire to continue to paint. I suppose that's like that the perfect metaphor for this show is that it's like a painting. Like a painting, you can always be adding brush strokes here and there, and we both share that sort of obsessive quality to want to keep going.

[19:00] Kip Williams: That's amazing. And it's a live, it makes it feel living and breathing at all times, even after the show has been locked, as they say, and put up to an opening night, it still can kind of feel it, you know, that it's amazing. Yeah, exactly. That's such a great point, particularly in a show where there is such an insane level of detail and precision required, that the moment a show like that becomes locked is the moment it dies. And one of the things that was you know, it was one of the very first things Sarah and I spoke about was that relationship with audience and how alive that has to be. She obviously talks directly to the audience so much throughout the show, and having that breath and that flexibility and that sort of sense of like old school theatrical vaudeville, it's a live show. Energy to it is is you know, that's sort of the that's how the production begins with that narrator character who is really inviting you into that world that's been conjured before your eyes.

[20:03] Kip Williams: And a technical question here, because this I mean, maybe this ruins the magic a little bit, but when she is talking to the pre-recorded videos, is it cued or is it reacting to her? So here's some here's some technical stuff that I'm very happy to share because it just like goes to show how talented Sarah is. It is not cued, so she has an exact time between lines. I have a feeling that was what it was, but I was nervous to think that because it's so precise. It's so precise, she has this incredible inner metronome, you know, and that rhythm has been really honed in rehearsals to find the music of that scene. Oscar Wilde's language is so rhythmic, so that's been a huge guide for us. You know, I mean, I sort of think about my task almost like being a conductor of a Sarah Snook orchestra, where there's like 26 Sarah Snook each playing a different instrument, and they have to play a symphonic sound, but also be distinct so you know which instrument it is, and she has the most amazing sort of musical sensibility, and also it's different every night. The way she plays the line is she finds a new rhythm within that space every night, so it's kind of incredible. So that is that is that's how that works.

[21:19] Kip Williams: Wow. All of the face tuning and Snapchat and everything is live. Some people have gone, it's impossible that that she's doing that without giving too much away the thing where she augments the selfie. It's like no, she does that live every night. So you know, there are it. I mean, I directed the thing and I still watch her do it by Jaws on the store. Oh, it's amazing. Like she's truly a lot. Yeah. I know we're running out of time. I wanted to move on to another question for you about some future projects. So you are set to direct Dracula in the West End next with Cynthia Erivo. This is big news recently with Cynthia playing all 23 roles. What are you allowed to tell us about this project? What's getting you excited about it? What's going on there with that?

[22:06] Kip Williams: I can't wait to hear. I can tell you, I can tell you precious little, you're gonna have to come and see it. Of course, of course. Other than you know, I mean, I feel like the luckiest director in the world, you know, getting to work with Sarah and Dorian and now getting to work with Cynthia and Dracula. It's you know it's virtuoso territory. It's you know, and everything Cynthia has done I've just been completely blown away by. So when it came to you know, thinking about this production on the West End, there was one person who I wanted to do it, and I'm really glad she said yes, she's she's gonna be extraordinary. And you know, their sibling works in a way, they the um, and there's a third sibling in the in it there, you know, trilogy of works is a production of Jekyll and Hyde as well that I've directed and adapted that um hopefully will be coming around the corner as well.

And they thematically speak to each other and form the speech together, but they're very distinct works from one another as well. And Dracula is particularly exciting, in part because the the story is so well known, and we're so obsessed with vampires, and and the way that we interrogate the vampire in this play is is very interesting, and and um you know, in the early stages of my conversations with Cynthia about it and her ideas for how to tackle that are thrilling.

[23:27] Kip Williams: And um the other element of it is that you know it's it's in a epistolary novel, so all of it is diary entries, letters, um so the relationship to the text is utterly different, has this confessional quality, this sense of actually peering into the mind of somebody, and you know, I think I think having an actor like Cynthia take you on that journey will be pretty astonishing. So it's exciting. I mean, definitely. And fun fact the night that we were at Dorian Gray, Cynthia Erivo was at the show. Well, she was right down the aisle. Right down the aisle. We were like, She looked fascinated by the whole thing. She was so it was wonderful to watch her watch it a couple times when I looked over, it was wonderful. We were like, what is she thinking right now? And then after the announcement happened, and we were like, oh we're getting close to the end here.

[24:22] Richie Grasso: Uh, we do have two final questions for you. Um, first, I'll go first. For aspiring directors and theater makers listening, what advice would you like to kind of offer to them um that are looking to define their own unique voice in the industry?

[24:36] Kip Williams: Um I would say two things. I would say um do it, find find the opportunity to make your work in whatever context it is. Don't hold out for the perfect opportunity. Try and make as much as you can. I often think, particularly for any storyteller, any artist, but I can speak as a director that the ideas you have, your creative soul is like a fridge, and you can store those ideas in your fridge, but sometimes the food will go off if you don't make a meal out of that food soon enough. That manifold holds. So do it, do it, do it, and you only get better through doing it. And then the second thing I'd say to young directors is the ideas that terrify you the most are the ideas you have to do it. So much of being an artist is about sort of running into the darkness and into the unknown and and being surprised by what you discover there and shining a light into that space for audiences to find something new.

But that's that takes vulnerability and it takes courage. And so hopefully hearing another director say to you, take that leap of faith might might help you do so. But I I know for myself that the the works that have been the most terrifying to make are the ones that have moved me forward the most as an artist.

[26:00] Richie Grasso: Amazing. Great advice. Wonderful. And for our final question for you, uh, we want to know if there's any fun behind the scenes story from your time working on Dorian Gray or any past shows you've done that our audience loves to hear some fun, or it doesn't have to be funny, it could just be any cool behind the scenes story that you're able to share with us from your career.

[26:20] Kip Williams: Well, um, I have a a little fun, a fun little cookie for people, um, two cookies for people in um no, wait, they're not cool cookies, Easter eggs. I mean, cookies are delicious as well, whatever your favorite. But I've got two little Easter eggs for people in Dorian Gray. So um when Sarah runs home from the theater just after she's um rejected Civil Band backstage. This incredible reworking of Lacrimosa that Clemence Williams, the sound designer, has done, and um all the set pieces swirl about the stage from Mark Hall's design. Suddenly we land inside this apartment, and we've sort of gone, started the play in wrecked empty stage space, and now we're in fully immersed um Victorian universe. And uh when Sarah lands through the front door, there is a portrait behind her, and um it is a portrait of um Faust playing chess with Mephistopheles, and it is uh an homage and nod to um Wilde adapting the Faust as a sort of archetype for for the piece, and very few people clock it, but like every sort of fifth or sixth show, I'll just hear one person go, huh?

[27:42] Kip Williams: I love that. That's one Easter egg, and I guess the other is when Sarah goes on the carriage ride um to the to the club, and that that that beat builds, um, she's doing this monologue, and the Victorian gaslights sort of changed into the Shinjuku electronic lights, and we're sort of passing through time as we do a number of instances in the show. Um and Sarah walks into the cab wearing blue trousers and black shoes, and she walks out of the cab wearing white trousers and white shoes, but she's been delivering the monologue the whole time. Oh, so she is there are complex costume changes in Mark Hall's design happening through the show that people don't even clock. I didn't even realize that. That's like I I gotta go back now. There's lots of things to discover on a second viewing. So, you know, if you can get along a second time, it's uh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's you in a new way.

[28:39] Richie Grasso: Well, I could sit here and talk over a whole nother half hour though. This is amazing. Truly amazing. So we'll have to have you back at some point. But this was just so wonderful, and I know we gotta wrap up now, but we thank you so much for coming on, and the best of luck to you and everyone with the Tony nominations and all this this wonderful time of year here in New York for Broadway, and wishing you all the best with the rest of the run, too. It's a truly remarkable piece.

[29:01] Kip Williams: Oh, thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

[29:03] Jeff Malone: Of course. Uh, that's all for today's episode of Half Hour. Thank you all so much for listening.

[29:08] Richie Grasso: Yes, we hope you enjoyed our conversation with Kip Williams. In the description, we'll share all information on where you can learn more about The Picture of Dorian Gray and Kip Williams and how you can get tickets.

[29:17] Jeff Malone: And to all our listeners, if you have suggestions for future episodes, we'd love to hear from you. You can connect with us on Instagram at Half Hour Podcast.

[29:24] Richie Grasso: Thanks so much for joining us today, Kip.

[29:26] Kip Williams: A pleasure.

[29:27] Jeff Malone: Thanks for having me.

[29:28] Jeff Malone: Hi, Richie, and I'm Jeff saying ta ta for now.

[29:31] Richie Grasso: Bye.