Award-winning theatre maker and actor and seasoned director, Anne Browning describes her directorial process: the start, the stepping back, and the objectives in between.
1. How do you begin?
I begin with the text. Working with the words on the page, I search for the author's intention, attempting to identify the story engine and central conflict. I’ll seek out the emotional and dramatic core of the play; what is its point and how can these characters be most vividly realised to support it? Casting is essential in this process and I spend a long time trying to find the most skilled and playful actors to draw out the tensions in intelligent, original and surprising ways.
2. How do you know when something is “finished”?
I question whether anything is ever finished. Shakespeare’s plays were constantly evolving with new casts and the movement of history. Ideas are forever in flux and so a work can always be complicated and deepened. Having said that, you do need to reach a level of polish by opening night! During the season, works will grow and morph as actors take ownership. They guide the ship and the director takes a step back. When that process begins, there is a level of completion for a director.
3. What is your objective in your work for Spare a Thought for Jana Wendt?
My objective is to give the audience a thrilling ride that shifts and turns on a dime — surprising, delighting, and moving them through the actions of unstable, flawed characters we recognise, condemn, and love all at once. Working closely with the design team, I aim to create a sensory world that supports the actors to achieve that most elusive of goals: to hold the audience fully inside the world of the play for its entire 70 minutes. Together with the actors, I want to craft a bold, precise, embodied, and hilarious work of theatre that enchants even as it unsettles.
Anne Browning is an award winning theatre maker and actor and graduate of The Victorian College of the Arts. She was co-artistic director of the WA Youth Theatre Company which staged the first adaptation of the work of Tim Winton’s Lockie Leonard Human Torpedo. Anne directed The Water Carriers, Australia the Show and The Colours for Melbourne Theatre Company and The Pitch with Peter Houghton for La Mama, Malthouse Theatre and on tour in Australia and the UK. As an actor she’s performed in The China Incident for La Mama and Malthouse Theatre, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney for Malthouse Theatre and Queensland Theatre and The Woman in the Window for Melbourne Theatre Company as well as numerous independent productions. Anne has worked with and been inspired by many of our finest directors and artists including Matt Cameron, Suzie Dee, Aidan Fennessy, Alma De Groen, Julia Blake, Helen Morse, Michael Gow and others. Anne was Production Coordinator at Alice Miller School in Macedon where directed and adapted And Then There Were None, The Man from Mukinupin, The Threepenny Opera , What Rhymes with Cars and Girls, Sweet Charity, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth and wrote and directed the half hour film Rabbit Hole. Anne recently adapted the musical Mary Poppins from the PL Travers books with a soundtrack drawing on the styles of funk, rock, soul and disco.
LA MAMA PRESENTS Spare a Thought for Jana Wendt
8-26 April 2026
FIND OUT MORE AND BOOK SPARE A THOUGHT FOR JANA WENDT