It’s impossible to measure the reach and influence of 30 years of a theatre company’s history, cultural memory and relationships. But these statistics provided by Rob Scott, HotHouse’s Technical Operations Manager for 20 years are a start. Consider all the creative relationships, careers, logistics, concepts, opportunities, skills and stories behind these statistics, and you’ll get a sense of HotHouse’s footprint and impact, both on our community and our nation. Since 1996, HotHouse Theatre has: 

• Commissioned or auspiced over 50 new full length Australian theatre scripts

• for many of those years, produced or co-produced 3 new shows per year

• Hosted over 1,400 shows and events at the Butter Factory

• Since 2004, HH’s 'A Month in the Country Residency Program', supported the work of over 500 theatre artists and arts companies from around Australia

• Played 220 regional tour dates in small country halls in Victoria & NSW

• Presented 74 performances across Australia in major Performing Arts Centres

• Produced 15 Schools Theatre Festivals (11 "Biting Dog" & 4 “Generate")

• Hosted 4 Comedy Festivals (two-week seasons) & 6 Galah Bar Scratch nights

• Provided employment and short-term contracts to around 350 professional writers, directors, designers, actors, production and stage managers and crew

• Given performing opportunities to over 300 community actors and 1000 students from local schools and delivered technical training to over 100 young people.

Evolution

As it evolved from the Murray River Performing Group, in 1996 Hothouse’s founders created an ‘Artistic Directorate’ of brilliant creative thinkers who gathered 4 times a year in Albury Wodonga to consider the pathway forward for a fledgling theatre company in a challenging regional environment.  

For metro-based artistic leaders like Marion Potts, Lex Marinos, Roger Hodgman and others who followed (among them Wesley Enoch, Fiona Winning, Maude Davey, Campion Decent and others) the Artistic Directorate model was a radically collaborative way of working inspired by landscape, river and community. They created far more than a local theatre company. With vision and through sheer hard slog, HotHouse became a regional creative powerhouse, transforming two run-down buildings into the Butter Factory Theatre and the A Month in the Country national artists residency. HotHouse’s regional infrastructure became a nationally unique theatre making ecosystem designed by artists and built by locals. 

In landscapes far from the city, HotHouse became a company of local, regional and national significance, a network of theatre makers and a body of work that connected this region’s creative community to stages all around Australia: STC, MTC, QTC, Malthouse, Belvoir, Arena, La Boite, Black Swan, Arena… 

Over time as HotHouse moved away from the artistic directorate model, subsequent Artistic Directors Campion Decent, John Halpin, Lyn Wallis, Karla Conway and the current creative leadership team of Andrew Gray and Lindy Hume have each brought distinctive creative approaches, initiatives and programming styles to each season, while ensuring community and the creation of new work were at the heart of HotHouse.  

A three-decade roll call, a legacy of regional creative leadership

The HotHouse diaspora (local, national and global) is a three-decade roll call encompassing hundreds of people who are currently some this nation’s most influential artistic leaders, directors, drama teachers, arts bureaucrats, comedians award-winning writers and hundreds of brilliant actors working all around Australia, the UK and Hollywood - including Academy Award nominee, Jacki Weaver.   

New Australian work + locally created work

HotHouse’s remarkable contribution to the national literature through the creation of new Australian work encompasses dozens of new theatre works created here in Albury Wodonga at the Butter Factory before touring nationally. These include Campion Decent’s Embers, Wesley Enoch’s Stories of the Miracles at Cookie's Table, Kate Mulvaney’s The Web and dozens of works by leading Australian writers, among them Patricia Cornelius, Lachlan Philpott, Raimondo Cortese and Katherine Thompson.   

HotHouse has been a platform for the works of local writers like Brendan Hogan (The Last Boy on Earth, All the Shining Lights), devised or scripted works for the HotHouse Studio Ensemble based on local stories (The Pyjama Girl)and collaborations between local community artists and visiting professional teams, like Caleb Lewis’s The River at the End of the Road, co-created by HotHouse Studio Ensemble and Sport for Jove. Dozens of local creative teams and independents have progressed their ideas from concept to realisation through the HotHouse ecosystem.