His newest production for the State Theatre Company, American Song marks 20 years of David Mealor’s Flying Penguin Productions. He looks back on his beginnings as a director, his collaborators, theatrical accomplishments, and might-have-beens.
David Mealor remembers a conversation, with an actor friend in Sydney, way back at the beginning of the century. It was when he first said out loud to someone that he would like to take up directing.
“It was because I would see myself as an actor in rehearsals thinking –‘ I could direct this better than them. But I didn’t have the courage of the people who were actually doing it!’ ”
So it prompted him to take steps. He approached Professor Julie Holledge with whom he had studied in the Flinders Uni Drama Centre acting group, graduating in 1994. He now wanted to audit her renowned directing class. After some negotiations she agreed and he sat in and watched her work for six months. It was also when he made connection with international designer Mary Moore and began to formulate ideas about staging and sets and how actors engage in them.
“That got interrupted” Mealor recalls, “because I went to Sydney to perform in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker for Brink Productions. But I had decided to have a go at directing so I put in a grant application to Arts SA. I had my body of work as an actor/producer. I was in the Brink ensemble so I had done maybe fifteen plays over six years. “
“I had done a theoretical exploration of what it was like to direct a production and put in a request for inviting some actors into the rehearsal room. I wanted a perfect play – not one with problems to be solved – and I wanted the best actors so it wasn’t an acting class.
“The play I chose was Translations by Irish writer Brian Friels. A friend recommended it. I read it and it was perfectly constructed. I wanted a play with a really large bullseye – so you can’t get it wrong.”
The workshops were interrupted by tragedy with the death of Mealor’s father, but after a break he persisted. He describes the actors’ patience and encouragement as they worked on specific scenes. The sessions went well and the actors readily affirmed that Mealor should pursue directing and the play should be staged the following year.
It was a great success. Opening in September 2005 the Holden Street venue sold out and the production later travelled to Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne for a well-received second season.
Flying Penguin Productions had found wings on the first outing. Mealor wryly describes how the name came about. Too self-effacing to call it “David Mealor and Players” and, because he had always been interested in penguins and their arduous lifestyle, he chose what he describes as a “suitably inappropriate metaphor for setting up a theatre company – and the ridiculous aspiration of it all.”
Aspirational it was – and inspirational as well. In response to the 20th anniversary, leading Adelaide actors have declared their debt to the company’s work. Writer, director and high-profile performer Elena Carapetis credits her role as Maire in Translations as the springboard to becoming a regular with State Theatre Company SA. Mark Saturno says of his casting in Glengarry Glen Ross – “Here was an iconic role in an iconic play that I would not get to play anywhere else in the world, and yet here was Flying Penguin giving me the chance I had coveted since drama school.”
In addition to an extensive list of freelance and actor training productions, David Mealor has launched fifteen productions for the Penguins. Following their impressive 2005 debut he followed in 2007 with two very contrasting choices – Pinter’s The Birthday Party featuring Rick Allert, Rory Walker, Ksenja Logos, Carmel Johnson and UK actor Gerrard McArthur, and Assassins, Stephen Sondheim’s mordant musical recounting the murders of a cavalcade of US Presidents
The Birthday Party, with a brilliant pared-back design by Mary Moore is deemed by Mealor himself as one of his best. It garnered a string of awards from the Critics Circle to the Sunday Mail and Advertiser and further established the company’s reputation for meticulous and vivid theatre.
Assassins, was chosen partly to demonstrate the range of genres and styles he hoped to traverse- “If I could do Assassins I could try anything.” It had been on Mealor’s wish-list since he studied it as student with Professor Michael Morley at Flinders. Matthew Carey provided musical guidance for the production with assistance from Morley.
There was a strong bunch of performers- the late Peter Michell, Cameron Goodall, Michaela Cantwell, Geoff Revell, Chris Matters, Syd Brisbane, Stephen Sheehan and more. Mealor recalls- “being in that rehearsal room was one of the greatest things I’ve been involved with.”
Intermittently, over the years, more productions followed. True West by Sam Shepard, a blackly comic study of two brothers, which introduced Renato Musolino, a frequent collaborator of Mealor’s who also featured in Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall (which had successful seasons in 2018 and 2021) and returns this month as the solo performer in Joanna Murray-Smith’s American Song.
Two productions – David Harrower’s Blackbird (2010) and David Mamet’s Oleanna (2022) demonstrated Mealor’s astute casting and careful presentation of controversial, transgressive material and vindicated his exacting process.
Similarly, the extraordinary production of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross brought together some of the best actors in Adelaide to re-examine a play about a group of predatory salesmen locked in never-ending rivalry and ultimately, self-doubt.
The acting Mealor describes as a celebration of Adelaide talent. Splendidly designed by Kathryn Sproul, it featured Mark Saturno, Chris Pitman, Nicholas Garsden and, together again for the first time since The Birthday Party, Rory Walker and Bill Allert
Mealor, who admits he is often unsure about texts on first reading, went back five times before finally deciding he “understood that play”. Realising that “we have all got older” he invited the actors, some he hadn’t worked with for sixteen years, to the project. “That production had not one moment of stress” he recalls.
“One of the things I’m best at,” he quietly notes, “is being able to predict what actors can do, and what they may think they can’t do, but I know they will. I’ve never conducted auditions for actors. I just offer them the role and that has worked. One of the good things about Adelaide is that you know all the actors and I am choosing plays because I know the pool of actors that can do them.”
Perpetually ready to learn and develop, Mealor has always fostered collaborations with the best available. Whether developing design principles from Mary Moore, Gaelle Mellis and Kathryn Sproul, lighting possibilities from Geoff Cobham, Mark Pennington, Chris Petrides and Nic Mollison, or theatre music from The Audreys and Quentin Grant, his attention to every part of the production is evident in the finished work.
His process, which has not deviated from Translations, is to do what is hardest in theatre, and that is to take the necessary time to read, research and ponder. He insists on separating the preparation rehearsal from the imperatives of opening night.
“Without that deadline focus you can say to the actors – keep talking . I’ve found that this way you can make exponential progress, you get a collective production. People share stories and get to understand the play. They learn to fall in love with it.”
For the latest Flying Penguin production for State Theatre’s Stateside program Mealor has chosen a monologue by eminent Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith. “I said to Renato – I’m getting itchy. Are you ? What can we do? “
American Song was commissioned by a community theatre company in Milwaukee and first performed in 2016. It draws its title from the poet, Walt Whitman’s magnificently bardic “I Hear America Singing” from his innovative classic Leaves of Grass (1855) – but it speaks to a troubled present.
Drawing on accounts from the Columbine school shooting in Colorado in 1999, American Song is narrated by Andy, a forty-something parent who bids goodbye to his son in the morning and, eight hours later, everything in his world has changed. Renato Musolino features, with design by Kathryn Sproul, lighting and AV by Nic Mollison, and music and sound design by Quentin Grant.
Mealor has always been interested in US history and culture even though he has never been there. He cites the criticism of Lars Van Trier’s film series Dogville for a similar reason . The filmmaker’s reply- “I eat hamburgers, I know America”. But as Murray-Smith’s play (updated to incorporate some aspects of Trump 2.0) observes: the crisis is, we thought we knew America – and now we don’t.
In conclusion, I asked David Mealor if he feels proud of his 20 year project and his reply is the mixed one of someone unused to pumping up his own tyres.
“I do when I’m reminded I should be, but there is so much more I wished and hoped I’d done. Fifteen shows . If I’d had the money I’d do seven shows a year. After Translations I applied for support to set up an ensemble company but the type of work I do wasn’t what people wanted to fund. And I think I have known that all along.”
That David Mealor has produced such high calibre work in this extended, precarious period of under-funded theatre and over-engineered cultural policy directives, has meant that artists like him, and there are many, have hugely subsidised their own work, and often at personal cost to their well-being.
It is also an irony that the largest grant allocations Mealor has received have been for developing new works that for various reasons have never reached production. The case for a professional repertory company performing already proven recent plays is stronger than ever.
The very existence of Flying Penguin Productions says they are true to their quixotic name. We can only hope that on the basis of an outstanding record of professional work and perceptive programming that more secure funding support could put breeze under their wings for more time to come.
American Song will perform from October 24 to November 2 at the Goodwood Main Theatre, Goodwood Road.
Published in InReview in edited form on October 16, 2025.