Sonya Suares’ mother-in-law has a running question about her work: who on earth wants to sit through a lecture? It’s a fair challenge for a director whose theatre practice is built around representation, marginalised voices and the ideas sitting underneath every story she tells. Sonya’s answer, delivered with a laugh in this episode of Showtime, is simple: the ideas are the foundation, but the work itself has to be genuinely entertaining first. Her latest project is a case in point — a Shakespeare play she describes, without much exaggeration, as history’s original Game of Thrones.
Recorded during the preview run of her new production of Antony and Cleopatra for Melbourne Shakespeare Company, Andrew G’s conversation with Sonya ranges from the strange psychology of being an optimist to the practical challenge of staging an epic, two-civilisation story inside a tiny black box theatre — and, eventually, to why she believes this 400-year-old play about a crumbling empire feels less like history than like the news cycle she scrolls through every morning.
Sonya is disarmingly honest about what optimism actually feels like from the inside. Rather than constant happiness, she describes it as something closer to permanent, low-grade disappointment — the feeling of holding the world to a standard it keeps failing to meet. It’s the same mechanism, she says, as perfectionism: the sign you’re a perfectionist isn’t confidence, it’s the nagging sense that nothing you make is quite good enough. Optimism, similarly, isn’t blind positivity; it’s hope colliding, repeatedly, with reality. And yet, faced with the alternative of simply giving up, she says it remains the only way she knows how to operate.
That drive toward hope runs directly into the reason Sonya makes theatre at all. She describes human beings as fundamentally story-based creatures — the news, politics, history and religion are all, in her view, competing narratives shaped by whoever is doing the telling. Her own work, she says, is a deliberate pushback against stories that disenfranchise people, built by deliberately inviting collaborators with different lived experience into the room rather than trying to tell every perspective herself.
Antony and Cleopatra puts that philosophy to the test on an unusually large scale. Sonya makes the case, convincingly, that the play is far closer to prestige television than dusty classroom Shakespeare — a multi-genre epic of politics, romance and empire, populated by real historical figures locked in what she calls a legitimate Game of Thrones power struggle. The challenge, as she puts it bluntly, is building that scale inside 45 Downstairs, an intimate independent venue, with a cast of thirteen and none of the budget of a prestige TV production. Her solution leans hard into what theatre can do that film can’t: metaphor, dreamscape and a design built around suggestion rather than literal spectacle, right down to a set inspired by Senet, an ancient Egyptian board game whose players race across the underworld toward eternity.
The origin story of this particular production is disarmingly casual. Jennifer Sarah Dean, Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s artistic director, asked Sonya to direct it while the two of them were grabbing lunch at a banh mi shop. Sonya said yes immediately, then spent the following months quietly panicking about how to pull it off. It’s a pattern she traces back much further than this production — to age sixteen, when her school offered no drama classes and she responded by producing and starring in her own season of The Importance of Being Earnest, entirely off her own initiative, rather than waiting for anyone’s permission.
That same instinct led her, years later, to found Watch This, Australia’s only theatre company dedicated to the work of Stephen Sondheim — a decision she describes, cheerfully, as a fairly direct path to financial ruin. Sondheim’s catalogue is beloved by theatre-makers but famously difficult to sell to a general audience; several people warned her against it. She built the company anyway, starting with Assassins, one of Sondheim’s least commercially obvious shows, and watched it sell out. More than a decade later, Watch This has accumulated 31 Green Room Award nominations and seven wins.
Representation is the thread running through nearly everything Sonya discusses, and she’s candid about how exhausting the fight has been. She recalls being told outright, early in her career, that she couldn’t play a Russian character on stage — despite most of the cast around her sharing the same non-Russian background — and has spent years since making the case, in company after company, for artists who don’t fit a narrow, traditional mould. She’s careful to distinguish between calling out laziness in casting decisions and calling people racist outright, arguing that the former keeps people listening while the latter tends to shut a conversation down entirely, even when the underlying issue is exactly the same.
That fight, she says, has genuinely moved forward — but she’s wary of complacency, pointing to recent political moments as proof that hard-won ground can just as easily be lost again. Change, in her view, isn’t linear; it’s incremental, generational, and something that has to be actively defended rather than assumed permanent.
Nowhere is that philosophy clearer than in how Sonya has reframed Cleopatra for this production. Traditionally, she argues, Cleopatra has been written into history as a supporting force in Antony’s tragedy — an exotic temptress whose influence “unmans” a great Roman general. Sonya’s production instead centres Cleopatra as the formidable political strategist she actually was: a ruler who outmanoeuvred two brother-husbands to take the throne of Egypt, partnered with Julius Caesar, survived his assassination with her infant son, and went on to align herself with the next great power in Rome. It’s not a softened Cleopatra Sonya is interested in — it’s a sharper, more accurate one.
Ultimately, she hopes audiences leave the theatre with a very simple realisation: that the people at the centre of this 2,000-year-old story aren’t as distant from us as the history books suggest, and that the same battles over power, empire and identity are still being fought today, in real time, all around us.
Antony and Cleopatra plays at 45 Downstairs, Melbourne, from 20 August to 13 September 2026.
Antony and Cleopatra tickets: melbourneshakespeare.com
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