Why Optimism Feels Like Disappointment | Sonya Suares (Cleopatra and Antony Director)

Andrew sits down with award-winning director and producer Sonya Suares, founder of Australia's only Sondheim repertory company Watch This, ahead of her bold new production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra for Melbourne Shakespeare Company, one that puts Cleopatra, not Antony, at the centre of the story. Sonya talks candidly about optimism's strange relationship with disappointment, why she started producing her own work at 16 rather than waiting for permission, and the repeated fights for representation she's had across two decades in Australian theatre. They also dig into how she's building an epic, two-civilisation world inside an intimate black box theatre on a shoestring budget, and why a 400-year-old play about a doomed empire feels less like history and more like this week's headlines.