Filming It Sweet

Creative home for Neil Armfield is a former tomato sauce factory in Sydney's Surry Hills. It's here Australia's finest director goes, as Shakespeare's Hamlet says, "to sleep, perchance to dream." Here, under Armfield's gentle, bespectacled gaze, Geoffrey Rush first leaped to life as Proposhkin in Gogol's Diary of a Madman and Cate Blanchett came of age as Miranda in The Tempest. It's also where Armfield dreamed up his 1998 stage adaptation of Tim Winton's novel Cloudstreet, the epic production that put his name in theatrical heaven. With 14 actors playing 40 characters over 20 years in five hours,...