Dianne Toulson, the general manager of Theatre Works, had a sheltered childhood growing up in Korumburra.
“You didn’t get exposure to the arts,” she emphasises. Toulson initially considered working in the law or as a policewoman. “I was drawn to those careers because they’re about justice, about standing up for people and making a difference. But in the end, theatre turned out to be my way of doing that.” Also, she jokes, “Let’s be real, I would have struggled with the rigidity of those professions. I like pushing boundaries too much.” Which is how she found herself at the helm of boundary-pushing theatre in St Kilda.
But Toulson wasn’t always on the cutting edge. When she first encountered St Kilda almost three decades ago, it was an eye-opening experience. She was working as a tax auditor in an office off Grey St. One day, a sex worker popped her head into Toulson’s car window and asked, “Are you interested?” Toulson naively said, “In what?”
During that time, Toulson fell in love with St Kilda. She remembers walking down to Acland St to get lunch, and people watching the stream of passersby from different cultures, hearing the burble of foreign languages, and taking in the vibrant busking scene. Of course, there was the grit too – the homelessness and the unpredictable energy on the streets, but Toulson believes it was all part of the fabric of the suburb. “It went with the territory because it was such a hustling, bustling place.”
Toulson, who was a single mum with four kids to raise, wasn’t exposed to theatre until her thirties. She started out working for the Women’s Circus, and adored the physicality and joyousness of the medium. She laughs as she recalls that her circus experience meant that didn’t conceive of theatre as a real art form. Not until she got a job working at Red Stitch. “Now I’m totally addicted. I live and breathe it.”
There were challenges too. “Supporting a family on a theatre wage is… not for the faint-hearted,” Toulson notes. But her stubbornness is what got her through. “You learn to stretch every dollar, take on extra gigs, and fight for every opportunity.” It paid off in other ways. “The flip side was that my kids grew up in a creative, dynamic environment. They saw firsthand what it means to work hard for something you love, even when it’s tough.”
When a position came up at Theatre Works in 2017, Toulson was working in Ararat at the Performing Arts Centre. “I actually chased the job,” she says. She wanted to return to St Kilda. “I always held it in my heart. I’d come to shows here and go, ‘Oh my God, you are not going to see that anywhere else’.”
Since starting at Theatre Works, Toulson has seen numerous challenges: funding cuts, the pandemic and ever-shifting audiences, as St Kilda has gentrified. Nevertheless, Toulson is passionate about Theatre Works being a place for underrepresented voices – particularly queer stories. “Theatre should reflect the world we live in, and for too long, queer and gender-diverse stories were pushed to the margins.”
Now, looking back at that sheltered kid from Korumburra to her current life as a person who leads a major theatre company in St Kilda, Toulson shakes her head in wonder. “I was so quiet, shy, reserved.” But she learnt something crucial throughout her tenacious career in the arts. “Confidence isn’t about never being nervous—it’s about doing it anyway. You fake it until you realise, you’re not faking it anymore.”
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Storyteller: Alexandra Collier is an award winning Melbourne writer who has written for theatre, screen and print. Her memoir Inconceivable: Heartbreak, Bad Dates and Finding Solo Motherhood about her journey to becoming a solo mum by choice was published by Hachette in 2023. She was recently a writer on the ABC/BBC detective series Return to Paradise.
