Andrew Upton to Become Sole Artistic Director of Sydney Theater Company

By DAVE ITZKOFF

When Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett, the husband-and-wife team that has served as the co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theater Company since 2008, complete their current and final term there, a familiar successor will be waiting in the wings: Mr. Upton will become the artistic director of that theater company, its chairman, David Gonski, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Under the joint leadership of Mr. Upton, the playwright, and Ms. Blanchett, the Academy Award-winning actress, Sydney Theater Company staged several globally acclaimed productions including “A Streetcar Named Desire” (which starred Ms. Blanchett as Blanche DuBois) and “Uncle Vanya” (which featured her as Yelena).

Though the couple had previously announced plans to step down, Mr. Upton said that he was contemplating an invitation from the theater company's board to stay on by himself during the recent run of “Uncle Vanya” at City Center d uring the Lincoln Center Festival.

“Once you decide to stop something,” Mr. Upton said in a telephone interview, “you go through a period where you think, ‘What have we done, what haven't we done? What we do better, what would I change?'”

“You think: No, I won't do it,” he said. “Really happy, know what to do, going to do this instead. And then the next day you wake up and you go, Hmm, you know what?”

After returning to Sydney from New York, Mr. Upton said he was “thrilled with at what had been achieved by that beautiful company, and just thrilled with being there.”

Mr. Upton said that his next term, which begins on Jan. 1, would be his alone and not an under-the-table partnership with Ms. Blanchett.

“I think there's an opportunity to make some change, and that's got to be done, just by me,” he said. “That is understood by Cate and I as a thing that needs to be done, in order to get the best out of it for myself at the company. But of course, we're married, very simpatico in conversations and in our thought processes. I'll be talking to her all the time. I think it takes the pressure off her, so she can actually stay outside and see when we say we're going left, are we going left? Or are we going right?”

The theater company's final program organized by Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Upton will be announced on Sept. 6. For his first solo program, which will present productions starting in 2014, Mr. Upton said he still hoped to cast Ms. Blanchett where possible and appropriate.

“When she was â€" and she still is â€" inside the company, there is a sense that she wants to and she will perform, and I think it's good to take that pressure off her at this point in time, just to free her up and to free the company up as well,” he said.

But when the right role comes along, Mr. Upton said: “I'm going to be knocking on her door and calling her agent.â €