Documentary filmmaker and 2018 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year Kim Beamish makes his directorial debut at The Mill Theatre in coming weeks.

Beamish, already acknowledged for his films Just Punishment, The Tentmakers of Cairo and Oyster, has spent recent years living in Hanoi working on a yet-to-be edited film called What Remains, about a former Vietnamese soldier searching for missing bodies of National Liberation Front fighters. 

Terror, by German lawyer and writer Ferdinand von Schirach, is the play Beamish will direct.

It’s a courtroom drama with the twist that the audience decides on the central character’s guilt or innocence in a scenario where a fighter pilot has shot down a hijacked plane killing 164 people in order to save 70,000 in a packed football stadium.

Since premiering, reports are that, aside from Japan, voting has been a consistent 60-40 split towards a “not guilty” verdict.

When I caught up with Beamish, the obvious question was, what’s the difference between directing a play and directing a film? 

The similarities, he says, are in the need for good lighting and sound, storytelling and the ability to move a script into the way you want it to be done.

“In film you can get angles, make cuts and edit, but not so much in theatre, where you really have to play the moment out,” he says.

But he’s not complaining: “It’s fantastic that you get that opportunity to play with things, working more in a 3-D space and taking notice of the whole stage. In films you can simply go to different locations, but in theatre you have to turn the space into many different locations.”

There’s also a bit of a difference in working with actors on stage, he says, “where you have to work on the overall scene rather than trying to achieve that one great moment”.

In his past career, subjects were mostly documentary characters from real life and that interest is something he was keen to bring to the stage.

“One of my favourite directors, Mike Leigh, directs both film and theatre, and I also try to bring to life stories based on world events, things that have happened maybe in Germany but relevant in Australia. There’s an argument about what should be done,” he says.

The play doesn’t present soft options and just punishment is one of the main themes, he says. 

“A lot of our research has been around the question, how to get rid of a bad apple or try another apple?” he says.

“A moral dilemma faces the pilot – how much is a life worth? And the play throws that to the audience.”

The format is not unfamiliar to him, since courtroom dramas are beloved of most film directors. 

The play is structured like a hearing, with the defence and the prosecution. He’s been playing with that convention, while including reenactment moments that describe some of the anguish and the trauma.

“The idea is to really engage the audience in the play,” Beamish says, “to get them thinking about what they think is correct and to make the decision.

“This plays upon my interest in social justice, my biggest focus whatever the subject matter,” he says, referring back to his 2006 documentary feature Just Punishment, about the case of the Australian Van Nguyen who was executed in Singapore in 2005 for drug trafficking.

“When Terror was presented to me by The Mill Theatre, I thought, this is for me,” he says, praising the theatre, which he says offered him support. 

“It’s like a training ground, it’s been great to bounce ideas around, especially with my mentor, Tim Sekuless, [who also plays Defence Counsel] who has shown me some points of difference between film and theatre.”

The Mill Theatre is a resource that shouldn’t be overlooked, he believes, explaining how they took him on board last year as “shadow director” for the comedy, Reasons to be Pretty.

“Now, here we are,” Beamish says, “that experience was 100 per cent necessary for me, walking from a camera to a theatre.”

Terror, Mill Theatre, Fyshwick. June 5-15.