As far back as she can remember, Moira Blumenthal’s passion lay in the arts. As a young girl she escaped into the world of make-believe with her pals, as part of the Girls Crystal Club, performing end-of-year school plays to a captive audience. Moira was born into a creative family in Johannesburg South Africa. Her father Max Karklin was a well-respected photographer who encouraged his young daughter in her artistic pursuits. Her earliest memory is sitting on a swing attached to a willow tree in her backyard, pretending she was performing in a circus. Some people seem born knowing their life’s work, Moira is one of those people.
As a young wife Moira helped her ex-lawyer husband Henry Blumenthal set up a secondary school before returning to her first love, the theatre. They emigrated to Australia in 1996 and three children, and six grandchildren later her well-honed skills as a producer/director are still in demand. She adores rehearsals, loves searching for plays, reading scripts and directing. The whole creative process that comes with the territory lets Moira lose herself in an artistic zone; it’s her dream job, one she will never grow tired of.
Over the years Moira has worked as a program consultant at the Seymour Centre and produced and directed plays there as well as in an array of other venues including the Studio at the Sydney Opera House, the Griffin Theatre, the Fig Tree Theatre UNSW, the iconic Old Fitzroy Theatre and for the past few years at the popular Eternity Playhouse attached to the Darlinghurst Theatre Company in Sydney. Moira is a storyteller who enjoys telling tales that relate to her tribe; her plays have Jewish themes and sit comfortably side-by-side with her strong Jewish heritage. Her father escaped Lithuania fleeing to South Africa in the 1920s for a better life, far removed from the pogroms and associated Jewish persecution.
For the past six years Moira has worked with Shalom, co-producing plays such as Aaron Posner’s stage adaptation of Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen, Victor Gordon’s You will not play Wagner and The Man in the Attic by Timothy Daly. Moira Blumenthal considers her professional career a blessing, and Sydney’s theatre audiences are all the richer for her hard work, her dedication to her craft and her love of storytelling.
Moira’s upcoming production of The Kingdom of Eucalypts – The enigma of Miles Franklin tells the tale of well-known Australian author Miles Franklin who returned to Sydney in 1932 after years living in Chicago and London. Frustrated by living with her elderly mother, lack of money and feelings of failure, she struggled to reignite her fame as a twenty-year old when she wrote My Brilliant Career. Hope glimmered when Miles met the mercurial publisher Inky Stephenson. They became firm friends, and he invited her to join his Yabber club of writers and progressive thinkers. Miles ignored the warning signs of Inky’s drift into dangerous politics. The Kingdom of Eucalypts showing at the Bondi Pavilion Theatre in Sydney from 30 October till 17 November 2024.
To book tickets visit: The Kingdom of Eucalypts | Humanitix
Last year Moira directed the much-acclaimed Stories from the Violins of Hope, a powerful play which dramatized the true story of one family of luthiers, the Weinsteins, who rescued, restored and brought to the world stringed instruments that survived the Holocaust.
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