Kingsville’s Anne Browning and Peter Houghton met playing Hamlet in 1997. Twenty nine years later they’re back on stage together, this time sitting up on the wrong side of the bed.
By Marie Vakakis
Local Kingsville couple Anne Browning and Peter Houghton have a history of working in theatre that stretches back almost three decades. Between them they’ve acted, directed and written for Melbourne Theatre Company, Malthouse and Sydney Theatre Company, collected a handful of Green Room Awards and taken Peter’s play The Pitch on tour to the UK.
Their passion for theatre is clear and while Anne enjoys being onstage she also shares her love of drama through teaching.
I interview them a few weeks before opening day, and start with a question I always ask couples (you just can’t get the therapist out of me). How did they first meet? I love hearing how people meet. I find their stories fascinating and sometimes I enjoy watching their expressions while they retell that story.
Their own story starts in a rehearsal room, and I find it adorable that they met over a shared passion. In 1997, while I was still in primary school, they were cast in a Melbourne Theatre Company schools production of Hamlet, where three actors played every character between them. Peter was Hamlet. Anne was Ophelia, and also Gertrude. “I essentially played his girlfriend and his mother,” she says.
The therapist in me has questions, how could I not? Freud would have had a field day with this story, and I’m intrigued. We agree it’s a conversation for another day.
After the play, they got together, married in 1999, and moved west the following year; first to North Sunshine and then to Kingsville, where they’ve lived since 2010. When they worked out they’d been together 29 years, they both laughed. It’s clear that they sell a lot of love and care between them.
For a long stretch their working lives went in different directions. Anne stepped away from the industry for more than a decade to teach drama and English and, as Peter puts it, “steady the ship” while their kids were young. Peter kept working as an actor, writer and director. Now the kids are adults, Anne has left teaching, and the first job that came their way was playing a married couple waking up in bed. For the role they swapped sides of the bed, which Peter admits felt completely wrong. As someone with very firm views about having a side, I was with him. They decided they needed something to help them get in and out of character.
Working together hasn’t always been easy. Back then, Peter says, their egos were “less healthy”. They were younger, a bit overambitious and didn’t know each other as well. Any criticism was taken very personally, and by Anne’s account they argued a lot. These days Anne says she’s simply too tired to have an ego. I’d offer a kinder summation – it sounds less like an ego that’s burnt out and more like the confidence that comes from knowing you can bend, adapt and recover. They both say it’s now more about the work than about themselves in it.
My favourite part of our conversation is watching them talk about each other. They are warm, excited and a little bit proud. “Not everyone gets to work together with their partner,”
Peter says. “You get to see what your partner actually does for a living, and it’s like, I can see that. You’re really good at this.”
Anne sees Peter work all the time, but this is the first time in around 30 years she’s shared a scene with him, and she’s loving it.
My other favourite thing to ask couples is about the habits their partner has that drives them totally nuts. Peter leaves his teabags in the sink. Anne starts her mornings in the hardest soled shoes she owns, on a timber floor with no rugs, before switching on a very loud coffee machine.
I confess that I leave my teabags on a tissue next to the cup. Anne is not impressed.
She sums it up beautifully. Underneath all the little grievances, the teabags in the sink and the noise in the morning, “there is real love underneath that.”
After nearly three decades in the west, they’re a couple well worth knowing.
Anne and Peter appear with Tom Gutteridge in Crapbox + more, four short plays by award winning writer Kevin Nemeth exploring the anxieties, absurdities and mysteries of the third act of life.
Explosives Factory, St Kilda, 28 October to 7 November.
Tickets at theatreworks.org.au/2026/crapbox
