The director’s cut: two Greek coffees, hold the dessert

Neil Armfield always brings a cloth napkin to lunch – just in case the restaurant doesn’t provide real linen.

The one he produces today (unnecessary as it turns out: Olympus is most definitely a real linen sort of place) has clearly been liberated from Qantas Business Class. (Sitting in front of Alan Joyce at the theatre one evening, Armfield says he once confessed his petty larceny to the former Qantas boss who was apparently unconcerned. “I think he had bigger things to worry about,” says Armfield.)

This delightful eccentricity is a small but telling detail. Armfield, one of the best regarded directors of his generation, can’t help but concern himself with how things look and how they might work better. At various stages he is gently directing lunch, the crockery and the Herald ’s photographer.

However – and this is perhaps the secret to Armfield’s success – being directed by him never feels onerous but more that he is gently leading you towards something you’d probably have chosen yourself anyway, given the time.

It’s something I’ve witnessed on several occasions when I’ve sat in on his rehearsals.

Away from the rehearsal room, Armfield is a supremely genial and attentive lunch companion, never short of an anecdote or an opinion. He scatters celebrity names like confetti, but without seeming in the least bit pretentious. It’s just Geoffrey (Rush), Cate (Blanchett) or Richard (Roxburgh), whom he worked with in this or that show over the past 50 years.

Nailing down a date for lunch has been far from easy. He’s in rehearsals at his beloved Belvoir St Theatre for a revival production of The Book of Everything , the award-winning show he first staged in 2010. The schedule is punishing and at one point we floated the idea of chatting over a sandwich at the theatre before Armfield decided he could get away after all for a proper lunch at nearby Olympus.

The restaurant, in trendy new Surry Hills Village (it’ll always be Redfern Mall to me) is light and buzzy, with the centre of the room dominated by a huge, pink bougainvillea. We settle on a collection of small dishes that arrive at regular intervals, leaving my recorded transcript punctuated by frequent exclamations of “Ooh, lovely” and “That looks beautiful”. Half a dozen oysters are followed by taramasalata, dolmades, spanakopita and grilled sardines.

As we pick our way through the food, Armfield is keen to talk about his current project, and the pleasure he feels to be bringing it back to the Belvoir stage.

“There’s something about the show that is so beautiful to return to,” he says. “It was one of my last shows at Belvoir [Armfield was inaugural artistic director there for 17 years, from 1994]. It’s about kindness and courage and how a society gets divided and the power of art in providing fun and beauty and pleasure and dimension. It feels so absolutely a prescription for our times.”

In the play, based on a children’s novel by Dutch writer Guus Kuijer, nine-year-old Thomas is growing up in post-war Amsterdam. The youngster inhabits a rich inner world of his imagination, largely as a refuge from his violent, fundamentalist father.