But the wunderkind, who runs the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London, was anything but blasé last night about the success of his dark satire on suburbia.
There were dark nights for Rudd after his defenestration but it remained a constant comfort that he had never been rejected by the Australian people.
As part of the UK's largest after-hours cultural festival, more than 500 museums, galleries and heritage sites across the country are turning nocturnal this weekend, inviting the public to experience their collections and history after dark.
How when his glider hit the ground in occupied France at 16 minutes past midnight on 6 June, shaking up the men inside, everything went dark.
In all these cases, the questions stay in the shadows, in the dark.
His production of Ben Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass applied the knife to yards of text, and his West Yorkshire Playhouse production of the children's classic Peter Pan was so dark and grim that one set of parents threatened to sue on the grounds that their child had been traumatised.
The show hangs on its carefully chosen and often filigreed dialogue, and it is that which leads you into the dark corners.
It is also reflective of a dark cultural truth where, to a lot of schoolchildren, particularly in America, the high school has become a genuinely dangerous place to be.
The reticent producer cut his teeth running similarly toned, small, dark basement events in Bristol, so he'll be right at home with City Bass's back-to-basics ethos, and his focused, skilful mixing of rarely heard 90s NY house'n'garage with prime UK modernism will put everyone in the right headspace to get down.
Related: Salutin' Putin: our lives inside a Russian troll house First Look Media, which published the leaks, described it as the UK spy agency's weapon in mastering the dark arts of the internet, a "hacker's buffet for wreaking online havoc".
Climbing out to one of the lookout points for a surf check we look through a small gap in the beachside trees to a view revealing the dark bumps of the swell.
