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Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymout Hoffman are backing a project to promote collaboration among theatre companies in London, New York and Sydney, Australia.

They are said to form an alliance with each of their theatre companies. Cate Blanchett and her playwright husband Andrew Upton who are part of the Sydney Theatre company will join with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Labyrinth Theatre Company in New York.

Under the deal, the American and Australian companies will stage work at the West End theatre, and British plays travel to Sydney and New York.

The first play to get the collaborative treatment is Riflemind, Upton’s play about an aging rock band’s reunion, which opens Thursday under Hoffman’s direction.

Howard Panton Trafalgar Studios creative director said that, while the world was growing ever more globalized, theatre remained “oddly insular.”

“There are so many exciting voices that we simply don’t hear here,” he said.

Blanchett will be seen next with Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button directed by David Fincher said live theatre was her first love. A film career “can often eclipse the raison d’être of getting involved in acting in the first place,” she said, but her fame gave her the chance to “harness one’s cachet to the cart horse of the theater for its own good.”

“I love the theatre, that’s what motivates me,” said Hoffman, who helped found Labyrinth in 1992 as a company devoted to new work. But unlike Cate Blanchett he felt the same love for both cinema and theatre.