Check details on company website
Gwen in Purgatory by Tommy Murphy Dir Neil Armfield
With Melissa Jaffer
A La Boite Theatre and Company B Belvoir co-production
Getting things right: Barbara Lowing – (Interview 11)
If Barbara Lowing is in a show, you know your night in the theatre is going to be a good one. I love her work, for which, incidentally, she’s won a stack of acting awards. I note from her C-V that she was the first Queensland graduate of WAAPA (West Australian Academy of Performing Arts). Apart from being a director-teacher and a terrific photographer, she’s also great company, so it’s good to catch up with her for lunch last week. Barb’s in Toowoomba rehearsing for the Empire Theatre Projects Company (EPC) production of April’s Fool by David Burton, directed by Lewis Jones.
This production marks a lot of firsts for the EPC: the first fully professional show, the first to tour – it opens in Oakey this week, then Chinchilla, Dalby, Ipswich and a city season in Brisbane at the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts. April’s Fool is possibly also the first-ever home-grown play about a real-life event in the city, the death of a young man, Kristjan Terauds in April 2009 from the complications following illicit drug use.
Director Lewis Jones heard of the events from mutual friends of the Terauds. His bringing of the story to the stage has been done with the full cooperation of Kristjan’s parents and extended family. The play also offers the perspective of other characters in the play – friends, observers – some of whom take varying points of view. ‘It’s didactic but never melodramatic,’ Barb adds. ‘Lewis and David have structured the text so there’s no sense of lecturing ever.’
We chat about the way the EPC production team have been working on what has turned out to be a verbatim theatre piece researched and scripted by Dave Burton and which the company has created from the ground up. Material has been drawn from interviews with friends, family and others associated with the event which is not yet 18 months old. The play’s action spans the 6 days following Kristjan’s death, in which his family attempted to come to terms with that most terrible of experiences for a parent, their child’s death. Whilst some names have been altered, all characters are ‘real’ and there’s not a word in the play, Barb tells me, that hasn’t been taken from interview transcripts, or from the diary which David Terauds (Kristjan’s father) kept during the event – as his book of solace, I imagine. Continue reading “Getting things right: Barbara Lowing – (Interview 11)”
This Week in Queensland Theatre: August 9-15
- Image by Dramagirl via Flickr
Further details on company websites
Opening:
April’s Fool by David Burton Dir Lewis Jones for Empire Theatre Projects Company (Oakey Cultural Centre)
Continuing:
The Secret Love Life of Ophelia by Steven Berkoff Dir Brenna-Lee Cooney at !Metro Arts
Boy Girl Wall for The Escapists, created and performed by Lucas Stibbard at !Metro Arts
I Love You Bro’ by Adam J Cass Dir David Berthold for La Boite Theatre at the Roundhouse (closes Sunday)
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The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (Review): Fractal Theatre
Iambic pentameter (aka blank verse) is known for being the rhythm that most closely approximates everyday speech in English. Most of us meet it for the first time in the plays of Shakespeare. With its repetitive de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM spring on each line of the verse, despite – or perhaps because it’s closely associated with Shakespeare – IP often gets a bad working over in the hands of inexperienced actors. In a misguided attempt to make it sound more ‘real,’ all the insistence and momentum in the rhythm can get flattened out and choked. Perhaps even more unfortunately, it can be spoken in a kind of reverential ‘poetic’ voice which casts the content and the speaker into some kind of other world divorced from reality. IP is full of traps for the young player.
And now, here’s playwright Steven Berkoff appropriating the old master’s metric verse form for The Secret Love Life of Ophelia, currently playing at !Metro Arts Studio in Brisbane. I started by mentioning IP because one of the real delights of this Fractal Theatre production, directed by Brenna-Lee Cooney, is that the two actors in the production, Eugene Gilfedder (Hamlet) and Mary Eggleston (Ophelia) handle the verse so well; it’s earthy, muscular, lyrical, downright dirty (but in a soft-porn kind of way) often delicate, and always affecting. Neither actor is the slightest bit disarmed by the text, in fact they chew it up and spit it out – as utterly befits this 21st century, retro-Elizabethan, poetic psycho-drama. Phew! Hoorah for them and hoorah for Berkoff; it’s great to hear such tough verse done proud. Continue reading “The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (Review): Fractal Theatre”
Boy Girl Wall (Review): The Escapists @ !Metro Arts (2010)
Spring is just round the corner; love is in the air – along with deadly magpies – so it’s a perfect time for a new, one-man show all about romance and other local hazards, natural or man-made. With no more than a stick of chalk, a couple of puppet socks, a few props and an overhead projector, Lucas Stibbard creates and embodies the entire world of Boy Girl Wall in the bare, black-walled box of the !Metro Art’s Sue Benner Theatre. It’s a sweet, very funny and touching confection, and a quite splendid night in the theatre from The Escapists. This is the same creative collective that brought you The Attack of the Attacking Attackers a year or so back. The Escapists’ manifesto: imagination, theatricality and the joy of play are all joyously present in Boy Girl Wall.
Floppy haired, chalk-stained-suited and bare-footed, Stibbard, like his quirky imagination, takes flight through the tiny space of the inner city’s favorite theatre haunt. Stibbard’s is a wonderfully original and intelligent voice, and he leaps and whirls in a non stop, dazzling performance in the best Aussie tradition of yarn spinning. Flicking and switching between characters with the ease of someone totally in charge and on top of his game, it’s a 70 minute delight which flies by at full tilt and as nimbly as the story teller himself. Continue reading “Boy Girl Wall (Review): The Escapists @ !Metro Arts (2010)”