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)”
