Flashpoint: New Writing for Theatre

These rehearsed readings of winning scripts from the RE Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Awards offer a rare opportunity to participate in the process of developing new theatre. The readings will take place at two venues: the Village Roadshow Theatrette at the State Library of Victoria and fortyfivedownstairs. Entry is free.

At the Library

Excerpts from three scripts, followed by Q&A with the playwrights, facilitated by Kristy Edmunds.

Time: Wednesday 29 July, 7.30pm
Venue: Village Roadshow Theatrette (entry 3, La Trobe St)
Bookings: 03 8664 7099 or bookings@slv.vic.gov.au
Free entry

Return to Earth, by Lally Katz

A young woman returns home and finds herself wide awake in a sleepy little town. Alice is a bit of a space cadet. Everyone in Tathra thinks so too. She wants to land. She wants to fit in. She has to fit in - her family needs her to sort herself out. However, no one in the town is really as normal as they look. Return to Earth is a play about family, friends, love, sacrifice and reconnecting with the world.
Director: Chris Kohn

The Orphanage Opera, by Angela Betzien

This is a new-form opera, adapted from a play by Angela Betzien. Its dreamscape narrative unfolds like an epic fairytale, exploring the image of the lost child in the Australian landscape. It tells a history of institutionalisation in Australia from the perspective of six women between 1820 and 2009. Highly theatrical in form, The Orphanage Opera borrows from and subverts genres such as melodrama, gothic horror and frontier drama. The new-form music concept creates a hybrid ensemble of traditional instruments, contemporary sound manipulation and design elements.
Librettist: Angela Betzien
Composer: Jethro Woodward
Director: Suzanne Chaundy

Shots, by Carly Beth Nugent

Michael Grant is a businessman from the suburbs. Wayne Stevens is a killer, living in an unpredictable world of crime, drugs and violence, constantly teetering on the edge of life and death. Grant and Stevens want each other’s lives. Grant’s violent longings are quelled by domestic concerns and his inability to escape from ordinariness, while Stevens yearns to become the quintessential suburbanite. When their paths finally cross, it seems they may have the opportunity to exchange fates. Shots explores Melbourne’s different worlds and the ways in which they co-exist and sometimes collide.
Director: Tee O’Neill

At fortyfive downstairs

Three scripts, presented in full.

Venue: fortyfive downstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Bookings: 03 9662 9966 or fortyfivedownstairs.com
Free entry

Big Noise, by Aidan Fennessy

Wednesday 26 August, 7.30pm
A woman lies bleeding on a darkened city street after a near-fatal attack. Big Noise traces the diffuse intersections over the course of a day that lead to a horrific crime. Strangers collide, streets intersect, and lives are changed forever. One night. One city. Six stories. Big Noise drills down into the everyday dislocation of life at the crossroads in a big city.

Topsy, by Kit Lazaroo

Thursday 27 August, 7.30pm
It’s 1906 and three Australians arrive on Coney Island, New York, to witness the execution by electrocution of a rogue elephant called Topsy. Bruna is a journalist documenting the event for a small newsletter, and she befriends an illiterate adventuress, Clothilde. They encounter Grenitch, a would-be revolutionary, at the Hotel Scheherezade. The three deprive each other of sleep with their fears, secrets and suspicions, while the elephant-keeper, Vasco, tries to extract money from them. The characters gradually move from posturing to revelation in this story of cruelty and incarceration in the carnival world of peepshows and alleyways.
Director: Jane Woollard
Cast: Georgina Capper, Colin James, Carole Patullo, Alex Pinder

Whiteley’s Incredible Blue, by Barry Dickins

Friday 28 August, 7.30pm
'Voluptuous French ultramarine light arrives upon a tiny Japanese meditation garden. Some gentle but insistent breeze worries at the incredibly beautiful bamboo plants... It seems a storm is to come. Mental; mortal; whatever.' Set either before, during or after Brett Whitleley’s untimely death (or all three), this one-person play, originally commissioned by the Melbourne Theatre Company, is a wild, transgressive journey into the great painter’s life and imagination by Melbourne’s most poetic playwright. A verbal extravaganza of the first order, the play expresses in words, rhythm and physical movement what Whiteley’s paintings express in vivid colours, outrageous forms and disturbing images - bold expressions of Australia’s collective unconscious.
Actor: Neil Pigot
Director: Julian Meyrick
Designer: Meredith Rogers
Lighting Designer: Kerry Saxby
Musicians: Robert George, Robert Calvert, Pietro Fine (Howley Calvert Jazz Trio)