Programme for Current Season

2005 Programme

Seven Little Australians | Falling Petals | The Wild Duck | Medea | Continental Drift - LUNCH WITH LUDWIG - THE GIRL ON THE SOFA - I WAS IN THE HOUSE, WAITING FOR THE RAIN | The Woman in the Window | Manly Mates

SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS

This entertaining adaptation of the classic Australian story makes the perfect holiday treat for all the family.

Laugh and cry with the Woolcot family of 'Misrule' as the Captain tries unsuccessfully to control his madcap brood.

Meet the ever-hungry Bunty, little Nell, Pip, Baby and The General, the irrepressible Judy, and Meg, discovering what it means to be sixteen in 1895.

A talented ensemble cast ranging in age from 3 to 63 brings Australia's most famous family tale to life.

"full of provocative ideas...darkly satiric" Mark Hopkins, SMH

FALLING PETALS

Assistant director: Esti Regos; Set Designer: Tom Bannerman; Costume Designer: Jen Hird; Lighting Designer: Spiros Hristias with Peter Barry, Kellie Higgens, Emma Wood, Amelia Longhurst and Adam Kennedy.

The Sydney premiere of this award-winning Australian play, a thought-provoking contemporary satire that is both funny and frightening.

Something strange is happening in the country town of Hollow: a mysterious plague is killing the young people. Sally, Tania and Phil, three vulnerable school-leavers, are caught in this diseased backwater. Success in their final exams may be the only passport out of a country town with no future. As the deadly outbreak reaches epidemic proportions, it becomes a desperate race against time, their straightforward ambitions ever more threatened as Hollow is put under quarantine and mob rule takes over.

Winner of the Wal Cherry Play of the Year award and the ANPC Young Dramatist award, this play shows brilliant young Melbourne writer Ben Ellis at his most sharp and observant. FALLING PETALS is a darkly humorous fable about the consequences of a culture of disposable youth. Powerful, caustic and deeply contemporary, it blasts the urban/rural fissure wide open.

The Wild Duck

The tranquil existence of the Ekdal family is shattered when a long-hidden secret is revealed and events from the past impact on their lives with terrible repercussions.

Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian dramatist, was a master at creating characters of profound psychological and emotional complexity. In plays such as HEDDA GABLER, A DOLL'S HOUSE and GHOSTS, he challenged the constricting social conventions and hypocritical attitudes of 19th century society with a striking clarity of perception that still resonates today.

THE WILD DUCK is not Ibsen's most often performed play, yet it is arguably his finest, matchless in its poignancy, depth and humour.

• Directed by Jess Kingsford
• Set & graphic design by Steven Butler
• Costume design by Alexandra Gallery
• Lighting & sound design by Michael Schell
• Tickets: $25 / $20 concession
• BOOKINGS: 9519 8958

Medea

They are scared of the blood that flows
without the need of a wound

it's why they lock us up

to protect us from ourselves they say

to break the spell of the woman

A great tragedy of love, lust, betrayal, retribution and revenge, a young, dynamic cast and a powerful and exciting new interpretation

One of the greatest of all plays: a classic drama of love, betrayal, revenge and retribution.

• Adapted and Directed by Anthony Skuse
• Set: Dane Laffrey
• Costumes: Xanthe Heubel
• Lighting:Anthony Pearson
• Cast: Manuk Aret, Sophie Goldrick, Sam Grant-Rarua, Adele Granger, Lisa Griffiths, Graham Hyland, Mona Kanaan, Lori Killesteyn, Jack Norman-Pottinger, Jennifer Perry, Esti Regos, Kate Skinner, Olivia Stambouliah

Special School Matinee Performance: Sat 14 May@3pm
The director and cast will discuss the production after the show.
School Students: $15 (one teacher free per 20 students)

NEW DIRECTIONS 2005: CONTINENTAL DRIFT

CONTINENTAL DRIFT is a dynamic season featuring Australian premiere productions of three groundbreaking plays from contemporary Europe.

CONTINENTAL DRIFT explores the nuances of modern relationships and society in plays by Jon FOSSE (Norway), Thomas BERNHARD (Austria), and Jean-Luc LAGARCE (France).

CONTINENTAL DRIFT opens up a cultural world outside the tradition of English-speaking theatre with three acclaimed examples of current European drama.

single play: $20 / $18
season ticket: $45 / $40
BOOKINGS: 9519 8958

• PLAY #1
  Australian premiere production by arrangement with Casarotto Ramsay

  THE GIRL ON THE SOFA

  by Jon Fosse
  English version by David Harrower
  directed by Tanya Goldberg
  16 June - 9 July, Thurs - Sat @ 8pm, Sun @ 5.30pm
  

  A painter reaches a crisis point in her life. She is blocked. She can't paint. In a dazzling technical tour-de-force, yet with incredible delicacy and restraint, the playwright takes us into her memory as she forces herself to examine the relationships which have marked her, the misunderstandings, the betrayals, the evasions that have built up throughout her life to immobilize her now. With Fosse's total mastery of stripped-back post-modern dialogue where the unspoken blooms without rhetoric, this play is what contemporary European theatre is all about.

  Jon Fosse, born in Haugesund, Norway, in 1959, belongs to the generation of writers that in the 1980s introduced post- modernism into Norway, in direct opposition to the established socio-realistic school of theatre. He has been widely translated, and is seen by many as one of the most important contemporary dramatists in Europe.

  "An evocative realisation of a fascinating text", SMH 18/6/05

  Set: Barry French Lighting: Tony Youlden
  Costumes: Simone Romaniuk
  Sound: Danny Krass Charlie Meadows Alon Islar
  Adrian Adam Maeve Dermody Louise Fischer Charles Freyberg Tenille Halliday Kath Perry Donald Sword Helen Tonkin

• PLAY #2 Australian premiere production by arrangement with Suhrkamp Verlag GmbH

  LUNCH WITH LUDWIG

  (RITTER, DENE, VOSS) by Thomas Bernhard
  Translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth Northcott
  directed by Gertraud Ingeborg
  

  21 July - 13 August, Thurs - Sat @ 8pm, Sun @ 5.30pm

  Cast: Elaine Hudson Ruth Hessey David Ritchie
  Set: Barry French Lighting: Tony Youlden
  Costumes: Katja Handt Sound: Johannes Swaton

  Vienna. Two sisters prepare a welcome-home lunch for their eccentric brother - with disastrous consequences! An off-the-wall satire about the horrors of knowing your family too well. The unpredictable outrageousness of Bernhard's curling irony is a sumptuous feast and a delight. LUNCH WITH LUDWIG is a savagely funny allegory of post-war Austria.

  Thomas Bernhard (1939 - 1981) is now considered to be Austria's greatest twentieth century writer. He scandalized the nation with his uncompromising exposure of their Nazi past and complicity in the Holocaust. The humanity permeating Bernhard's work gives the dark fury of his writing a veiled tenderness and his voice is so outrageous that it irresistibly makes you laugh.

• PLAY #3

  I WAS IN THE HOUSE, WAITING FOR THE RAIN

  by Jean-Luc Lagarce translated and directed by Louise Luccarini 25 August - 17 September, Thurs - Sat @ 8pm, Sun @ 5.30pm

  Late one summer evening, a young man returns to his home. The five women of his family have been longing for this moment. They have heard nothing from him since his sudden departure, years earlier, after a last terrible fight with his father. Now he has reappeared and collapsed without uttering a word. They have put him to bed in his old room, lovingly kept ready for him. Will he live until morning? Grandmother, mother and sisters take up their vigil, talking into the night about the love that has made them put their own lives on hold. But why did they really wait? And what does 'love' actually mean? Layer upon layer is peeled away as they expose their perceptions of themselves and of each other.

  Before his death from AIDS in 1996 at the age of 38, Jean-Luc Lagarce was one of France's most prolific and acclaimed dramatists and his reputation has continued to grow. This wise and beautiful play, written in the last year of his life, is a fine example of his work: elegiac, probing, full of humanity and compassion, gentle humour and poetic insight.

Sunday 18th September at the New Theatre

1 p.m. BIRD SINGS THE BLUES, a folk concert by Loosely Woven, the well-known group of 22 instrumentalists and singers. Fully acoustic - hear the actual sounds of violin and guitar strings, accordion & concertina, reeds, recorders and human voices (including your own!). All proceeds towards the New Theatre Building Fund. Tickets: $10 (9519 8958)

5 p.m. THE FIREGROUND, a new play by award-winning Sydney playwright Jennifer Compton. First-ever reading, staged and directed by Matthew O'Sullivan in the author's presence. THE FIREGROUND is a gripping human drama set in a NSW rural community. Cast includes Jock Brown, Alan Faulkner, Marcello Fabrizi, Les Asmussen, Angela Carmichael, Amanda Crompton, Tony Curtis, Libby Fleming, Louise Luccarini, Aidan Pezzutto, Steve Vella. Entry by donation.

The Woman in the Window

Directed by Kevin Jackson.

Cast: Bard Canning, Les Chantery, Tanya Goldberg, Elaine Hudson, Belinda Sculley, Amber Todd, Lucy Taylor

Set: Tom Bannerman; Lighting: Michael Schell; Costumes: Kim Scott; Sound: Pete Neville; Asst. Director: Kate Wild

Australia in the 23rd century: humanity is blinded by science; there are no countries, only corporations; Shakespeare lies undiscovered deep within the computer archives; and no female poet is ever acknowledged.

But in this futuristic world of intellectual terrorism and rigid controls, one young woman fights back.

Funny, ironic, thrilling, visionary: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW celebrates the endurance of the human spirit of creativity.

A beautiful play by one of our finest writers at the height of her powers.

(by arrangement with RGM Associates)

"striking and compelling ... a wonderful play ... moving and imaginative ... Kevin Jackson has gathered an excellent cast and directs with an expressive, simply physical grammar and utter clarity ... Tom Bannerman's set and Kim Scott's costumes are delightful and serve the production well." - review by Stephen Dunne, SMH. October 1, 2005

MILESTONE EVENT IN AUSTRALIAN THEATRE

Playwright, feminist, social activist and New Theatre Life Member MONA BRAND will turn 90 on Saturday 22 October.

To honour her life and work, New Theatre and NIDA are joining forces to present a SPECIAL BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION in her presence.

New Theatre members will present excerpts from her plays and songs; there will be tributes from old friends and professional colleagues; a birthday cake (of course) and the chance to toast an important Australian artist.

Mona Brand was one of a group of determined women dramatists whose work for stage and radio from the 1930s to the 1950s helped establish our national theatre culture.

Many of these women were also left-leaning: paid up members of the Communist Party or fellow travellers, active in political and social movements of the day and consequently deemed dangerous and subversive by the conservative powers-that-be, their activites closely monitored by ASIO!

It was at the radical New Theatre that these writers and their plays found a natural home. Mona Brand broke new ground with he r examination of Australian society and culture from a feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist standpoint, in opposition to the 'pioneers-and-bush' mythology that characterised so much Australian writing. Her plays questioned and explored the way we live in a manner not seen again until the emergence of 'new wave' groups like Nimrod and The Pram Factory and playwrights such as Sewell, Nowra and de Groen. New Theatre is proud to claim Mona Brand as a Life Member.

New Theatre and NIDA hope that you will be able to join us for this very special event.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND TO BOOK A SEAT AT THE PARTY, Email:newtheatre@bigpond.com or Phone: 9519 3403

"What did Premier Askin, his Police Commissioner and their mates get up to in the Octopus Room of the Hotel Manly on a Saturday arvo?"

Manly Mates

It's January 1972. The NSW Premier has just changed his name by deed poll and had himself knighted. With his mate the Police Commissioner he's celebrating with a few illegal bets and a glass or two in the Octopus Room at the Hotel Manly.

Add to the mix a tipsy wife, an SP bookie, a curvaceous political candidate, a shrewd barmaid, a Mafia hitman, a rookie cop, a junkie and paper bags full of money! Stir well and let the farce unfold.

Corrupt politicians, crooked cops, cunning local councillors: even if you're too young to remember who said: "Run over the bastards!" you'll recognise the real bent bastards in this fast and funny Sydney comedy!

Cast: Frank McNamara, Alan Faulkner, Jennie Dibley, Alan Popely, Erin McMullen, Barry French, Syann Williams, Jennifer Davis, Gerrard Woodward, Glen Fey and Rich Knighton

Set and Lighting Design: Tony Youlden
Costume Design: Suzanne Gayle
Assistant Director: Leigh Rowney

10 NOVEMBER - 17 DECEMBER 2005
THURSDAY - SATURDAY @ 8PM / SUNDAY @ 5.30 PM

Tickets: $25 ($20 Concession)
Bookings: 9519 8958