Brisbane Festival Memorial in-theatre program

BY ALICE OSWALD / BRINK PRODUCTIONS (AUS)

Brisbane Festival is an initiative of the Queensland Government and Brisbane City Council

MEMORIAL Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre | 7 – 9 September

BRISBANE FESTIVAL ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S NOTE In just two months, the world celebrates the centenary of the Armistice that ended the First World War. Memorial employs the Trojan War as a prism through which we can reflect on that war – after all, Troy is only 75km from Gallipoli. The presence onstage of 215 members of the Brisbane public underlines that war touches us all, indiscriminately. The great Helen Morse occupies the centre of that picture, giving illuminating voice to Alice Oswald’s humanising poem.

This is Troy, Gallipoli and Brisbane as one. David Berthold

ALICE OSWALD

CHRIS DRUMMOND

Poet

Director

Alice read Classics at New College, Oxford.

Chris is Artistic Director of Brink Productions.

Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the

His productions have been presented by

Gap-StoneStile (1996), received a Forward

most major theatre companies in Australia.

Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Her

Credits include Memorial, Ancient Rain, Long

second volume, Dart (2002), was the outcome

Tan, Tartuffe, The Aspirations of Daise Morrow,

of years of primary and secondary research

Thursday, Land & Sea, Skip Miller’s Hit Songs,

into the history, environment, and community

Harbinger, The Hypochondriac, When the Rain

along the River Dart in Devon, England. Alice’s

Stops Falling, Beetle Graduation, The Clockwork

other collections of poetry include Woods, etc.

Forest, This Uncharted Hour and Drums in the

(2005), winner of a Geoffrey Faber Memorial

Night. Chris’s production of When the Rain Stops

Prize; Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009), illustrated

Falling won multiple awards and significant

by Jessica Greenman; A Sleepwalk on the Severn

national acclaim. Chris was Associate Director

(2009); and Memorial (2011), a reworking of

at the State Theatre Company of South

Homer’s Iliad that has received high critical

Australia between 2000 and 2004 and his

praise for its innovative approach and stunning

credits include Babyteeth, Art, The Dying Gaul,

imagery, which won the 2013 Warwick Prize for

The Merchant of Venice, Drowning in my Ocean

writing. Alice was the first poet to win the prize.

of You and Night Letters. Chris’s production

Alice’s many honours and awards include the

of The Flying Dutchman for the State Opera

T. S. Eliot prize for Dart, a San Eric Gregory

Company of South Australia was nominated

Award, an Arts Foundation Award for Poetry,

for a Helpmann Award nomination for Best

a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and

Director. In 2010 the ABC’s Limelight magazine

a Ted Hughes Award. Her most recent,

nominated Chris as one of the top 50 players

acclaimed, collection, Falling Awake (2016) won

in the arts in Australia.

the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is BBC Radio 4’s poet in residence.

J O C E LY N P O O K Composer

YA R O N L I F S C H I T Z Movement

Jocelyn is one of the UK’s most versatile

Yaron is a graduate of the University of New

composers, having written extensively for

South Wales, University of Queensland and

stage, screen, opera house and concert hall.

National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA),

Often remembered for her score to Eyes Wide

where he was the youngest director ever

Shut, which won her a Chicago Film Award and

accepted into its prestigious graduate

a Golden Globe nomination, she has worked

director’s course. Since graduating, Yaron

with some of the world’s leading directors,

has directed over 60 productions including

musicians, artists and arts institutions –

large-scale events, opera, theatre, physical

including Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese,

theatre, and circus. His work has been seen

Royal Opera House, BBC Proms, Peter Gabriel,

in 39 countries and across six continents by

Massive Attack and Laurie Anderson. Her first

over one million people and has won numerous

opera Ingerland was commissioned by ROH2

awards including six Helpmann awards and

for the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio

the Australia Council Theatre Award. His

in 2010, and The BBC Proms and The King’s

productions have been presented at major

Singers commissioned her to collaborate

festivals and venues around the world including

with the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion on

BAM, the Barbican, Les Nuits de Fourvière,

Mobile. Jocelyn won an Olivier Award for the

Chamaleon and all the major Australian

National Theatre’s production of St Joan, and a

festivals. His film work was selected for the

British Composer Award for her music-theatre

Berlin and Melbourne Film Festivals. He was

piece Speaking in Tunes. She won a second

founding Artistic Director of the Australian

British Composer Award for her soundtrack

Museum’s Theatre Unit, Head Tutor in Directing

to Akram Khan’s dance production DESH. In

at Australian Theatre for Young People and

2014 she composed the score for Lest We Forget

has been a regular guest tutor in directing

choreographed by Akram Khan for English

at NIDA. He is currently Artistic Director and

National Ballet to mark the centenary of WWI,

CEO of Circa. In 2018 he has been Creative

as well as the score for King Charles III, a new

Director of Festival 2018: the arts and cultural

play by Mike Bartlett performed in London and

program of the 21st Commonwealth Games,

Broadway, New York. Earlier this year Jocelyn

and directed a new production of Idomeneo

won a BAFTA for her score for the 2017 TV film

in Lisbon at The Teatro Nacional de São

version of King Charles III. Her soundtracks for

Carlos, and is also directing four new Circa

The Wife, a feature film starring Glenn Close,

creations, including En Masse for this year’s

and for The Staircase, a documentary series

Brisbane Festival.

by director Jean-Xavier Lestrade, are both due for release in September.

HELEM MORSE

Director’s Note

Actor

In 2012 I was standing in Foyles book shop

Helen is one of Australia’s most respected and acclaimed actors. She has worked with all the major theatre companies and many independent ensembles in a wide range of classics and contemporary international and Australian plays. Recent productions include: Angels in America Parts 1 & 2 (Fortyfivedownstairs); JOHN (MTC); Daniel Keene’s Photographs of A (Antechamber/NEON); Michael Gow’s Once in Royal David’s City for Belvoir; Tim Winton’s Signs of Life, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, for Black Swan/Perth International Festival; Robyn Archer’s Architektin for STCSA; Love.War.Death.BREL (Adelaide Cabaret) and the national tour of KAGE’s Sundowner. Many earlier productions include: Frozen, A Little Night Music, Arcadia; Our Country’s Good, Death & the Maiden; Duet for One; Nick Enright’s Good Works; Alma de Gröen’s The Woman In The Window, for which she received a Green Room award and

looking for something to read on the long flight home to Australia when playwright Bryony Lavery handed me a copy of Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad by Alice Oswald saying, ‘somebody needs to turn this into a piece of theatre’. Even before I’d read the first line I was struck by the ideas Alice Oswald expressed in her foreword: This is a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story. Matthew Arnold (and almost everyone ever since) has praised the Iliad for its ‘nobility’. But ancient critics praised its ‘enargeia’, which means something like ‘bright unbearable reality’. It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves. This version, trying to retrieve the poem’s enargeia, takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping.

she played Theodora Goodman in Adam Cook’s

The idea of translating a work’s atmosphere

adaptation of The Aunt’s Story (Melbourne/

is a compelling one, but coupled with the

Brisbane International Festivals and Belvoir.)

notion of enargeia Memorial offered the

Her recent concert work includes L’Invitation

possibility of being an immensely theatrical

au Chateau which she adapted and performed

proposition. In the theatre gods (and ghosts)

with PLEXUS Trio and Rebels, Renegades &

are manifest, real, physical presences and in

Rascals with SouthernXSoloists at the Bangalow

the right context, theatre can conjure a living

Music Festival. Helen has received several

communion with our immortal selves.

awards during her decades of work and was

Reading Memorial, I was stunned and moved

nominated recently for an AACTA for her

by the clear chiming invocation of Oswald’s

portrayal of Lottë in Fred Schepisi’s film

language, its rhythms, repetitions, images,

of Patrick White’s The Eye Of The Storm and

wit and humanity, and its cumulative power

a Helpmann for JOHN (2017) and Memorial

as an elegy to all those lost in battle, its deeper

at the Adelaide Festival 2018.

song for the mourning of those who wait at home and finally, for the elemental world itself.

Our tragedy is everything, and yet nothing

Jocelyn Pook’s transcendent music is a work

in the vastness of these elements.

of exquisite alchemy, reframing Memorial,

And this was language yearning to be

it creates an aural landscape through which

spoken aloud.

the act of performance can travel.

Memorial became a hook in my mind. It stayed

Within this simple elegant idea we always

with me over a couple of years, floating in the back of my imagination, looking for the right context in which to find a theatrical shape.

Then in 2014 a series of conversations with Yaron Lifschitz, Artistic Director of Circa, about the theatrical possibilities of the text led us to an ambitious idea of working together, with composer Jocelyn Pook, to stage Memorial internationally in 2018 to mark the centennial year of Armistice Day. The essence of the idea was simple. There are 215 soldiers named in Memorial and we wanted to populate the stage with a man, woman or child for every name. The ‘soldier chorus’, would be drawn from the community, simultaneously evoking the soldiers themselves and their connections to home and loved ones – the widows, orphans and grieving

knew what was demanded was a virtuosic central performance. At its heart Memorial is really about the words and the actor and the intimacy of the actor/audience relationship.

It’s an elemental role this role of the poet, all at once it’s the voice and heart of a god, the wind, the rain, the earth and of time itself, but it’s also the voice and heart of a thousand lives arrested in unspeakable moments of visceral human experience: men in the instant of their dying, wives and mothers in the heat and ice of their grieving, children in their brutal awakening… it all coalesces, expanding into a single thread… these voices embodied in one voice, singular and universal, a collective story told by a lone storyteller.

It has been one of the great privileges of my career watching Helen Morse find the breath

families who are left behind. This great chorus

and sinew of this extraordinary text.

would work in harmony with Oswald’s great

My deepest thanks to all the incredible artists

poem to manifest an innate and vital truth –

and all the community members who have

a bright unbearable reality – conjuring a living

given so much to this production, and to the

expression of enargeia; our gods and ghosts

inspiring team working behind the scenes

coming back to earth.

who every day create miracles to bring

For all of its immense power, there is another

Memorial to the stage.

extraordinary voice in this production that

Chris Drummond

rises to meet the spare towering beauty of Alice Oswald’s poetry.

CREATIVE TEAM

MEMORIAL PRODUCTION TEAM

Poet Alice Oswald Concept Chris Drummond & Yaron Lifschitz Composer Jocelyn Pook Director Chris Drummond Movement Yaron Lifschitz Set Design Michael Hankin Costumes Renate Henschke Lighting Nigel Levings Sound Jane Rossetto Associate Director/Associate Movement Director Benjamin Knapton Music Director Jonathan Peter Kenny Producer Lee-Anne Donnolley (Far & Away Productions)

Production Manager Tess Ryan Chorus Manager Suzanne Critchley Stage Manager Tanya Leach Assistant Stage Managers Deanna Covino & Michelle Delaney Sound Engineer Michael Jackson Wardrobe Coordinator Tracey Lord PR & Marketing Coordinator Amanda Werner

PERFORMERS Actor Helen Morse Cello Monique Clare Harp, soprano Loni Fitzpatrick Counter tenor Jonathan Peter Kenny Clarinet, accordion Jarrod Linke Violin, soprano Kelly McCusker Mezzo soprano Melanie Pappenheim Double bass Annie Silva Oboe, shawm, recorders, gralla, Bulgarian singer Belinda Sykes Macedonian singer Tanja Tzarovska Viola Kieran Welch Featuring Exaudi Australis and the Queensland Festival Chorus with the Vocal Manoeuvres Academy Youth Ensemble, singers from Cheap Trill and Access Arts.

ABOUT BRINK PRODUCTIONS Brink Productions is acclaimed for making original works in collaboration with great artists. In recent years Chris Drummond, Brink’s Artistic Director, has been sourcing extraordinary texts – poetry, verbatim interviews, short stories, epic poems – and repurposing them to create original theatre.

Dedicated to evolving the artform of storytelling in the Australian theatre, Brink’s works are enriched by extensive creative collaboration.

Brink wants theatre to be a transcendent experience: a place to collectively observe ourselves, giving voice and flesh to the crises, mysteries and wonders of human existence.

Brink wants theatre to start deep conversations about big ideas that contribute to and engage with the national discourse in ways that enliven, inspire and elevate. Brink wants to find new

Chorus Master Alison Rogers

ways to place culture at the centre of daily life.

Dancers Tobiah Booth-Remmers, Lina Limosani, Larissa McGowan

BRINK PRODUCTIONS BOARD

BRINK PRODUCTIONS TEAM Artistic Director Chris Drummond General Manager Karen Wilson Producer Lee-Anne Donnolley Finance Theresa Williams Minutes Emily Mortimer

Chair Stuart Symons Bill Allert Amy Cooper-Boast Mimi Crowe Martin White

THE SOLDIER CHORUS (Names correct at time of printing) Coralie-Ann Airens-Wilmot, Abigail Anderson, India Anderson, Melissa Anderson, Prudence Arango, Georgina Austin, Ava Bampton, Sophie Bannister, Deborah Barrett, Peter Barrett, Emma Bell, Thea Biesheuvel, Isabella Bolton, Rance Boreham, Aleasha Bould, Anna Bowden, Stephen Brierley, Vivien Broadbent, Mary-Helen Buchan, Eulla Cadoo-Dagley, Niamh Cadoo-Dagley, Deborah Callaghan, Moana Campbell-Rogers, Aria Carlos, Zoe Carlos, Hannah Carpenter, Eve Carroll, Phoebe Carroll Campbell, Julie Chatel, Chelsea Chua, Jamie Coburn, Nefeli Cook, Amy Cooker, Kay Cooper, Emmi Cosgrove, Raymond Cosgrove, Vicki Costantini, Lucinda Cowle, Sharon Cross, Alana Cummins, Taylah Curtin, Emma Cutler, Caitlin Dacron, Phil Dahlenburg, Aarya Dath, Fiona David, Sherryn Davies, Jay Deagon, Bryce Delany, Jessica Dick, Katrina Drake, Michelle Ebzery, Felix Egger, Hamish Elliot, Kelsey Ellen, Mary Evans, Georgia Fisher, Elizabeth Fitchett, Megan Fowler, Catherine Gilmour, Nicola Gray, Candice Green, Kerrie Harth, Erica Henderson, Giaan Hoffman, Rebecca Holdorf, Lucy Hood, Joshua Hughes, Emily Hunt, Amanda Hurley, Caitlin Hurtado, Beth Incognito, Ashley Joliffe, Stephanie Keay, Peter Krenske, Kalisi Latusela, Nigel Lau, Harry Lay, Sally Lee, Rebecca Lepahe, Isabella Lightfoot, Edie Linaker, Elizabeth Long, Sebastian Lonton, Vanessa Lonton, Skye Lyons, Anya MacDonald, Miranda MacDonald, Felicity MacKay, Nicole MacKay, Phoenix Macrokanis, Ella Macrokanis, Michael Maggs, Alicia Marsden, Cameron McAndrew, Michael McCrystal, William McFarlane, John McGrath, Amber-Jane McMahon, Ian McWilliam, Luke Mears, Hunter Mills, Carys Moroney, Chloe Mudie, Hamish Mudie, Hugo Mudie, Andrew Neilson, Pierre Nicol, Alice Night, David Norton, Menita Overton, Bettina Partridge, Christopher Perlinski, Zak Phillips, Lesley Phillips, Catriona Pine, Hannah Porritt, Hadeed Pourshafighi, Yasmin Powell, Rebekah Qleibo, Jay Radford, Catherine Ramsey, Bray Ritchie, Andrew Robinson, Jordan Robinson, Kate Robinson, Louise Robinson, Sally Robinson, Sophia Robinson, Moana Rogers, Nicholas Russell, Katelyn Ryan, Pauline Ryder-Smith, Polynn Salon, Adham Samman, Tanya Sarapa, Jeremy Saywell, Horst Schirra, Kaija Scott, Hugo Scott, Kristian Scott, Zoe Seeley, Michael Sepelini, Robbie Sinclair, Priscilla Sizer, Riley Slatter, Caitlin Stark, Charlie Stewart, Jayden Stubbs, Katelyn Suschinsky, Mabel Tamone, Coralie Tapper, Carol Tierney, Lauren Towns, Natasha Townson, Hessa Tukiauha, Ann Uldridge, Margaret Vellnagel, Aaliyah Villar, Paige Villar, Sascha Vosper, Wendy Wallin, Daniel Wang, Kate Watkins, Gemma West, Alicia Whisson, Tristan Whitchurch, Sophie Whitecross, Megan Winsen, Andre Wium, Dorothy Young, Samantha Young, Jazz Zhou.

THANK YOU Rick Allert AO, Robyn Archer AO, Kay Cooper, Robert Davidson, Quentin Grant, Kate Gould, Philip Griffin, Scott Harrison, Glenn Hill, Bruce Hubbard, Kathie Massey, Carolyn Mitchell, Françoise Piron, Barbara Pym and the Mount Torrens and District Community Association, Hon Christopher Pyne MP, Toni Racklin, Maureen Ritchie, Nat Ryner, Katrina Sedgwick, Annie Silva, Neil Simpson, Jenny Waldman, Gary Weston, Government of South Australia and all the wonderful volunteers appearing in Memorial.

Copyright agent for Alice Oswald: www.unitedagents.co.uk | rcobbe@unitedagents.co.uk This project is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Major Festivals Initiative in association with the Confederation of Australian International Arts Festival Inc., Adelaide Festival, Brisbane Festival and Melbourne Festival.

This project has been supported by the Australian Government’s Anzac Centenary Arts and Culture Fund.

This project is assisted by Arts South Australia Australia – Independent Makers and Presenters – Major Commissions Fund.

This project is co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW: WWI Centenary Art Commissions (UK) and the Barbican.

Brisbane Festival Chair Paul Spiro Deputy Chair Philip Bacon AM

Artistic Director David Berthold Chief Executive Officer Charlie Cush

QPAC EMERGENCY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

Patrons are advised that the Performing Arts Centre has EMERGENCY EVACUATION PROCEDURES, a FIRE ALARM system and EXIT passageways. In case of an alert, patrons should remain calm, look for the closest EXIT sign in GREEN, listen to and comply with directions given by the in house trained attendants and move in an orderly fashion to the open spaces outside the Centre.

In keeping with the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Brisbane, the Turrubul and Jagara Yuggera Peoples, and recognise that this has always been a place of creative expression. We wish to pay respect to their Elders – past, present and emerging – and acknowledge the important role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to play within our creative community.