MTC Scenes - Spring 2015

MTC

scenes Spring 2015

Alison Bell

Back to the beginning

Ash Flanders

Down in the basement

Steve Vizard Over the top

Finegan Kruckemeyer Across the universe

Look both ways Inside information

There is so much more to be done as we reach into Melbourne’s heart to open this flagship arts organisation to more people, showcasing timely stories relevant to twentyfirst century Melburnians.

In moving forward we want to connect with even more children, students, families, and our multicultural communities. We want you all to be part of our story and for us to be part of yours as we continue the journey into 2016 and beyond.

Cover: Alison Bell in STCSA’s Betrayal.

MTC Headquarters 252 Sturt St, Southbank Vic 3006 TELEPHONE 03 8688 0900 FACSIMILE 03 8688 0901 E-MAIL info@mtc.com.au WEBSITE mtc.com.au

Scenes is produced quarterly and is a publication of Melbourne Theatre Company. All information was correct at the time of printing. Melbourne Theatre Company reserves the right to make changes.

EDITOR AND WRITER Paul Galloway GRAPHIC DESIGN Helena Turinski COVER IMAGE Shane Reid Melbourne Theatre Company is a department of the University of Melbourne

Brett Sheehy Artistic Director Mark Leonard Winter and Michala Banas in Birdland; (below) Matt Hetherington, Matt Day and Amber McMahon with other cast members in North by Northwest

Southbank Theatre 140 Southbank Blvd, Southbank Vic 3006 BOX OFFICE 03 8688 0800

PHOTOS: JEFF BUSBY

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s we launch Season 2016, it’s a great time to reflect on the past year which has been incredibly exciting for Melbourne Theatre Company, and I hope for Melbourne audiences as well.

In the past twelve months we’ve co-produced a major musical premiere with the Broadway and West End success Once; brought internationally acclaimed star Miriam Margolyes back to Melbourne for I’ll Eat You Last; co-produced Complexity of Belonging, a dance-theatre piece that impressed Melbourne Festival crowds before wowing European audiences; and had two hit World Premieres – Pennsylvania Avenue and North by Northwest – picked up for return seasons in early 2016.

We’ve reached new audiences with stories from near and far, ranging from Tim Rogers and Aidan Fennessy’s new Australian musical What Rhymes with Cars and Girls, nominated for a range of Helpmann Awards, to British playwright Simon Stephens’ rock’n’roll drama Birdland.

We’ve also reached new areas, not only with our international touring, but with our Education Production I Call My Brothers touring regional Victoria and Tasmania with the assistance of Crown Resorts Foundation and the Packer Family Foundation in our Sharing the Light initiative.

This is in addition to mounting the third NEON Festival of Independent Theatre, recognising our ongoing commitment to supporting Melbourne’s vital small-to-medium sector, and continuing the Women Directors’ Program and the MTC Connect Program, with Multicultural Arts Victoria. As well, our touring programs, family productions, and expansive education initiatives are all paying dividends in spades, with many of them setting benchmarks for arts organisations around the country. But be assured – we’re not resting on our laurels!

What lies beneath As time slips backwards in Betrayal, Alison Bell strips the layers away

Alison Bell Betrayal (STCSA)

PHOTO: SHANE REID

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n response to my casual opening enquiry about how things are going with Betrayal in South Australia, actor Alison Bell says with blunt honesty, ‘It’s just one of those plays that are ugly things to be inside of.’ She laughs as she says this and assures me that her role as Emma is ‘perversely quite enjoyable’ to play. Nevertheless, being held in Harold Pinter’s tight triangle of marital infidelity is uncomfortable. ‘I mean there’s no release in these scenes,’ she says. ‘As an actor inside them I’m required to conjure all the emotion, but keep it repressed. And that leads you feeling quite awful by the end of it.’

A little later, Bell returns to the point: ‘I suppose, I know now why an actor’s impulse is always to release – you know, always to cry dramatically or to shout loudly, because it does allow you to release that tension that you’ve built.

But this play doesn’t give us that option.

We would be doing Harold Pinter a great disservice if we were doing that sort of thing.’

There are great advantages to interviewing an actor after the show has opened. With all the rehearsals and discussions behind her, and after a week of playing before a responsive audience at Adelaide’s Dunstan Playhouse, Bell could speak with much more certainty and precision about Pinter, the play and her role. Discomfort aside, Bell feels that she has gotten to know her character, Emma, very well, even though, partly due to Pinter’s terse style, she remains a mystery to the audience.

‘Someone described watching me in the role as never knowing quite what Emma wants,’ she says. ‘But I, the actor, know what she wants. I feel I have filled her in. But I’m pleased that audience member didn’t know what Emma wanted. Because she obfuscates, she lies, she holds back, and Pinter’s writing doesn’t give away the usual answers.

But that enigma’s okay, because as the actor I’m more than happy to fill in the gaps to create a full internal world.

That’s my job with all roles.’

When Betrayal was first produced in London in 1978, some critics accused Pinter of going soft.

Expecting another set of codified power games over territory as in The Caretaker, The Homecoming and No Man’s Land, the daily reviewers were confounded by what seemed to be a conventional marital infidelity drama.

But time and deeper thought has led most of those critics to recant and to the view that Betrayal fits perfectly within Pinter’s run of work, depicting the codified power games over territory that exist in any close relationship. Over the past weeks of rehearsal and performance, Bell has learnt how subtly those games can be played. ‘[Pinter] has written three very articulate characters,’ she says, ‘but emotionally they’re completely inarticulate. They’re not at all comfortable about expressing their needs or wants clearly. Everything is spoken around. That gives a big hint to how these characters function emotionally. There is no directness in

their expression. It’s a very British thing and we’re trying to be true to that.

There was a lot of criticism of the recent Broadway production, because they didn’t do that. I saw that production, a very compelling production, but I tend to agree that it wasn’t obeying Pinter’s instructions … To my mind and to [director] Geordie Brookman’s mind, Pinter is all about what lies under the surface, and the surface is always a betrayal of what is really happening with the character.’

The play’s structure famously runs in reverse chronological order, from the end of the affair back to the beginning, requiring the actor, in Bell’s words, to ‘take off layers rather accumulate layers as in most plays’, a stripping away that exposes the lies within the triangle of wife, husband, husband’s best friend.

‘What Pinter does give you – and it is a great gift – are very real human interactions,’ Bell says. ‘I mean, I think it’s very rare to meet emotionally courageous people. Most of us tell white lies most of the time – just to get through life. And that’s what gets people through difficult emotional situations. People are vulnerable in these situations and incapable of the courage one needs to deal authentically. So Pinter’s being truthful and accurate about that, and that’s a real gift for an actor.’ ▲ Betrayal by Harold Pinter plays until 3 October at the Sumner.

Alison Bell spoke to Paul Galloway.

Making a night of it

William McInnes, The Effect (2014)

Prompt Corner

Faces old and new

By the time you read this, State Theatre Company of South Australia’s acclaimed production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal will have begun its season at the Sumner, starring Alison Bell, with Adelaide-based actors Nathan O’Keefe, Mark Saturno (below left) and John Maurice completing the cast.

Our big family show, The Boy at the

Edge of Everything, from Tasmanian writer Finegan Kruckemeyer opens for the September school holidays at the Lawler. Emily Goddard (below left) returns to MTC having made her debut with us in 2012 in Elling. The rest of the cast, directed by Peter Houghton, consists of Company debutants: Matt Furlani, Sebastian Lamour, and Felix Berger-O’Neil.

Ash Flanders makes his MTC mainstage debut in Jonathan Tolins’s one-person show Buyer and Cellar.

And surprisingly, considering his profile in Melbourne’s independent theatre scene, especially as cofounder of the multi-award-winning company, Sisters Grimm, the show will be his first time playing in the Arts Centre.

The show that ends MTC’s 2015 Season and takes us up to the Christmas season, Steve Vizard and Paul Grabowsky’s The Last Man Standing, will feature stage veteran Peter Carroll (below right; last seen at MTC in The Season at Sarsaparilla), William McInnes (The Effect), Nicki Wendt (Rockabye, below right) and Toby Truslove (The Speechmaker). Director and former MTC Artistic Director Roger Hodgman has also added a quartet of new faces to the line-up: Simon Maiden, Esther Hannaford, Jensen Overend, and Alison Whyte.

Free Production Briefings

Before seeing the show, you can prime your mind and pique your interest by listening to the director, creative team and cast discuss the play and their approach to the production in our free Production Briefings. With a chance to ask any questions you may have, these briefings are a great way to add value to your theatre-going. Everyone is welcome, so please place the final two briefings of the 2015 Season in your diary: Buyer and Cellar, Fairfax Studio, Monday 26 October, 6pm The Last Man Standing, The Sumner, Monday 2 November, 6pm.

Subscribing online

Just as the official launch of Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2016 Season winds down at Hamer Hall on the evening of 7 September, the online launch of the season just gets into gear. Nowadays, most Subscribers have been sold on the ease and convenience of renewing their subscriptions online at mtc.com. au/subscriptions. But look smart about it.

The priority booking period for returning Subscribers, giving you first dibs on the best seats in the house, closes on Friday 9 October.

To receive priority, all we need is the email address you used last year and your password (there’s a forgotten password function if you can’t lay your hands on it). Then it is just a matter of looking at the plays on offer, making your selection (choose all is our suggestion) and following the prompts. Nothing could be easier. ▲

PHOTO: JEFF BUSBY

S

ince the opening of Southbank Theatre in 2009, Script Bar and Bistro on the ground floor has become a feature of Melbourne theatregoing. Rather than booking a pre-show dinner elsewhere and rushing to make curtain-up, many MTC Subscribers have discovered the unhurried convenience of booking a table at Script and, as the announcements to take one’s seats waft from the tannoy, to finish up and make a decorous move to the Sumner.

Of course, the mouth-watering bill of fare is another good reason. We invite you to try Script if you haven’t already, and if you haven’t dined there in a while, you should return soon to try the whole new menu of authentic, regional Italian tastes from Script’s new Head Chef Roberto Grillo, direct from Puglia. For bookings, phone: (03) 8688 0880.

Making mystiques

Playwright Steve Vizard tackles our national myth-making

PHOTOS: BENJAMIN HEALLEY, JO DUCK

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wenty years ago, Steve Vizard was asked by the federal Labor Government under Prime Minister Keating to be the Executive Producer of a concert commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. As you can imagine, it was a gig that was impossible to refuse and close to impossible to pull off to everyone’s satisfaction.

The concert had to be upbeat but respectful, celebrating the victory but acknowledging the human cost, and somehow fulfilling the desires of all: the veterans and the Defence Department, the Government and the Opposition, and the viewing public. ‘There were so many stakeholders to please,’ Vizard recalls, ‘and it seemed bigger than Ben Hur.’ Broadcast live, The Australia Remembers Gala Tribute featured every major star of the day singing songs from the period, interleaved with many video messages of goodwill from the current leaders of our former allies, including Her Majesty, The Queen. Looking back, Vizard thinks it turned out well, but it was a close run thing.

For The Last Man Standing, his new comedy with music by his long-time collaborator and mate Paul Grabowsky, he drew on memories of organising that concert – with appropriate comic exaggeration – to form a convenient frame for his thoughts on the centenary of Gallipoli and the Anzac myth. ‘It struck me that since the play’s about how we commemorate Anzac, it would be best do it through a commemoration event itself. So I invented the Royal Command Centennial Gallipoli Concert – the pinnacle of these centennial celebrations.’

Vizard has long been fascinated by the question of how nations choose to identify themselves. Why, in an everchanging world, do nations choose certain events, stories or symbols to anchor themselves in the past? Why those choices and not others? Why, in Australia’s case, should Gallipoli be so central to our national story?

‘Is Gallipoli our foundation myth?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘Does it stand to explain Australia? Well, increasingly,

obviously, it does. Our politicians are absolutely clear that Gallipoli equals Australianhood – “the crucible of our nationhood.” Our historians say it is.

Most people in the street say it is. Our national broadcaster says it is – you only have to look at everything to do with Gallipoli and Lone Pine this year.

‘Now, I don’t have a particular view one way or the other. My interest is in interrogating the nature of mythmaking: how myths are created and perpetuated, and misappropriated, too. Because there are many elements that go into making a myth. First, there is the historical event, but then there’s the way that key social actors, including the government, appropriate that myth and entwine that myth in their own agendas. And this year everyone’s appropriated Gallipoli: Woolworths, charities, every politician, Australian football teams and leagues, the cricket team. Every major actor who plays on the national stage has somehow entwined Anzac with their own values and agendas.’

Having recently re-read Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, I describe the very different and ambivalent view in the fifties towards the old diggers. ‘Yes, there’s a school of thought that says, “Mythology grows as history recedes”. When the Anzacs were still alive, the reality of their experience didn’t permit any excessive mythologising of it. Their capacity to tell it as it was, their presence among us as old men with their foibles and their frailties,

‘One of the no go areas of the myth has become that we are not allowed to laugh at the myth. I find that heavily ironic …’

Peter Carroll, The Last Man Standing; (inset above) Steve Vizard and Paul Grabowsky

anchored the myth in secular reality.

The minute the vacuum was created, we began elaborating the facts with our own imagining, our own needs. This is what the play is about.’

It is almost inevitable that The Last Man Standing is a comedy, considering Vizard’s background as a writer and performer on television sketch shows such as Fast Forward and Full Frontal, and as host of his own late night chat show in the early nineties. But he has a serious reason for choosing comedy.

‘One of the no go areas of the myth has become that we are not allowed to laugh at the myth,’ he says. ‘I find that heavily ironic, given that everyone will tell you that one of the defining characteristics of the diggers at Gallipoli was their larrikin sense of humour. We mucked around, we were disrespectful of authority, we used blunt humour to get through the darkest of times. And now, in the centenary of Gallipoli, that particular trait has seemingly been leached out of all the ceremonies and commemorations.

The comedy as well as the drama comes easily because of that gap, the gap between the historical reality and our solemn contemplation of sacrifice.’ ▲ The Last Man Standing, by Steve Vizard, music by Paul Grabowsky, runs at the Sumner from 6 November to 12 December.

Steve Vizard spoke to Paul Galloway.

Farewell

Bob Hornery and Alex Scott

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ithin a few weeks over winter, the theatre community lost two favourite veteran performers, Bob Hornery, who died on 26 May, and Alex Scott, who died at the end of June. Both actors were closely associated with MTC Alex Scott and Zoe Caldwell, The Visit (2003); (above) Emily Barclay throughout our history and and Bob Hornery, The Importance of Being Earnest (2011) their deaths were keenly felt within the Company.

Born in 1931 in Sydney, where he became a regular performer in musicals, Bob Hornery first worked at the roles in The Lady’s Not for Union Theatre Repertory Burning, Pygmalion, The Company (precursor of Importance of Being Earnest, MTC) in 1960 in the revue The Voice of the Turtle, Arms Look Who’s Here!, staying and the Man, The Heiress, on for the rest of the season Blithe Spirit, Private Lives, and taking on comic roles in Colombe and Twelfth Night.

She Stoops to Conquer, The Under the direction of MTC Mystery of a Handsome Cab founder John Sumner and and a revival of The Lady’s often matched with ingénue Not for Burning. After a Zoe Caldwell, he helped set successful career in the the high standard of acting UK, Hornery returned to in the Company that Australia in the eighties. ensured its success.

In recent years, he was a He moved to England favourite actor and close in the 1950s and became friend of director Simon Phillips, it is due to versatility and amiability. a successful stage, television and film performing in many of Phillips’s I think they are my two qualities that actor. When he returned to Australia in productions, most recently in 2011 in have carried me through.’ the early eighties, he took lead roles at The Importance of Being Earnest.

Alex Scott was this Company’s first MTC in The Perfectionist, Godsend, The In a 2007 interview for Scenes, he leading man. He was a twenty-three Winter’s Tale, and Man and Superman. spoke about his fifty-five years in show year-old radio actor in 1953 when John In 2003, he returned to the Company business: ‘I have had an extraordinary Sumner hired him to join the Company in our fiftieth anniversary production of life in the theatre, a charmed life. I’ve in its inaugural season. The two-week The Visit, once again playing the lead always believed that I’ve been repertory format required Scott to role opposite Zoe Caldwell and joining enormously lucky. I have hardly been rehearse a new role every two weeks a cast of veterans which included out of work, which is an extraordinary while performing the current show in Bob Hornery. thing to say in this business. I have been the evenings. During his two seasons in Both will long be remembered by thinking about this, you see, and I think the ensemble, he performed leading this Company. ▲

PHOTOS: JEFF BUSBY

THE TEN NETWORK IS A PROUD MAJOR MEDIA PARTNER OF MTC

Won’t rain on her parade

Divas deserve a little devotion says actor Ash Flanders

PHOTO: SARAH WALKER

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Ash Flanders, The Sovereign Wife (Sisters Grimm 2013)

t isn’t difficult to work out why Barbra Streisand is such an icon in the gay community. All the credentials are in the voice, a soaring, expressive instrument that can put a thrill in any musical phrase. And if she has a tendency to exaggerate the emotional line of a song, to overload the brush with vivid feeling, all the better. Such divas do nothing by halves, neither in their art nor their private lives; they are loved for their excess.

Ash Flanders, soon to play a Streisand-besotted actor in Buyer and Cellar, believes that Streisand might be the last of the great musical divas. Our popular culture is too disposable now for a powerful and talented performer to sustain a career over generations as Streisand has. ‘The need to reinvent yourself as an artist is too intense, too quick’, he says. ‘Barbra is one of the last great, lasting artists. She’s from a circle of divas who were allowed to be divas.’

Flanders cautiously admits to being a little besotted with Streisand himself.

He has all the albums, although he prefers the early ones from the sixties when she took herself less seriously.

There is something about her kooky, insecure Jewish girl shtick in those days that he can relate to. It was the persona that made her a favourite in the gay clubs of Greenwich Village in the early years of her career before Broadway discovered her and made her a star.

Nowadays, Streisand rarely performs in public and is happy to live a quiet life on her Malibu estate, where she tends to her collections of beautiful things. In her 2010 coffee-table book, My Passion for Design, there are pictures of the faux shopping mall she had created in the basement of her barn to display her collections. It’s from such selfindulgences that her fans’ love grows.

When a couple of years ago, he heard that American writer Jonathan

Tolins had written a one person-show set in Streisand’s basement mall, Flanders’s interest was immediately piqued. Although he is perhaps best known in Melbourne for his work with gender-bending independent company Sisters Grimm, solo projects have been a major part of his career so far. There’s a lot of solo cabaret in his CV and his one-person hit I Love You Bro went to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2008.

‘I love to do one-person shows,’ he says.

‘I don’t play well with others. I love having all the audience to myself.’

He got hold of the play and loved it.

‘I think it’s any actor’s dream, this play.

It’s a play that allows you to excel in many different parts. So it’s about artistry. And celebrity, as well. It’s about what happens when artists get caught up in their own personas. I’ve always found that really interesting.’ Early last year, he pitched Buyer and Cellar to MTC’s Artistic Director Brett Sheehy and found Sheehy had already booked to see the show on his next trip to New York, where it had become the hot ticket of the season.

Before one gets the wrong idea, Buyer and Cellar is rather more than a tizzy fan letter to a celebrity; it’s also funny exploration of fandom and celebrity, the most unstable and unrequited of relationships. Flanders believes we are hooked on celebrity culture to a degree that is unhealthy.

‘I think celebrity is something that has only become more and more like a sugar rush,’ he says, ‘like the first taste of chewing gum. You love it and then it kind of blands out. That’s why our culture just chews up new talent, new experiences, everything’s now. That fascinates me.’

‘I love reading stories about people who don’t realise this. They play into the machine. And when they finally look behind the curtain and see that there is nothing really there, how do they cope with that? The older I get the more I see fame as a very strange damaging thing.’

And does that mean Flanders wouldn’t wish fame and celebrity on himself? He laughs before replying, ‘Maybe I am just trying to convince myself of that. I’m just being like Charlie [in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory] who says that the Golden Ticket must make the chocolate taste awful.’ ▲ Buyer and Cellar by Jonathan Tolins plays at the Fairfax Studio from 30 October to 12 December.

Ash Flanders spoke to Paul Galloway.

Southbank Theatre

Living in the city Corporate partnerships

PROUD SPONSOR OF MTC genovese.com.au

homes in the Melbourne Arts Precinct for over twenty-five years. Over the last two decades they have sold and successfully completed nearly $4 billion worth of inner-city homes and apartments in Melbourne, assisting thousands of people to live in the heart of one of the world’s most liveable cities.

Central Equity apartments in either Southbank or the Melbourne CBD represent the best of twenty-first century inner-city living, with many of Melbourne’s best restaurants, parks, theatres and sporting venues all readily accessible by foot. With apartments nearing completion in Southbank, Melbourne’s cultural heart, you could be mere moments away from all four MTC

venues at the Southbank Theatre and Arts Centre Melbourne.

Central Equity is Production Partner of MTC’s The Weir, and is proud to contribute to the arts landscape in Southbank, the arts being an integral part of Melbourne’s cultural identity. ▲ Join our long list of corporate partners including Audi Australia, Qatar Airways, Goldman Sachs and InterContinental Melbourne The Rialto. For more details please contact Dean Hampel, Corporate Partnerships Manager on 03 8688 0952 or d.hampel@mtc.com.au

PHOTOS: BENJAMIN HEALLEY

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hrough all our work, both at Arts Centre Melbourne and Southbank Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company endeavours to make the Melbourne Arts Precinct a place of connection, collaboration and creativity. From theatres and galleries, to cafes and parks, the Southbank area has seen rapid development in the past few years and continues to become a major destination for visitors and a key location for inner-city living.

Central Equity, one of Melbourne’s most respected property developers and property managers, are synonymous with inner-city living in Melbourne. They have been creating award-winning

Leaping ahead with Audi

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o MTC, a great partnership is one where both brands are perfectly aligned and integrated.

A terrific example of this is our partnership with Audi Australia. As MTC’s Opening Night Partner, Audi celebrates our partnership by hosting four Opening Nights each year for our MTC Opening Night audience. Each event is stylishly designed and flawlessly executed with Audi precision.

Marking their fourth year as a Major Partner of Melbourne Theatre Company, Audi has long been a dedicated supporter of the arts. Each year Audi Australia assists MTC in bringing important works to the stage in Melbourne. Also partnering with Sydney Theatre Company, Audi demonstrate a strong commitment to live theatre in Australia.

Each striving for excellence in their fields, both MTC and Audi share a passion for quality. Like MTC, Audi is renowned for world class design. MTC’s team of designers and production staff work tirelessly to perfect the design elements on display in the set, props, costumes, sound and lighting design of each production. For Audi, the same care is put into every detail of their sleek European designs.

September is shaping up to be an exciting time for MTC and Audi, with us both launching exciting new products for 2016. MTC will launch our 2016 Season on September 7 at Hamer Hall. Similarly, Audi will launch the next generation Q7 in early September, soon to be the benchmark of its class.

At MTC, we are proud to enjoy the continuing support of Audi and look forward to a long future working together. ▲

‘Since we are a German brand, culture and the arts are important to Audi’s heritage. The arts reflect our brand values in a premium and sophisticated way. A partnership with MTC, a theatre company known for pushing boundaries, works extremely well in terms of innovation and progressive thinking. The result is a robust partnership between two great brands that not only enables Audi to support the arts in Australia, but offers us a dynamic platform to host our customers and generate new relationships with prospects outside the traditional vehicle showroom.’

Andrew Doyle, Managing Director, Audi Australia

ever n s ’ ture . u f e good Th o s ed look udi ew A

Q7.

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All-n PHOTO: BENJAMIN HEALLEY; HEATH WARWICK

Birdland Opening Night at Southbank Theatre foyer and forecourt

Major partner of Melbourne Theatre Company Visit your preferred Audi Dealer or audi.com.au

London’s West End district; (below) Qatar A380 aircraft

London calling MTC Members

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n 2016, MTC Members will have the chance to take a stroll along the Thames and compare notes with London theatre-goers, thanks to MTC Major Partner Qatar Airways.

Join or renew your MTC Membership for 2016 before 1 December and automatically go in the draw to win two return airfares to London and two tickets to see a show during your trip.

The winner and their guest will travel in style on the five star international carrier, recently voted the World’s Best Airline by Skytrax.

Adam Radwanski, Qatar Airways Country Manager, Australasia, says this exclusive competition for MTC Members reflects the airline’s commitment to providing exceptional, premium experiences. ‘The Qatar Airways

MTC Lounge is a great example of how our partnership with MTC creates firstclass, exclusive opportunities for MTC Members. Through this competition, Qatar Airways is delighted to offer MTC Members an opportunity to experience our world-class airline, and to further their passion for theatre both here in Melbourne and abroad.’

Closer to home there’s still plenty to enjoy about the MTC Members program, with on-going benefits for MTC Members at our fabulous array of dining

and retail partners. And don’t forget the Qatar Airways MTC Lounge is open for members from one hour before each Mainstage perfomrance at Southbank Theatre every Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night performance.

For more information about MTC Members and the Qatar Airways competition, visit mtc.com.au/ members or contact Memberships Co-ordinator Syrie Payne on (03) 8688 0958. ▲

Gift Vouchers Our Readings gift vouchers make the perfect gift!

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PHOTOS: ISTOCK

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Found in space

Playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer sends his messages out to the world

PHOTO: ESSIE KRUCKEMEYER

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inegan Kruckemeyer is a major Australian playwright with over seventy completed works for the stage and a thriving international career. He was an inaugural recipient of a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, and has picked up three AWGIE Awards and a Helpmann Award among his innumerable prizes and nominations. He is constantly completing writing commissions and has come to expect up to a dozen separate productions of his plays each year, especially in Europe and America.

Yet, the funny thing is that he’s not a household name in Australia, not even within the theatre community. His success has been long and consistent while his profile has remained low.

For Kruckemeyer mainly writes for children and young adults and, therefore, doesn’t get the big press reviews, nor is he the subject of theatre foyer chat. During the September school holidays, MTC presents his fantastical and thoughtful family play The Boy at the Edge of Everything, which has had numerous readings, showings and full productions in America already. ‘It’s a pleasure that comes with being a playwright,’ he says about the world-wide reach of his work. ‘I stay at home in Hobart and from time to time the words do the travelling for me.’

Yes, but it’s not a pleasure most Australian playwrights enjoy, I point

out; most never receive international productions of their work. He accepts his luck and puts it down to the strongly collegial nature of the Theatre for Young Audiences community, which frequently gather together in conferences and festivals, including the One Theatre World Conference and Festival, a triennial jamboree where he meets theatre-makers from everywhere. It’s a case of pure networking: ‘You begin a conversation as artists always do, just talking first about each other’s lives, and then

work tends to come through commissions – it was really just two mates having a chat, with an idea of creating something together.’

Their wide-ranging discussions eventually narrowed down to the idea that children have two parts to their natures. ‘There’s a part that delights in social activity and doing things – the stimulation of that. And the other part, which children need, is just quiet contemplation. I think we care so much about how well children are interacting in the busy, responsible world that we don’t allow them to be the contemplative, slightly more Zen beings which children also are. We worry if the child just sits there thinking about stuff. In this case, I decided to divide the two sides of the one person into two characters – the boy on Earth who lives in a maelstrom of activity, and the Boy at the Edge of Everything, who is in complete peace and a bit lonely as a result. Then, through a series of far-fetched travels, they come to meet each other and come to recognise the pleasure of their own lives within the other’s wishing.’

Born in Ireland and raised in Adelaide, Kruckemeyer became involved in youth theatre from about nine years-old and was a teenager when he first started writing for his group. He has also written twenty or so plays for adults (he is currently completing a commission for MTC for our mainstage season), but ‘there’s a great sense of permission in the works you can write for a children’s audience in terms of the fantastical.

But, at the same time, children are natural structuralists. You can’t break a convention once you’ve set it up.

Once you establish a set of rules to

‘… there’s a stringency in writing works for children, coupled with an ability to explore, that’s very exciting for a writer.’ talking about ideas that you may have had, and these have led to productions.’

The Boy at the Edge of Everything came out of such a casual TYA relationship. In New York a few years ago, he met a local director, Jonathan Shmidt Chapman who was creating the Education Kit that went along with one of Kruckemeyer’s plays. After discovering that they were ‘kindred artistic spirits’, it seemed natural for Shmidt Chapman to ask him to write a play for his new company Trusty Sidekick. ‘It was never a money-on-the-table kind of formal commission – although most of my

a world, even if it’s a very far-fetch world, they want you to adhere to those rules. So there’s a stringency in writing works for children, coupled with an ability to explore, that’s very exciting for a writer.’ ▲ Finegan Kruckemeyer’s The Boy at the Edge of Everything runs at the Lawler through the school holidays from 23 September to 3 October and, in school performances, from 5 to 9 October.

Finegan Kruckemeyer spoke to Paul Galloway.

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Movie Offer

Movie Offer

Nominated for six BAFTA Awards and winner of four, The Hollow Crown is an epic miniseries adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. Paced for a modern audience, whether Shakespeare fans or curious neophytes, it remains an event in British television history. An all-star cast includes Ben Whishaw (Skyfall), Jeremy Irons (Dead Ringers), Tom Hiddleston (The Avengers), Julie Walters (Harry Potter), Simon Russell Beale (The Deep Blue Sea) and Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game).

For your chance to win one of twenty DVD box sets of The Hollow Crown, email your name and subscriber details to offers@mtc.com.au with CROWN in the subject line, or call 03 8688 0900,

by Friday 18 September 2015.

London Road

From 24 September

This critically acclaimed film, adapted from the award-winning National Theatre production, explores the lives of real English residents who found themselves in the media spotlight, following the deaths of five women in their small Ipswich community.

Using their own words set to an innovative musical score, London Road tells a moving story of ordinary people coming together during the darkest of experiences.

For your chance to win one of fifty inseason double passes to London Road, email your name and subscriber details to offers@mtc.com.au with LONDON in the subject line by Friday 18 September 2015.

A Walk in the Woods

From 3 September

Starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson, A Walk in the Woods is a heart-warming comedy based on the book by celebrated travel writer Bill Bryson.

Reluctant to settle into retirement, Bryson (Redford) and his old friend Katz (Nolte) set out to hike the Appalachian Trail – over 2,100 miles through some of the most spectacular and rugged wilderness in America. Together they encounter an assortment of eccentric characters, wild animals and perilous weather in an epic journey that will test the limits of their friendship.

To redeem this offer, present this coupon at any participating cinema and receive two tickets for the price of one full-priced adult ticket. Valid Monday to Fridays, 3 September to 1 October (excluding public holidays, weekends and discount days). Not valid at HOYTS LUX, Bean Bag Cinema or Xtremescreen; Nova Deluxe, Village Cinemas Gold Class, VMAX or Special Event screenings.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL IS A PROUD CORPORATE PARTNER OF MTC

08 — 25 oCtoBer 2015

NomiNated for two HelpmaNN awards aGes 9+

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tHu 22—suN 25 oCtoBer

By Kate Mulvany // Based on the BooK By Kit WilliaMs

Southbank theatre

Griffin theatre CoMpany and state theatre CoMpany of south australia

OFFICIAL AIRLINE PARTNER

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