MAKING TIME FOR NEW WORK - IG LIVE WITH RED STITCH ACTORS THEATRE ENSEMBLE
One of the unexpected joys for theatre makers over two difficult years has been the glimpse of a more profound connection to their work and lives, and with it an awareness of the value in letting a new creation ‘breathe’ - like a good loaf of bread - to let the work settle and the ingredients rise.
Even after many developments, there’s nothing like time, as well as the occasional audience, to really distill and enhance a production. So what can we learn from the last few years about our theatre practice in Australia?
Slow Cooking
Many actors will recognise the exhilaration felt when coming back to a show, perhaps for a tour, long after it has closed its first season. There is a vast transformation in our relationship to the work that magically seems to clarify our understanding of our role and the play in performance after we’ve spent time back inside our regular lives.
Red Stitch ensemble theatre actor, Caroline Lee, was working on Michele Lee’s Single Ladies in early 2020 when the team were 4 previews into production week just as theatres were forced to close. The show ended up frozen in time for 12 months as dust settled over the completed set ‘like Miss Havisham’s mansion’ until the covers were finally pulled off in March 2021.
Images below of Andrea Swifte, Jim Lai & Caroline Lee in Single Ladies - production photos taken by Jodie Hutchinson.
Watch the full IG video here.
But, far from the disaster it posed for Red Stitch’s box office and many other shows in Melbourne, Caroline felt the actors’ understanding of their characters and their relationships with one another, were profoundly improved by the time spent away.
“Each individual project is its own creation with the design team, the stage managers, director and the actors...and more time allows that trust and that connection and that understanding to grow - as well as those ‘threads’ between the actors. In Single Ladies we’d talk on the phone during that year of lockdown and it was like we bonded much more deeply because we’d been through the experience together.”
We perhaps don’t get enough of that experience in Australian theatre: where a play is given the chance to have multiple lives. Larger markets allow new shows to tour highly engaged provincial audiences, or to be reimagined and transferred to different venues, as the intent and power of the original idea coalesces by being revisited in many subsequent drafts.
The experience of playing to different audiences - and that valuable ‘settling’ time in between productions - means that a mature work ‘premiering’ on the West End is often many generations from its origin.
Deep Connections
Red Stitch theatre audiences loved the Melbourne setting of ‘Single Ladies’, and some report still having a ‘chuckle’ when visiting the Collingwood supermarket where Caroline’s character made her most dramatic appearances.
Similarly, Red Stitch’s latest production, Prayer Machine, is set in contemporary Melbourne and will be instantly recognisable to our audiences.
Eric Gardiner’s tragic and mesmeric drama of missed opportunity portrays the lives of two local men who grew up together at high school in the 1980’s.
Director, Krystalla Pearce, has been part of the development process from the beginning at Red Stitch, and the play was approved for production way back in 2019 - originally set down for the 2020 season.
Since then, two postponements and disrupted rehearsals have cruelled the project but a new season has finally been confirmed for next month (Nov 12 - 28), and Krystalla couldn’t be happier with where they’re at.
Images below of Joe Petruzzi & Patrick Williams in Prayer Machine - rehearsal photos taken by Darcy Kent.
“One of the biggest strengths of this production is, I think, the connection between the two actors, Joe and Patrick...their wonderful dynamic and the beautiful friendship that they’ve developed will really serve the work once we can all be together again.”
It’s a long road from where she found herself in 2020, having returned from the USA a few years ago and just starting to make connections in the local Melbourne theatre network. To be shut down and then, as it turned out, put into quarantine with her young family for 14 days after a casual contact, was, she says, ‘so shattering’:
“But then it was such a positive time in some ways. Spending time with our little kids…and we were (still) able to get really good work done on Zoom. So…my work was continuing but I also had this complete slowdown that I assumed was going to be absolute torture but actually found a lot of beauty in.”
Bringing it All Back Home
Caroline agrees. She feels one really positive thing that has come out of recent experience is a newfound appreciation for her creative life...and its place in her home:
“I just have a really different relationship with my house. I’ve done lots of actual work in different rooms...I’ve been filmed for new projects, created performances in every single room...I feel like I have a creative life embedded in my home now. I’ve actually really loved that discovery.”
One of those projects was part of a collaboration with Krystalla and other actors, workshopping a development based on The Decameron.
Krystalla’s idea was to explore the text, set during the years of the bubonic plague, in which a group of youths escape to a country residence and pass their lengthy time in isolation by telling stories and re-imagining their lives.
“It celebrates the power of storytelling...the power of isolation, and also the power of the group”.
It’s the notion of story, for Krystalla, that brings together her feelings about the lessons learned from confinement, not just as an analogous setting to our current experience but in a broader, anthropological sense.
Stories are what make us human and are essential to our survival. The act of creation, says Krystalla, contextualises our lives, ‘makes sense of our situation and helps us to work through it.’
They’re certainly in no hurry to rush this idea to the stage. Nice and easy does it.
See the video recording
Catch our next Instagram Live chat on the 27 October @redstitch