A sure bet: Apocalypse Theatre Company & Griffin Independent’s The Dapto Chaser

First produced in 2011 by Merrigong Theatre Company, Mary Rachel Brown’s The Dapto Chaser is a wart-and-all love-letter to greyhound racing, and sinks its teeth into the dog-racing culture with gusto. Produced by Apocalypse Theatre Company and Griffin Independent, The Dapto Chaser is ninety minutes of acutely-observed writing and performances, wrapped up in the story of a family stuck in the vicious cycle of gambling as everything goes to, well, the dogs.

Many years ago, I read Markus Zusak’s series of books about two brothers who live near Central and spend a chunk of their time around the Wentworth Park dog track. Like Brown’s family – the Sinclair’s – the Wolfe brothers are fighting against their circumstances, each other, and end up winning in a way that only they and people like them can. The Dapto Chaser centres around a dog called ‘Boy Named Sue’, his owner Cess, Cess’ brother Jimmy who works at the Dapto race track, their father Errol, and the dog club manager Arnold Denny, and the dog-eat-dog struggle they find themselves locked into seemingly forever. Where The Dapto Chaser succeeds with flying colours, is in its language, its depiction of this family on the lower edge of society; in its evocation of the colourful and larger than life characters you find trackside.

Apocalypse Theatre Company’s ASYLUM

Rapid-response theatre flies in the face of theatrical tradition, but it shouldn’t always be like that. The average play takes approximately two years to reach the stage, by which time any topicality it may have had initially has long-since passed. Enter rapid-response theatre, where plays appear on stage mere weeks after being pitched or commissioned. You might remember Hollywood Ending at Griffin in November 2012; where that project took nine weeks to journey from concept to the stage, Asylum – a twenty-four-play cyclical response to the federal government’s Operation Sovereign Borders – appears approximately four weeks after pitching. The plays here are raw, unsentimental, unflinching; visceral. Under the artistic direction of Dino Dimitriadis, Apocalypse Theatre Company hosts 97 artists in a fearless and challenging exploration of what it means to seek asylum, what it means to come to Australia by boat, how it affects us – personally, as a community.

All we have to go on: Apocalypse Theatre Company’s Construction of the Human Heart

I first discovered Ross Mueller’s Construction of the Human Heart in 2008 or 2009, in the university library, and became fascinated by its conceit, its design and its delicious ambiguity, but until now have not had a chance to see it performed. Enter then, Apocalypse Theatre Company with their current production currently playing at the intimate Tap Gallery theatre in Darlinghurst. Written in one act, Mueller’s play unfolds with a directness and a beguiling fragility, and exposes the very constructedness of theatre.

Perhaps better called ‘Deconstructing theatre’, the story revolves around a Couple, two unnamed characters, simply referred to as ‘Him’ and ‘Her’. They are both playwrights, we discover, and as the play unfolds over its lean sixty-five minutes, they build around themselves as much as us a fortress of words. But, like the best defences, it begins to crack, until their words crack open, meaning bleeding onto the stage, and they desperately cling to their disappearing words, to themselves, to each other, trying to remember how to go on, how to Be.