Small world, big dreams: Belvoir & La Boite’s Samson

Small towns don't feel small when you grow up there.  That comes later.  The world as you know it seems wide.  You feel close to it, the smells, the seasons, the secret places.  But slowly, imperceptibly, like childhood itself, that comfortable, familiar, reassuring world starts to slip away.
 – Noel Mengel, RPM

Julia-Rose Lewis’ assured first play Samson is a one of those coming-of-age stories which dot the landscape of the Australian psyche. Set in a small country town, the play follows the lives of Essie, Beth, Sid, and Rabbit, as they collide, love, fight, dream, and burn burn burn. Co-produced by Belvoir and Brisbane’s La Boite theatre, Samson arrives in Sydney after a two-week run in Brisbane fizzing with life, exploding in Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre with vitality and something akin to incandescence.

Chasing dreams: The Last Great Hunt’s Falling Through Clouds (Sydney Festival)

While Perth-based theatre collective The Last Great Hunt are a relatively new ensemble, their reputation and work is not. As the creators of previous Sydney Festival shows such as The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer (2011) and It’s Dark Outside (2013), they have forged a name for themselves as makers of highly theatrical means using little more than a blank stage, clever masking and projections, and the audience’s imagination. So it is with their most recent offering, Falling Through Clouds, presented at the Seymour Centre as part of this year’s About An Hour program.

Food for thought: Belvoir's The Cake Man

Set against a backdrop of an old tarpauline, a ring of old packing boxes and crates, jerry cans and metal drums are set around the tiny Belvoir Downstairs space. As items are bought on – a cardboard box, an iron, a chair, table cloth, blanket – we see the beginnings of a house emerge. It could be a stage anywhere, a makeshift space made from whatever is at hand, and it seems perfectly suited to the warmth and intimacy inherent in the space. The first scene – a clever and sly depiction of a pre-invasion culture – soon gives way to a heated and politically-charged vision of Christian missionaries in Aboriginal communities, and we are thrust into the middle of The Cake Man’s grist, its political and social backdrop writ large upon its face.

A co-production between Belvoir and Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, The Cake Man was written by Robert J. Merritt in the 1970s, and was the first full-length play staged by the National Black Theatre in Redfern. In the intervening forty years, we are ashamed to realise perhaps how little has changed, how racism and intolerance is still ingrained in our way of thinking no matter how much we’d like to think to the contrary, and The Cake Man becomes a sly indigenous perspective on white paternalism.

FRAGILE: IDEAS – THIS WAY UP: Remembering Brain Freeze

Four years ago, I assembled a group of friends and we made a film. We didn’t set out to blow our minds or create something of undeniable genius or change the world; we set out to make a film, have fun, and feel as though we’d created something special and wonderful out of a bunch of words on a page. That was our goal, our sole reason.

In a nutshell, the film – brain freeze – is about Leonard, a struggling author, and his attempts to end the writers’ block that has been plaguing him for the past eon. Onceuponatime, he was a successful author, but he hasn’t written anything for months. Desperate and at his wit’s end, he decides to go into his mind to see what old ideas he can use. But as he soon finds out, his characters have other ideas.