Transfigured night: SUDS’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s perennial masterpieces – an effervescent concoction of magic, darkness, dreams, comedy, and love, it is the first Shakespeare play I studied at school, the first one I loved wholeheartedly, and certainly one of the best introductions to the Bard’s work, and a play for all ages. Presented here by SUDS (Sydney University’s Dramatic Society) in the Seymour Centre’s York theatre, this ‘Dream’ has been given a slight reworking - inspired by a queer reading of the play - which opens up new spaces within the four-hundred-year-old play and proves it can still be a fresh experience, even if this is not your first encounter with the play.

Like Me - thoughts for an as-yet-unmade film

This is an edited version of a document prepared in November 2011, prior to starting work on the project.

Like Me is, simply, As You Like It without the politics, the explicitly philosophical debates or the ‘clowns.’ In other words, it focuses squarely on the six ‘kids’ – Rosie, Cecelia, Orlando, Oliver, Silvius and Phoebe – and takes them to a farm out near Dubbo for a couple of days, long weekend maybe, and throws them all in it together. Over the course of the long weekend, relationships develop and blossom, truths are learnt, feelings made known and affections made clear. In the end, though, who gets who? It’s not as simple as it once seemed, not now anyway.

Before the film starts, Rosie is in a fight at school with Charlie who said she was a guy. (We may or may not see this). So she and Charlie were suspended, as was Cecelia by association. Four friends – Rosie, Cecelia (Cee), and their friends Oliver and Orlando (Oliver’s brother) – had long planned to go on a road trip together, and now that the long weekend is upon them, now seems as good a time as ever to get away and find themselves, discover each other. Silvius and Phoebe are also invited along for good measure; the more the merrier, or so they say.

As we meet them – Rosie and Cee, then Orlando, Oliver, Silvius and Phoebe (arguing, lost) – they find themselves on Orlando’s family farm, a slowly shrinking sheep run still pulling itself out of the recent drought. Besides the sheep, there is a forest that runs down and along the border of the farm and it seems the perfect location to set up camp… To paraphrase Chekhov, ‘it’s a comedy – three women’s parts, three men’s – and is set in a forest (on a sheep farm) with a great deal of conversation about Being and relationships, and five tons of love.’