|
Night Letters
by writer Susan Rogers and director Chris Drummond, inspired by Robert Dessaix’s novel
18 January 2006
Directed by Zoe Steen, Night Letters will be performed by Faculty of Creative Arts Summer Session students from 26 - 28 January 2006 at 8pm in the Performance Space at the University of Wollongong. Robert Dessaix’s novel, Night Letters, was first published in 1996 to high praise. Variously described as ‘a journey more exalting than a trip to Venice’ (Australian Book Review), and ‘daring, confronting and provocative’ (Herald-Sun), it offers us the correspondence of an Australian man, Robert, writing from a Venice hotel room to a friend at home. The man has been diagnosed with an incurable disease, and his letters offer us his reflections on death and dying, his search for meaning in the preceding life, and his quest for greater value in his uncertain but perversely liberated future. Director, Chris Drummond and writer and visual artist, Susan Rogers, collaborated on the theatrical rendering of this unique piece, which premiered at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 2004.
Dessaix’s extraordinary use of narrative and imaginative plot offered Rogers and Drummond an inspiring springboard for experimentation in form and language on the stage. For Drummond, the Venetian hotel room of Dessaix’s novel was ‘a theatrical space with the figure of a dying man in exile surrounded by his ghost and demons – a magically metaphorical space, simultaneously internal and external’ (Programme Notes, Playbox, 2004).
In this context, Robert’s theatrical journey is one of experience: we are witnessing his grappling with such complex questions as the ones Susan Rogers asked herself when reading the novel: ‘How do we live a good life?... How do we identify what it is to be human? What has happened to compassion and kindness?’ (Programme Notes, Playbox, 2004). It is unapologetically a journey of self-discovery and search for meaning; it is also an experience of grief, both Robert’s own, and his realisation that grieving is a collective experience. We discover through him that the imagination is boundless, but just as high as it can soar, as painfully can it intern.
Robert’s experience reveals itself poetically through history - we journey through Robert’s mind while he travels through Austria and Italy, but more evocatively we travel with him freely through four centuries. A love, extraordinary in its ordinariness, is revealed, and the gift is wrapped in magnificent storytelling.
The University of Wollongong Summer Session students are excited to be presenting this ambitious and provocative piece over three nights in January.
The public are invited to attend the Performance.
26th, 27th, 28th January 2006, 8pm, Performance Space, University of Wollongong
Bookings are recommended, admission $15 Adult and $9 Concession
Bookings: contact Brooke at the Booking Office on 02 4221 4889
Further information: contact Zoe Steen on 0407 175 445 or zoes@uow.edu.au
|
|
|
