For many years we had been talking about establishing a theatre collective to continue working with our graduate students, presenting performance work in a professional context outside of our acting program. And here we are, finally, with Robert The Cat!
It took no time at all to agree on a script for our first work: Caryl Churchill’s ‘Love and Information’, written in 2012. We had both directed a handful of Churchill plays in the past (and Anatoly has acted in Cloud Nine, playing the 5 year old Cathy!) and so were keen to embark on a journey with her again. And it is always a journey… Her works are challenging to direct, as the text provides such space for interpretation and theatricality and demands such emotional commitment from its actors.
With 57 short scenes and approximately 120 unnamed and non-gendered characters in Love and Information, it is important to us that we take this opportunity to present, or represent, a truly diverse array of people/characters on stage.
We are also very excited to be Metro Arts’ resident emerging company for 2019. The team at Metro are incredibly supportive, and we value this relationship immensely. We would also like to acknowledge our place of work and home away from home -literally!!! - TAFE Queensland. We are so very fortunate to facilitate our own acting program at the Southbank campus. If our black box theatre, recently renamed the Norman Price Theatre, could talk, what stories it would tell!
Lastly we’d like to acknowledge our actors, with whom we share so much intense and memorable history! It’s such a complete joy to have this space and time to work with them again on this amazing and epic text by one of the most important playwrights working today.
Lisa and Anatoly