MAN ABOUT TOWN

Here's the new poster for Torchwood season three, Children of Earth - oooooh.....

The Store Room Theatre, formerly home to some of Melbourne ’s most innovative independent theatre companies, is preparing a dynamic new program for 2009 after being dark for over a year. Based above the Parkview Hotel in North Fitzroy , the Store Room – an intimate, 63-seat venue – picked up a swag of awards, including a coveted Green Room Award, within a few years of opening its doors in 1999. It quickly developed a reputation for staging exciting productions by emerging theatre makers, and became a meeting place for Melbourne ’s independent theatre community. “It became a very sought-after venue to present work at, and it was quite hard to get work on there,” recalls writer/performer Angus Cerini. “So even though they were a really small venue above a pub … it had a lot of cache to it; and that’s represented by the kind of shows that went in there and their kind of audiences. The audiences that the Store Room managed to attract in a very short space of time would put...

It struck me a moment ago - as I typed the names of the three very different shows I caught over the course of three days last week in the title of this blog post, above - that despite their differences, there is a unifying thread that links all three, tenuous as it may be. Woyzeck sees the eponymous character's pysche broken down and destroyed by the machinery of the military; 19 year old Warnambool expat Tom Ballard's stand-up show Is What He Is focuses on Ballard's coming out as gay in a country town; and Noel Tovey's remarkable monologue Little Black Bastard is a story of indigenous survival in the face of sometimes shocking abuse and deprivation in the 1940s and 50s. All three productions, then, are in one way or another about the struggle to maintain one's sense of self in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds... not that that's necessarily relevant to each work individually, but taken collectively, it's an amusing coincidence, don't you thin...

I can't wait...

I missed this inspired piece of slapstick when it premiered at The Arts Centre last year, so was delighted to get another chance to see it, albeit in a new production, which is now showing until February 14. Written by Patrick Barlow and based on Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film (which is in turn based on John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps , first published in 1915) it tells the story of Richard Hannay (played by Mark Pegler), a stiff-upper lipped sort of chap who blunders into a spy ring, gets framed for murder, and is chased across Britain by the police - sometimes with a young woman, Pamela (one of several roles played by Helen Christinson) handcuffed to his wrist. Four actors play the story's 100+ characters, with Russell Fletcher and the wonderfully adaptive Jo Turner taking on almost all of the roles, everything from the mysterious figures watching Hannay's apartment from beneath a streetlamp (which they carry on and off stage with them as they come and go) to...

Today was my last day at the MCV/Canvas office for the week. As of today I am only working two days per week, with the other three days of the week being devoted first and foremost to freelancing, my responsibilities as Chair of Melbourne Fringe, and producing and presenting my weekly radio program SmartArts on 3RRR. This means I've cut my salary in half in the middle of a recession with no guaranteed source of income until I can start generating some regular income from writing for the arts section of The Age etc. Mad? Possibly - but fuck I'm looking forward to the challenge. Wish me luck!