Marina Prior and Jane Turner play close friends in the hilarious UK comedy Jumpy, premiering in January 2015 at MTC. (Photo: Jo Duck)
Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2015 season ‘Life in Living Colour’ will bring 12 plays to Melbourne audiences next year. Stories range from a hysterical take on parental anxiety, to the dynamics of our celebrity obsessed culture, a musical love story that spans the class divide, to plays sprinkled with a thrilling dose of political intrigue, infidelity and adventure, through to a boy lost in space – the season seems packed with theatrical delights.
Artistic Director and CEO, Brett Sheehy said the first thing he and his team consider while planning a season is the wish to have a program of significant breadth.
‘We look at the international canon, new international works, the classic cannon and we look at the Australian cannon of plays as well and from that we draw down the 11 or 12 that end up comprising the Mainstage season. What is driving the reason for any work to be on our stage is a passionate wish by an artist to see a work realised.’
A British comedy by April De Angelis called Jumpy starring Jane Turner and directed by Pamela Rabe would kick start MTC Season 2015. Sheehy called it ‘a passionate collision of wishes’ for the play to happen at MTC.
‘April De Angelis first came into my orbit in 2006 at the Adelaide Festival, where I was Director and presented a contemporary comic British opera called Flight, and the libretto was by April. My watching April’s progress since the opera Flight and being a fan of her work and wanting to do something with her as a writer, Jane being passionate about this particular play and Pamela wanting to direct Jane in this play – that’s how Jumpy came about at the MTC,’ said Sheehy.
The play also stars Marina Prior as friend and confidant to Jane Turner’s character, Hilary, the mother of a rebellious teen, played by Brenna Harding (Puberty Blues).
Sheehy said it’s an incredibly funny play but it also has an undeniable focus on women with the key characters of mother and daughter and the way the relationship has shifted radically in the past 20-30 years. ‘I mean when my sisters and I were growing up, daughters were never best friends with their mothers. The change that has come in the past 20 years is that the relationship between mothers and daughters is based on friendship even when those daughters are still very young in their early teens or so. How mothers now juggle that responsibility – balancing the friendship with the need for being a role model for your daughter – is something that contemporary mothers have come to terms with wonderfully, but it’s certainly a new thing socially.’
Another play in MTC’s 2015 Season that sheds light on a social change in our society is What Rhymes with Girls and Cars. Paying homage to Tim Rogers’ highly successful album of the same name, playwright Aidan Fennessy has crafted a beautiful new musical that touches on the prickly issue of class divide.
‘The play is quintessentially Australian and incredibly contemporary. It is a love story, unabashedly, but what it also examines, which is something Australians are very shy of examining – class difference and class structure in Australia,’ said Sheehy.
The story is about a boy from the so called “wrong side of the tracks” and a girl from the so called “right side of the tracks” meeting up, and how they make their relationship work in a world which still endures the class divide. ‘We pretend to be a completely classless society, but we still have the private school-public school divide, the financial divide, the haves and have-nots and so on. I think we as Australians sometimes kid ourselves into believing that we are completely flat non-hierarchical society. I think we still are not – and this play highlights that,’ said Sheehy.
Believing theatre to be a vehicle for social commentary and social change, Sheehy feels that works on the stage at Melbourne’s state theatre company should shed a new light on issues facing our society.
‘Everything on our stage should say something to us in our time and place, i.e. to us Melbournians in Australia in the second decade of the 21st century. Even when we present classic works, of course they should speak to us and our own humanity and our own lives and relationships,’ said Sheehy.
Among the stable of classics playing at MTC in 2015 are Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. ‘The advantage with great classic works, like Endgame and Betrayal is that the themes are so key to humanity and core human nature and relationships that they still speak to us across decades. But I believe the experience of the theatre separate from the words being spoken – that theatrical experience we have also needs to feel fresh and contemporary for us,’ said Sheehy.
Sheehy feels that the lack of contemporariness is deadly to the art form.‘The art form has to be kept alive. That doesn’t mean we don’t do classics, but we always do them through a contemporary lens. And the audience sitting there should be receiving something fresh and new for them and their lives.’
Have a listen to Artistic Director Brett Sheehy, actor Jane Turner, writer Aidan Fennessy, and Director Sam Strong talk about MTC’s 2015 Season.
Tickets for the premiere season of Jumpy, What Rhymes with Cars and Girls, and the Beckett classic Endgame are now available. Other plays in the 2015 Season are currently available as part of an MTC subscription.
