Ashleigh Cummings will make her La Boite debut next year. (Credit: Dylan Evans)
Julia-Rose Lewis’ play Samson, is a story that sees the lives of a group of young people altered after the death of their friend. It is Lewis’ first full-length production and was developed while she was in-Residence with La Boite last year.
It will premiere as part of the 2015 programme, and will also be upcoming Australian star, Ashleigh Cummings’ La Boite debut.
The part that captured Lewis’ imagination was the idea of how a tragedy could be the start of something wonderful rather than the end.
‘The focus for me was trying to see how young people deal with their first grief and how they can come out the other side of it.’
Set in an unnamed town, the play opens with the death of the character Samson, who dies after jumping into a swimming hole with a rope swing.
The setting of the play was an amalgamation for Lewis – of the country town she grew up in, places with rural communities and the edge of suburbia.
‘I have purposely not named the place because I wanted it to feel kind of open. It’s a deadbeat town and not a bustling city.
‘I feel young people growing up in these communities have to deal with more trauma in their life than young people in an affluent city,’ adds Lewis.
The starting point of the play was a series of serious accidents in and around the town that Lewis grew up.
‘There’s a swimming hole in the town that I grew up in and the Council would take the swings down because they didn’t want young men and women jumping off it and injuring or killing themselves.
‘But the community, mostly the friends of these young people who died, would always go and put the swings back up,’ says Lewis.
She got interested in why people kept jumping when these accidents were occurring. To her it almost felt like an act “in memoriam” for the people who died.
‘There was something beautiful about that, but also very sad. I wanted to create a kind of a snapshot of those young people that were caught up in those decisions.
‘Looking back, I think a lot of young people feel that life is very long, and that they have their whole life ahead of them and that they are invincible in some way.
‘And I think the play was about capturing that feeling and then looking at how it affects different young people,’ adds Lewis.
Samson is a La Boite and Belvoir co-production. It will open in April at La Boite and and then transfers to Belvoir for a Sydney season.
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