Oedipus Rex
Belvoir presents
Oedipus Rex Director ADENA JACOBS Belvoir’s production of Oedipus Rex opened at Belvoir St Theatre on Saturday 23 August 2014. Designer & Dramaturg PAUL JACKSON Composer & Sound Designer MAX LYANDVERT Design Associate EMMA KINGSBURY Stage Manager ELIZABETH ROGERS Director’s Attachment ROBERT JOHNSON With PETER CARROLL ANDREA DEMETRIADES
THANK YOU Costas Demetriades PHOTOGRAPHY Pia Johnson DESIGN Alphabet Studio
Oed Biographies
ADENA JACOBS Director
Adena is Belvoir’s Resident Director and the Artistic Director of Fraught Outfit. Adena graduated with an Honours degree in Creative Arts from Melbourne University and a Masters of Theatre Practice from the Victorian College of the Arts. In 2013 Adena’s Fraught Outfit production of Persona (which premiered at Theatre Works the previous year) was presented at Belvoir – it won five Green Room Awards in 2012 including Best Production and Best Direction. Adena’s other directing credits include Hedda Gabler (which she also adapted, Belvoir); Exil (Sydney Chamber Opera/Carriageworks); On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (NEON Festival – Melbourne Theatre Company); Elektra (The Dog Theatre); The City (Red Stitch Actors Theatre); This Is For You (La Mama); and Cleansed (Victorian College of the Arts). Her assistant directing credits include Wild Surmise (Malthouse Theatre) and Clybourne Park (Melbourne Theatre Company). Adena was the recipient of the Melbourne International Arts Festival’s Harold Mitchell Fellowship (2010), the Female Director in Residence at Malthouse Theatre (2012), and is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab.
PETER CARROLL
Peter’s distinguished career has spanned over 90 productions. For Belvoir he has appeared in Old Man, The Book of Everything, Happy Days, Hamlet, The Blind Giant is Dancing, The Tempest, The Chairs and Stuff Happens. Other theatre credits include Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (TML Enterprises); Night on Bald Mountain, Happy Days (Malthouse); No Man’s Land, The Crucible, The War of the Roses, Gallipoli, The Serpent’s Teeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Season at Sarsaparilla, The Art of War, The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Lost Echo, Mother Courage and Her Children, Victory and The Cherry Orchard (Sydney Theatre Company). Peter has won many awards including a Sydney Theatre Critics’ Circle Award and an Honorary Doctorate of Creative Arts. Peter is the recipient of the Media Arts & Entertainment Alliance’s Lifetime Achievement Award; he continues to be a proud supporter of the union. ANDREA DEMETRIADES Andrea is a NIDA graduate. Her theatre credits include The Book of Everything (Belvoir); Perplex, Pygmalion (Sydney Theatre Company); Intimate Letters, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Pericles (Bell Shakespeare Company); Helly’s Magic Cup (State Theatre Company of South Australia) and Winter (Griffin Theatre Company). Andrea’s feature films include the title role in Alex and Eve, Around the Block and Nerve. Her television credits include Janet King,
dipus Crownies, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Mr and Mrs Murder, Think Tank and All Saints. Andrea has received two Green Room nominations for Bell Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Pericles. PAUL JACKSON Designer / Dramaturg Paul was an Associate Artist at Malthouse Theatre from 2007 to 2013. He has designed lighting for Belvoir (most recently Nora and The Government Inspector), Malthouse Theatre, The Australian Ballet, Royal New Zealand Ballet, Melbourne Theatre Company, West Australian Ballet, Victorian Opera, West Australian Opera, Sydney Theatre Company, BalletLab, Lucy Guerin Inc., World of Wearable Art New Zealand, La Mama, Not Yet It’s Difficult, Chamber Made Opera, and many others. Paul’s work has featured in festivals in Asia, Europe and the UK, and he has lectured in design at the University of Melbourne, RMIT and the Victorian College of the Arts. Paul has received a number of Green Room Awards and nominations for design, as well as receiving the 2012 Helpmann Award for lighting design. He was named in The Bulletin’s Smart 100 for 2004 and was the Gilbert Spottiswood Churchill Fellow for 2007.
EMMA KINGSBURY Design Associate
Emma trained at NIDA (BDA Design) and the University of Melbourne (BCA). She was costume designer on The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe for Belvoir in 2013. Emma’s other design credits include Atomic (Off-Broadway); The Chimney Sweep (Pinchgut Opera); I Have Had Enough (Sydney Chamber Opera); The Criminals (Old 505); and Two By Two (Little Ones Theatre). She has worked on the feature films Gods of Egypt, The Wolverine, Andy X: The Movie and also on How to Train Your Dragon (Arena Spectacular). Emma was art director for Magical Tales seasons 4 and 5. Her other credits as production designer include The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, The House of Bernarda Alba, The Lonesome West and Ubu Roi. MAX LYANDVERT Composer & Sound Designer Max is an awardwinning composer, sound designer and director. His composition/sound design credits include Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, The Business, The Ham Funeral, UBU, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Belvoir); The War of the Roses, Gross und Klein, True West, Life is a Dream, Oresteia, The Three Sisters, The Art of War, The Lost Echo, Festen, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Waiting for Godot, among many others (Sydney Theatre Company); The Ham Funeral/Journal of a Plague Year, Eldorado (Malthouse Theatre);
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Same, Same But Different, Never Did Me Any Harm, Not in a Million Years and The Age I’m In (Force Majeure), as well as numerous shows for other companies. Max’s work as director includes My Head Was a Sledgehammer (B Sharp); Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty (B Sharp/Melbourne Festival of the Arts); Manna (Sydney Theatre Company); I’ve Got the Shakes (Darlinghurst Theatre); and his own work, Close Your Little Eyes (Sydney Festival). Max has won two Helpmann Awards and has received Sydney Theatre Award and Green Room Award nominations. Max’s screen composition work includes the upcoming Matchbox/Foxtel six-part television drama The Devil’s Playground. ELIZABETH ROGERS Stage Manager Elizabeth graduated from the Wesley Institute in 2007 with a Bachelor of Drama (Production). Since then she has worked on various musicals and children’s shows both in Australia and abroad. Among her credits are The Rocky Horror Show (TML Enterprises, Australasia tour); Barney’s Space Adventure (MEI, Middle East and Asia tour); Xanadu (Xanadu the Musical, Docklands); A Chorus Line (TML Enterprises, Australasia tour); and Freud’s Last Session (Strange Duck Productions, Theatre Royal). This is her first production with Belvoir.
Director’s Note Adena Jacobs Any community that has fallen prey to violence or has been stricken by some overwhelming catastrophe hurls itself blindly into the search for a scapegoat. Its members strive desperately to convince themselves that all their ills are the fault of a lone individual who can be easily disposed of. Rene Girard, Violence and The Sacred For me, Oedipus Rex is the embodiment of suffering. A person trapped by his inescapable fate – he would kill his father and marry his mother. He was destined to become the plague he was seeking to destroy. This production is a meditation on the myth of Oedipus Rex, and the notion of suffering itself. It is a poem. A code of symbols. A series of impressions that emerge from the darkness of the theatre. Tragedy cannot be represented. It can only be experienced through the senses. We have lost the language of Tragedy. Within the context of the last 100 years of history, and when so much of the world currently faces a crisis, language and representation fail us. Sometimes the theatre fails us. There is no chorus. No unifying, guiding voice. The gods have become absent or indifferent. Reason eludes us. So within this context: what is prayer? What is ritual in a world that has lost its rituals? Is catharsis still possible? In Sophocles’ words ‘how can we cleanse ourselves?’
Sophocles’ play is the source, the wound. For us, it acts like a memory of horror. It is so deeply imbedded in our psyches. Collectively and individually, none of us can escape it. Our production begins where the play ends. Oedipus, blind and exiled, carries out his days, led by his daughter Antigone. He is a man at the edge of his life, stained by memory. When Oedipus entered the plagued city of Thebes he was crowned as King, but now, he has become a scapegoat; a virus that must be contaminated or purged. An embodiment of guilt and abjection. A site of crisis. He has been expelled so that others can live. Oedipus Rex exists so that we, the audience, don’t have to gouge out our own eyes. In Greek, the word polis literally means city. It refers to the notion of citizenship or body of citizens. Through a contemporary lens I can’t help but think of how notions of citizenship and displacement still permeate our world. As an audience, we have a great responsibility. We will always be in the majority. We bear witness. We are complicit. Why aren’t we intervening? In this case, the performer is blind. Someone who can’t look back. Our gaze is a powerful one. We are the polis. We are the gods. We empathise, we judge, we punish. We feel ashamed at our own looking.
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Thank you to the cast and the creative team for their extraordinary collaboration and for co-authoring this work.
The Windows C.P. Cavafy In these dark rooms where I live out empty days, I circle back and forth trying to find the windows. It will be a great relief when a window opens. But the windows are not there to be found – or at least I cannot find them. And perhaps it is better that I don’t find them. Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny. Who knows what new things it will expose? Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
Adena Jacobs
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