MTC Scenes: Autumn 2015

MTC

scenes Autumn 2015

Interviews with Alan Trounson Eugyeene Teh Carolyn Burns Osamah Sami

Independent spirit Inside information

independent theatre sector, where many women directors do brilliant work, and major theatre institutions such as MTC. I wanted to bring these talented women into our building so they can learn about the culture here, how this machine works and the special demands it places on you. Theatre is a competitive environment and the program also focused on networking and career-building skills. Our inaugural program was implemented last year and its success can be seen in the fact that three alumna of the program will direct MTC productions this year.

Recently, we announced the ten participants in the 2015 program and hope for a similar success rate.

After two years with MTC, I still feel I have much to learn and many Director Leticia Cáceres, more things to Sound Designer Pete achieve. So far Goodwin, and Composer I have directed Missy Higgins (Cock, 2014) four productions (Constellations, Cock, Yellow Moon and The Effect) and two mainstage shows for 2015 (Birdland and Death and the Maiden) are well down the pipeline.

Throughout I have constantly felt grateful for the resources at my disposal, including all the theatre professionals in every department that help the show through to Opening Night.

Before I knew it, I was designing and However, I admit, that I still occasionally implementing a program to address the feel the tension between my own artistic sensibility and the pragmatic dearth of women directors working for needs of a state theatre company. But mainstream theatre companies. Using that’s a creative tension and something the findings of an Australia Council I’ve tried to make work for me. research paper on the issue as a starting point and consulting with the Leticia Cáceres Australian Women Directors Alliance, Associate Director I pieced together a year-long program of meetings, events and activities to help bridge the gap between the certain degree of institutional inertia.

It turned out to be the opposite. Brett was looking for new initiatives, he was open to fresh ideas. His attitude was that the slate was clean and anything was possible.

Brett’s new artistic vision for MTC was that we should be a leader in the artistic community of Melbourne, engage more widely and fully in the city’s cultural life, and reach out to new audiences and new creative energies.

This fitted in perfectly with the projects I had in mind, especially concerning getting more women artists working for the Company. I pitched my idea for a program targeting women directors and was a little taken aback by the passion with which Brett embraced it.

Cover: Belinda McClory and Aaron Pedersen of The Waiting Room Scenes is produced quarterly and is a publication of Melbourne Theatre Company. All information was correct at the time of printing. Melbourne Theatre Company reserves the right to make changes.

EDITOR AND WRITER Paul Galloway GRAPHIC DESIGN Helena Turinski COVER IMAGE Jo Duck Melbourne Theatre Company is a department of the University of Melbourne

MTC Headquarters 252 Sturt St, Southbank Vic 3006 TELEPHONE 03 8688 0900 FACSIMILE 03 8688 0901 E-MAIL info@mtc.com.au WEBSITE mtc.com.au Southbank Theatre 140 Southbank Blvd, Southbank Vic 3006 BOX OFFICE 03 8688 0800

PHOTO: GINA MILICIA

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wo years ago, when I became Associate Director at MTC, I really didn’t know what to expect.

Feelings of excitement about the new job and all the possibilities it held were balanced out by trepidation of the unknown. Although I already knew something of how the Company worked, having directed Helicopter and Random for our Education department, stepping into a leading position in the creative team was something else completely.

Frankly, after so many years working from project to project in my own way, I didn’t know if I could adjust to being part of this vast machine called MTC, which has an established culture, a strongly defined audience base and its own ways of doing things. There were certain goals I wanted to achieve in the job, but I wasn’t sure whether the Company would accommodate them.

I see now that luck broke my way. I joined the Company at a moment of enormous change in its creative direction. A new Artistic Director and Executive Director in Brett Sheehy and Virginia Lovett had come in and a new Associate Artistic Director, Sam Strong, was joining me in the Directors’ office. I had expected major challenges in proposing new ideas and initiating new programs.

I expected to have to overcome a

Not quite déjà vu

PHOTO: MANDY JONES

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Professor Alan Trounson, the IVF pioneer, talks about Alan Trounson, the character in his daughter’s play.

ast February, during the Cybec Electric play readings, Alan Trounson took his seat in the Lawler to watch a group of actors present his daughter Kylie’s play The Waiting Room. It was a strange experience, he says, to watch a character called Alan Trounson go through many of the events that are still part of his memory. He saw a young Alan Trounson, played by Aaron Pedersen, work long hours to perfect a repeatable technique for in vitro fertilisation. He saw Alan face failure after failure; he saw Alan’s marriage and family-life suffer for his work; he saw Alan’s battles with anti-IVF protesters, and he saw Alan and his team’s ultimate triumph.

‘Yes, it was weird,’ he says, ‘but it wasn’t quite like looking into a mirror.

It was like looking at someone you are slightly uncomfortable about but intensely interested in. There are some things that aren’t exactly right, but they serve the story really well.

As a scientist, of course, I would like everything recorded with absolute accuracy. But, you know, it’s a play. It doesn’t necessarily represent things as I really remember them. It’s Kylie’s creation. It presents life as a series of lessons and key events, which is not how it feels when you live it.’

In 1980, Professor Trounson led the team responsible for the first IVF birth in Australia, creating in the process two crucial techniques that have vastly improved the success rate of fertility

treatment. Based at Monash University, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor, he eventually moved into stem cell research. From 2007 until recently, he was President of the multibillion dollar California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, set up to find therapeutic uses for stem cell technologies. Undoubtedly, his has been a distinguished career, but, as the play shows, there was a time when everything seemed in doubt.

‘The play celebrates an important part of history,’ he says. ‘But it also deals with how people felt then and how people feel now. For me, the real heroes of the story are the patients, those infertile couples who stood up in the first place. They said, ‘We want to try’, when really we had no success we could point to. They broke the ground with us. We were partners.

They believed we had something that would eventually work and were prepared to try it out.’

In the play, Kylie Trounson uses her father’s discoveries as a kind of fulcrum, balancing his story with the contrasting expectations of two infertile couples, one before IVF and one after. The play stresses how the advent of successful fertility treatments changed lives and attitudes. We forget how much confusion, misunderstanding and protest the first ‘test-tube’ babies engendered. In 1980, Professor Trounson found himself in the middle of a turf-war.

‘I mean, religion had essentially owned conception for centuries,’ he says.

‘It was one of their last bastions. So when it was shown as scientific fact that you could manipulate the process to help people, the mystique and the religious components of the process disappeared.

It was hard for them to accept that they couldn’t own it anymore.’

Although he spoke to Kylie about those pioneering days, he made no stipulations about how this history should be written. Even after seeing the play during Cybec Electric, he had only one serious quibble. It worried him that his closest colleague Dr Carl Wood was portrayed as a typical Australian bloke, which he wasn’t at all. ‘He was a very gentle man in many ways, that’s why women loved him.’

And what of his own portrait in the play, which shows how his singlemindedness led to the breakdown of his first marriage? Did that worry him?

‘No,’ he says simply. ‘I absolutely accept I got sucked into the project one hundred-and-fifty per cent. I gave very little back to people who really deserved more. Unfortunately, it remains a part of my character and my family have to survive it. I still rely much on the understanding of those closest to me. This is what happens if you are a driven individual.’

The Waiting Room by Kylie Trounson plays at the Fairfax Studio from 15 May to 27 June

Cybec Electric 2014: The Waiting Room. Aaron Pedersen, Alison Bell, Travis Cotton, Belinda McClory; (foreground) Director Naomi Edwards

Up and running Prompt Corner

Matt Day and Caroline O’Connor in Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot (2008)

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etting himself up to be abducted, drugged, chased, shot at and crop-dusted, Matt Day, last seen at MTC in Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot, has signed on to lead a great cast in North by Northwest. Joining Day and director Simon Phillips on the cross-country manhunt will be Amber McMahon (pictured above left, The Season at Sarsaparilla), Tony LlewellynJones (Realism), Deidre Rubenstein (His Girl Friday), Matt Hetherington (Next to Normal), John Leary (Private Lives), Lucas Stibbard (in MTC Education’s Boy Girl Wall), Ian Bliss (Apologia), Sheridan Harbridge (The Speechmaker), Nicholas Bell (The Speechmaker) and Lachlan Woods (Hamlet).

Four people in one room and only one of them able to walk – Samuel Beckett certainly liked to place tough restrictions on his actors. Luckily, the cast of Endgame are more than up to it.

Colin Friels (Red), Luke Mullins (The History Boys) and Julie Forsyth (Private Lives) were on board for the season launch in September. They have since been joined by Rhys McConnochie (above, The History Boys).

Kylie Trounson’s new play The Waiting Room goes into rehearsals soon

with Aaron Pedersen (King Lear), Belinda McClory (Queen Lear), Brett Cousins (Glengarry Glen Ross), William McInnes (The Effect) and Kate Atkinson (Rockabye). Michala Banas (centre right) makes her MTC debut in the show.

Speaking of Company debuts, the entire cast of MTC Education’s latest production for VCE students I Call My Brothers will be first timers for the Company: Alice Ansara (far right), Osamah Sami, Ray Chong Nee, and Joana Pires.

A chore no more

Exchanging your theatre tickets used to be a bother. You had to tramp down to the theatre box office to swap your ticket for another night, or faff around with phone calls, envelopes, stamps and mailboxes. But now, for MTC shows in the Sumner, it can all be quickly resolved online. Subscribers can exchange tickets in their package for another performance date or, subject to availability, to another production entirely. Just log-in to your account at mtc.com.au and follow the links.

We also offer a Free Up Seat function,

which allows you to generously donate your seats back to us for resale if you cannot attend a performance.

Your questions answered

Whether you like to know a little more about the show you are about to see, or just enjoy the frisson of peeking behind the theatrical curtain, MTC’s free and public Production Briefings can be a central part of your theatre-going.

Usually held on the Monday before the first preview, these open forums, led by the director, catch the show at the high tide of creativity. Discover the ideas and choices driving the production, the trials and the joys of the rehearsal room.

And, of course, feel free to ask your own questions.

The next Production Briefings are: Endgame, The Sumner Monday 16 March, 6pm The Waiting Room, Fairfax Studio Monday 11 May, 6pm North by Northwest, Playhouse Monday 25 May, 6pm

Recently Wilson Parking came on board as an MTC Season Partner, and, to mark the association, Wilson have announced a special online deal for all MTC ticket-holders. At the Eureka carpark on Southgate Avenue, under the Eureka Tower, ticketholders can receive a special night and weekend rate of $6 by booking their space on Wilson’s ‘Book a Bay’ service. To access this great deal simply use the promotional code ‘MTC’ when pre-booking your parking space at: www.wilsonparking.com.au/book-a-bay.

PHOTO: JEFF BUSBY

Eureka! – a cheap park

Missing links Eugyeene Teh puts clothes on the bare bones of Beckett’s masterpiece.

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he designer Eugyeene Teh, whose first costume design for MTC will be revealed in Endgame, finds himself caught somewhere between liberty and restriction.

After years of working in independent theatre, making do with low budgets or no budget at all, he is pleased to be at a major theatre company with all its resources at his disposal. On the other hand, this is a Samuel Beckett play, so there’s not a lot of airspace for a designer’s flights of fancy, especially since the Beckett estate is notorious in its insistence that productions follow the playwright’s stage directions closely.

‘I know there is a very particular control over what can be presented,’ Teh says about the Beckett Estate’s strictures.

‘But the text isn’t too specific. There’s some room there to move. It’s quite interesting, because Beckett describes a lot of the design, what the set should be like, but then there are some holes. For example, he describes what Hamm is wearing, but never describes what Clov is wearing. So there is free rein there. He does prescribe what Clov wears when he comes back at the end – then we follow the script. So in the design we picked up the missing links.’

nuclear annihilation was on the minds of the first audiences and critics in the latefifties. But Teh, Strong and set designer Callum Morton, in the spirit of Beckett, wanted to thwart easy interpretations of the characters’ situation.

‘The time and place are not specified in the script, so we tried hard not to specify one in the design,’ says Teh. ‘It is more or less universal and kind of timeless.

Not necessarily post-apocalyptic, but maybe a time of stagnancy. However, we settled on a premise for them, where they had been before. We decided that before they came to this room, they might have been at the opera. A long time ago. I think we wanted to address where they got their clothes from. We also had a desire to give them a little bit of flair. Yet even that was pulled back.

It’s just a departure point.’

Eugyeene Teh began his career in architecture, before adding a Masters in Design from VCA to his resume in 2008. Since then, his work for a wide range of independent theatre groups has attracted notice. Last year, NEON Festival audiences saw his impressive designs for Little Ones Theatre’s Dangerous Liaisons. ‘I am glad to have

PRODUCTION PHOTO: SARAH WALKER

‘I am glad to have done a lot of independent theatre,’ he says, ‘because it makes you more conscious of your decisions. It’s so hands-on, you don’t want to waste your time.’

A production of Endgame presents daunting challenges for everyone involved, from the design team to the audience, who are presented with one grim room, four characters (three of them immobile) and a suggestion of a bleak landscape outside. Beckett’s theatre pares human life back, creating comedy and pathos in an environment of want and scarcity. Not promising territory for a costume designer. However, in their early discussions about the costumes, Teh and the director Sam Strong decided not to place limits on their thinking. ‘We went all out,’ says Teh. ‘We explored many, many concepts and designs. Some were way out there. Then, after sorting them out, we pulled everything back to sit within the boundaries, while still leaving some originality and play.’

Some like to see the world in Endgame as post-apocalyptic. Certainly the idea of

Dangerous Liaisons (Little Ones Theatre, NEON 2014); (right) Eugyeene Teh

done a lot of independent theatre,’ he says ‘because it makes you more conscious of your decisions. It’s so hands-on, you don’t want to waste your time. You cannot spend four weeks building a set that you are not very pleased with.’

Now he’s at MTC with a professional wardrobe department and a large costume store to support him. ‘Yes it’s a nice feeling to work with a wellresourced company,’ he says. ‘My ideas are not as limited to what I can find for tuppence and can make myself. But then there are other pressures, a greater expectation to get things right. I’ve found already that here [at MTC] I’ve become a little more self-conscious.

It’s easier to take risks in independent theatre, and risks are very important.

If you don’t take risks you will end up doing the same thing over and over again. I hope that the greater expectations won’t take the risk out of my work.’

Endgame by Samuel Beckett runs at the Sumner from 21 March to 25 April

‘It was too much for the American officials to digest that Osamah and Ali and Mustafah had come to America to do Saddam – the Musical. They wouldn’t believe us. They said, “You are far too organised to be a theatre company.”’

Sami laughs now at the absurdity of it all, but at the time it was scary. The group was interrogated for twenty hours before being handcuffed and deported. The authorities took particular interest in certain text discussions Sami had on his phone concerning a terrorist cell called Essendon Football Club, suspiciously known as the Bombers.

‘I named the whole team for them – James Hird, Matthew Lloyd – but they just thought I was using it as a front to talk about my terrorist activities.’

‘Some of the guys didn’t recover – still haven’t recovered,’ he says. Asked why he is able to find the funny side of the experience, Sami speaks fondly and at length about his late father, who had endured so much. ‘He could put your worries into their place: “Really? Is that the worst that could happen?”’

I Call My Brothers by Jonas Hassan Khemiri is presented

by MTC Education and runs at the Lawler from 16 April to 1 May

Someone to watch MTC Education

PHOTO: PAUL GALLOWAY

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wake up sometimes and I look in the mirror and I wonder: Is this the Iranian me? The Iraqi me? The Australian me? And I’m half-Kurdish as well.’

You’d think if anyone was a candidate for an identity crisis, it would be actor Osamah Sami, but he seems to be holding together rather well. Our conversation, which ranges across many of the problems facing the Muslim community in Australia today, is serious without becoming sombre. Although life can occasionally drift into absurdity for an Australian guy called Osamah living in a post-9-11 world, he has the happy ability to turn adversity into anecdote. He can flip almost any experience over and see the funny side.

The play he’s about to rehearse, however, has a different tone. MTC Education’s I Call My Brothers was written by Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri and follows the main character, Amor, played by Sami, as he goes about his business in a city in the hours after a terrorist attack. Sami knows well the psychological labyrinth the play describes.

He was eighteen when the World Trade Centre went down and marks it as the moment everything became weird. Like young Amor, he became very self-conscious in public.

‘And it wasn’t just that I thought everybody was watching me,’ he says. ‘It was a crazy two way thing. It was also me watching them watching me. Which also made me assume the worst. Do they think that I’m a terrorist? Do they think I’m going do something to harm them? And it got me so worked up that I could very well say something to provoke the situation. And I’m sure some of it was in my mind. How did I know what some guy on the tram was thinking? But at the time, everything was heightened. Out of control. So when I read this script, yeah, it was telling me about something I’d lived through.’

Sami’s father, a Shiite cleric from Iraq, had been a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein. He met his Kurdish wife, Sami’s mother, in an Iranian refugee camp.

Sami was born in Qom and the family came to Australia in 1995 when Sami was twelve. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and English, which he says gives versatility to his acting career: ‘Yes, I can play both an Iranian asylum seeker and an Arab terrorist.’ He starred opposite Claudia Karvan in the SBS drama Saved and in Belvoir’s production of Baghdad Wedding. He writes, too. His memoir Good Muslim Boy will be published later this year and he’s co-written a screenplay soon to be directed by Wayne Blair, director of The Sapphires.

In part, the movie will be based on an incident that occurred to him and fellow cast members travelling to Detroit to perform a musical-comedy called The Trial of Saddam. Written by his father in Arabic and rehearsed in the local mosque, the show had already been a hit among the Iraqi community in Australia. The Detroit shows had sold out.

But this was 2005, not long after the London and Madrid train bombings. The company never got past US immigration in San Francisco.

Widescreen thriller

North by Northwest is experimental theatre on a cinemascopic scale, says writer Carolyn Burns

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oger O Thornhill is the wrong man, but no one believes him. The cops don’t believe him and the thugs with the guns don’t believe him. For them, he’s the right man and he’s got to be stopped. So Thornhill starts running …

Alfred Hitchcock returned again and again in his films to the theme of the unjustly accused hero who is forced to clear his name. It wasn’t just because he loved seeing his heroes squirm on the pin of false accusation. He also knew that a hero on the run could take the plot virtually anywhere. That’s liberating for a film director. In the case of North by Northwest, Hitchcock followed Roger from Madison Avenue, New York, to Rapid City, South Dakota, and the action never stops.

Yet, what might liberate a film-maker, could create a cluster of headaches for the writer taking on the stage adaptation. How does one hold Hitchcock’s trans-American sweep within the confines of a stage? Carolyn Burns, who has adapted the screenplay for the forthcoming MTC production, won’t divulge too many technical secrets, except to say that the production will be experimental. Some solutions have never been tried before – certainly not at this scale. From the beginning, she has collaborated closely with director Simon Phillips, lighting and set designer Nick Schlieper and video effects expert Josh Burns to find ways through the daunting technical challenges.

‘We throw ideas around and I will roll off any good idea they have,’ she says. ‘Occasionally, they will roll off an idea I have. I think that is one of the strong points about this team. They know each other so well that they have short cuts of dialogue and language. One says half a sentence and the others know what they mean. Simon and I are like that, too. He’s never been one to say, “You are the writer; I’ll do what you want” – which he does with some other writers. We tend to have brisk and frisky discussions.’

If anything, Burns who previously adapted High Society for MTC in 1992, has made it harder for herself by insisting on fidelity to Ernest Lehman’s screenplay and Hitchcock’s film, which she studied closely many years ago as a student at the Australian Film and Television School and came to admire.

‘My adaptation plays great homage to the original script, because it’s a great script,’ she says. ‘We had to make a decision early on whether we create a farce like The ThirtyNine Steps [MTC 2008] or, which is what I wanted, a true comedy-thriller, a political thriller. That’s what fascinated me, as a political person, is the political aspect. I didn’t want to spoof the film, with four actors, men dressing as women, and all the quick changes. So after Andrew Kay (the show’s coproducer) asked me if I was interested in writing the script, I spent a year looking at it, thinking about it, finally deciding that if we could get the thriller aspect of it happening from the beginning, then I could do it. But it requires a bigger cast and some risk.’

Throughout the various drafts, which were helped along last year by technical workshops at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and later in MTC’s Sturt Street

Adapted by Carolyn Burns: High Society (1993), Jeremy Stanford and Helen Buday

MAIN PHOTO: JEFF BUSBY

We had to make a decision early on whether we create a farce like The Thirty-Nine Steps or, which is what I wanted, a true comedythriller, a political thriller …

rehearsal rooms, Burns kept the audience in mind. Her guiding principle has been to write for those who have never seen the film. This keeps her honest and the storytelling fresh, forcing her to communicate clearly what is going on without assuming that everyone is already one step ahead. She’s also aware that Hitchcock had the benefit of close-ups and changes of camera angles; she has to tell the same story completely in the ‘wide-screen’ format of the stage. It’s been a challenge, especially since Lehman wrote such a taut script.

‘The script is so well-structured there’s little rejigging it,’ she says. ‘One thing I have done, at the beginning, is set up certain characters in a more clear way. I have used a little Rear Window, so we are spying into six or seven little scenarios, bringing in the spying theme from the start, hearing different conversations to set up the curiosity of the audience. Whether it will work or not, well we’ll see. This is all a big experiment.’

North by Northwest, adapted by Carolyn Burns runs at the Playhouse from 1 June to 4 July

Help support MTC Youth Ambassadors Philanthropy

MTC is assembling a special giving circle to support our 2015 Youth Ambassador program. We invite you to join us as we challenge and inspire fifteen of Victoria’s outstanding Year 11 Drama and Theatre students through a year of extension activities beyond the classroom.

Meeting monthly, the Ambassadors will join in talks from actors, directors and industry professionals, attend MTC productions, and have the chance to discuss and critique them in a gathering of like-minded peers. For these young people with a true passion for theatre, most nursing ambitions to make careers in the arts, this unique program offers

an extraordinary insight into how a major theatre company produces work, acting as both a forum for their ideas and an incubator for their aspirations.

As we have learnt by talking to former MTC Youth Ambassadors, the program can be a game-changer that empowers a student to follow their creative dream.

We ask you to join us and help a dedicated young person gain this invaluable experience. The MTC Youth Ambassador Circle is seeking fifteen donors to contribute $1000 each to support the 2015 program. The fifteen Ambassadors begin their MTC journey in April and Circle supporters will have

opportunities to meet the Ambassadors and engage in some of their activities.

To find out more about the MTC Youth Ambassador program and how you can be part of this giving circle, please contact Sarah Kimball, Philanthropy Manager, on 03 8688 0959 or s.kimball@mtc.com.au Youth Ambassadors over the years: (above) at the 2014 Season Launch the 2013 Ambassadors meet Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch, writers of MTC’s The Speechmaker; (below) some of the inaugural group of Ambassadors before a show in 2011

MTC 2015 YOUTH AMBASSADORS GIVING CIRCLE 15 Students = 15 Supporters @ $1000 each

First class all the way Corporate Partners

2015 is already shaping up to be a tremendous year for Corporate Partnerships, with some exciting new partners joining Melbourne Theatre Company’s corporate family.

MTC is delighted to welcome Qatar Airways as a new Major Partner.

Commencing in 2015, the partnership reflects both companies’ commitment to offering first-class experiences, premium service and promoting Melbourne as an international cultural destination. This three-year partnership also sees the launch of the Qatar Airways MTC Lounge, a brand new facility available exclusively to MTC Members and VIPs. Qatar Airways Country Manager Australasia, Adam Radwanski, said ‘Qatar Airways has a long tradition of commitment to supporting organisations which gather excellence, and we are delighted to be partnering with Australia’s leading theatre company.’

Joining Qatar Airways is renewing Major Partner Audi Australia, who will continue to support MTC’s Opening Nights. Now entering the fourth year of partnership with us, Audi is devoted to supporting world class performance in Melbourne. Audi Australia’s Managing Director Andrew Doyle said, ‘Audi is committed to a close alignment with forward-thinking companies like MTC who aren’t afraid to push the limits.

It’s this kind of thinking that makes MTC one of Australia’s leading arts companies, and ensures that Audi is back for another strong year of partnership.’

MTC is also pleased to welcome Aesop, Artbank, InterContinental the Rialto, Little Creatures, Pickawall, Redbank, Southgate, Time Out Melbourne, Uber, Wilson Parking and Yamaha as brand new Season Partners

for 2015. They will join renewing Production Partners Central Equity, Genovese Coffee and Goldman Sachs, all of whom share our vision to enrich lives through the storytelling power of theatre.

To join our corporate family, contact Dean Hampel, Corporate Partnerships Manager on 03 8688 0952 or d.hampel@mtc.com.au.

PHOTO: BLACKNOTE PHOTOGRAPHY

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Drive design. Book a test drive at audi.com.au MTC proudly supported by Audi Australia.

(Top) At the Thank-you Event for 2014 Partners, MTC’s Dean Hampel with Dianne Biviano of Qatar Airways, Mark Simpson and Damien Mulvihill of the Design Office, Adam Radwanski of Qatar Airways and Brent Pittman of Australian Ballet (Bottom) Production partner UBS’s Exclusive Dinner on the Pennsylvania Avenue set with Bernadette Robinson

A room with a view MTC Members

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Become a member

The Qatar Airways MTC Lounge

Members a few of my personal artistic passions. The first is a love of contemporary Indigenous urban art, and the entrance foyer and South Lounge feature works by Julie Dowling, Vernon Ah Kee, Adam Hill and Darren Siwes (whose triptych is visible in the photograph above).

‘In the North Lounge, I was keen to complement the architecture of our building and the view out towards NGV, as well as Southbank Theatre’s striking black and white design. This led me to examine the works of Richard Blackwell

Access to the Qatar Airways MTC Lounge is just one of the benefits of being an MTC Member.

Members also enjoy discounts at Southbank Theatre bars every time they visit, as well as discounts on parking and dining at Arts Centre Melbourne, and discounts at a number of restaurants, cafes and shops within Southgate.

For all queries about membership and benefits, please contact: Mandy Jones, Engagement and Events Manager members@mtc.com.au or phone 03 8688 0958 Or join at the Southbank Theatre Box Office or online at mtc.com.au/members

PHOTOS: BENJAMIN HEALLEY

hroughout the Jumpy season, MTC Members have been enjoying the all-new Qatar Airways MTC Lounge at Southbank Theatre. Our second floor function rooms have been transformed into a comfortable, exclusive, lounge experience, providing friendly staff, light refreshments, magazines, a sheltered terrace overlooking the Melbourne skyline, and private amenities.

One of the most exciting features of the beautifully designed lounge is a changing display of artworks in specially curated exhibitions, with the inaugural exhibition curated by MTC Artistic Director Brett Sheehy AO. ‘The creation of the beautiful new Qatar Airways MTC Lounge gave us a unique opportunity to work for the first time with Artbank, the Australian Government’s extraordinary visual art leasing program,’ Sheehy explains.

‘In a very generous partnership, I have been able to draw from Artbank’s extensive collection to curate the opening suite of works for the lounge.

In doing so, I wanted to share with

and Victoria Reichelt. In Reichelt’s work I love the nod to a different kind of performance, that is, the cinematic.’

Sheehy concludes, ‘I hope Members enjoy the selection and take time to read the wall texts accompanying each artwork’.

The Qatar Airways MTC Lounge operates from one hour before all mainstage evening performances in the Sumner on Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, and during interval (where applicable). The current exhibition curated by Brett Sheehy will be on display for six months.

Transform your space with Pickawall Pickawall is a proud partner of Melbourne Theatre Company New Showroom located: 359-361 Swan Street Richmond VIC 1300 567 877 www.pickawall.com.au

Scenes_Art.indd 1

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Watch and learn NEON Residency

PHOTO: RAWCUS

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he rehearsal is a kind of black box from which a show emerges – that’s how most theatre companies like it. Show the answers not the workings out, we say. Or to put it another way, rehearsals are like getting gussied up for a night out; nobody wants to see us at the dressing table in our knickers. However, a few companies take a different attitude. For them, the preparation is just as important as the final product, the journey an end in itself.

For instance, Rawcus, the acclaimed Melbourne ensemble of performers with and without disability, take a long time to develop their thrilling and distinctive productions. Meeting weekly, starting from practically nothing and building patiently from there, the troupe can take years to devise a show. ‘The work very much comes from the bodies and the imaginations of the ensemble,’ says Rawcus’s Artistic Director Kate Sulan. ‘We are a diverse group of people with very different viewpoints and experiences of the world. We start each show with practically nothing and then the show develops from all of our ideas and inputs over a long time, with more time on top of that to polish what we come up with.’

It is such an idiosyncratic and evolving process that Sulan is at a loss to describe it. ‘We get a lot of people asking us, “How do you make that?”

Rawcus Director Kate Sulan and cast in rehearsal

And the only way to understand what we do is by coming and watching us work. And then they see.’

Interested members of the public will have their chance to see what goes on in a Rawcus rehearsal room during our forthcoming NEON Festival of Independent Theatre in July.

MTC has invited Rawcus to take up residency in the Lawler for a week to begin work on their next show. During the week, the doors will be unlocked for a pair of Open Rehearsals and a Masterclass on collaborative theatremaking.

Sulan is careful to stress these will be the very early days of rehearsal.

‘We have a few starting points. The way we work is we play and explore and see where the energy and electricity arises. We meander until we catch that spark. When that happens, we follow.’

The Open Rehearsals on 22 and 23 of July will allow those interested in Rawcus’s collaborative creative methods, to see the ensemble making their early breakthrough moves towards their next show, catching those first sparks. For those with a

We start each show with practically nothing and then the show develops from all of our ideas and inputs over a long time …

‘It’s a beautiful gift for us as a company to be able to start this new work all together, spending a week discovering what that might be,’ says Sulan. ‘At the same time MTC is going to provide some staff and a voice coach to work with us, giving us some new skills. In return, the other part of the residency will be an opportunity for others to watch and participate in our creative process and understand our methodology for making a new work. It’s very exciting.’

deeper interest and perhaps wanting to develop their skills in groupdevised work, the Masterclass on 25 July, will give a more hands-on experience of the process.

Those interested in attending the Open Rehearsals or the Masterclass need to apply. Application details are available in the NEON 2015 brochure or online at mtc.com.au/NEON. NEON 2015 runs from 14 May to 25 July

Special offers Autumn 2015 Ticket Offer

Book Offer

Film Screening

Ticket Offer

Opening Night Package

The Importance of Being Miriam

From 19 March

Following critical acclaim for MTC’s I’ll Eat You Last, the internationally renowned Miriam Margolyes returns to Melbourne in The Importance of Being Miriam. Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and Charles Dickens’s Mr Bumble are just some of the unforgettable literary characters brought vividly to life by Miriam Margolyes, who will be joined by acclaimed classical pianist John Martin, delighting audiences with a selection of popular music and song.

MTC subscribers can access discounted $89 tickets to The Importance of Being Miriam, which plays at the Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse from 19 to 22 March. Just use the promo code SCENES when booking online at www.artscentremelbourne.com.au or by phone on 1300 182 183.

Hello, Beautiful by Hannie Rayson

Available Now

Hannie Rayson—writer, mother, daughter, sister, wife, romantic, adventuress, parkingspot optimist—has spent a lifetime giving voice to others in the many roles she has written for stage and television. In her new book, Hello, Beautiful! Scenes from a Life, she shines the spotlight on herself. From a childhood in Brighton to a urinary tract infection in Spain, from a body buried under the house to a play on a tram, Hello, Beautiful! captures a life behind the scenes – a life of tender moments, hilarious encounters and, inevitably, drama.

Readings is offering MTC subscribers $5 off signed copies of Hannie Rayson’s new book Hello, Beautiful! (Now $24.99, was $29.99)*. Simply enter MTC into the notes field when ordering at www.readings.com.au, or show this offer at any Readings shop in Carlton, Hawthorn, St Kilda, Malvern and State Library of Victoria.

X+Y

Tuesday 31 March

Nathan (Asa Butterfield) is a teenage maths prodigy who lives with his mother (Sally Hawkins). He understands the world through logic and is bewildered by his mother’s deep love, preferring his brilliant but underachieving maths tutor (Rafe Spall). But when the Mathematical Olympiad whisks him from English suburbia to Taipei, life flares into a vivid spectrum as he starts to comprehend what lies beyond reason and experiences the most irrational thing of all … first love.

Courtesy of Pinnacle Films and Cinema Nova, MTC subscribers have a chance to win one of a hundred double passes to a special screening of X+Y at 6.30pm on Tuesday 31 March at Cinema Nova. Simply email your name and subscriber details to offers@mtc.com.au with X+Y in the subject line by Sunday 15 March.

Sydney Dance Company’s Frame of Mind

From 6 May

A powerful double bill featuring deeply personal pieces from living legend William Forsythe and Rafael Bonachela. Appearing for its Australian premiere, Quintett is Forsythe’s poignant masterpiece, featuring five dancers at their most athletic and arresting. Bonachela’s world premiere Frame of Mind features a dramatic contemporaryclassical soundtrack by Bryce Dessner (The National), recorded by the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet..

MTC subscribers can access a special early bird offer for Frame of Mind, which plays at Southbank Theatre from 6 May. To receive 25 per cent off full price A-Reserve tickets for Wednesday or Thursday performances, use the promo code FRAME when booking online at www.mtc.com.au or by phone on 03 8688 0800.

Black Diggers

22 April

Black Diggers by Tom Wright (actor in Love Song and The Glass Solider) uncovers the untold stories of our Indigenous ANZACS. Described by The Guardian as ‘a new high point in telling a national narrative’, this production draws from interviews with their families, as well as conversations with veterans, historians and academics. These young men step from the blank pages of history. We will remember them.

MTC subscribers have the chance to win an exclusive opening night package to see Black Diggers at Arts Centre Melbourne, including two tickets to opening night on 22 April, a programme, and two drink vouchers to Curve Bar. To enter, simply email your name and subscriber details to offers@mtc.com.au with BLACK DIGGERS in the subject line by Sunday 15 March.

*Only while stocks last.