Fringe Premiere for The Last Time I Saw Richard
Well known South Australian independent theatre company five.point.one will present a new Australian show at the 2016 Adelaide Fringe in mid-February. The Last Time I Saw Richard is one of only eight 2016 Fringe events to have secured an Adelaide Fringe Cultural Fund grant for the 2016 festival. Lesley Reed reports.
Adelaide Fringe established the Cultural Fund in 2014 to provide support to artists registering a show in the Adelaide Fringe. This year, eight grants of $5000 were offered to Australian artists to help them present work in the 2016 Fringe, including five.point.one’s production. Work was from a mix of genres – cabaret, children’s events, circus and physical theatre, comedy, dance, film, interactive, music, theatre and visual art. Applications were assessed on their level of innovation, dare and risk, audience connection and marketing and promotion.
The Last Time I Saw Richard is written by Cat Commander and directed for five.point.one by Craig Behenna. It stars Elizabeth Hay (work includes Danger 5,Volpone and Jesikah- STC, TV’s ANZAC GIRLS) and Charles Mayer (work includes The Popular Mechanicals for STC, ANZAC GIRLS, Sam Fox Extreme Adventures and Deadline Gallipoli ).
Adelaide’s five.point.one believes The Last Time I Saw Richard showcases new Australian writing at its finest.
“The Last Time I Saw Richard is a kind of tragic anti-romcom about April and Richard, who are thrown together in a series of hotel rooms,” said the play’s Director Craig Behenna. “He's an actor who may once have had a bit of success but is now struggling to keep his act together. She's smart, sharp, great powers of observation and self-awareness, but also directionless. April and Richard keep coming back to this kind of non-relationship and don't quite realise the ways that they do and don't fit together. The Last Time I Saw Richard is a play about people who exist, people who you know; people who are desperately trying to sort their shit out. With absolutely cracking dialogue that keeps you wondering who is keeping the secret, who is doing what next, why the hell are these two…everything you think about when you watch a couple together.”
Craig Behenna added, “Cat Commander writes with precision, humour and heart about intimacy and isolation, our mistakes, fears and desires. Her characters are unsettlingly familiar and accurately drawn.”
I asked Craig why the play was chosen by five.point.one.
“The Last Time I Saw Richard was first seen in the closing night slot of The Reading Sessions, a series of fourteen rehearsed play-readings in fourteen days, selected from almost a hundred submissions from across Australia,” he said. “Charles Mayer and Elizabeth Hay were the first actors we chose. It was obvious that the audience were into this script from the moment the actors started to play it. You could feel the fun and sadness and love in the audience by the time the last scene ended. We did a Q&A chat afterwards and it was by far the largest number that we'd ever had to stay back for a chat, and - this is the thing that really swung it, for me at least - we had people say to us, ‘I don't go to theatre, I don't see plays, but I want to know when you're doing this as a full production so I can come and see it'. That's a big factor for us - we're doing new Australian work and we want to do shows that appeal to people who have never seen theatre and to theatre veterans.”
Cat Commander’s sharp wit finds its way into her scriptwriting. Trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, she has a Masters in Writing for Performance. Her teachers included Joanna Murray-Smith and Raimondo Cortese and her work includes sellout shows at Melbourne and Perth Fringes. Armed with a long background in improvisational comedy, she has done some intensive training at iO in Chicago, which trained Amy Poehler and Tina Fey.
As a company, five.point.one has recently moved in a new direction. Fresh from the critically successful and multi-awarded Notoriously Yours, which gave the company the opportunity to work with technology and projection in an exciting way, new Artistic Director Brad Williams is utilising his tech skills and acting background to lead the company in exploring the storytelling potential of technology with projection.
“For The Last Time I Saw Richard we'll be working with projection and colour to bring out the emotional reality that neither April or Richard can come out and say,” said Director Craig Behenna. “We can use technology to give their world a reality that's right for the story and the characters, using a little bit of poetry with colour to bring out and complement the feelings they're going through. And make it beautiful.”
A man. A woman. A hotel room. Will they or won’t they? The Last Time I saw Richard is an edgy, sexy play that teases and intrigues the audience.
WHEN: February 15-27at 9pm (70mins). Rated M.
WHERE: Bakehouse Theatre – Main Room, 255 Angas Street, Adelaide.
TICKETS: $16.50 - $28.00
BOOKINGS: www.adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix
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