Home – 14 July – 25 July – Studio 2, The GreenHouse

---

 

by Margi Brown Ash

 

Queensland Theatre Company presents a Force of Circumstance production

Part performance, part installation and part conversation, in Home spectators become co-creators as they share their stories of where they came from.

Laying bare her own personal yarns from an amazing life, Brisbane theatremaker Margi Brown Ash weaves backwards and forwards through time and criss-crosses the globe in this moving and uplifting story of belonging and not belonging. Her own life is one of movement and constant reincarnation – from a schoolgirl dreaming of the future in 1960s country NSW, to a Number 96 soapie starlet in ’70s Sydney, then an actor in ’80s New York. Yet Brisbane has become a constant, a safe port from the rolling seas and changing tides of life.

Home is a sensitive, affecting and intimate theatre experience. After development in Mexico, the USA and Brisbane’s Metro Arts and as part of La Boite’s indie season, the critically praised show has found a new home at QTC.

“The original idea of Home grew out of a letter I received from one of my daughters while they were living in Palestine, describing how a family’s house had just been bulldozed down. The next few years were spent writing this play, as a way to understand the importance of home.” Margi Brown Ash

“This sensitive, lively work empowers the audience as Brown Ash brings us all Home. A rare and refreshing theatrical work that connects the whole audience. Not to be missed.”
-Arts Hub

Co-Director /Co-Deviser: Leah Mercer

Designer: Bev Jensen

Composer/Sound Designer: Travis Ash

Lighting Design: Ben Hughes

Performers: Margi Brown Ash and Travis Ash

 

 

 

Happy Days – 18 July – 15 August – Bille Brown Studio, QTC

---

 

by Samuel Beckett

Queensland Theatre Company presents

Winnie is trapped. Buried to her waist in a desolate place, under the pitiless gaze of the sun, she kindles hope out of a hundred little rituals and distracts herself with chatter and her meagre bag of possessions as her slow sink into oblivion continues. Is this brave woman the eternal optimist – or just deep in denial?

Samuel Beckett’s absurd, surreal masterpiece Happy Days is a powerful tale of resilience and of one woman’s struggle to survive against the odds – a rueful hymn to the adaptability and indomitability of the human spirit, and an exploration of the meaning of life itself. Winnie is a tour-de-force role for a female actor, and Queensland theatre icon Carol Burns is set to bring her to life at the Bille Brown Studio.

“Winnie has a brave heart first and foremost. We are all trying to make our way through life as best we can and Winnie uses all the resources that are available to her, wisely husbanded, to get through the day. This script is like a piece of music and you must let yourself feel it through to the end, and then consider the journey.”
–Carol Burns

Play Briefing: 13 July

Director: Wesley Enoch

Composer: Alan Lawrence

Cast Includes: Carol Burns

 

 

Grounded – 29 July – 15 August- The Greenhouse

---

by George Brant

Queensland Theatre Company presents

She was the queen of the skies. The Air Force’s finest. Top Gun. She lived for the squeeze of the trigger as she rained missiles down on the minarets below. But then she fell in love, fell pregnant, and fell back to earth with a bump.

Rekindling her career, The Pilot finds warfare has changed. No longer soaring above the battlefield, instead she slumps in a chair in the Nevada desert, peering at images of a different desert half a world away for twelve hours at a time. She’s a Reaper drone pilot, remotely controlling a death-dealing robot, a pitiless $11 million eye in the sky that can obliterate a convoy or village in seconds.

As the sands of America and Afghanistan start to blur, The Pilot realises it’s one thing to go off to war, but quite another to fight a war wirelessly, clock off, and kiss your child goodnight.

Featuring Libby Munro, who stunned audiences and critics with her blistering Matilda award winning performance in 2013’s Venus in Fur, as The Pilot.

 

“George Brant’s writing is compelling and has rightly won awards.”
-The Telegraph

Director: Andrea Moor

Cast: Libby Munro

 

The Seagull – 29 August – 26 September – Bille Brown Studio, QTC

---

by Anton Chekhov | Adapted by Todd MacDonald and Daniel Evans

 

Queensland Theatre Company presents

Gather artists in a room and sparks are going to fly. That’s why Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and Queensland Theatre Company’s Actors Studio are perfect partners.

Artistic Associate Todd MacDonald works with Daniel Evans to marshal an ensemble cast of ten acclaimed Brisbane actors in this contemporary retelling of a play with grand themes that resonate down through the ages. When famed but fading theatrical diva Arkadina brings her entourage ­– including her writer lover Trigorin and tortured, unconventional playwright son Konstantin – to seek solace at her brother’s country hideaway, she unwittingly sets light to a powderkeg of repressed emotions as flames of passion are lit and extinguished and love triangles mesh together and drift apart.

The combined skills of a stellar cast take centre stage in QTC’s Actors Studio production. The enduring brilliance of the text is emphasised in this stripped-back, raw experience that cuts to the heart of the heartbreak in a classic play about all the things which still fascinate humankind – family, power, sex, fame and passion.

“… Anton Chekhov casts an extraordinary spell over 21st-century theatre audiences. A century after his death, he speaks with a mix of wit, idealism, sadness and wisdom that connects with the hopes and fears of today’s audiences.”
-The Guardian

 

Cast Includes: Emily Burton, Helen Cassidy, Nicholas Gell, Amy Ingram, Jason Klarwein, Barbara Lowing, Brian Lucas, Christen O’Leary, Hugh Parker and Lucas Stibbard

Directors: Todd MacDonald and Daniel Evans

 

 

 

---

 

All associated graphics, logos, trader marks, trade names or copyrights are the property of the original owner and are used here for factual and educational purposes only.

If there are any errors please contact us with corrections mail@theatregold.com