If re: group performance collective is any indication of the future of live theatre, audiences can rest easy — the curtain won’t be closing anytime soon. Their play POV, coming to Frankston Arts Centre on September 23, combines live documentary filmmaking, unrehearsed adult actors and a child who holds all the power.
Director Solomon Thomas credits writer Mark Rogers with the original concept. “Mark came with the idea of working with a kid in a one-hour monologue. He questioned what would happen if we trusted the whole show to a child. That was the challenge, and we all started pitching ideas from there.”
POV was co-created by re: group collaborators Solomon Thomas, Mark Young, Malcolm Whittaker, Steve Wilson-Alexander and Carly Young — friends who met studying theatre at the University of Wollongong and have built a reputation for inventive, experimental work.
At its heart, POV explores how to talk to children about mental illness while watching it unfold on stage. The story follows 11-year-old Bub, an aspiring documentary filmmaker trying to understand her mother’s erratic behaviour. Armed with a camera, she captures dramatic, cinematic re-enactments that reveal the family’s story to the audience.
A unique feature of the production is that the two adult actors are unrehearsed and different every night. Guided by Bub through hidden earpiece prompts and planted scripts, they navigate scenes and difficult questions in real time.
“For us, the real, live negotiation between two adults and a child constitutes the ‘documentary’ in the work — even though the scenes they are re-enacting are mostly fictional,” Solomon says. The work draws on the creative team’s lived experiences of family life, childhood and mental health.
Solomon’s own path to theatre-making was unconventional. Raised in a creative family and educated in both Steiner and mainstream schools, he initially imagined a career in dance or music. But while studying at the University of Wollongong, he discovered a passion for creating theatre rather than performing in it.
“I arrived at university wanting to be an actor and left wanting to make theatre,” he says. “I loved weird experimental theatre and wanted to make work like that.”
After university, a chance encounter while working as an usher at Carriageworks led to eight years touring internationally with the puppetry company Erth’s Dinosaur Zoo before he turned his focus to making his own work.
Now, with re: group, Solomon continues to push theatrical boundaries. In POV, audiences witness what happens when artists trust each other to tackle a difficult subject, hand narrative control to a child and allow a story to unfold organically. The result is bold, immersive and riveting theatre.
ANDREA LOUISE THOMAS
POV is at Frankston Arts Centre on Wednesday, September 23 at 7:30. Book seats online or call 03 9784 1060.