Cosi-PROGRAM.Pdf

BY LOUIS COSI NOWRA Welcome While there are a number of great Australian classics, there are few that manage the trifecta – withstanding the test of time, having successful iterations across multiple artforms and maintaining their place on school curriculums. It just so happens that two of these classics appear in our 2019 Season. Later in the year we’ll be treated to a spectacular new staging of Storm Boy, and this new production of Così brings Louis Nowra’s much loved characters back to MTC, 25 years after Così’s debut. This special story reminds us all of the transformative power of music and performance, and how art can make us soar – even if just for a moment. It is vital for us as human beings and something MTC promotes year round through our productions and special programs. As we approach the end of the financial year, we invite you to help MTC continue leading the way on and off-stage by making a tax-deductable donation at mtc.com.au/continuethestory. The important role donations play for the company has grown exponentially over the years, and they have allowed us to achieve some truly extraordinary things. MTC’s home venue continues to be a remarkable and enduring example of what can be achieved through the power of philanthropy. Like each and every production at MTC, Southbank Theatre itself could not have existed without the shared passion, generosity and loyalty of our donors. Here’s to 10 years of our home and those who made it possible. Enjoy the show. Brett Sheehy ao Virginia Lovett Artistic Director & CEO Executive Director & Co-CEO Melbourne Theatre Company acknowledges the Yalukit Willam Peoples of the Boon Wurrung, the First Peoples of Country on which Southbank Theatre and MTC HQ stand, and we pay our respects to all of Melbourne’s First Peoples, to their ancestors and Elders, and to our shared future. MTC is a department MTC is assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, MTC is a member of Live of the University its arts funding and advisory body, and by the State Government of Victoria through Performance Australia and the of Melbourne. Creative Victoria. Australian Major Performing Arts Group. MELBOURNE THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS A MELBOURNE THEATRE COMPANY & SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY CO-PRODUCTION COSÌ BY LOUIS NOWRA 30 APRIL — 8 JUNE 2019 Southbank Theatre, The Sumner — About the Play — ‘Let’s aim for the stars!’ It’s 1971 Australia and outside, the nation is protesting the war in Vietnam. Inside, a cast of lovable amateurs are preparing for a performance of Mozart’s famous comic opera, Così Fan Tutte, but no-one can sing, act or speak Italian. Its aspiring young director, Lewis, has just finished drama school and his first directing gig is at a psychiatric facility. What could possibly go wrong? — Cast — — Creative Team — Gabriel Fancourt Zac/Nick Director Sarah Goodes Esther Hannaford Julie/Lucy Set Designer Dale Ferguson Glenn Hazeldine Henry Costume Designer Jonathon Oxlade Bessie Holland Cherry Lighting Designer Niklas Pajanti Sean Keenan Lewis Composer & Sound Designer Chris Williams Robert Menzies Roy Associate Sound Designer Amy Holley Rahel Romahn Doug Assistant Director Rachel Chant Katherine Tonkin Ruth Fight Choreographer Lyndall Grant George Zhao Justin Stage Manager Julia Smith Stage Manager – Tour Jess Maguire Assistant Stage Manager Pippa Wright Costume Design Mentee Charlotte Lane Production Secondment Caitlin Tsiolkas Rehearsal Photography Deryk McAlpin Production Photography Jeff Busby For information regarding running time, please see a member of the Front of House team. Opening Night Partner Production Partner Media Partner A co-production with STC Motley Mozart Louis Nowra tells Fiona Gruber about the people who changed his life, and how they came to form the inspiration behind his iconic play Cosí. Director Sarah Goodes with Katherine Tonkin, Esther Hannaford and Bessie Holland t the beginning of Cosí, would-be For Lewis’s girlfriend Lucy and best friend thespian and psychiatric hospital Nick, it is their place in the tumultuous patient Roy says, ‘This is where political landscape of early 70s Australia I belong, in the theatre.’ that is the problem. They’re fighting against A the status quo and Australia’s involvement The themes of identity and belonging are in the Vietnam War; what sort of a society central to Louis Nowra’s play. Its characters do they want to belong to? have trouble adhering to the world as it is, and for young theatre director Lewis and Nowra wrote Cosí in 1992 but based it on his odd-ball cast of the hospitalised, the events of his own youth; in 1971, as a make-believe world of Mozart’s and 20-year-old he directed a version of Da Ponte’s opera is a welcome refuge. Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta, Trial by Jury, at Plenty Psychiatric Hospital in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Bessie Holland, Katherine Tonkin, Glenn Hazeldine, Rahel Romahn, Esther Hannaford, Robert Menzies and Sean Keenan; (below) Sean Keenan and George Zhao He hated the operetta (which is why he ‘The audience go “oh my goodness, are we substituted it with Mozart in the play) and laughing at the patients or are we laughing it wasn’t a great production, he says, but it with them?”’ he says, ‘But by the end,’ he was worth it. continues, ‘they’ve forgotten they’re watching patients, rather than an eccentric group of ‘It was a one-off performance and I don’t characters brought together for a play.’ know how messy it was but at the end, it was one of the greatest experiences of And he says his characters, including my life; after the applause, the euphoria pyromaniac, sex-mad Doug, obsessive- was absolutely magnificent. Because you compulsive Ruth and know-it-all Roy, can have to remember, asylums are very be found in many a theatre cast, alongside melancholic places.’ egos that have to be assuaged. ‘You have to give an aria to each actor so that there The play has been performed around the would be no jealousy’. world (most recently in China) and is produced by between 20 and 30 amateur The environment of Cosí is a world that companies every year in Australia; no longer exists. It’s difficult to convey, its savage humour bites hard, but the he says, the important role asylums played laughter is, at the start, uneasy. in society before most were closed in the 1990s. (Below) Director Sarah Goodes with Robert Menzies and Rahel Romahn; (opposite, clockwise from left) Glenn Hazeldine, Bessie Holland and Rahel Romahn; Glenn Hazeldine; Gabriel Fancourt ‘… I thought there was an honesty among [them] about their own condition and how they saw the world.’ — Louis Nowra Although in many cases places of abuse, who wanted to overthrow the government they were also, he argues, places of refuge. and believed their own bullshit. ‘[In contrast] I thought there was an honesty among mental By the 1960s, the introduction of tranquilisers patients about their own condition and how and anti-psychotic drugs had treated a they saw the world,’ he says. generation of patients. It is this era in which the play is set, an era that saw revolutionary Nowra knows more about mental illness ideas about mental health alongside and institutions than many of his rebellion in the streets. contemporaries; both his grandmothers spent time in Melbourne’s Mont Park ‘Lewis, like me became much more fascinated Asylum and his mother suffered from in what was happening in the mind than what trauma. ‘She had her demons’, he explains, was happening outside,’ Nowra explains. He ‘because she shot and killed her father.’ describes the student radicals as "poseurs" (From top) George Zhao; Gabriel Fancourt with Director Sarah Goodes; Glenn Hazeldine, Katherine Tonkin, Robert Menzies and Gabriel Fancourt He’s written about his troubled childhood in the memoir The Twelfth of Never: it’s also fictionalised in his 1992 play, Summer of the Aliens; featuring a teenaged Lewis; Così, is the second part of a semi- autobiographical trilogy. The third and final play, This Much is True, was written after a 25-year gap. The latter is set in a pub in the harbour-side Sydney suburb of Woollomooloo and it’s there that I meet Nowra. He spends part of each day at the Old Fitzroy Hotel and the final part of the Lewis Trilogy was commissioned and produced by the hotel’s resident theatre company, Red Line Productions, in 2017. What unites all three plays, and is as true of Cosí as for the rest, he says, is a cast of oddball characters who have trouble fitting in. ‘The pub we’re in … I felt right at home and a lot of people I mix with here are definitely a bit strange. I thought, that’s typical, I’ve gone for a group of people I really adore … but in the three plays these people are never going to be part of middle class suburbia; and those are the people that have changed my life.’ n Hear more from playwright Louis Nowra in our MTC Talks podcast series. mtc.com.au/MTCTalks Cast & Creative Team GABRIEL FANCOURT ESTHER HANNAFORD GLENN HAZELDINE Zac / Nick Julie / Lucy Henry Gabriel Fancourt is a graduate of Esther Hannaford most recently Since graduating from NIDA in NIDA where he appeared in Lord played Viola in Twelfth Night 1994, Glenn Hazeldine's selected of the Flies, A Midsummer Nights (Melbourne Theatre Company) theatre credits include Dead Dream and This Property is and Carole King in Beautiful: The White Males, The Judas Kiss, Condemned. Gabriel’s further Carole King Musical (Michael Don’s Party, The Father (MTC); theatre work includes Henry V Cassel Group).

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