Producer Lexi Sekuless has brought a leading director and Australian theatre historian to Canberra to work with her company.
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Julian Meyrick is directing Good Works, a 1994 play by writer Nick Enright, whose works for stage and screen included Cloudstreet, The Boy from Oz and Blackrock.
Meyrick is Professor of Creative Arts at Griffith University and author of Australia in 50 Plays, which called for Australian theatres not to overlook the nation's heritage of stage works.
He's directing a cast made up of current and returning Canberra actors in what will be the third professional production of Good Works (it had a revival in 2015).
Meyrick said unlike Britain and the US, Australian theatre doesn't have a strong tradition of revivals, a state of affairs he wanted to change. Bringing Good Works back to the stage was part of this passion.
"It's a memory play," Meyrick said - the actors play characters from childhood into adulthood and the action jumps back and forth in time.
"It's a collage [operating on] an emotional level rather than an indicative level."
The play is set between the 1920s and 1980s. It looks at two small-town Catholic families and the friendship between Shane (Martin Everett) and Tim (Oliver Bailey) and their mothers (played respectively by Adele Querol and Sekuless). Helen McFarlane and Neil Pigot play four roles apiece.
Meyrick said the play was not about big characters and tragedy on a grand scale but about ordinary lives where "things go wrong by inches".
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He and Sekuless had known each other for years and Meyrick came to Canberra to see her 2022 revival of The Torrents, a 1955 play by Oriel Gray that shared the Playwrights Advisory Board Competition prize with Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll but was not as well known as Lawler's work.
Meyrick was impressed by the production and by the aims of Sekuless for her company, both in producing theatre and in professional development such as acting classes and training in theatrical techniques.
"The issue for Canberra is that there are a lot of creative people who don't live in Canberra - they go elsewhere to make a living," Meyrick said.
He praised Lexi Sekuless Productions as a company that wanted to mount high quality professional theatre in Canberra using local and returning talent.
"The actors are all Canberrans or were from Canberra - that was one of the aims of the company."
Meyrick was also impressed by the Mill Theatre's intimate L-shaped space with its high rig, providing more choices for lighting, and by the fact that it has exits at either end, allowing for a good flow of action.
"It's fantastic - it can be like a large theatre when you need it to be and it has all the intimacy of a small theatre."
Good Works is on at the Mill Theatre at Dairy Road, Building 3.3, 1 Dairy Road, Fyshwick, from July 12 to August 12, various dates and times. Adult themes. See: milltheatreatdairyroad.com.
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