Next Season And Better Premises Stitched Up
The Age
Thursday December 8, 2005
FIRST comes the bad news: the daring fringe theatre company Red Stitch will produce one less play next year. Now the good news: the reduction is caused by the renovation of the company's St Kilda headquarters.
"It will take us out of the third world," says the company's artistic director, David Whiteley, speaking in the tiny box office behind the All Saints Church in Chapel Street.He points to the red tent outside the door and says that will be replaced by a new foyer. The production end of the building is also being expanded to provide new dressing rooms and a first-floor rehearsal space-cum-studio theatre."There will also be indoor toilets, and we will get street frontage on Dandenong Road," Whiteley says. "We want the theatre space still to seat less than 100 people, but the dressing rooms are the most important thing - they are (now) sub-human. We're lucky to have running water."The Anglican Church offered to underwrite the renovations in return for the company's agreement to increased rent over a longer lease. "We felt able to make the commitment because we're confident that we will continue to exist for the next three years, thanks to a grant from the Myer Foundation," he says. This now allows for the actors to be paid for a production.But the project does not include funding for new seating, and the company is looking for sponsorship to include this in the development.Red Stitch was founded as an actors' ensemble in 2002 to attract a new audience, concentrating on the best plays from around the world. It has been at its current location since 2003.Whiteley says Red Stitch is exploiting a gap in the market between the other fringe companies and the Melbourne Theatre Company, which sometimes competes for the same plays. This is proof of the company's ambitions. Whiteley says he was keen on including the Pulitzer prize-winning Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley, but that was booked by the MTC. "But we usually have no problem picking up what the state companies leave," he says.The company's first three productions for next year will be Fewer Emergencies by Martin Crimp, This Is How It Goes by Neil LaBute and Tejas Verdes by Spanish writer Fermin Cabal.Whiteley says that Crimp is considered by many to have taken over Harold Pinter's mantle as Britain's best playwright in recent years. Crimp's Cruel and Tender was one of the MTC's strongest productions this year, but it was left to Red Stitch to mount his earlier play, The Country, in its current season.Red Stitch is currently staging a sell-out production of The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute - who is best known for the play and film In the Company of Men - and is rushing in the American writer's latest production after its New York premiere earlier this year. The Spanish play looks at events in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship and examines the burden of guilt on the current generation.Foreign language plays appear less frequently in the company's program, but Whiteley says he is keen to explore theatre beyond the Anglo-Celtic world. He would also like to mount an innovative production of a classic by such authors as Brecht, Ibsen and Chekhov."We would jump at anyone who came to us with a new interpretation of their works," he says.Red Stitch cannot get public funding because it very rarely produces new Australian plays, but he says the company is working on the development of several new local scripts."It is short-sighted and mean-spirited (of funding bodies) to make that a criterion of any group being offered grants," he says. "Imagine if such a restriction prevented people from seeing the best of American or English films because they have no Australian content."Red Stitch is considering making up the reduction in its season later next year with a production of one of the new Australian plays now being developed. But it will depend on the actors' energy levels."The ensemble has been working non-stop since 2002 and might need to take a break instead," Whiteley says. Red Stitch's first season in 2006 is made up of Martin Crimp's Fewer Emergencies (March 17-April 16); Neil LaBute's This Is How It Goes (April 28-May 27) and Fermin Cabal's Tejas Verdes (June 2-July 1). Go to www.redstitch.net
© 2005 The Age