A Questioning Intelligence Carries Red Stitch Into Bold Future
The Age
Tuesday December 4, 2007
RED Stitch Theatre Company, which is renowned for its productions of top overseas scripts, enters a new phase in its six-year history in 2008 with the first production of a new Australian play it has commissioned.
The play, Intelligence, was commissioned with funds from the Australia Council after playwright Michael Gurr, who wrote Crazy Brave and Sex Diary of an Infidel, approached the company and said he would like to write for its actors.Red Stitch's artistic director, David Whiteley, says the company was always determined that any new work must be developed in-house to ensure it met the company's standards."It's been a pleasure working with Michael over the past two years," he says. "He was very open to our ideas and sometimes would write a whole new scene after discussions with us."Intelligence is set in an interrogation training centre coming under closer scrutiny after the government increases its funding."It is relevant to modern society, where mutual suspicion has become a growth industry," Whiteley says.The company also hopes to stage a second Australian play in the second half of 2008 as a result of its writers-in-residence program, under way since last June with playwrights Tom Holloway and Lachlan Philpott.Whiteley hopes these home-grown productions will lead to the company receiving organisational funding from Arts Victoria for the first time. Although Red Stitch won two Green Room awards earlier this year against competition from the much bigger companies, Melbourne Theatre Company and Malthouse, it has struggled to receive regular grants.The company has received $40,000 a year from the Myer Foundation for the past two years, but that expires in six months' time."That has allowed us to pay actors and crew some pocket money, but it doesn't go very far when the cost of staging just one production is about $23,000," Whiteley says.Red Stitch is also introducing a graduates' program next year that will allow two theatre graduates to spend a year with the ensemble to learn about the industry.The company's program for the first half of next year includes the return of two authors - America's Neil LaBute and Britain's Jez Butterworth - whose previous plays have been hits.The third overseas author, Bruce Norris, wrote The Pain and the Itch for Chicago's Steppenwolf company. LaBute's The Mercy Seat is different from his previous Red Stitch productions, The Shape of Things and This is How it Goes.It is set in Manhattan near the destroyed twin towers the day after September 11.A couple having an illicit affair explore the options of pretending to be among the casualties of the terror strike.LINK? redstitch.net
© 2007 The Age