The twisted coming-of-age tale 'First Love Is The Revolution', presented by Griffin Theatre Company, centres on motifs of hunger and desire, drawing parallels to the likes of 'Romeo & Juliet', but pushed to deranged extremes.
It's an Australian premiere, a bittersweet love story between a fox and a lonely teenage boy.
Writer Rita Kalnejais is sure to rattle audiences to their core with her extreme and anthropomorphic tale of love and bloodlust, directed by Lee Lewis.
'Beneath the light of the full moon, Basti captures Rdeca and so begins a starcross'd romance between hunter and prey.'
Cast members Sarah Meacham who plays Rdeca and Guy Simon as Thoreau/Rovis open up about their first impressions upon encountering the script for 'First Love Is The Revolution'.
“My first impression? Outrageous! I felt so invigorated and ignited by such a blasting text, it jumps out at you,” Sarah says. “It ignites so many visuals in your mind because it's such a crazy world. That's how I felt after I first read it.”
“I was just like 'what am I reading?'” Guy adds. “And as it was going on and unfolding I was like 'oh my gosh'. As an actor you read 20 plays [and] you feel like you're good at predicting where the story is going and then it's like 'oh my god, I don't know anything'.”
Rehearsal - Image © Brett Boardman
It certainly is a concept that shatters the mould of traditional theatre, let alone that of a traditional love story. Guy and Sarah respectively had their own methods of becoming their characters.
“It's a lot of going out in the bush and hunting small animals,” Guy jokes.
“Because it's such early days [at the time of the interview], we're sitting around the table and really unpicking the script and talking about stripping back the notion of human civilisation that each of us are built with.
“The process is stripping all of that back, then going 'what is the law of these foxes and their survival?'. . . It's quite a Pagan or Darwinian thing of 'how do we now navigate the world with these new sets of eyes, a tail and a couple of ears?’”
“For me it's assessing their values,” Sarah explains. “I start with 'what do they want, and what do they need, and what is their threat, and what is their greatest desire?' and then you put it into the world of where they are. For them it's the wild, the threat of death is so immediate to them; they're so instinctual – this fighting, hunting, eating, and breeding – it becomes so reduced to these core values.
“Then you go back to 'what do they want, what do they need, what do they like, and what gives them pleasure'. That's the part that exists with humans as well so that part becomes quite easy.”
Rehearsal - Image © Brett Boardman
The play navigates the nature of love through opposing and conflicting social and societal spheres. The symbolism behind Basti and Rdeca’s blooming relationship is firmly planted in the trade-off between meeting expectations and attaining desires, playing into the theme of a romantic tragedy.
“A line in the play is: 'I am not tame because I love you'. There's this concept of 'tame', as in, to be domesticated and under the demands of a human,” Sarah says. “So for a fox to be tame or to become domestic with a human is the ultimate betrayal to their birthright. To love one another is the cost of their lives, it is the biggest sacrifice.”
“And there's a lot of talk around destiny and giving in to it,” Guy concludes. “What is your destiny and do you adhere to it or do you fight against it. That also plays into it.”
