Fairytales, fables and folk stories, QTC's latest production 'The Magic Hour' takes the sweet and the scary and twists them into bleakly hilarious tales. This one-woman show stars Ursula Yovich playing a slew of sideline female characters and the result is a night of dark comedy and soulful song that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
Written by Vanessa Bates, whose childhood celebrated the 'magic hour', an hour of storytelling and sharing family memories. She recalls sitting beside her grandparents' record player, entranced by the tales of 'Treasure Island' and singing along to 'Fifteen Men On A Deadman's Chest'. These childhood experiences served to excite Bates about the power and allure of stories and there are the more familiar, along with some unusual tales, woven into the fabric of this production.
“When Vanessa proposed to me the idea of an evening of fairytales for adults, I was immediately intrigued.”
She started to notice, however, that certain types of people didn't feature much in the retellings — the poor, the disenfranchised, the mentally ill — and stories about the people that had slipped down the cracks of society. And along the way, she noticed that many of these stories involved women. So for Bates, 'The Magic Hour' is a way to celebrate the lives of the forgotten, the silent characters, the overlooked and avoided, and to finally acknowledge the parts they may have played in the fairytales we all know so well.
As director Chris Bendall points out, “'The Magic Hour' celebrates that essential craft of storytelling. And these stories are from a time where fairytales were passed down from parent to child, spoken rather than written, and reinvented each night with a little extra colour and detail added.” When you combine such well-known and cherished content with a new twist or a different location, things start to get interesting. “When Vanessa proposed to me the idea of an evening of fairytales for adults, I was immediately intrigued.”Get ready for a night of magical and musical storytelling, where seven original, complex and compelling women are brought to life by the ultra talented Yovich.
'The Magic Hour' plays from May 20-31 at Bille Brown Studio.
