Although the play only runs for an hour, 'Peggy Pickit Sees The Face Of God' touches on a range of serious topics.
The play was written in 2010 by Roland Schimmelpfennig, a German playwright. It has been adapted and performed many times since then, and at last, it is Adelaide's turn.The play only requires a cast of four and they have been rehearsing since early April this year.
Joh Hartog is the Director of this play, and he's excited to showcase a German show.
“I find German writing in the last 20-30 years particularly good but of course the English-speaking world doesn’t get faced with it too often,” Joh says.
The basis of the play is fairly straightforward, it's a story about old friends from medical school who meet for dinner after an interruption of six years. Liz and Frank have made their lives in the West. They’ve done well for themselves. Carol and Martin have just returned from a six-year stint in Africa. Their return seems to have been caused by a deteriorating situation which forced them to flee.
But as Joh explains, the story is “deceptively simple”.
“The set is just the living and dining room, that doesn’t change throughout. What [Schimmelpfennig] does – he is brilliant at playing with form, people step out of [the setting] and tell a story, then step back into it.
“So you can hear the subtext and what characters are thinking at the time... At some stages the actor steps out and tells a story, one that has nothing to do with the character, but to do with the overall meaning of the play,” Joh says.
Image © Tarsha Cameron
Joh has been a director on and off since the early '70s, however has been heavily involved in the scene since he did his degree in his early 40s. Now, not only does he direct but he lectures at Flinders University, where he studied.
Joh Hartog Productions has also staged Schimmelpfennig’s 'Arabian Night' and 'The Golden Dragon'. All these plays tease out the complex relationship between the West and other areas of the world; the Middle East, Asia and now, Africa.
“In this play, Schimmelpfennig takes it one step further and mentions Western sensibilities and African sensibilities. I think, if anything, [the play] talks about how you can't see everything through Western eyes. Western eyes are very relative to ourselves and we don’t often understand the stuff that goes on elsewhere.
“You only have to see our general attitude towards refugees, we see them as a problem but we completely ignore the fact that they come from the most disastrous situations that most of us wouldn’t survive, let alone get out of. The complete lack of understanding of the devastation these people go through is lost to us most of the time, in a way that's a good thing but it then becomes ignorance and ignorance is not always bliss,” Joh explains.
Joh has faith that this play will entertain audiences in an unexpected way.
“It's not heavy, we are always so afraid of German plays, there's a stereotype that Germans don’t have a sense of humour, this is simply not true, these plays have tremendous amounts of humour throughout.”
