Sunnytown Shines Down On Brisbane

'Sunnytown' takes the audience on a trip into a young girl's mind as part of La Boite Theatre's 2015 Indie Season.

The play alternates between a 13-year-old girl's troubled domestic life and her subconscious as she retreats into herself to escape life's problems. Director Heather Fairbairn joined production after she 'fell in love with [the] magical surrealism' of the script. “It's a little bit like an Australian 'Alice In Wonderland'. We follow this girl's journey as she goes inside her mind, into an extravagant shopping centre that she has conjured in order to escape from the problems of living with her warring parents.”

Heather Fairbairn

'Sunnytown' came about after NIDA graduates Heather and Krystal Sweedman (Writer) began collaborating and formed their own theatre collective, Shot In The Dark. “When I was doing my final show at NIDA last year I had Krystal collaborate with me as a session writer because I did a theatrical adaptation of some Schubert song cycles and I wanted some dialogue intersected in. That was the first piece that we did, and now 'Sunnytown', and we have other projects in the pipeline as well. It came about from a standing collaboration that we really just decided to put a name to.”

Shot In The Dark's desire to create “image-based theatre with a purpose” can be seen through the emphasis on visual style in creating the world of the subconscious. “We've got two worlds in the production: we've got domestic scenes that we're presenting through naturalism – natural movement, natural lighting. And then we're using tropes from surrealist theatre in the scenes where Dani, the lead character, goes into her subconscious – the full mis en scène, surreal lighting effects, and physical theatre techniques to create quite a surrealist atmosphere for those scenes, to delineate them from the domestic.

Olivia Hall-Smith

“The purpose aspect of it is that there's a social cause inherent in the writing that we explore. 'Sunnytown' touches on a lot of contemporary issues including alcoholism, domestic abuse and infidelity so we're exploring the problems that are taking place within this family. It's kind of a critique of Australian society and how these problems exist but we can tend to gloss over them or try to sweep them under the carpet with the kind of 'she'll be alright mate' kind of attitude rather than facing the problems and trying to resolve them, it's more a kind of denying that they exist.”

The play was cast after Heather held a weekend of open auditions at La Boite, finding new young talent to play to the 13-year-old lead role. “We saw a lot of people in those two days; some were very experienced actors and some were less experienced. And Olivia Hall-Smith, she's very young, she's straight out of high school, but she's just got this quality about her that I was looking for for Dani. It's rather a profile-building opportunity for her to get such a big role straight out of high school but she's kind of my diamond in the rough.”



'Sunnytown' was funded after Shot In The Dark ran a successful Pozible campaign, raising $7,000, more than their $5,000 goal. “It's been a great signifier of the level of support we've got for doing this work from the artistic community, which is where most of the pledges came from. Also, we were successful with getting MACH funding from Creative Partnerships Australia, so for every dollar up to our target amount, Creative Partnerships Australia matched, so it was a very successful campaign.”

The production runs at La Boite as part of the indie season, a collection of four independent plays that attempts to 'nurture a sustainable independent theatre culture in Brisbane, to enable closer ties between independent practice and La Boite, to help create more outstanding theatre made with passion and rigour, and to cultivate new audiences for theatre right across the city'.

'Sunnytown' plays La Boite Theatre 14-31 October.