Tender Napalm is sure to ignite La Boite with its haunting exploration of catastrophic, young love.
There is an inescapable darkness to a great love. Like an alluring, quixotic opiate it has the ability to ensnare unwitting victims in allegories of tenderness and idealism. And yet, it is in the midst of such great love that we also traverse our most destructive, volatile episodes; veritable battlegrounds of definition as a couple and as individuals. It is this post-apocalyptical, emotional war-zone which serves as the basis for Brisbane Festival offering, Tender Napalm.
Tender Napalm, penned by prodigious British wordsmith, Phillip Ridley is an exploration of the destructive, passionate, consuming nature of a great love experienced in youth. Set amid the remnants of an unidentified disaster, the narrative spans the life of a love story with equal measures of fantasy, raw emotion and dance carrying the protagonists through both disaster and euphoria.
Kurt Phelan, who portrays Tender Napalm’s displaced Romeo, affirms that the play is “about lovers and the catastrophes that happen when you’re not ready for life to take hold.” Catastrophes which invariably present themselves during the course of a catalytic first love, the kind explored in the La Boite production.
“It seems so familiar, all the stuff that we’re dealing with but its also so mythical. Everyone knows love and everyone knows tenderness and how sometimes that can be quite destructive,” notes Phelan.
Renowned for his darkly emotive literary offerings which have found voice in the form of plays, books, films and songs, Ridley’s Tender Napalm is an examination of the dichotic, often chaotic universe of desire which “seems to be quite beautiful and picturesque on the surface but underneath there is bubbling lava,” explains Phelan.
“You go on this huge, big, fantastical journey through time and space and their relationship and then he just drops you and leaves you with this beautiful scene where you go, 'Oh, that’s what they were talking about.'”
Ridley’s romantic dystopia is brought to life by La Boite Artistic director David Berthold and esteemed choreographer and Australian Dance Theatre Artistic Director Garry Stewart. Stewart’s dance directives help enrich the visual language of Tender Napalm, exploring the physicality of the characters’ predicament and taxing the skills of his players.
“Garry’s choreography is so visceral and really quite unforgiving. It takes all your energy and all your power and that’s what’s so charming about it. You’re watching these people just throw themselves around the room and create these virtuosic pictures with their body.”
Luckily for Phelan, dance is a visual language the NIDA graduate is fluent in. Born in Townsville, Phelan moved to Sydney straight out of high school to pursue his musical theatre dreams. It wasn’t long before the former dancer landed his first show in the form of Singing in the Rain before going on to amass a plethora of musical credits and parts in original casts including a pre-Broadway Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Whilst refining his acting skills at NIDA, Phelan discovered an affinity for writing his own one-man productions. Efforts which culminated in the premiere of his debut play The Bitter End at Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival earlier this year.
“I started writing it when I graduated from NIDA [in 2010]. I kind of started working at doing a lot of shows and I worked with a director and a writer from my year as well. And I’d been working on this script that I thought was a one man show just 'cos I’d always written cabarets, I thought maybe I can write a fringe festival-esque one man show,” explains Phelan.
“So I started writing this show and I gave it to a friend of mine to read and she said to me, ‘You've got a play here, why do just have one person? You should have all these characters.’ So I put it together and I sent it off to a festival and it got accepted.”
Described by one reviewer as 'a modern day Tristan & Isolde meets Social Network', The Bitter End was so well received it resulted in official requests for further scripts and gave Phelan the chance to experiment with another aspect of the performance process. “It’s really great to be able to let go of a work and trust the people that are putting it on to do the right thing.”
No doubt both Ridley and Brisbane Festival audiences will be equally enthralled by the way the La Boite team has interpreted Tender Napalm. The catastrophe-ravaged love story is sure to provide a gripping theatre experience.
“The dance world will love it, the theatre world will love it, but anyone who's ever been young and in love will just absolutely adore it because it takes you on such a journey.”
