Two-hander 'This Is Where We Live' by Vivienne Walshe is an award-winning story of disconnection and love.
The work is being taken on at Perth's Fringe World (celebrating its WA premiere) by producing house Feet First Collective – a company known for its larger scale, immersive works focusing on stories and themes with a sense of urgency and relevance.
'This Is Where We Live' is set in a dusty town in regional Australia, and follows two outsiders drawn together in the vein of 'Orpheus And Eurydice'. Thus, like their counterparts, this love comes with its share of devastation.
It's a show exploiting Australian speech and poetry, and those who love new writing, physical theatre and young adulthood will be drawn to it.
Here, Producer/Director Teresa Izzard and Producer/Actor Lauren Beeton answer some questions about 'This Is Where We Live'.
Tell us a bit about 'This Is Where We Live'.
Teresa: ‘This Is Where We Live’ is a challenging two-hander that won the prestigious Griffin Award in 2012. It is a story of disconnection and love. Chloe the ‘bombshell’ comes from a background of domestic violence and suffers from dyslexia. Chris is the son of the English teacher and despite being an ‘odd boy’ with a love of poetry and jazz, is destined to leave the gravel and the heat for a life beyond Chloe’s destiny. They are drawn together but their powerful first love, like in the myth, is laced with tragedy. It was developed in association with the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference and premiered in 2013 in Sydney at the Griffin Theatre to excellent reviews. The original director Francesca Smith states: “The play is like a giant theatrical poem. The speech has the rhyme and rhythm of pop music – it’s unlike anything else I’ve seen before”.
Image © John Congear
What can you tell us about the show’s creator, Vivienne Walshe?
Lauren: Vivienne Walshe is an Australian Canadian playwright who studied at WAAPA and graduated from the acting course in 1997. We were particularly drawn to her philosophy as a playwright as detailed in her writer’s note for this play:
“These days, when I’m really astonished by a play, I go home and research the writer. How did they get there? How did they write a play that was so assured, it was as if the audience gasped and laughed as they wrote it, seated on the other side of their desk? What I think I have discovered is that these playwrights I admire rarely work alone. Novelists try their hand at plays all the time and usually miss the mark and for me, it’s the sense of a live audience they’re forgetting. The play is a blueprint for something that’s supposed to happen between the audience and the actors on stage and it’s a strange kind of witchcraft.”
This sense of creating in ensemble as well as the relationship between the actors and the audience resonates with what we often set out to do as a company, so it has been a very happy marriage between playwright and company with this show!
What appealed to you most about this show?
Teresa: When I’m searching for a play, I read a lot of scripts. . . And often I don’t get all the way through them! Not so with this one. It confounded me, intrigued me and enticed me. I was instantly excited to analyse all the clues and work towards solving the challenges it presented in the rehearsal room! It's inherent theatricality; the poetic language, the piercing ideas and the vibrant imagery have driven the way we’ve staged it. It’s the kind of text you need to engage with rigorously, as it is so open to interpretation, so we’ve had a lot of fun discovering our version of it!
Lauren Beeton - Image © John Congear
As the Artistic Director of Feet First, what was it about this show that made you want to present it at Fringe World?
Teresa: Feet First Collective shows are usually quite large-scale endeavours and the last time we toured we had a team of 12! This time we started with the idea of a ‘miniature’ work that would be easy to tour and would be suitable for Fringe conditions: ‘This Is Where We Live’ is perfect for that! The vision was to tour interstate as well as build new audiences through performing at Perth’s Fringe World. The show was accepted into Theatreworks’ 2021 Melbourne Fringe season but that’s now been postponed to this year, so we’re starting with Perth Fringe. We’re really excited to see how audiences respond!
Founding members and core artists are coming together to produce this show. Why was it important to bring them in for this?
Teresa: As a company one of our aims is to create a collective of artists that work together over time, so I wanted to select a work specifically focused on the core and founding members; myself, Lauren Beeton, Samuel Addison and Donald Woodburn. I wanted a small, tight-knit central team of people who’d worked together before as we were experimenting with translating our process to a smaller-scale work. We do have a slightly bigger team around us; Dylan Dorotich, John Congear, Dani McDonald and Tracy Routledge who are all making amazing contributions to the process.
Image © John Congear
And what are you hoping to communicate to audiences with your performance?
Lauren: Above all, this story is about facing reality! It’s a beautiful contrast between the non-naturalistic style of the play and the very blunt version of reality that it reveals. It’s a break away from the ‘love conquers all’ narrative that we are often fed, and a look at what’s underneath the simplistic love story. It’s not a story that is told enough, which is heartbreaking because it is reality for an unfortunately large number of people. As a company we have always been about answering tough questions and facing hard truths, and I believe that’s what the audience will come away from this play with.
Why do you think it belongs within this festival?
Lauren: The beauty of Fringe World is that it provides a place for people to push the envelope. 'This Is Where We Live' certainly does that! Additionally, the much broader, more diverse audience that we see attending Fringe World events means that we have the opportunity to perform for a much greater demographic. 'This Is Where We Live' is primarily about young adults and the chance to bring the story to the audience and potentially introduce to a whole new style of theatre is very important.
Samuel Addison - Image © John Congear
Describe this show in three words.
Lauren: Punchy, beautiful, fast-paced.
Teresa: Real, illuminating, gritty.
'This Is Where We Live' plays Cookery at Girls School (Fringe World) 8-13 February.
