fortyfivedownstairs.com

See article in its original contexte here by Ash Cottrell for Theatre People.

Fortyfive downstairs is one of my favourite art spaces in the city so when I get the chance to see a play there, I jump at the opportunity. I love the descent into the depths of the theatre from the street entrance and I’ve often wondered if there were forty-five stairs on the way down as well, but always forget to count. I find the steep stairs and the fairy lights dazzling on the way down and the anticipation for the looming performance grows as the set is revealed once at the bottom.

This time around the lower ground floor revealed a compelling set (designed by Christina Logan-Bell) that consisted of a large corrugated iron structure dominating the area. It looked rustic, rural and intrinsically Australian. It was also walked on by the audience as they were ushered to their seats and I started to wonder whether the show would be interactive. The set was sprawling and I thought as I sat in the front row how exciting it would be to have the actors cover such a large space. They did it well and to my credit, I chose the right seat to capture all of the drama.

Comedy/Drama would perhaps be a more apt genre description as there was plenty of comedic relief amidst the drama. At one point Fawlty Towers meets Dog Day Afternoon came to mind when a stick-up turned into a hilarious exchange as incompetent characters met stubborn and fearless ones.  Indeed for me, it was the farcical moments in the play, performed with brilliant timing and physical comedy that were the most enjoyable.

Here, the stand out performers were David Kambouris who played the volatile, arms-dealing, dedicated dog owner, Richard and Elizabeth McColl who played the straight talking Aussie battler, Glenda. On this point, I loved this play’s willingness to be silly. Too often in my opinion, theatre plays the dark and serious notes and there doesn’t seem to be enough of the playful. In these stakes, True love travels on a gravel road delivered the goods.

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Maribyrnong Leader, 21 May 2013

See article in its original context here by Cameron Woodhead for The Age.

In her new play, Jane Miller treads a fine line between black comedy and romantic drama, in which six characters are bound together on a day scarred by lethal violence.

The deadly climax looms with the inevitability of a thriller, and the short, jigsaw-like scenes that lead to it tease out questions of infatuation and intimacy, often with an enjoyably offbeat sense of humour.

Sam (Chris Broadstock) is a bank worker having the day from hell. He has faced the music for cheating on his wife (Marnie Gibson), but things get much worse when his hapless co-worker Jake (Glenn van Oosterom) turns up with a gun and a crazy plan to elope with his lover Maggie (Emily Goddard).

A hostage situation develops and everything that can go wrong, does.

Played on a corrugated-iron set with a noir-like reveal, the production is swift and twisted with a weird, cartoonish quality. Director Beng Oh seems to have a talent for dark farce: I laughed out loud at the cleverly handled banter, heightened caricature and ludicrous comedy.

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Melbourne Observer, 22 May 2013.

The Age, Tuesday 21 May 2013.

See article in its original context here by Liza Dezfouli for artsHub.

Jane Miller’s True Love Travels on a Gravel Road opens with young ingénue Maggie asking the audience a question – is any of what is about to happen her fault?

Taking the title of an Elvis song as its name, this play asks big questions about romance, showing how fantasies of love can create monsters of us all. True Love Travels on a Gravel Road offers a range of comic characters in a small town that find themselves victims of a farcical heist gone wrong, a blundered would-be crime committed for love by Jake (Glen van Oosterom).

Jake and Maggie (Emily Goddard, radiant in the role) are lovers. Each is ‘a little bit out of step’. Jake wants to make Elvis fan Maggie happy by fulfilling her dream of visiting Graceland. But as Maggie’s embittered single mum Glenda observes, theirs is a match made in a sheltered workshop. Maggie is married for a start. Jake’s not the brightest boy in town and his prospects are small. The phrase ‘giving it all up for love’ is put on its feet here in a nicely structured, very funny play, which treats all its characters with affection.

Trying to prove himself as something more than a ‘tard’ leads Jake on a hopeless course to acquire the money to take Maggie away. A secondary story hinges around Jake’s boss, Sam (Chris Broadstock), and his practical wife Angie (Marnie Gibson), exploring the consequences of their inability to admit vulnerability to each other.

This production, tightly directed by Beng Oh, enjoys standout performances from Goddard and Liz McColl, who crackles and sparks as Glenda – she has many hilarious lines to work with and makes super use of her natural funniness. However, to my mind, Glenda became stuck on the one subject and I would like to see her comment more broadly. Glenda is reflected on stage by petty crim Richard (David Kambouris), bringing a nice comic timing and oddly sympathetic presence to his hapless gun-dealing dog owner roped into a small town drama.

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Quite often plays in Melbourne’s independent scene get produced without going through a rigorous process of re-writing and workshopping, or at least that’s how it looks. Some might say that’s a good thing, because it gives the scene an edge and allows for experimentation. But when the audience comes away thinking the play was written more for the playwright’s enjoyment than their own, that’s not good for anybody.

Happily,True Love comes to the cavernous 45 downstairs performance space as a fully realized, and very entertaining piece of theatre. Director Beng Oh says, in the program notes, that Miller’s every word “has been carefully chosen, tweaked and placed just so”, and you agree with him.

The story presents three couples – the dreamy Maggie (Emily Goddard) who is married but longs for a happier life with the sweetly deluded Jake (Glenn van Oosterom); office workers Sam (Chris Broadstock) and Angie (Marnie Gibson), whose courtship and marital problems are achingly real. Finally, there is the bogan gun-dealer Richard (David Kambouris) who starts to develop an appreciation for Maggie’s jaded mum Glenda (Elizabeth McColl) in an hilarious scene in which they are both tied to a chair by an electric power cord.

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See article in its original context here by Dione Jospeh for Australian Stage.

In a post-modern world driven largely by instant gratification it isn’t often that love stories resonate. Littered with cheap clichés and histrionic characters its quite rare to come across a simple tale, a story of unrequited love and staged with all the simplicity that such a story deserves.

Jane Miller’s Australian play set in a regional country town aspires to be just that, but unfortunately it narrowly misses the mark. True Love Travels On a Gravel Road,taken from one of Elvis’ more obscure songs, is the story of Jake, a young man dismissed as the town ‘tard’ who is committed to making the woman of his dreams happy.Maggie has always wanted to go to Graceland and Jakeis determined to make this dream a reality. With numerous obstacles in his path, not least his lack of money, Maggie’s straight-shooting mother, Glenda and the fact that Maggie is married, Jake must make some hard decisions. But there’s more than one romance afoot. Jake’s boss, Sam has his own problems about security and commitment and fumbles his way through a relationship while Glenda isn’t shy of sharing the ramifications of being a single mother. Add a somewhat psychotic dog owner with a penchant for providing arms and you have a very mixed bag of characters.

However, Miller has the remarkable ability to capture the language of her characters from the prattle of a bitter mother to the anxiety of a unfaithful husband. Maggie, played by Emily Goddard, is the epitome of the wistful maiden trapped in a pragmatic marriage, and while her vocal expression has the tendency to fall into a monotone, the passion and vulnerability exhibited by her lover Jake, (Glenn van Oosterom) does create some special chemistry on stage. As the jaded mother Elizabeth McColl settles into her role as the play progresses and gives one of the most memorable performances, perhaps more endearing in her sympathy towards Jake near the end than for all her rancorous comments. The relationship between Sam (Chris Broadstock) and Angie (Marnie Gibson) is somewhat extraneous to the actual narrative of Jake wanting to take Maggie to Graceland but is within itself a perceptive portrayal of relationships over time. As the slightly maniacal supplier of essential ‘merchandise’David Kambouris offers a strong performance, at his best when paired up with McColl.

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See article in its original context here by Tim Byrne for  Time Out.

Despite a few bumps along the way, this Elvis-inspired tale of love-and-armed robbery is still a road worth travelling.

Photos by Sophie Dewhirst and Glenn van Oosterom

When you’re young and living in an unnamed rural Australian town, options can seem pretty limited. You can marry a truck driver or get knocked up by the local chemist. You can screw around on your wife or you can hold up your workplace for ten grand and a plane ticket to Graceland. The characters in True Love Travels on a Gravel Road (a mouthful of a title and not particularly accurate) try all of these things and none of it helps much. Escape is not an option.

Maggie (the excellent Emily Goddard) is married to Trevor but head over heels for Jake (Glenn van Oosterom), or at least for what Jake is willing to do for her. Her mum, tough-talking Glenda (Elizabeth McColl), has instilled a love of Elvis in her daughter, especially Elvis the actor, and playwright Jane Miller brilliantly weaves a number of Elvis’ star turns into the dialogue. Elvis is inspiration and goal, both King and God, and Maggie gets it into her head that Graceland would represent a kind of Shangri-La for young love. Or perhaps a paradise lost. Jake decides to do what it takes to get them there.

In counter-point to the impulsiveness of Maggie and Jake, Miller offers us another relationship in Sam (Chris Broadstock) and Angie (Marnie Gibson). Hapless and ambivalent, Sam marries Angie but can’t really accept that she will stay. He’s constantly preempting their break-up, much to Angie’s understandable frustration. At one point he says to her ‘I imagine you leaving and having millions of options’. What he neglects to see is that for Angie options are irrelevant. She’s made her choice.

The cast is rounded out by Richard (David Kambouris), a local arms dealer and the one who provides the Chekhovian gun that is bound to go off before the night is through. Although the mood here is more Raising Arizona thanUncle Vanya.

Miller’s strength as a writer is in her monologues. The play is strongest when Maggie and Sam address the audience directly. Goddard in particular manages to invest her character with a dark and suggestive subtlety, at once innocent naïf and dangerous siren. It’s unfortunate she isn’t in it more. The play is on less stable footing when it tries to negotiate action. The central scene is a hold-up, a tense and dramatically rich scenario that is largely overplayed and eventually pushed into the realms of pure farce.

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See article in its original context here on Theatre Press.

REVIEW: True Love Travels on a Gravel Road

See article in its original context here by Anne-Marie Peard.

Melbourne playwright Jane Miller is the first in a new series of chats about writing and what it’s like to be a writer. Before the opening night of her new play, she chats with Anne-Marie Peard and offers advice to emerging playwrights, which all begins with reading and seeing plays and theatre.

Miller’s second full-length play opens this week at fortyfive downstairs in Melbourne. True Love Travels on a Gravel Road, which is also the name of an Elvis Presley song, was a recipient of the R E Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Award in 2011.

Described as a comedy about living the dream, it’s about Jake, who has been pegged as the town “tard” all of his life, but when he falls in love with Maggie anything seems possible and making Maggie’s dream of escaping to Graceland becomes his quest.

Miller’s plays have been produced around Australia and internationally, beginning in 2006 whenPerfect Stillness reached the finals of Short & Sweet in Melbourne where it won the People’s Choice award for Best Overall Production.

Her first full-length work, Happily Ever After, premiered in 2010 at La Mama with a sell-out season followed by a tour.

What made you want to write this play?
I was asked to write a piece for the National Theatre Drama School and started working on a few scenes. Unfortunately work commitments meant I couldn’t pursue the opportunity but I had written a scene between two guys on a street undertaking a business transaction with a dog barking continually and interrupting them. The rest of the play evolved from my curiosity about that transaction.

How long did it take you to write it/how many drafts?
I wrote the first scene in 2009 and finished the first draft in January 2011. I kept leaving it and coming back to it in between other projects but once I finished the complete first draft, I worked on it consistently through the readings and The R E Ross Trust Development process. We are rehearsing version 16.

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See article in its original context here by Kylie Northover for The Age.

When Jane Miller won the R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Award in 2011, it was more than just a boost for an up-and-coming playwright – the 44-year-old had barely written a thing since her teenage years.

An ”early mid-life crisis” and a six-week CAE course changed all that.

”I hadn’t written for 18 years,” says Miller, whose play, True Love Travels on a Gravel Road, opens at fortyfivedownstairs next week. ”I had written a couple of high-school productions and then I just stopped – I didn’t write another thing,” Miller says.

Writing was always in the back of her mind as ”a dream”, but she ”got caught up in the idea of getting a job that was safe and buying a house, that sort of stuff”.

Miller works as a librarian at the University of Melbourne and says a few years ago, she suddenly thought, ”Oh, I was supposed to write.”

She enrolled in a six-week course run by Peter Murray ”and it completely reintroduced me to this thing that I had loved. I thought I’d just see if I still loved it.”

She wrote a short play, Perfect Stillness, for the Short and Sweet competition – an annual event in which entrants write 10-minute plays, many of which go on to be produced as full-length works – and won the people’s choice award.

”I’m really fortunate as that was the first play I wrote,” Miller says of the 2007 work.

”It then went on to have international productions. I’m just amazed by it.”

She’s written several short plays since, which have also been performed at Short and Sweet and the Melbourne Writers’ Theatre’s MelBorn festivals. In 2012, she made her debut at La Mama with her first full-length work, Happily Ever After.
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Published in the Stonnington Leader on 14 may 2013.

Article published in The Age, Saturday 11 May.

See article in its original context here by Anne-Marie on her blog, Sometimes Melbourne Theatre Talk.

Jane Miller is of my favourite Melbourne playwrights. She’s really only just started writing, but since first noticing her at Short and Sweet in 2007, she’s written a pile of terrific short plays and her first full length play, Happily Ever After, was one of my favourite productions in 2010.

The premiere production of her second full-length play opens at fortyfivedownstairs on Thursday (previews on Wednesday). True Love Travels on a Gravel Road, which is also the name of an Elvis Presley song, was a recipient of the R E Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Award in 2011.

Described as a comedy about living the dream, it’s about Jake, who has been patronised and pegged as the town “tard” all of his life, but when he falls in love with Maggie anything seems possible and making Maggie’s dream of escaping to Graceland becomes his quest.

After the success of Happily Ever After, Jane’s again joined with Director Beng Oh and she says,”Beng challenges me in the best possible way – he is incredibly generous and open – and I trust his judgement as a director and dramaturge.”

Beng says that Jane “has a brilliant ear for dialogue – the laughter in this work arises from the choices, situations and language of the characters. She doesn’t dwell on their misery but you glimpse it and it grounds the comedy.”
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See article in its original context here on Beat Magaine.

Multi-award-winning playwright Patricia Cornelius returns with her newest production, Savages, at fortyfivedownstairs this month. Known for her three-dimensional characters and astute knowledge of the human psych; Savages illustrates the story of two close mates discovering their identity. Director Susie Dee worked closely with Cornelius to create the sharp, somewhat callous, rhythm of Savages, bringing life to taboo subjects of misogyny, gender identity and sexuality.

Savages will be performed at fortyfivedownstairs from Friday August 16 – Sunday September 8. Tickets are available through fortyfivedownstairs.

See article in its original context here by K.E Weber on Theatre People.

Following two years of development, 15 Minutes from Anywhere will present the premiere of a refreshingly new Australian comedy drama – True Love Travels on a Gravel Road written by award-winning playwright Jane Miller and directed by Beng Oh.

Impressively, the work is a winning 2011 script from the R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Awards. It is set in rural Australia and is about ordinary people who go to extraordinary lengths in pursuit of a dream without regard to the consequences. Director Oh has been involved with the project for two years. He first directed a reading at La Mama in March 2011 and has been with it every step of the way since then through readings, workshops, discussions, casting, grant applications etc. “We’ve gathered a great group of actors together for the production as well as an fantastic creative team,” he says. “I’ve got a lot invested in the work and I think it’s going to be quite emotional come opening night.”

He and playwright Miller have been creative collaborators for over six years but this is their first foray into producing. 15 Minutes from Anywhere is the banner under which both are co-producing this work. Oh first became aware of the new Miller script when he was directing her first full-length play, Happily Ever After. “I read it and loved it,” Oh says. “The play is funny, it has wonderful characters and great language. Jane writes for performance. Her texts look simple on the page but they come alive in the hands of good actors and affords them ample opportunities to play and to make the part their own. It’s a joy to behold. True Love Travels on a Gravel Road is a comedy with a moving narrative and I still love watching it in rehearsals.”

Oh admits that Miller is his closest collaborator. “It wasn’t something that we necessarily planned, it’s just turned out that way,” he states. “We first met in 2006; I directed a production of her award-winning short play, Perfect Stillness, in 2007; and it’s naturally gone on from there. I directed Jane’s first full length play, Happily Ever After at La Mama in 2010. We had a successful season and subsequently toured the play in 2011. In the middle of rehearsals for Happily Ever After Jane mentioned that she was working on a new play and asked me if I would like to read it, which started our collaboration on True Love Travels on a Gravel Road.”

“Jane and I are really in sync. I don’t know if it’s because we’re the same age. We’ve got different backgrounds but we get on very well. I think it’s because we respect each other’s work. I wouldn’t tell Jane how to write and she wouldn’t tell me how to direct but we’re not averse to making offers to each other. I think it boils down to trust. We trust each other.”
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See article in its original context here by Lucy Graham for Weekend Notes.

Misogyny has been big news in Australia this year, and theatre lovers can take it further with the World Premiere of Savages in Melbourne this winter.

Staged in one of Melbourne’s most intriguing theatre spaces, fortyfivedownstairs, Savages a dynamic play by award winning playwright Patricia Cornelius, pulls no punches as it explores the dark side of mateship.

Savages tells the story of four male friends whose holiday is soured by anger, bitterness and life’s disappointments. It is billed as ‘a cautionary tale about a group of ordinary mates who don’t really know themselves or what they can become – it is a tough look at masculinity and misogyny’.

Patricia [Cornelius] is unafraid to tackle subjects that are taboo or difficult,’ says director Susie Dee. ‘She is a deep thinker who wears her heart on her sleeve and speaks her mind with candour and fluidity.’

And Dee should know. She and Cornelius have been collaborating since the 1980s in projects with the Melbourne Workers Theatre, The Berry Man at Hothouse Theatre (2010) and Green Room awards winner Taxi for the Big West Festival (2011).

The cast features Mark Tregonning (The UFO Show – Uncle Semolina), Lyall Brooks (Urban Display Suite – High Performance Company), James O’Connell (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea), and Luke Elliot (The Lower Depths – fortyfivedownstairs).

Savages will run from 16th August – 8th September 2013. Early bird ticket prices are available for performance between 20th and 30th August, and may be purchased now and until 5th of June: $40 Adult, $35 Concession and Groups of 6.
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See article in its original context here by Hannah Bambra for Melbourne Review.

Without pretence or forcefulness, Sydney’s Gallery 9 are creating an inter-state art scene.

For years Gallery 9 has promoted the work of Melbourne artists in their Darlinghurst exhibition space. To continue the exchange, the gallery is bringing the recent works of their acclaimed Sydney-based painters down to show at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne.

“This is a collection of wonderful artists with a broader appeal than the city that they live in,” says Will Sturrock, manager at Gallery 9.

The gallery happily acknowledges that a shared time and medium are the only elements that tie these artists together. Sturrock and his team have purposely avoided curating the collection and named it simply and honestly, Contemporary Painting. The result is an approachable, eclectic exhibition without a forcibly woven thread between the abstract and figurative paintings of the six artists who are on display.

The exhibition comes from an interesting standpoint as the work of each post-modern painter seems to resonate with one or many twentieth century painting styles. Julian Hooper, Tonee Messiah and Simon Blau create semi-abstract pieces, their gestural brush strokes and opaque shapes occasionally bleeding into classic fine art forms and figures.
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See article in its original context here by Dylan Rainforth for Art Guide.

Yunuen Pérez and Sissy M. Reyes

Production designer Yunuen Pérez and cinematographer Sissy M. Reyes were friends in Mexico City before they moved to Melbourne and Sydney, respectively, around four years ago. While Pérez established herself in Melbourne’s independent theatre scene and Reyes worked in television they nurtured a project where they would have what Pérez calls “full directorship”. The results are the twelve powerful images on show in Mex-tli, Mexican Goddesses.

“We were looking,” Pérez says, “at indigenous cultures back in Mexico: the Aztecs, Mixtecs and many other different and ancient indigenous communities. We were very attracted to these storytellings and histories because we have a mix of that in Mexico: every single Mexican is part-indigenous and part-European.”

It’s no accident the show is called Mexican Goddesses. “The concept is strong female characters, dignified women who, regardless of the activities they are doing, are very powerful women.” Pérez says it was important for the duo to present empowered female archetypes, in defiance of what she sees as stereotypical depictions of “the Mexican macho man and the submissive woman beside him”.
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