Hilary Bell's 'The Bloody Bride'

I've just returned from Lismore, where 'The Bloody Bride' played to full houses at the Star Court Theatre. For info and video click here.

Eighteen months ago, Julian Louis, NORPA's artistic director, asked me to read Lorca's 'Blood Wedding' with a view to adapting it for regional NSW. It's a sharp, hot, passionate play, repressed desire tangling with unbridled emotion and operatic gesture. It feels to have been written in a white heat. I went to Lismore on a reccy. How would this wild, Latin story transfer to laconic country Australia, particularly the Rainbow Region with its smiling hippies, its peace and plenty? Julian introduced me around. We hung out at the Winsome Hotel. We 'borrowed' Living Books from the municipal library. I'd spent the obligatory months of self-discovery at Byron in the early '90s, and had some stories of my own. I began to get a sense of darker subcurrents that would lend themselves to what is, of course, a universal story. As I started working I found the ideas moving away from the Lorca to the stage where it was no longer the basis for an adaptation, but a departure point for an original play.

There were two things I wanted to retain from  'Blood Wedding': the sexual tension of the love-triangle, and the evolvement from the opening's (relative) naturalism to the heightened, poetic lushness of the final scenes. The title having been established by Julian from the start, I would also need blood, and a bride. With these parameters, and a rough idea of our three characters, six months later we workshopped the play. The process of reciprocal generosity between actors, Julian, dramaturg Janis Balodis, and myself was nothing short of inspiring, and I worked into the night, completing the first draft in a matter of days. The year's interim saw some major changes in the script, but its form had been forged in the same 'white heat' energy so essential to Lorca's play. 

We hope to tour or on-sell Julian's muscular, lyrical production. Stay posted for further developments.

ZARATHUSTRA!

We’ve been a bit slack really, we seven, in keeping up with this blog. Scripts and productions have come and gone and Not Much Attention has been paid. For example, I didn’t post the re-production of Gondwana, a piece I evolved with the kool kidz at Erth (they really are cool – check out their website at http://www.erth.com.au/Home.html) for Brisbane’s Out Of The Box Festival in June this year. (It went well – the combination of 10,000 kids and a set of scary dinosaurs is INFALLIBLE. We were proud.) Nor did I flag two radio plays of mine, Davy and Moon Door, on ABC Audio Arts that were broadcast some months apart this year. These are just my sins of omission – the rest of the 7-ONers have sins of their own.

BUT we are working on an interesting 7-ON project at the moment. We received funding from the Theatre Board in the last round to develop an adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. This is not necessarily an easy gig but you can see how we might be attracted to it. Upside down morality, supermen, embattled translators, the perils of conformity, the emptiness of a materialist and acquisitive culture, huge butterflies, dancing songs, soothsayers, dwarfs, dead bodies placed in trees for ravens to pick their flesh. Fantastic.

We were very keen, however, to find a way to approach the material from an initial standpoint that was performative rather than textural. So we approached the Drama Dept at the University of Wollongong to see if we could work together in a way that might serve their students’ needs as well as ours. Ultimately they will evolve their version (called All Or Nothing) and we will evolve ours (Thus Spake Zarathustra). But in the meantime they’ll take advantage of us as seven very different writers , dramaturgs and in this case provocateurs and we’ll take advantage of their bodies and minds in space (under the direction of Chris Ryan.)

The method? After some weeks of 7-ON meeting to combine our individual ideas and research we prepared a series of five templates/provocations covering Parts 1 – 4 of Thus Spake Zarathustra and a further template covering Nietzsche’s life and times. This was to evolve the basic material of both versions of the original. We have committed to three further sessions of dramaturgical input to the results of the students’ work. At the moment we are taking it in turns for a couple of us to go down to Wollongong once each week to work with Chris and the students. We’re only halfway through. It’s been so interesting. Keep you posted. VL