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The Amateurs

A medieval to modern morality play
by
ABR Arts 05 July 2022

The Amateurs

A medieval to modern morality play
by
ABR Arts 05 July 2022
Khisraw Jones-Shukoor, Brian Lipsom, and Emily Goddard in <em>The Amateurs</em> (photo courtesy of Red Stitch Theatre)
Khisraw Jones-Shukoor, Brian Lipsom, and Emily Goddard in The Amateurs (photo courtesy of Red Stitch Theatre)

It opens outside the tiny wooden box that is Red Stitch’s St Kilda home; the actors come towards us with torches blazing, in medieval masks. What follows is a brief pageant, a morality play that breaks down when one of the players falls victim to a mysterious pestilence – although it’s clear from the catch in the other actors’ voices that this contagion is not entirely unexpected. The actor drops, and his sister must be wrenched from his fallen body before she too succumbs. The plague is about, and all anyone can do is run.

American playwright Jordan Harrison’s The Amateurs had its première in 2018, before our own great pestilence descended like some vengeful deus ex machina, closing theatres around the world, disrupting them still. This seems incredible given how appallingly relevant its themes are, how resonant the play feels, stretching its dramatic tendrils backwards as well as forwards in time. A bunch of desperate actors traversing a blasted wasteland, trying to outrun an unseen but deadly virus? It’s our contemporary experience writ large.

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Comment (1)

  • One thing which struck me about the play was its playing, first, of humans' relatively long trip into the modern, and then the relatively short trip into post-modernism with the arrival of Brian Lipson's character, the person of the now. The lived, present feeling in the theatre of our togetherness and inter-reliance was strong and powerful, in the way or parallel to the way the Noah and the Ark story presents itself.
    Posted by Jim Daly
    22 July 2022

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