Paul Kelly’s new work Ancient Rain is another example of Merrigong Theatre Company taking risks to bring the best in performance to Wollongong audiences.
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The show opens this week at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, the only venue in NSW to host the work, following its Australian debut at the 2016 Melbourne Festival.
Merrigong’s artistic director Simon Hinton pushed to include it in their program long before it was ready for the stage.
“Brink Productions is a company I’ve admired for many years ... they told me they had this project in development and I was like, ‘I really, really want to make it happen at Merrigong’,” Hinton said.
“We certainly work hard to find exciting projects that are happening all over the place and we keep our ear to the ground.
“If I think something’s exciting I’ll take a risk before seeing it.”
Kelly spent the last 18 months working with Irish-French performer Camille O’Sullivan and composer Feargal Murray to craft 100 years of Irish poetry into a cabaret-style ode to the centenary of the Easter Rebellion.
The dark day in Irish history saw members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood battle for their independence from the United Kingdom, ending in 485 people dead and another 1,500 wounded.
“The themes are based around that event, pop culture history of Ireland, resistance, the fight to keep their own culture intact; bonds between families, quite a few of the poems speak of relationships between parents and children, and men and women,” he said.
If I think something's exciting I’ll take a risk before seeing it.
- Simon Hinton
The iconic singer shares the vocals with O’Sullivan, accompanied by an Irish-Australian band which stars his nephew Dan Kelly.
While there is no particular story-line as such, the show does have “a certain theatricality to it” with strong links between the poems, which stretch from classic authors like WB Yeats and James Joyce to contemporary artists like Jessica Traynor.
Kelly said the biggest joy for him was discovering a world of poetry he was unaware of, hoping the audience will be intrigued also.
“The thing that excites me the most is getting deeper into the poems, all good poetry you can experience over time and it keeps giving you something,” he said.
Ancient Rain is at IPAC from October 26 to 29 with a post-show Q&A with the cast on Thursday October 27 from 6:30pm.