In the ancient Grecian myth of Pandora’s Box, Pandora, unable to quench her curiosity, opens the box that she’s never meant to touch, thus releasing all the evils of the world. When the evils flee the box to plague humanity the one thing left behind is hope.

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Perth theatre maker Jeffrey Jay Fowler, in developing his newest production found himself considering the story and the nature of hope. ‘The question there is, is hope the one thing that we have to fight all of the evils, or is it actually the greatest of all evils? …Hope can be really horrible like when you love someone and you can never be with that person. How long can you feed yourself on it and how much does it hurt?’

Along with other notable alumni from the WAAPA/SOCA Contemporary performance degree like Matthew Lutton, Wyatt Nixon Lloyd and Zoe Pepper, Fowler is one of the new generation of talented emerging theatre makers shunning the big lights of the east coast to develop their practice here in Perth. Fowler’s eagerly awaited new work, Hope is the Saddest opens this month at the Blue Room.

When success of Fowler’s debut show Zen’s Red Mouth led to an invite from ARTRAGE festival to develop a monologue, Jeffrey leapt at the opportunity, enlisting former uni mate Michelle Robyn Anderson as collaborator and performer. The pair drew on their mutual fascination with Dolly Parton to create the material for the monologue. Fowler explained that ‘As soon as we started work with our subject, we felt there was more to it, so we applied for a Blue Room grant and we got it. We’ve been working on the project for just under a year.’

‘We wanted to create a character who had the vibrance and the essence of Dolly.’ He continues on to explain the fascination of Dolly, ‘She is so plastic, and yet, she is so real. Her falsehood is contradicted and made real by her humanity. One of my favourite quotes from Dolly is “ hope that people realise that underneath all the blonde hair and big boobs is a brain and a heart”…We didn’t want to actually put a Dolly Parton character on stage, so we looked at, well, what about a big Dolly Parton fan?..

The Dolly Parton fan became the titular character Hope [Michelle Robyn Anderson], who preaches about her idol in order to share her feelings. The play follows the journey she goes through when she meets and falls in love with a gay man who uses machinery to explain his feelings, Theo [Nick McRobbie],

As Fowler says ‘What is that when you’re gay and a woman’s in love with you? If you do really like her, or you really have this fond affection for her and she’s a beautiful person, is the only barrier sex? That question arises for the character Theo.’

In order to develop the piece further, shifting it away from a simple relationship piece, it was decided that a third point of reference was needed. ‘That reference is a character Marion,’ Jeffrey explained. ‘Marion is a modernisation of the name Mary – in Hebrew it means “sea of bitterness” which is really weird.’ The bitterness of Marion [Natalie Holman] is a polar opposite to eternally optimistic Hope.

Despite the detailed research into Dolly Parton – including the 300-odd songs in Dolly’s backlist – and mythology, Fowler is keen to point out that the show isn’t a Dolly musical, nor is it spouting philosophy. It is, he says, short enough for the attention span of the modern generation, heartbreakingly funny and essentially ‘A black comedy about a Dolly Parton fan who is in love with a gay man, and they get stalked by a strange woman who lives in a suitcase.’

Death, Delusion, Dolly……Don’t forget to get your tickets early – Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s last show was a sell-out, and this one looks too good to miss.

Hope is the Saddest

• June 13-30
• 6.30pm Tues-Thurs, 9pm Fri-Sat
• The Blue Room Studio
• Bookings 9227 7005
• www.pacs.org.au