Director Matthew Lutton took time out from co-creating the final scenes of The Goose Chase last month to describe to OUTinPerth the intriguing collaborative working process he and actor Eamon Flack used to develop the show.
‘I’m passionate about the way we have been making it. The way we’ve made it has utterly informed the show [that] we’ll be presenting to audiences. It started as a whole load of discussion; it’s born out of personal stories.
We started workshopping in March a year ago, and it’s been a process of talking about ideas, a process of improvising, we bring in other actors, everyone brings in sort of photos and pictures and videos, it’s like a saturation process we’re just flooded with and then we weave through it. It’s very much like a laboratory; we throw out huge, huge amounts of material. Often we look back at our note books from six months ago and there’ll be one thing from this massive notebook that’s made it in the show, but it all still sits underneath.
At every point of the story we have a selection of ways we can tell that story. We can decide to tell it through monologue, words, music, dance, we can try and tell it through silence, it’s not like when you’re given a script and those are the words – we have a much greater option. For the audience it means all those choices are far more integrated.
We talk a lot about the form we are using tells our story for us. Like when an object on stage gets replaced by a coke can it tells us a bit about commercial globalisation coming in and taking over…. There’s not much point if the show was just a lot of in jokes, but I think the show is very accessible, we’ve worked very hard on that.
It’s the first show for the company that we are hoping to tour, that will represent us, our ideas and our work nationally and internationally. I’m very conscious of trying to find our first outing, your first tour is very important, not to do it too early, not to do it too late. If it all goes well on the opening night…. we’ve been sensing for a while this is the show we’ve been wanting to take on the road.’
A collaboration between ThinIce and Deckchair theatre, The Goose Chase runs from the 4th to the 20th of May at PICA. Details www.deckchairtheatre.com.au
