Baby Boomers are worrying their way through climate change and whether Australia should be turning towards nuclear energy. What sort of world are we going to leave behind for our children and grandchildren?
There’s more to it than the practicalities of going carbon neutral, says Melissa Cantwell, the director of Black Swan Theatre’s production of The Children to be performed at the Heath Ledger Theatre from August 24.
The play, written by the UK’s Lucy Kirkwood, was nominated for a Tony Award and was the winner for Best Play at the 2018 UK Writers’ Guild Awards.
Melissa says The Children is about our world. “It’s about our world right now, it’s by no means just an issues play, it’s got a little something for everybody,” she says.
Starring three of WA’s acting icons Nicola Bartlett, Humphrey Bower and Caroline Brazier, the play is about our relationships, our social responsibility, and what we leave behind for the generations that follow.
Nicola has been a part of the performing arts industry in Australia for the last 35 years.
Television watchers will know her well from: Ship to Shore II, Parallax, Rapture of the Deep, Contagion, Three Acts of Murder, Sororal,
The Reckoning, The Legend of Gavin Tanner, Antecedents, Factory 293, Whet, Council, Emerald Way and The Twelve (season 2) and has just wrapped on We Bury The Dead.
She received the PAWA award for her role in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia and appearing at the Rome, Sydney and Melbourne International Film festivals for her lead role in the feature film Little Sparrows.
Theatre acting credits include Antigone, The Cherry Orchard, Face to Face, Soul Mates, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The
Unexpected Man, Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen, The Ghost’s Child, Old Love, Is This Thing On, Signifying Nothing (a winner at 2017 Adelaide Fringe Festival) and And I’m the Queen of Sheba.
Actor, director and writer, based in Perth, Humphrey Bower has worked with companies and artists across Australia in theatre, opera, dance, puppetry, film, TV, radio and audio book narration, and is also a sessional acting teacher and guest director at WAAPA. He is currently an associate artist at Black Swan.
Recent stage credits include An Imaginary Life (Hosted by Humphrey Bower and Libby Klysz); (Mary Stuart (Perth Festival 2022); Things
I Know To Be True, The Tempest (Black Swan, 2021); Savage Grace (Steamworks, 2021); The Cherry Orchard (Black Swan/Perth Festival 2021); The Golem (The Blue Room, Perth, 2020); The Apparatus (The Blue Room, 2019 and Sunset (STRUT/Perth Festival, 2019).
Caroline Brazier is another WA actor whose face will be instantly familiar to TV watchers with credits that include Rake, Packed to
the Rafters, Offspring, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Tidelands, Home and Away, Mystery Road: Origin, Troppo, Joe Vs Carole, Wakefield, Wolf Like Me, Year Of, The Twelve S2, the Stan Original series Silver (sequel to Scrublands) and Ten Pound Poms S2, both of which are soon to be released.
Caroline’s feature film work includes Rogue, Locusts, Pulse, Three Summers, How to Please a Woman, the US feature Blacklight (opposite Liam Neeson) and the soon to be released Runt.
Caroline has extensive theatre work including lead roles for the Sydney Theatre Company’s productions of Death of an Anarchist, Dinner, and critically acclaimed production of Mary Stuart in the role of Mary. Caroline reprised this role for Perth Festival in 2022. She also appeared in Black Swan’s critically acclaimed production of Things I Know To Be True by Andrew Bovell.
Director Melissa Cantwell has a mountain of work behind her. She has held roles as artistic director of Perth Theatre Company; associate director (PTC) and program manager of The Blue Room Theatre.
When Have a Go News interviewed her the trio of actors was just a few days into rehearsals for The
Children and Melissa was pleased at the way it was shaping up.
“It’s really exciting. It’s just a beautifully kind of muscular play and we’re wrestling with it, it’s fantastic,” Melissa says.
And this particular cast is dynamic.
“They’re like the three characters, they all have really different energies. It’s beautiful to work on something that’s so intimate with such skilled actors and be only a few days into rehearsal and making discoveries and seeing what it really can be.”
It’s at this stage of the production where the play takes on an individual character.
“It’s a combination of having some really great first instincts from the performers and then, getting to a place where you can really explore the rhythms of the play and the technical kind of demands of it.”
Nuclear power and global warming can both be touchy subjects in a conversation but Melissa says as director she stays outside that conversation to let the play speak for itself to a degree.
“It’s incredibly mature writing and very precise. So really, my job is about serving the script and letting it pose the questions and challenges to the audience.”
The three mature actors are an important element to the play.
“Certainly in the context of the children, the age group is important because it’s about, on one level, generational responsibility and not securing one particular generation, but it’s about what we hand down to our children, It’s lovely to be working with a really experienced cast.”
And this, she says is a work about the complexities of being an adult, about the complexities of having family and relationships.
“It’s wonderfully, wonderfully sunny in moments and deeply moving in other moments. It’s one of those rare plays that has everything.”
Tickets are available from: https://blackswantheatre.com.au/season-2024/the-children
