Billed as a “black comedy about white terror” that is “crammed with sex, opera, fear and bodily fluids,” The Hayloft Project’s Delectable Shelter isn’t necessarily the kind of show that you’d expect to find in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival listing. Luckily playwright and director Benedict Hardie shed some light on what audiences might expect from the performance.
Billed as a “black comedy about white terror” that is “crammed with sex, opera, fear and bodily fluids,” The Hayloft Project’s Delectable Shelter isn’t necessarily the kind of show that you’d expect to find in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival listing. Luckily playwright and director Benedict Hardie shed some light on what audiences might expect from the performance.
“Delectable Shelter is an original comedy play … and centres around a group of wealthy people in a bunker at the end of the world preparing for a new society 350 years into the future,” says Hardie, “and in the middle of that … they sing classical arrangements of 1980s love songs.”
Hardie, also the Artistic Associate for The Hayloft Project, explains that while the company has quite a good reputation for their theatrical works this is the first time they have brought their theatre practice to a comedy festival. “It is a dark comedy, it is an absurd comedy but it’s not something that most comedy festival punters would expect,” he explains.
It’s not unusual for The Hayloft Project’s shows to be a little confronting, with their most recent production, a retelling of the Ancient Greek tragedy Thyestes, featuring nudity, strong sexual themes and violence.
“We seek to create theatre that is alive today. We seek to create something that is going to speak to an audience now and not going to feel musty and old. We want to make something that feels fresh and exciting and sometimes that means we get pretty ruthless.”
Mind you, the show did earn the company nine of their eleven Green Room Award nominations in 2010 as well as critical acclaim from critics like Alison Croggon and Cameron Woodhead.
“There is a lot of desire in this country, particularly in Melbourne, for exciting theatre. I think we’re realising that you can do other things with it other than kitchen-sink dramas. You can create things that are exciting … and have all the same energy as a live concert,” says Hardie, “I think a lot of people are attracted to that in Melbourne at the moment and that’s what we are doing. I think we are riding a bit of a wave … it’s a good time to be making theatre.”
While it wasn’t his original plan in his theatre-making, Hardie also directs Delectable Shelter. “At one stage I was just going to write this play and look for a director but the idea just got so crazy that it sort of seemed like no one else could follow through on it except for me.”
However in true Hayloft spirit, Hardie is prepared to rip his own work apart in the directing room. “I think directors need to be pretty hard on the text they use. I don’t think they should nurture them at all … they should be ruthless.”
With that sort of attitude, and an ability to radically reinvent classics such as Thyestes as well as Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in a relevant and interesting way, The Hayloft Project have attracted a whole new audience to the theatre scene.
“We do believe that it’s important to bring new people to the theatre, if you don’t do that then the art form dies. We do bring our own sensibility; we’re all young people ourselves. We try and make things that speak to us and are going to speak to people that are in our situation living in our political and social reality at the moment … but also the things that make us laugh, the things that move us and make us cry. They are a reflection of the generation we live in … so we move and hopefully our audience moves with us.”
The Hayloft Project’s Delectable Shelter will be playing at Theatre Works in St Kilda from March 31 to April 17. Tickets are available via the Theatre Works website.
