When I ask actors Zachary Pidd and Samuel Gaskin about their production Peacemongers, which theatre collective The People are bringing to the Darebin Arts Centre in April and May, Pidd is quick to refer to the performance as the real, live, breathing thing that it is.
“Peacemongers is a massive beast that we love. It lives outside because we can’t fit it in the front door anymore, but we built a shelter for it and adorned its mane with flowers we found on our travels,” Pidd says, before adding, “It’s also a documentary theatre musical about utopia and having difficult conversations.”
Whilst the idea of documentary theatre may be new to some, the idea of having difficult conversations around the dinner table will be familiar to most. Presented as part of the Darebin Arts Speakeasy at the Darebin Arts Centre, Peacemongers will be showing from April 24 to May 5 and will include a meal served alongside projected idealisations of a utopian world.
Peacemongers by The People
- April 24 to May 5
- Darebin Arts Centre, 401 Bell Street Preston
- You can buy tickets here
Explore Melbourne’s latest arts and stage news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
Infused with a dash of musical theatre, the show aims to tackle a range of serious topics plaguing our current moment and confront social polarisation through real conversations, and, of course, some song. “The way that music has been implemented in the show is not as predictable as your standard musical theatre scenario,” Gaskin says.
If Peacemongers is anything, it’s sure as hell not predictable. This experimental project is exploring what it is to attempt a real-life utopia, and does so all through the lens of documentary theatre. What is documentary theatre, you ask? “I’m honestly not sure what it means either,” Pidd jokes. “To me it’s about showing all the steps to how we got there.”
Just like the conversations at hand in the production – which have been circulating in the culture and political climate for years, decades, centuries, forever – the show itself has been a multi-year process. “We have built [into the show] a sort of chronology of real and fictional material to give a sense of scale and research we couldn’t do otherwise,” Pidd explains.
Pidd, who is also one of the co-creators of Peacemongers and has created some of the music for the performance, says the journey to getting the show on the road has been nothing short of “dreamy” with the crew of artists involved in its making. “We are all very different in our approach to making art, which is why we came together in the first place,” Pidd tells me. “The difference was integral to the success of this show; how could we find some sort of common artistic language?”
Finding a common language to connect with the people around you perhaps is what the show is all about: in the face of bigotry and polarisation, how can we come together to create utopia? Can we? And while these questions can exist on a global, world-consuming scale, so often they start with the people around our own dinner tables. “We’ve all been at those awkward family dinners with the racist uncle or aunty that take a turn for the worst at some point,” Gaskin aptly puts it. To replicate this exact scenario is the inclusion of dinner in the performance, just to make the events of the night feel that even bit more surreal. “Including a meal just seemed right,” Gaskin says, “when it came to trying to solve bigotry and build a utopia.”
Tickets to this unique kind of family dinner are selling fast, so best to grab them before you miss out on a seat at the table. The show’s run includes a preview performance on April 24, an audio described performance on April 28, a post-show talk on May 1, and an Auslan-interpreted performance on May 2, so that everyone can get a chance to ponder what it is to build a utopia in the face of a world that seems to be lacking any semblance of one.
Even still, despite the world sometimes feeling like it lacks any cause for hope, the team at Peacemongers aren’t without optimism. For Gaskin, it all comes down to working with a bunch of “heart-centred creatives” within the Peacemongers production. “Watching them all be brilliant whilst I’m being brilliant too has given me all the hopeful optimism that I reckon we will all be ok in the end.”
Tickets to Peacemongers at the Darebin Arts Centre are on sale now.
This article was made in partnership with Darebin Arts Speakeasy.
