Upon graduating from the Victorian College of Arts in 2010, Samson quickly became an ensemble member of the Red Stitch Theatre Company. After successes in Ruben Guthrie and Day One. A Hotel. Evening. she appeared in Matt Scholten’s The Heretic before auditioning for Malthouse’s Pompeii, L.A. Samson says she was drawn to the script immediately. “I think the script is very brave. It’s quite ironic and dark in its humour, and there’s also something grand about the play. I can’t quite explain that – hold on give me a second, I’ll find some better words so you can write them down. It’s exciting! That’s what I’m trying to say: it’s a really exciting piece.”
A fan of Greene’s play The Moth, Samson continues, “I thought The Moth was the most beautiful piece of theatre so when I got the script sent my way and it was Declan Greene meets Matt Lutton, you know this is going to be a bit special and I’d like to be involved in that please.” Joining theatre veterans like Greg Stone, Belinda McClory and Tony Nikolakopoulos, Samson gushes, “They’re actors I’ve admired for a while now, so it’s great to be in the same room as these people and learn from them and try not to gush and be a big dag in the first week and be like, ‘I loved you in King Lear!’ But they’re a lovely bunch of people which is good because this play’s quite dark in a way, so there has to be a lot of trust in the room.”
Following a catastrophic accident set to bring about the apocalypse, the story follows an unnamed child star, played by up-and-comer David Harrison, as he battles through not only the collapse of his physical world but the disintegration of his damaged mind as well. Throughout his journey, his nightmares and his reality violently collide, giving way to a schizoid world inhabited by the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Judy Garland and Jonathan Brandis. His fellow child stars, like him, are lost in a universe where childhood was stolen and adulthood never began. Samson, whose central role is Diff’rent Strokes victim Dana Plato, explains. “It’s the process of him trying to get his fractured mind back together in this nightmare world inhabited by other child stars stuck in limbo. He’s trying to find his identity in the aftermath of this accident, and from this emerges this kind of nightmare version of Hollywood.”
This internal battle parallels the collapse of capitalism itself and the contrast is very intentional. “It’s a fascinating thing that humans have become pure capital in some way, when we’re talking about celebrities and particularly child stars,” Samson elaborates. “I don’t think you or I are removed from it to be honest. We feed this machine. Everyone does. We have an ownership of these people. We say Britney Spears and she means something to us individually; she’s not just a human of her own accord, and that’s fascinating.” But it is also incredibly caustic, and that is the message Pompeii, L.A. is attempting to enforce. “There should be more protection of children in this industry because it can be quite clearly destructive, and we know that. We see this child rise to fame and we know what’s going to happen. We know where it’s going. We see the car crash before it happens, and we still feed into it.”
And playwright Greene is of course not exempt. An avid follower of celebrity blogs and gossip, the inspiration for Pompeii, L.A. grew from his bemusement at the entire culture. When asked if she sees the irony in criticising the dark sides of the entertainment industry using entertainment, Samson laughs. “I do think that it’s interesting that we are using this topic as a form of entertainment. And then satirising the use of [celebrity] as entertainment within the scenes of the play. But also the play is incredibly cynical about it. It’s raising issues that a lot of other entertainment won’t dare to, because it’s not actually damning any of the child stars but the structure around them that creates a very unsafe world for them to live in. Declan’s a very good writer in that he knows what he’s writing, and he’s very brave in that he’ll face a lot of uglies.”
Greene has also been working very closely with Lutton to accurately bring his script to the stage. “Declan is in the room all the time and we are constantly getting rewrites,” says Samson. “It makes the process very alive. It’s a piece that’s ever-changing and evolving and as an actor you have to evolve with it. I’m just very excited about being a part of it. I think it’s going to hit nerves good and bad, because it’s a much known topic but a relatively unexplored one.”
BY KATE MCCARTEN
