November 2018. My play for voices, Westward Ho!, has just been listed for performance/purchase with Australian Plays. It concerns an ageing greyhound trainer, and a twelve-year-old boy who saves him from death by leading him back over a strange version of his life. It premiered in 2012 with the Centre for International Theatre, produced and directed by theatre legend Guy Masterson and the brilliant Joanne Hartstone.
She was buried in the Parklands. By her husband, who’d clanged her on the head with a shovel. Used it to bury her, at three in the morning, when it was all quiet. She just talked and talked and talked, never stopped. And in the end, he’d had enough. So he murdered her. Caved in her skull, right at the back. Put her in his bread van and drove to a quiet spot, dug a hole, dragged her into it, and without a word of a lie, she was still talkin’ as he covered her with dirt…
She was buried in the Parklands. By her husband, who’d clanged her on the head with a shovel. Used it to bury her, at three in the morning, when it was all quiet. She just talked and talked and talked, never stopped. And in the end, he’d had enough. So he murdered her. Caved in her skull, right at the back. Put her in his bread van and drove to a quiet spot, dug a hole, dragged her into it, and without a word of a lie, she was still talkin’ as he covered her with dirt…
Westward Ho!
Westward Ho! is a play for voices. It was first performed at the Higher Ground Theatre by the Centre for International Theatre (CIT) at the 2012 Adelaide Fringe. The story begins with sixty-something ex-Greyhound trainer, George Lake, recovering in hospital from an unnamed condition. A stranger, a twelve-year-old boy, arrives and tells him to get dressed - a man has asked to see him. After some argument, George agrees to go. The pair follow a map the man has given the boy. They walk, dance and sing their way through Adelaide, passing the homes, workplaces, pubs and alleyways in which George has spent his life.
A story of love and secrets lost, forgotten and found, perhaps too late – a city, a boy and an old-man, drifting west.
A story of love and secrets lost, forgotten and found, perhaps too late – a city, a boy and an old-man, drifting west.
