THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN PLAY Comes to the Old Fitz Theatre

The Great Australian Play by Kim Ho, nominated for Best Writing and Best Production at the 2020 Green Room Awards, comes to Sydney's Old Fitz Theatre this month.

Presented by Montague Basement and Red Line Productions, this ingenious satire has been reimagined for a post-pandemic Australia.

The play follows five screenwriters attempting to create the next great Australian story out of the myth of Harold Bell Lasseter, who in 1930 charmed Australia with stories of a golden "reef" in the heart of the desert and mounted a doomed expedition to find it in the middle of the Great Depression - before disappearing into the desert himself.

"When I first heard about Lasseter, it felt like a story I've always known. That quest for gold that leaves you empty-handed - the distinctly colonial folly, that misguided hope - it got under my skin," says playwright Kim Ho.

"By simply vanishing into the desert, Lasseter punched a reef of gold-sized hole in the colonial Australian imaginary. That void is what The Great Australian Play is about."

In the process of telling Lasseter's story, the screenwriters lose themselves in a story and a nightmare they haven't yet begun to understand. Following its critically-acclaimed season at Melbourne's Theatre Works in 2020, the play has been reworked for its upcoming Old Fitz outing, taking on the lockdowns and funding cuts of the intervening years.

"It's a work about making art under pressure and it certainly felt like we were living it at times," says director Lusty-Cavallari. "We were creating this world where our five characters lose their minds trying to create a cohesive story of the Lasseter legend and we definitely began to identify with them."

"In the aftermath of COVID this existential crisis of why we make art and whether there's a place to make it felt much more prescient," says Lusty-Cavallari. "Lasseter used the desperation of the Great Depression to convince people to fund his expedition in search of a gold reef, and the idea of this hubristic panacea is something that echoes throughout history."

Bringing the work to Sydney's Old Fitz Theatre has a special resonance for the history of the play.

"The Lasseter myth was born in Sydney," says Ho. "Lasseter first told the story of his gold reef at the old Worker's Union headquarters on Pitt Street, barely a stone's throw from the Old Fitz. The unemployed men who begged for work along the Hungry Mile (past what is now Sydney Theatre Company) were the same men who ate up Lasseter's tale."

"Sure, the expedition ventured into the inland deserts... but it started and ended here, and he won over people's hearts in Sydney".

The production will also mark Ho's playwrighting debut in Sydney.

"I grew up on Gadigal Country, made my first theatre here. This is the first of my plays ever to be staged here; it feels like a homecoming."

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