ROULETTE

Roulette is 8 x 30 minute instalments of what will eventually be 12 x 2 hand, 1 act plays. The Ranters production was presented (8 of the 12 pieces) at the 2000 Adelaide Festival and as part of the 2001 Belvoir Street Theatre subscription season before touring to Europe. The approximate running time when completed will be between 6 - 7 hours.

All the plays are set in different locations throughout a city. The plays do not have overlapping characters or storylines, but are linked through contemporaneity and juxtaposition.

Technical requirements for Roulette are minimal: an intimate performance space, basic props and an uncluttered lighting design. The cast consists of 16 actors (8 male and 8 female) but actors can double-up.

(i) Inconsolable

A man and woman meet in a café. They confide, collude, become intimate, then part when she realises that she cannot give him what he wants.

(ii) Borneo

Two women meet on a plane. The relationship turns on its head as the younger woman provides the older with a fresh look on life, with a twist in the ending.

(iii) Petroleum

A successful businessman has gambled his fortune away and crashed his car on the outskirts of town. He meets a young man at the service station where he has to wait for the mechanic. An uneasy trust emerges.

(iv) Legacy

A young woman selling goods on the street confronts a builder's labourer trying to sell him hand cream. They share some time and a joint.

(v) Fortune

A young man has inherited his mother's house, still inhabited by his mother's partner. The power between them shifts through the piece, until tension reaches dangerous levels.

(vi) Night

A young woman meets another woman at a bar. They both get excessively drunk until one makes a pass at the other.

(vii) Sickness

A man is dying in a Hospice and is visited by a priest. Throughout the meeting they confront each other with their opposing views on life.

(viii) Hotel

Two female cleaners in a Hotel. The everyday power struggles, politics (and ultimately, violence) of two cleaners, as they talk while working.

Themes

The themes of Roulette are designed to cover a very wide range of human endeavour and experience. The plays are developed thematically as follows:

(i) Inconsolable

Desire - female 20s, male 30s

(ii) Borneo

Travel - female 40s, female 20s

(iii) Petroleum

Misfortune - male 40s, male 20s

(iv) Legacy

Self-expression - female 20s, male 50s

(v) Fortune

Marriage, inheritance - male 50s, male 20s

(vi) Night

Career, responsibilities - female 30s, female 20s

(vii) Sickness

Health - male 30s, male 40s

(viii) Hotel

Class, rank - female 30s, female 20s

The themes of the pieces yet to be developed are: (ix) Law, (x) Business, (xi) Children and (xii) Friendship.

FEATURES OF BLOWN YOUTH

A topical and confronting visit to the home of several disaffected twentysomethings, somewhere in urban Australia.

There's Dove, sometime drug user and oftentimes stripper; Isabella, finishing her economics degree and dreaming of her imminent escape to Europe; Existentialist Nihilist Maoist (this week) Oron, looking for the meaning of life rather than for a job; gentle and philosophical Harriet, an aspiring writer who's got the keen for Oron; and Guido, battling with his own demons of inadequacy, personal impotency and machismo. Passing through are Rot, a callow 18-year-old skinhead who Dove picked up at the strip club, and Syv, Guido's sexually uninhibited and experimental girlfriend. Then there's the appearance of slimy ex-con Alexander Strawberry, the new landlord, whose prurient intentions for the house and its occupants certainly aren't friendly.

A devastating social commentary on the bleakness faced by young people in urban Australia.

ST. KILDA TALES

St Kilda Tales was inspired by real people who live around the vibrant suburb of St Kilda in Melbourne, where the writer and various members of Ranters Theatre have lived for a number of years. But while the St Kilda milieu inspires the production, St Kilda Tales is not an attempt to represent St Kilda on the stage; in fact St Kilda's heterogeneous community is the springboard into a contemporary urban ritual.

The project is entirely non-representational, and utilises the anarchic energy of the performers in an organic framework to explore and celebrate the complex diversity of urban life. St Kilda Tales strips away literary excesses, theatrical conventions and technical distractions to create a unique experience for the audience.

The Ranters Theatre production of St Kilda Tales used:

THE ROOM

The Room is a play for one actor which unfolds within the claustrophobic dimensions of a room, surrounded on all sides by a projected landscape of the man in the room's eerie imaginings. The man interacts with various 'ghosts' from his past and ritualizes his obsessions with the few remaining objects left at his disposal. His situation becomes increasingly more bizarre until he is engulfed by madness.

The play is non-naturalistic. It is a metaphysical journey into the central characters soul. Meaning slowly disintegrates, rationality slowly crumbles, past and present are fused into a continuous verbal monologue.

THE FERTILITY OF OBJECTS

Have you ever looked deeply into the eyes of your obsession and sworn you would do anything to possess it? Bob and Insatiable stand before a great shiny object of desire for which they will do or sacrifice anything.

THE LARGE BREAST or THE UPSIDE - DOWN BELL

A vignette in which a man and a woman meet in a park and their idle small-talk belies a mysterious relationship and sublimated attraction. The play uses contemporary urban surrealism to convey a sense of disjointedness, and there's a nod to absurdism in its dialogue.