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Canberra Today 12°/16° | Saturday, March 30, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Moorhouse’s portrait of a ‘suffocated visionary’

moorhouseNEXT week The Street Theatre is showcasing  an adaptation of Frank Moorhouse’s prize-winning novel, “Cold Light,” one of the his Edith Campbell Berry novels. Although Frank Moorhouse’s work has been successfully adapted for film and television, this is the first time that his work has been adapted for the stage so the public showing of the first draft by playwright Alana Valentine will be a world premiere.

At  The Street on Tuesday,  July 9, there will also be a discussion with Moorhouse, Valentine, director Caroline Stacey, and the cast to assist us progress the work to production-ready stage.

Stacey comments that  work of this scale covering decades and major historical events is hugely rich and offers great opportunities for an epic work that involves fictional characters and also ‘real’  people like  former prime ministers Robert Gordon Menzies and Gough Whitlam.

She notes that the stage play is not  a collaboration between Valentine and Moorhouse – it will be entirely Valentine’s work and he will work with her as an advisor and source.

Valentine’s previous work with The Street was “MP” in 2010 which the theatre says “garnered much critical acclaim.” She comments, “of all the iconic female characters in Australian literature, Edith Campbell Berry is surely at the forefront of those needing to have the breath of a living actress walking and talking her lines, inspiring us with her intelligence, sensuality, wit and perceptiveness… ‘Cold Light’ is a portrait of a suffocated visionary.”

The Street Theatre optioned the rights to the Edith Campbell trilogy in 2012 and “Cold Light” is a Centenary of Canberra commission in partnership with The Street Theatre.

“Cold Light” first draft, at The Street Theatre, 7:30pm, Tuesday,  July 9, tickets $10, bookings to 6247 1223 or www.thestreet.org.au

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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