SEASON ONE '08

MALTHOUSE THEATRE PRESENTS
A MALTHOUSE THEATRE, ADELAIDE BANK FESTIVAL OF ARTS AND SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE PRODUCTION

MOVING TARGET

BY MARIUS VON MAYENBURG
TRANSLATOR MAJA ZADE
DIRECTOR BENEDICT ANDREWS
SET DESIGNER ROBERT COUSINS
COSTUME DESIGNER FIONA CROMBIE
LIGHTING DESIGNER PAUL JACKSON
SOUND DESIGNER HAMISH MICHAEL
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR HALLIE SHELLAM
STAGE MANAGER LYDIA TEYCHENNE

CAST ALISON BELL, JULIE FORSYTH, RITA KALNEJAIS, ROBERT MENZIES, HAMISH MICHAEL, MATTHEW WHITTET

COMING READY OR NOT!

Six people wait in a non-descript room: dirty walls, an old carpet, a sofa, a small table, a few chairs, a sleeping bag. Without warning, someone walks to the corner and counts to 100. The room is ripped apart and turned inside out as the others desperately try to disappear.

Hide and Seek, like theatre, is concerned with appearance and disappearance, with becoming strange for a time, with metamorphosis. It taps into archaic terrors of being found or forgotten, of being hunted, of trying to escape.

Amid the anarchy of these obsessively replayed games, the people in the room report on unnerving behaviour of prepubescent children in their community. The local tweenies are developing terrifying powers. Lamps are flickering, strange stains are appearing, mysterious green packages are being planted in shopping centres. Questions are being asked;

Should the parents call the hotline?
Is it ok to torture a child for information?
Could a ten-year-old plot mass murder?
…or an entire generation of children?

By turns hilarious and horrific, this production has been created by playwright Marius von Mayenburg (Fireface, Parasites, Eldorado) and director Benedict Andrews (Eldorado, Julius Caesar, The Season At Sarsaparilla, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf) in collaboration with an exceptional Australian cast and creative team. Andrews and von Mayenburg work together at the Schaubühne theatre in Berlin where they have together created productions of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One. Spawning from this distinctive creative friendship Moving Target marked von Mayenburg’s first premiere outside of a European theatre.