World Premiere
Alice returns home to the sleepy seaside town of Tathra and everything seems just as she left it. So why does it seem so unfamiliar? Her family try to help her out and she wants to settle down – really she does – but some part of her still floats way up there in the blue.
Enter the fresh and off-centre world of award-winning playwright Lally Katz with a fantastical play that looks deeply to the strangeness within.
Key image by James Grant, production photography by Jeff Busby. Teaser video by Sunny Leunig.
For Lally Katz lateral thinking is like breathing. She apparently cannot help but apply it to everything that falls under her keen eye, transforming our world of mundane phenomena into hers of strangeness and estrangement. A play steeped in autobiographical detail, Return to Earth is a sad, lightly-twisted comedy about returning home and discovering a foreign country. Though completely a one-off, Katz shares much with the Absurdists, which is why bringing in Julie Forsyth to star seems the right move. Through a long association with Anthill Theatre, she became our best exponent of Ionesco and Beckett. And, doing some lateral thing of our own, who better than Eloise Mignon, daughter of Anthill’s founder Jean-Pierre, to play the space cadet Alice. With a further syncopated element in Kim Gyngell’s stage presence, director Aidan Fennessy will surely find the perfect off-beat charm.
Artistic Director Simon Phillips
Credits
