Australia Day

07 Sep-27 Oct ,

Theatre

First published on 23 Sep 2011. Updated on 18 Oct 2011.

Australia Day is Jonathan Biggins’s wickedly funny new play inspired by his own experiences as an Australia Day ambassador. In the fictional small country town of Coriole, members of the Australia Day committee comprising an ambitious Liberal Mayor, a Greens Councillor, a bigoted builder, an Australian-born Vietnamese school teacher and a member of the CWA, learn that orchestrating celebrations of national pride was never going to be easy. Veteran director Richard Cottrell (Loot, Travesties) directs a cast that includes Geoff Morrell and Alison Whyte.

Cate: This is actually based on Jonathan Biggins’s experiences as an Australia Day Ambassador – major artists and celebrities who go out to communities and try and activate the sense of community and express their sense of Australia-ness on our great day. And, as we all know from Jonathan’s work, he’s an incredible satirist and is able to harness the current political conundrum in often quite hilarious ways.

Andrew: He’s captured all the conflicting traffic jam of obstructionist politics that’s going on in Australia at the moment and embodied it in this council group who are planning, and executing by the end of the play, the Australia Day celebration.

Cate: It’s very funny, but the wonderful thing that Jonathan’s done with these characters is he’s given them all a fatal, very human flaw. So there’s a melancholia and poignancy, to the play that actually takes it somewhere else, as hilarious as it is.

(Illustration: Alan Moir)

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