| Homebody/Kabul | B Sharp |
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 Save us from God, from war, from exile, from oil exploration, from the West, from the children with rifles, carrying stones, only the children with stones, carrying stones, can save us now.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of Angels in America, Tony Kushner, comes a prophetic story about the crossfire between East and West, Homebody/Kabul. Taking to the Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre stage on September 11 will be real life mother and daughter, Gillian Jones, in the acclaimed role of Homebody, and Lotte St Clair as her strong-willed daughter Priscilla.
A British, book-obsessed housewife bides her time with a guidebook of Kabul. She reaches the Taliban-ruled city in August of 1998, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. As her husband and daughter search for her and the answers to her disappearance, they discover a chaotic world where the political and the personal become blurred and increasingly ambiguous.
Director Christopher Hurrell says, “Tony Kushner is truly a prophet of the theatre. In 1991, he forged his experience of the horror of the AIDS epidemic in the eighties into Angels in America, a testament that looked forward to the optimism and sense of impending triumph of the nineties. In 1999, before the new millennium had even dawned, Kushner peered into the largely ignored trauma of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and there he saw a conflict waiting to happen.
“Well ahead of its time, Homebody/Kabul searches for answers with wisdom, compassion and breath-taking poetic beauty. In the dangerous collision of cultures, we find a suspenseful, intriguing and raw drama that foresaw much of the horror associated with the disastrous situation in modern-day Afghanistan,” he said.
Best known for his epic two-part masterpiece Angels in America, which was named one of the 10 best plays of the 20th century by London’s National Theatre, Tony Kushner also co-wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. His other plays include Caroline or Change, A Bright Room Called Day and Widows with Ariel Dorfman.
Joining Gillian Jones (Scorched, Antigone, Exit the King) in Kabul is a remarkable cast that includes Keith Agius (The Surgeon, All Saints, Danny Deckchair), Simon Bossell (The Quiet American, Better Than Sex, All Saints, The Alice), Odile Le Clézio (A Country Practice, Young Einstein), James Evans (Paul, Private Lives, Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), Tony Llewellyn-Jones (Salvation, Rogue Nation, Metamorphosis), Craig Meneaud (Kick, All Saints, Go Big), Nicholas Papademetriou (Sons and Daughters, Home and Away, Mission Impossible 2) and Lotte St Clair (Home and Away, Defiance, Never Swim Alone).
Homebody/Kabul is the seventh play in the acclaimed 2008 B Sharp Season. The Downstairs Theatre is Company B’s independent wing which hosts the annual B Sharp Season, supporting independent artists to present dynamic small-scale work and deliver a vibrant range of theatrical voices in an intimate setting.
The most remarkable play in a decade. Without a doubt the most important of our time. New York Observer
This eerily timely work about Afghanistan is mesmerizing and mournful, vast and intimate, emotionally generous and stylistically fabulist, wildly verbal, politically progressive and scarily well informed. Newsday
It’s about desolation and love in land-mined places, private agony and public squalor, fathers and daughters, the Babel of language and lost civilizations, disintegrating, rotting cultures, sordid Western values and furious opposites, murderers and fanatics, opium highs and tranquillized lives lived out in disgust and self-obliteration... The voice of yearning within Homebody/Kabul has now become more urgent, as if time were running out... Name me a better play of our time – for our time. New York Observer
Sam Hawker, Tangent Productions and B Sharp present
Homebody/Kabul
by Tony Kushner
Directed by Christopher Hurrell
Set Designer: Tom Bannerman
Sound Designer/Composer: Rosie Chase
Dramaturg Sime Knezevic
Assistant Director Velalien
With: Keith Agius, Odile Le Clézio, James Evans, Tony Llewellyn-Jones,
Craig Meneaud, Nicholas Papademetriou, Lotte St Clair and Gillian Jones
Where: Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills
Preview: Thursday 11 September
Special Event (Fundraising event for Mahboba’s Promise): Friday 12 September
Opening Night: Saturday 13 September
Season Dates: 11 September – 5 October
Plays: Tues 7pm, Wed-Sat 8.15pm, Sun 5.15pm
Tickets: $29/$23 (Preview $20, Cheap Tues Pay-what-you-can min $10)
Bookings: 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au
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