Philip Rouse

DON'T LOOK AWAY

An interview with Philip Rouse

Life stirs yet in the small-to-medium arts sector, and we’re lucky enough this year to witness the birth of a whole venue – a 60-seater theatre atop Kings Cross messy-night mainstay The World Bar.

As the saying goes, something new pairs well with something old, and so Philip Rouse, artistic director for Aussie revivalists Don’t Look Away, is christening the Blood Moon Theatre with Nick Enright’s classic play, A Property Of The Clan.

“It’s great, actually!” says Rouse of the opportunity. “I think it’s gonna be a really interesting new venue on the Sydney entertainment scene … It’s very much a cave, and people need to work to find interesting new ways of presenting their shows in that space, so I’m finding it really exciting to work there.”

Rouse is setting the tone for future experiments with the design for his production, which may be more familiar to young Australian audiences as the source material for HSC regular screener Blackrock.

“An idea that the designer Martelle Hunt and myself came upon is the idea of the students of this school, and just the actors in general, painting the whole way through, and creating a work that’s been inspired by those murals at the back of your primary school tuckshop,” says Rouse. “We’re working with that and using paint as a really visceral way, a very material way of expressing some of the darker forces at play in the show.”

Of which there are plenty: A Property Of The Clan chronicles the rape and subsequent murder of a teenage girl at a party, and the circumstances surrounding the event. It’s heavy stuff, but Rouse is sure of his approach.

“You can’t skirt around it at all when you’re dealing with this kind of material,” he says. “It’s examining the pathology that leads to it: that’s the pathology of victim-blaming, the pathology of slut-shaming, the pathology of guys’ sense of entitlement over women.

“In the examination of that there’s a lot of discussion, we talk a lot about our own experiences with these things, things that we’ve witnessed – I think if you’re afraid of talking about it, you simply can’t get anything done.”

Admirably, this is a company that genuinely wants to get things done, and is doing so by donating a chunk of the ticket sales to White Ribbon, an organisation dedicated to making violence against women an issue for men to face.

“We’re in an epidemic at the moment – 60-plus women have been killed in this year, in 2015,” says Rouse. “The media talk about it, don’t wanna call it what it is, which is abhorrent violence against women and abhorrent acts of domestic violence.

“We have to be responsible with this sort of material as theatremakers and as human beings and as a society, and if we’re gonna do this, we need to be giving to something that affects real change. We make art and that’s very important, but these are real issues for a lot of people. Anything we can do to help, we will.”

This change begins at the Blood Moon Theatre, a name that Rouse takes to have great portent for the future.

“It’s just about something that’s usually very small becoming very large, which is the lunar effect of the blood moon,” he says. “It’s a new venue, it’s very small – it’s never gonna seat more than 60 people.

“But even with the nature of this work, with A Property Of The Clan, maybe something really small can help in very large ways.”


A Property Of The Clan previews at the newly opened Blood Moon Theatre, at The World Bar on Tuesday September 29 then runs until Saturday October 17.

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://thebrag.com/arts/property-clan