Performance Anxiety

presents

WEEPIE

by

Chris Goode

at

The Blue Room

Tuesday- Saturday, November 5 – 16.

In 1994, when two young men stabbed to death a passing motorist at random, Britain was rocked and outraged. People were shocked and confused by the ordinariness of the murderers. Unlike the boys who killed baby James Bolger, they did not have ‘deprived’ or violent backgrounds, but were well-mannered young men from ‘good’ homes. In the following controversy, the British Prime Minister told Parliament that it was time to stop tolerating and start punishing.

WEEPIE says no to that and suggests that we might all be culpable. It shows how the crime was not 'motiveless' but an expression of notions of masculinity and power that we perpetuate. Chillingly, the play suggests how murder might make sense and how it might also be beautiful and fulfilling.

The ingredients of WEEPIE are as bizarre as the play is audacious; a 'good-looking youth with a classical education', a 'happy mellow kid' training to kill, an aggressive talkshow host, a mystic who picks up radio through her teeth. All the parts are played by two actors.

'Weepie is horrifying and hilarious, beautiful and disgusting, an emotional, aesthetic and intellectual roller coaster that is more exhilarating than almost all the experiences I have had in the theatre', says director, Donald Pulford. 'It is an intensely theatrical piece that reminds us what is possible in and special to the theatre.'

The Blue Room season will be Performance Anxiety’s third, after Hobart and Melbourne.