03.10.2008

bogan pride etc.

Oh it’s already the start of October (birthday month of many loved ones and Melbourne Festival time…sweeeeet…) and lots has been happening.

On Monday 6th, on SBS at 9pm, Bogan Pride starts screening. Bogan Pride is a comedy musical (!) television series written by and starring Rebel Wilson. Rebel, Tony Ayres and Michael McMahon produced, it was directed by Peter Templeman and the DOP was Brent Crockett. Tony Bartuccio choreographed the dance sequences. They were an amazing and wonderful team. Rebel plays Jennie Cragg, a bogan whose mother has got so fat she can’t extract herself out of her recliner-rocker, meaning that Jennie needs to find $10,000 for her mother’s stomach stapling operation. I play Erin La Mont, who is the (slightly demonic) leader of a Christian girls youth group and thus, together with my assistant Gaylene, the spiritual guide of Jennie and her two bf’s Amy-Lee Lee and Nigella.

It was a fantastic piece to work on, the main cast got on really well, I loved the opportunity to play in a comedy and also really loved the singing and the dancing (because there are two musical numbers in every episode…) Tony Bartuccio was just fantastic to work with. We had a screening at ACMI last week of the first two episodes, which was quite nerve-wracking and intense: seeing yourself for the first time, up on a big screen, with about 500 other people…but it seemed to go well…people laughed a lot and said some lovely things afterwards…notwithstanding the fact that those comments were accompanied by liberal doses of champagne. So it goes to air publicly this coming Monday, and then I guess I’ll find out what everyone else thinks…unfortunately probably without the champagne.

Also, in case you missed this lovely bit of news, my novel, Stripped, is being published in parts in the literary journal Meanjin, which has also been very exciting and nerve-wracking. Sophie Cunningham has taken over the editorship of Meanjin and is doing a brilliant job of re-invigorating it, both in terms of form and content. My novel starts with the prologue, entitled The End, which is published in Volume 67, no. 2, June 2008; and the next part, which covers something like the next three chapters, is in Volume 67, no. 3, September 2008; and the next part is due to come out in December. It is possible to subscribe to Meanjin, so then you get each new instalment of my novel, together with lots of really wonderful other writing, delivered to you…and it’s also cheaper that way! And it’s also in lots of libraries.

Finally, I’m just about to start rehearsing a beautiful play called Care Instructions, which will be on at the Courthouse in Carlton, Nov. 19-29. The play is a “post-Beckettian tour-de-force set in a laundromat. Who remembers the thirteenth godmother from Sleeping Beauty: the uninvited guest by whose curse the princess fell asleep for a hundred years? Now she washes, waiting for her chance to ‘make another better wish.’ Care Instructions wrings every drop of polyphony from the scripted language; Marguerite Duras meets Gertrude Stein on a perfect drying day.” It’s written by Cynthia Troup, directed by Margaret Cameron and is performed by Liz Jones, Jane Bayley and myself. I can’t wait.