We chat to Benedict Hardie, the writer and director of the play Delectable Shelter, a hilarious production which has its Sydney premiere tomorrow night at the Seymour Centre. We take some time to get to know the origins of the production and get a taste of what to expect…
How is preparation going for the show?
The show’s in Brisbane right now. We’ve been touring for about a month so far and all this week up in Brisbane and next week down in Sydney.
Are you up in Brisbane at the moment?
No, I’m in Sydney, but I only see the show every couple of weeks.
And how have they been going?
Really well. Really fantastically – a really great response. It’s a very exciting show to be touring, because it’s really not you would expect. It’s a bit out of the box this one. So, when you’re doing a regional tour it’s a bit of a risk – some audiences that don’t see a lot of theatre might not be quite used to it. When it comes to Sydney, it will be a whole different game again, but the responses have been fantastic – lots of laughs and lots of good energy for the show.
Can you talk about the origins of the story. As the writer as well, can you go back to the very beginning of it all?
Sure. Quite a few years ago now, the original production of the show was in 2011 at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. When I started writing it, I wanted to write a play about people’s unspoken fears and prejudices. I thought that it would be hard to make that into the dramatic substance of a play, but if my characters were the last five surviving human beings on earth suddenly everything about their personalities becomes very important to the future of the world. And that sort of forces you to deal with the things that are not safe, your prejudices and your various hopes and your various doubts about the world and the other people in it.
That said – that’s how it become science fiction – it become an apocalyptic play with plays on ideas of climate change or the nuclear holocaust or any kind of thing which might wipe out the Earth that doesn’t exactly tell you what’s happened. Because the play starts after we got past the point of no return. So, it’s set in an underground bunker- the last five surviving human beings on the planet. It’s three acts and the first act is set in a shelter underground, the second act is one year later when the first few little babies are being born and the third act explodes it all and turns it on its head – it’s 350 years later and all the actors are playing their descendants. They all play multiple characters, various oddball characters drawn from a very small gene pool and it’s the final day in the shelter before returning to the surface of the Earth to re-populate. And everyone is filled with anticipation and terror.
There’s a bit of a trend at the moment with apocalyptic films like The World’s End. Are you hoping that, that trend will help bring in audiences?
Yeah, well what’s amazing is that the The World’s End and Delectable Shelter is that they’re comedies. People are playing with that material in a black way – that’s what Delectable Shelter certainly does. We use the end of the world to sort of heighten the drama and that’s how you get good satire. When you play on people’s real fears and people’s real insecurities about themselves and their society – that’s where you get some really rich and exciting comedy from.
When you look back to the original production in 2011, has it changed a bit since then? Where you able to do a bit more with it from this run of shows?
Yeah, we have changed quite a bit since then. It’s good to be able to re-visit it and maybe sharpen its political teet a little bit. There’s an aspect to the play where the characters you’re seeing are wealthy white people and I was writing the play with a particular fascination at this point in history where it’s sort of the end of Western certainty or, for want of a better word, white supremacy. All the rich white people are starting to realize that they’re going to have to share the planet with people that they thought, once upon a time, where beneath them.
And so that’s a part of the play – it plays on their fears that maybe there not the last surviving people on Earth – that there might be some from another continent that is potentially more powerful and threatening. Also, we got to re-visit the music, the music is a massive part of the show that is composed or arranged by Benny Davis that people might know from a band called the Axis of Awesome. The song has an unimaginable 50 million Youtube hits. But the music is acapella, five-part, Bach style-choir arrangements of 1980’s love ballads. So, the thread in the story is that only two pieces of music have survived – one is a 1980’s love ballads book and one is Bach’s St Mathew’s Passion and all the music stems from those two sources.
Any particular reason you chose those songs?
Well, it’s a dark play and I was pretty attracted to what I could think of as pretty much the most earnest and most love, sentiment filled music I could find. It was those epic 1980’s love ballads that don’t have a trace of irony in them – they’re just all about the power of love and the glory of love. And so I sort of wanted to play with that in a slightly subversive way.
Has the show played in Sydney before?
No, this is the first time a Sydney audience will get a chance to experience it and it’s a pretty surprising ride. The music appears to be completely separate to the action – the vaudevillian interludes. And it’s not till later in the show that you start to add it all up and see how everything fits in together. And the first two acts sit firmly in the grounds of satire – it’s very mannered and probably a sort of British style of humour. But then that gets completely shattered in the third act, which is barely containable. No comic stone left unturned.
Transcription by Jemma Nott
Delectable Shelter premieres tomorrow night at the Seymour Centre in Sydney and runs until the 17th of August. All the details you need are here: http://www.seymourcentre.com/events/event/delectable-shelter/
