'Eloquent, playful, big-thinking, tender and fierce – Michael Gow’s new play is an astonishing act of theatrical invention.
'Will Drummond is bewildered. All the old certainties are coming apart. When he finds himself sitting by his mother’s bedside in a hospital room on the north coast of New South Wales, suddenly he’s faced with the mortality of loved ones, faced with the state of the world as it was and as it is right now. Set adrift, Will considers loss and what’s left, class and contradiction, and navigating a corporatised and globalised world alone.
'Once in Royal David’s City is big and small at once, tumbling from the fifties to the present, from East Berlin to Byron Bay, from brief encounters to the cycles of history. It’s about death and Christmas and class warfare and what to teach school children about politics and art. It’s about the old working class and the new middle class and what one has to learn from each other.
'It is beautiful.'' (Source: Belvoir website)
Performed at the Belvoir Upstairs Theatre 8 February - 23 March 2014.
Director: Eamon Flack.
Set & Lighting Designer: Nick Schlieper.
Costume Designer: Mel Page.
Composer: Alan John.
Sound Supervisor: Michael Toisuta.
Stage Manager: Luke McGettigan.
Assistant Stage Manager: Keiren Smith.
Assistant to the Set Designer: Georgia Hopkins.
Stage Management Secondment: Michelle Sverdloff-Bruer.
Costume Secondment: Hannah Koch.
Cast: Helen Buday, Brendan Cowell, Maggie Dence, Harry Greenwood, Lech Mackiewicz, Tara Morice, Helen Morse, and Anthony Phelan.
Co-produced by Queensland Theatre Company and Black Swan Theatre Company for the 2017 season.
Played the Heath Ledger Theatre (Black Swan Theatre Company), 25 March to 9 April 2017.
Played the Playhouse, QPAC (Queensland Theatre Company), 22 April to 14 May 2017.
Director: Sam Strong.
Cast: Adam Booth, Jason Klarwein, Toni Scanlan, and Steve Turner.
'At a time when a convicted drug smuggler is rumoured to be about to collect a fortune for her remarkably unremarkable story and when we are heading into a new round of so-called ‘culture wars’, in which an extraordinary amount of heat will be generated with precious little light accompanying it, it is refreshing to be presented with another of Michael Gow’s forensic explorations of the world in which we stumble around. From that explosion of fury, pain, and Wagner, The Kid (1983) onwards, Gow has observed society with a ruthless but compassionate eye. Anger and grief are the dominant emotions that fuel his work, and they are very much in evidence in his latest play, Once in Royal David’s City.' (Introduction)
'At a time when a convicted drug smuggler is rumoured to be about to collect a fortune for her remarkably unremarkable story and when we are heading into a new round of so-called ‘culture wars’, in which an extraordinary amount of heat will be generated with precious little light accompanying it, it is refreshing to be presented with another of Michael Gow’s forensic explorations of the world in which we stumble around. From that explosion of fury, pain, and Wagner, The Kid (1983) onwards, Gow has observed society with a ruthless but compassionate eye. Anger and grief are the dominant emotions that fuel his work, and they are very much in evidence in his latest play, Once in Royal David’s City.' (Introduction)
