Arabian fantasy on stage

An urban world of sheer pleasure and intimacy will be seducing audiences at the Griffin Stablemates Theatre this season.

Arabian Night is a fantasy-like play by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig that is scheduled to open Friday 1 August.

The play will star Alice Ansara, Bryce Youngman and Andre Jensen and is the first show to appear under the banner of Bob Presents, a collective group of theatre experts and lovers.

Director Eamon Flack said the play is like a strange vacuum, sucking everybody’s desire into a terrifying climax.

We’ve turned the Stables into a kind of hypnotist’s stage, he told Sydney Star Observer.
Everything’s happening right in front of you, you can see the actors sweat, you can hear them think, and this play thrives on immediacy like that.

The script gives the audience an insight into the lives of five ordinary people in an apartment block who all succumb to a life of extraordinary fantasy and desire in a harem-like environment. The characters include two lovers, an insomniac, a voyeur and a caretaker.

It’s a sort of magic box which reflects a whole lot of fragments of timeless myths of love and revenge through our everyday lives and sets us wonderfully and terrifyingly free for a night, Flack said.

It’s a pretty sexy, dark play. It revels in fantasy and takes great pleasure in the shadowy side of life -” life seems to teach a lot of GLBT to appreciate those impulses pretty powerfully.

The hardest part [about directing the play] is that it’s so precisely written … so it requires incredible poise on the one hand, but on the other hand it’s shot through with this spirit of desire and urgency and all those messy kind of things. So joining those opposites is the hard bit but when it works it’s also really exhilarating.

It’s a thrilling kind of wake-up for the heart and mind. Hopefully everyone will walk out breathing deeper and they’ll look at the night around them and it’ll all seem full of a lot more possibility.

One of the great delights about this play is that it takes the humdrum of modern life and all our confusion and uncertainty about our immigrant populations and our fears about the Middle East and turns them into these remarkable flights of possibility.

info: Arabian Night opens on Friday 1 August and will play until Saturday 23 August. Tickets start at $22. Bookings: 1300 306 776 or www.griffintheatre.com.au