Alternative Media Group

THEATRE: DEATH IN BOWENGABBIE

Author:

Sophie Mallam

Posted:

Monday, 1 March 2010

“In a way it’s a microcosm of Adelaide, because, you know, there’s a bit of me in that, this guy who has to have a life in a big city to feel he can progress his career but has a sentimental attachment to his old hometown,” says Sydney playwright Caleb Lewis down the line from his birthplace in the city of churches. Disembarking at the Old Fitz next week from a back-by-popular demand run at the Adelaide Fringe Festival (where it picked up an award for Best Writing in 2009), the AWGIE-winning Lewis’ Death in Bowengabbie tells of Oscar, a thirty-something architect who, on the verge of marrying and moving to Dubai to build, “new cities, free from history,” who’s called back home for his Aunt Jeannie’s spectacularly festive funeral. The town is dying – literally – and as the play unfolds we’re witness to a series of increasingly and competitively elaborate memorial events; most memorably, a nautical-themed affair to the sounds a Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On; which contrive to lure Oscar back to the past he’s been avoiding. “It was a notion of this young man being continually pulled back to his childhood town and being torn between what he thinks he wants and what he needs,” says Lewis. “There’s [an] incredible sense of nostalgia there which is reflected in the 1940s matinee quality about it – it’s a real time-snap of yesteryear in its style.” Far from a mournful exploration of grief, the play’s black comedy even delighted the residents of the retirement home where Lewis’ mother works, for whom you’d expect the topics of death and the past would be a source of ambivalence. “That was probably my favourite performance because we had over a hundred little old ladies there all dressed up in their theatre gear and loving it,” says Lewis. “Because as much as the play is about death, absolutely, I was also thinking about memorials like the Taj Mahal, and funerals that I’d been to, so really, it’s about love, about how far people are willing to go for love and how far you’ll put yourself on the line for someone that you care about.”

Mar 11-26, Old Fitzroy Theatre, cnr Cathedral & Downing St Woolloomooloo, $17-35, 1300 438 849, rocksurfers.org

Playwright Caleb Lewis at right

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