Category: Lachlan Philpott

LOST BOYS, is a new Australian play from Lachlan Philpott, commissioned by the Merrigong Theatre Company. It is based on the crimes of gang violence and murder centred in the community of Bondi Beach, that has also been featured in a recent documentary and television series (SBS Television). The first act of the play is set in 1985, Prime Minister Hawke. The second act of the play is set in 2017, Prime Minister Turnbull. The location of the play is in the beach suburb of Bondi and concerns three generations of the local Murphy family. In 1985, two brothers Robert…

This production of SILENT DISCO, by Lachlan Philpott is a revival. It was first presented in Sydney at the Griffin Theatre in 2011 in a production directed by Lee Lewis. Lachlan Philpott is an Australian playwright that, generally, talks of the community of the underprivileged underclass. In SILENT DISCO, the focus is on the story of Tamara (Gemma Scobie), an intelligent young adolescent handicapped by the surrounding environment of a ‘broken family’, and poverty, coping with a struggling school system, her ill single father, Laurence (Brendan Miles), and the hormones of middle teenage growth exploding in a doomed infatuation with…

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY, is a new play from Lachlan Philpott. It had its premiere season in Belfast in 2013 and played last year in Melbourne. Written in a kind of open verse style with a duo of actors narrating as a Greek Chorus (Thomas Campbell, Niki Owen) and interacting as minor characters, four other actors embody the major characters to tell the story of Harry Crawford in the working class suburbs of Sydney in the early years of the last century. In virtual poverty, Annie Birkett (Jane Phegan) cares for a house for her son, Harry (Jonas Thomson), and…

We sit in the cavernous Bay 17 and face a huge black-curtained void. When the performance commences we are confronted, quite closely, with a suited figure, in a specific, intimate kind of light, in a wide-armed gesture standing on a raised, small mirrored-floor oblong. The figure (Luke Mullins), with a visible face-microphone assisting, begins in an intimate sotto voce (with pronounced sibilant ‘ss’s’), a 50 minute conversation with his ‘self’. This nameless figure reveals his job as that of a body double for a film actor, Kane – an actor of second/third tier suspense thrillers, adventures e.g. “Briefcase Bomb 2”…

M.ROCK is a new play by Lachlan Philpott. Commissioned by the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) and co-presented by the Sydney Theatre Company. Mr Philpott is, in my experience, the most interesting of the ‘new’ contemporary Australian writers. For those of us who have closely followed Mr Philpott’s work, M.ROCK, is a very surprising and pleasing change of content and tone, from his other recent major works: COLDER (2007), SILENT DISCO (2009) and TRUCK STOP (2012). COLDER is a fierce experience of grief for an unaccounted loss of a son, and the ruins endured by family and friends as his memory,…

TRUCK STOP by Lachlan Philpott was commissioned by the Q Theatre Company, Penrith, and the play is inspired by an incident that occurred at a NSW high school. Katrina Douglas, the producer for the Q Theatre Company and Director of this production: “While the initial incident that inspired the play did not occur in Western Sydney, TRUCK STOP is very much a Penrith story. Working with a dramaturge Francesca Smith and myself, Lachlan researched and developed TRUCK STOP over a ten month period in collaboration with the Penrith and Blue Mountains communities. He combined his intimate knowledge of school communities…