While the shadow of COVID-19 still creeps around, light is returning to smother the dark, and people are finally leaving their caves to answer the irresistible urge of gathering to share uplifting experiences.
The footy is back; so are stadium concerts, blockbuster musicals and gallery showings.
Here in Shepparton, Tank’s inspired Art and Ale events are packed out and sport fields are jumping.
It’s once again a busy winter.
We nearly forgot how warm winter could be, meeting friends and family for a chat and a hug or a shout in all those gathering spaces.
This weekend, apart from the theatre of sport, there are three other live theatre events taking place that will bring people together from across the Goulburn Valley to celebrate, enjoy and perhaps question our collective journeys so far.
Shepparton Theatre Arts Group kicks off its season of the play Twelve Angry Jurors, which deals with weighty issues such as guilt, innocence, capital punishment, equality, the legal cornerstone of reasonable doubt and the ability of people from different backgrounds to reach consensus. The play is based on the original 1957 film and earlier teleplay titled 12 Angry Men — because at that time women rarely sat on juries.
STAG’s choice to produce this play is a brave one. There’s no singing, no dancing, no big costume changes and no big set. In fact, it doesn’t have any of the big drawcards that a 21st-century audience might expect. What it does do is act as a mirror and make people think, which is the original purpose of drama. From the Greeks, through Shakespeare and on to the 20th century, live theatre has been a place for the grand contest of ideas to take place and in the process to show us who we are or could be.
I do applaud STAG for offering a theatre space for thought, not just amusement.
In these days of virtually unlimited hours of screen entertainment, theatre is a special place because it happens in the moment, with real people transforming in front of a live audience. There is an electric transference of energy that moves between players and audience. If the audience reacts, so do the players and vice versa. In that sense, live theatre is a kind of magic because it is ephemeral. While film is immutable and unresponsive to audience reaction, each live theatre performance is unique and will never be seen or performed in quite the same way again.
Echuca Moama Theatre Company’s production of Shrek The Musical, which ends on Saturday night, will also provide a unique, live experience. Lighter and full of colour and movement with plenty of song, dance and costumes, it might not present a grand contest of ideas — but it does retell the old fable of Beauty and The Beast about trust and truth and the shallowness of appearances.
My own play, Some Shiny Days, about fatherhood and childhood, is being revived with a reading for voices and music at Nathalia’s The G.R.A.I.N. Store on Sunday afternoon. It sits somewhere between seriousness and silliness, which is just about where I live on this rag-tag journey we are all on.
I do hope you can attend at least one of these unique, magical experiences. You may or may not be transformed, but you will be immersed in a riveting, shimmering mirror for an hour or two.