Review: RAW - Shaken & Stirred

RAW - Shaken & Stirred
Shopfront Theatre for Young People
6 March 2007


My friend and long time colleague's girlfriend said to me, 'Come on. We're going down on Friday night. Why don't you come and check it out?'

He was a directing mentor for a bunch of students who were honing their skills at Shopfront Theatre for Young People in Carlton. From what I knew, it was an evening of short skits and experimentation that would eventually lead to a more comprehensive show towards the end of the year.

I hadn't been to Carlton, in the heart of Sydney's southern suburban sprawl, for the longest time. An old colleague of mine had been the artistic director there and I had regularly made the journey down to see what the young actors and directors were getting up to. But since her departure, I have been out of the loop.

If you have never been there before, the theatre is out the back of a converted shop and home just next to the train line that stretches from the centre of Sydney all the way down to the Southern Highlands of New South Wales and beyond. There's a barbie out the back, an outdoor loo and a fantastic black box theatre that provides a palate for all these young creatives to gel and create.

It really is a magnificent venue that is the home to the yearly intake of young talent, throwing ideas around, putting on shows, attending classes, making sets, costumes and above all else... theatre.

We all pile in the car, ready for the drive through the bumper to bumper Friday night traffic of King Street and straight down the Princes Highway. In twenty minutes we are there. A crowd is loitering in what appears to be an old garage, hugging polystyrene cups of tea and chocolate wrappers.

On the left of the makeshift box office is an art installation that you can see through a window, as the light pours out, casting a blue and red light over the car park. A quick visit to the bathroom through the kitchen and out the back to where the performers are getting ready and smoking a few cigarettes. There isn't any pretension here.

We all go in. The smell of a freshly painted black floor and walk in music of some new release lounge music.

At first, I was a little ambivalent. What are we going to be fed tonight? You often assume that youth theatre is kind of like the audition theatre that many actors try and produce.

The surprise is that from the moment it started I was drawn in. Astonishing creativity, originality and risk taking theatre that pushed boundaries of bodies in space and played with the theatricality of ideas.

My mind flickered back to an event I went to in Slovenia, just after I arrived to start my year or so of study. A youth theatre festival that brought together troupes of young performers from Romania, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Croatia, Serbia and Hungary. A week long event that celebrated theatre and performance and showed the best of the best from each country, converging together to showcase their ideas and concepts.

And yet, here I was seeing the same originality and bold decisions that made that festival in Slovenia such a highlight of my time there. The type of performance that opens your minds to the possibilities of complicated ideas, executed so beautifully in a celebration of simplicity.

Each of the performances were directed, devised, written and acted by all the young members of this theatre. And they attacked their subject matter bravely and with beautiful results. Each was no longer than about five or ten minutes long and many of them contained unique voices in theatre.

Certainly, some of the ideas didn't quite work and certain character based confidence needed to be injected into some of the performances, but if this is the next generation of directors and performance art devisers, Sydney's theatre scene has a bright future. I'll happily go back to Carlton and see what they do next.


Image: Courtesy STYP