Parramatta Breaks Out Into Its Own Backyard

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday October 2, 2006

Barrett Newkirk

BIT by bit Riverside Theatres is aspiring to become western Sydney's performing arts super complex.

The Parramatta venue hosts more than 800 productions a year, ranging from student dance recitals to the Bell Shakespeare Company, and it regularly gives Sydney's independent theatre productions a second life in front of a suburban audience.

But with its newest project, Breakout, Riverside is looking closer to home, something it hopes residents of the greater west will learn to do if they want to see fresh, innovative stage shows.

Breakout is a workshop and reading series that connects playwrights with professional directors and actors in order to refine scripts. Organisers expect it to foster new plays for the Riverside stages.

Riverside producer Camilla Rountree is heading up the new program. In the four years she's been with the company, she says, the area around Parramatta has changed, as has its people.

"It's an area that's very rapidly becoming gentrified. It's very aspirational, and it's very sophisticated."

To keep this shifting audience interested in local theatre, Rountree says Riverside wanted to aid writers from the greater west area or support projects that may resonate with its residents.

"We thought it was very important in Parramatta to encourage people not to get in their cars and go to the city so often, but to just come down the road to Riverside," says Rountree. "The best way to do that was to present things that are unique to this theatre. And the best way for us to do that is for us to do the productions ourselves and to do productions of brand-new Australian works."

She says the long-term goal is twofold. "One is to develop new work to go onto our stages to go into our own season so that we really are developing our own individual style or voice. And the other is to foster a group of writers and good directors and really good professional actors who are happy to work here in western Sydney." Of the six plays and one musical theatre piece comprising Breakout's first round of readings, Rountree says she hopes as many as three will become part of Riverside's future seasons.

Participating playwrights are a mix of established and new blood, says Rountree, and include Gary Baxter, Sime Knezevic, Rick Viede, Caleb Lewis, Noelle Janaczewska and Suzie Miller.

Baxter's play The Confectionary Aisle was the first to get the Breakout treatment with a minimally staged reading last week followed by a discussion with invited guests. The play has been a project of Baxter's for 10 years. It's been workshopped and read numerous times and shortlisted for two playwright awards, but it still awaits its first production. He hopes Breakout will help that happen, now that he has feedback from the artists and a new audience.

"When there are people reacting [to the play] you get a sense of where they want it to go," says Baxter. "Without it being read by actors you don't know how it is going to affect the audience."

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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