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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 38, Number 20. August 8 1975

The Australian Performing Group

The Australian Performing Group

THE NEW ZEALAND STUDENTS ARTS COUNCIL PRESENTS AUSTRALIA'S FOREMOST CONTEMPORARY THEATRE ENSEMBLE FROM MELBOURNE'S "PRAM FACTORY" N.Z. TOUR 1975

The beginnings of the 'Pram Factory' consisted of an assemblage of people mainly from Melbourne University campus. The group grew in terms of reputation and experience including a successful tour of Perth. Thereafter a split occurred in the original group, the larger part of which now calls itself the Australian Performing Group. In search of larger premises they came up with a mamoth warehouse that used to be a pram factory - hence the name which persists.

The Australian Performing Group describes itself as a co-operative venture designed to provide a foundation for experiment in the performing arts and is concerned with developing a uniquely Australian from of theatre.

As well, the group is strongly involved in a socio political programme including touring through prisons, hospitals, orphanages, factories and schools.

Since 1970 the Group has been involved in several Australian tours to Sydney, Tasmania, Adelaide, and now New Zealand. They are touring the four main centres and are appearing in Wellington as follows:

Main Season: The Les Darcy and Mrs Thally F Tuesday August 12th to Saturday August 16th Downstage Theatre (Hannah Playhouse) 8:15 p.m.

Late Night: One of Nature's Gentlemen Thursday August 14th to Saturday August 16th. Downstage Theatre (Human Playhouse) 11 p.m.

The Three Plays

The Les Darcy Show

A tragedy of Australian innocence bought up, exploited and done-in. A comedy that chronicles the story of Les Darcy: Irish-Australian son, born in Maitland, N.S.W., world middleweight boxing champion in his nineteenth year, victim of the conscription controversy during World War I, then exiled side-show boxer in the United States, and finally a celebrated corpse at the age of twenty-one.

The play is a good example of Hibberd humour and economy, belonging to a strain of Australian theatre which is nationalist, popular and narrative. As such, it is an apt vehicle for the energetic, illustrative acting of the APG.

The Les Darcy show was first produced at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1974. This is the first production by the APG.

Mrs Thally F

This play was first performed in 1972, when written as a companion piece to Howard Brenton's 'Christie in Love'. Together they made up an evening on the theme of murder.

It is a short study of an Australian housewife who polished off her two husbands with rat-poison - in fact the world's first thalium murderer. This sensitively structured and concentrated work centres on the fragile personality of Mrs Fletcher, her enmeshment in the harsh society of isolated women in the 40's;

One of Nature's Gentlemen

One of Natures Gentlemen was written in 1967 and first performed as part of Brain-rot in 1968. It was also, in an expanded adaption, the first production presented by APG at La Mamma.

The play comically focuses on the male anthropology of the bar room, the rituals of mateship and domination laced with jargons of sport and sexual inuendo, the punch-drunk antipathies of two dilapidated dags.

Into this schemozzle strides the woman of their dreams, an archetypal floozie whose superior game-sense rapidly splits the opposition into two camps, precipitating a hectic conclusion in which violence, passion, and farce are ludicrously blended.

One of Nature's Gentlemen has been described as a piece to warm the hearts of little men everywhere. If nothing else, it is an everlasting monument to bad taste.