FEVER

FEVER brings together again the team that created the multi award-winning Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? – writers Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas, composer Irine Vela and director Julian Meyrick. Produced by Melbourne Workers Theatre in 1998, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? toured nationally the following year and won numerous awards, including the 1999 Gold Awgie, the Jill Blewitt Award, the Victorian Green Room Award and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award.

FEVER is about the way humanity consumes that which nutures it.

Set against a landscape marked by a sense of turmoil and deprivation, the connecting image in FEVERÂ’s 4 plays is the riverÂ…as a line of demarcation that separates people; as a body of water that must be crossed to reach the promise of the other side; as a means of escape from turmoil and delivery to what is unknown. It is a stinking rotten sewer poisoning all who take from it and the source of renewal and change.

Says Director Julian Meyrick, "FEVER aims to uncover aspects of our society that are complex, difficult and painful to comprehend. It is vital that we count the cost of current behaviour, explore the darker nature of our past and call to account those who are responsible. FEVER pushes beyond the boundaries of ‘realism’, staking out its territory in another direction entirely; one that uses allegory, epic theatre, surrealism and music-theatre to investigate the burning issues of race, class, culture and environment."