Insouciance & The Prodigal Son

"comedy and pathos from two connoisseurs of Australian idiom"

WORLD PREMIERE AND VICTORIAN PREMIERE

in association with Melbourne Festival

Two of our most original and distinctive playwrights in their first double-bill together since the formative days of the Pram Factory.

Insouciance is a bravura exposé of prescription drugs and their destruction upon a family, written with a bold comic sweep and heartfelt compassion. From the author of the award-winning Remember Ronald Ryan and Lonely Lenny Lower, this is a powerful, sometimes haunting new play in Dickins' distinctive blend of relish, tenderness and rage.

The Prodigal Son wittily and provocatively explores the sharp surface and dark undercurrents in the return of an adult son to his parents. From the prolific author of one of our great theatrical milestones, A Stretch of the Imagination, and the ubiquitous Dimboola, comes a riveting distillation of irony and ownership.

Both playwrights are masters of the vernacular and share a Rabelaisian approach to theatrical life. A tribute to the genius of these Melbourne dramatists and their enormous and influential contribution to the development of Australian theatre, this is hungry, life-enriching drama. Picaresque, absurdist, and iconoclastic.

'With wistful humour, and mordant satire sometimesÂ…Dickins' many plays often portray down-and-outs or battlers in a broad cartoon-like style that blends surrealism with elements of theatre of the absurd.' Oxford Companion to the Theatre in Australia.

'Â…celebration with satire, fun with gravity, fiction with information, ignorance with politics, slang with poetryÂ…able to jolt and agitate within a context of sheer enjoyment.' Oxford Companion to Australian Literature

"You're lucky to have a stretcher and a portion of gas fire. During the Great Depression we got warm by sleeping on top of bisexual swagmen. They seemed to come from under every log in the old days." Insouciance
"Children. They suck you dry. They sup upon your very marrow. To them your blood is raspberry pop. They gnaw at your liver. Guzzle goblets of fluid, cerebrospinal and lymph. They eat your placenta." The Prodigal Son