1989

Director Rose Clemente and members of the cast talk with Murray Bramwell about The Heartbreak Kid currently playing at Theatre 62.

It was after presenting Witchplay  for the Fringe season at the Lion Theatre last year that Adelaide actors Rose Clemente and Christina Totos decided to plan further ventures. Witchplay, a solo piece, had been performed by Rose and directed by Christina. Now, for The Heartbreak Kid, the roles are reversed. Along with local performers, Ian Dixon, Maurie Annese and Nicholas Opolski, Christina Totos is back on stage and Rose Clemente has taken on her first professional directing assignment.

Planning for this production began last November when they secured performing rights for The Heartbreak Kid and then set about getting funding from  the Australia Council, the SA Department for the Arts, Foundation South Australia as well from the Multicultural Arts Trust. That all took time and attention which meant that, while they were keeping their fingers crossed waiting for the money to come,  they were forced to turn down other work opportunities.

In the meantime the Theatre 62 management had indicated their support for the idea, attracted to the idea of staging new Australian work. Then, in June, the funding was approved with the stipulation that local actors and crew be employed for the production. Lisa Philip-Harbutt was hired to do the design and Paul Cate the lighting, and auditions began. Rose Clemente speaks enthusiastically about the calibre of local applicants and how much that vindicated her commitment to producing new theatre in Adelaide.

While she and Christine readily concede that they needed to move to Melbourne and Sydney to develop their work and further their opportunities they are also very pleased to be initiating a production in Adelaide.

“It’s not that artists don’t want to come back,” Rose explains, “there is this assumption  that once you go you have betrayed your home town- whereas a lot of people really do want to work here.”

Like Nicholas Opolski for instance. He has been working in Sydney and Melbourne, most recently with Kerry Walker’s stylish two-hander,

Knuckledusters, based on the life and writings of Edith Sitwell. Apart from touring with Rents, Opolski hasn’t performed in Adelaide for five years and when Rose Clemente offered him a part in The Heartbreak Kid he jumped at the chance.

But the appeal was not just the repatriation. Richard Barrett’s play has attracted warm attention since it was first performed by the Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney a couple of years ago. It is about Nicky, a young Greek kid, out of step with those around him, whose life becomes even more complicated when he falls in love with his teacher, also Greek who, only just out of College herself, still lives in the over-protective confines of her family.

“It’s a wonderful play,”enthuses Rose Clemente, “It’s a young, vital, exciting piece which has a lot to say about young people coming to terms with their sexuality and the cultural limbo land that so many young second generation Australians inhabit. But it says all that in a way that is extremely entertaining for young people to see. Because it is set in an inner city school we have been promoting the play in local schools such as Thebarton and Adelaide High. We have also made the references as local as possible -Hindley Street not Oxford Street, Jules not The Exchange, Rostrevor not Penrith.”

Ian Dixon, who played the lead in the highly successful Come Out adaptation of  Gillian Rubinstein’s Space Demons, plays the Kid. “I feel close to the role, even though I am not Greek,” he explains. “After a rather unsteady adolescence myself, I feel I am able to present the character to young people who are going through what I went through, what we all went through, at an earlier age.”

For Maurie Annese, just eighteen in his first professional role, it is all a lot closer. “I play the Heartbreak Kid’s cousin,” he grins, “as well as his father, a man in his fifties. That took a while to get into,” he adds, to the great amusement of his fellow cast members.

In his mid-twenties, Nicholas Opolski admitted he found it hard at first to get back to being  Steve the schoolboy. `But the school uniform helps,” he adds drily, “You put on a school uniform and suddenly you have no personality. Those inground memories of my schooldays, they all come back, those long slow boring days at school.”

Like Rose, Christine Totos has a strong commitment to the play. “It is quite special. There is a lot of theatre around that wants to put a message across and communicate with its audience and in the process batters them over the head with a sledgehammer; there’s not enough sense of hope or joy or celebration about the conflicts we go through. This play celebrates those conflicts and people warm to it and embrace it rather than turn away from it.

Both women believe that the play will find a broad audience, one that does not usually come to the  theatre. “There’s a forgotten audience out there,”says Rose. “They don’t go to the theatre and then when something like Wogs out of Work comes to town all these people who never go usually are there laughing and enjoying themselves. Theatre 62 is located in the Thebarton, Mile End area and that’s where the forgotten audiences live.”

The Advertiser, 1989. No details.