When The Light Leaves
In one sentence: a critically acclaimed Australian play by Rory Godbold that explores how people navigate the complex reality of a terminal illness.
How did it come about?
With this show, as the director, I was aiming to amplify the visceral experience I felt when I saw a rehearsed reading of Rory’s gripping play at La Mama Explorations. As a close friend, Rory’s story touched me deeply and I felt compelled to serve his writing in a way that honoured his father’s life and legacy and demonstrated Rory’s great artistry.
I was inspired by Julie Taymor’s concept of the ideograph to inform how we navigated a play whose often short scenes moved fast across time, place, stages of health and decline. Once we arrived at the central metaphor — light — the hanging pendant light became our ideograph. I attempted to marry this with a constant attention to how feeling technologies — aka stagecraft elements, but really, anything that is doing something with ‘feeling’ (see Erin Hurley’s work) — were working on the audience’s bodies. This meant working with Imogen to achieve an intensity in the sound design, balanced with a delicacy of lighting and costume and simplicity in the set, alongside having very finely tuned physical choices made with the actors, and working with the lead actor Tomas Parrish to use Laban and Chekhov techniques to activate the audience’s mirror neurons at a minute level.
The whole show was an incredibly delicate balancing act and I was on the edge of my seat every single time I sat through it because each element was so crucial and needing absolute precision.
See more about the approach via my blog post on the Citizen Theatre website.
“Director Jayde Kirchert gets authentic, intensely felt performances from the cast...There’s an emotional clarity to them, too, a zest for life” — Cameron Woodhead, The Age
Show info
Premiere production at La Mama Courthouse, June 2019. Also performed at Wonthaggi Shed Theatre August 2019 and Gasworks Theatre 2020 for Midsumma.
Written by Rory Godbold
Directed by Jayde Kirchert
Designed by Stu Brown
Lighting Design by Gina Gascoigne
Costume Design by Aislinn Naughton
Composer/Sound design by Imogen Cygler
Stage Manager: Teri Steer
Associate Producer: Steph Clare-Cover
Associate Producer: Alex Suttie (La Mama season)
Cast: Tomas Parrish, Veronica Thomas, Leigh Scully and Michelle Robertson
For more images, videos and info visit the Citizen Theatre website.
Image credit Stu Brown
