Two plays featured in this year’s Anywhere Festival are related by more than blood but by a special bond of creativity.
Mother and Daughter, both multi award winners for playwriting and direction have written and produced plays for this year’s festival that highlight the importance of humanitarianism.
Tania Nash has written the multi award winning (Anywhere Theatre Festival 2019, 2021) Rogue Toad Trilogy, all social consciousness plays, the first two controversial contemporary Australian narrative (Racism, and Engagement & Obsession with Social Media) through the eyes of anthropomorphided animals.
Sewer Rat will follow in their footsteps and explore the vehement subject of the plight of refugees within Australia.
Highlighting the story of the Murugappan family from Biloela, this is a play about how conversations, compassion
and community will get society further than debate and dispute.
Tania has enlisted her husband Neil to play an angry racist rat and is no slouch when it comes to acting and writing, having just completed Icarus, a play based on the Icarus Myth and how it relates to depression and Robin Williams’ death.
Sewer Rat is a lighthearted and humorous take on a very serious topic which aims to generate conversation rather than argument. Tania says “the development of works aiming to explore modern-day Australian social commentary on certain topics
allows for creative expression between the creatives and the audience, and possible creative problem-solving in a world gone mad with sensitivity”.
Virgo Nash is an emerging creative, an award-winning playwright, actress and theatre producer, studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drama) and Business at QUT.
Her first play, You Had Me at Hello, was awarded second place in Queensland Theatre Company’s 2018 Young Playwrighting Competition and received Best Play, Best Director and Bursary of Excellence at the Sunshine Coast Theatre Festival in 2019. Throne, in its early stage development, was performed as part of QUT Vena Cava Productions’ FreshBlood Festival and sold out both shows with glowing reviews. Virgo has since developed the work further and has enlisted her sister, multi-award winning actress Bodhi Nash, to play a lead role in Throne, a professional ballerina broken by her mother’s expectations. Throne, a play set in a toilet, explores income inequality and the challenging upbringing of those with broken family units.
Virgo aims to raise awareness, strengthen the community and unite citizens no matter what socioeconomic status they are. Throne is proudly supported by the Regional Arts Development Fund a partnership between the Queensland Government and Noosa Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.
Sewer Rat and Throne are on in May (6,7,8) in the underground tunnels of the Springhill Reservoir in Brisbane and Noosa 13 and 14 May in Noosa Junction.
For tickets visit, anywhere.is/event/sewer-rat/2022-05-13/
