Double Bill for New Theatre to round out July

A mouth-watering double bill of quirky productions Quiet Companions and The Bryce is Right is set to play Newtown’s New Theatre nightly from 25-28 July.

Quiet Companions is an engrossing mix of drama and improvisation that eavesdrops on the game-playing of a decade Victorian couple, starring Lyn Pierse and Marko Mustac.

It begins in a pleasantly naughty Victorian Salon. A Lord and Lady have escaped their spouses and stuffy lives to join their wicked society friends for some more exotic entertainment. When their friends don’t show up, they revisit their youth with a ritual of increasingly twisted games. As they play, the layers of their cvilised lives are peeled away, exposing the psychological nightmares that lie beneath.

It is improvised but not intended to be especially funny, referencing Absurdist theatre along with post-modernism, Brechtian alienation, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and the  darker aspects of power and sexuality from the Bible, just to name a few.

The second piece, The Bryce is Right, features award-winning cabaret artist Bryce Halliday telling, in song and sketch, the stories of history’s most obssessed and just plain wrong individuals.

Through story-telling, jokes, jazz standards, show tunes and his own original songs Bryce Halliday, winner of the Showcase Award at last year’s 9th Annual Cabaret Showcase, explores some of the incredible beliefs people have defended through history and what it is to be right.

From logical fallacies through to conspiracy theories and, of course, the end of the world, it’s an evening of wine, wit, music… and crippling self-doubt.

The double bill will play nightly from 8pm at the New Theatre on King Street, Newtown. Bookings and more information are available online at www.newtheatre.org.au