Sydney hosts Australian Premiere of Howard Barker’s ‘Judith’

 Bondi’s Pavilion Theatre will play host to the Australian premiere of Howard Barker’s play Judith, from 13 October, 2011. 

 Bondi’s Pavilion Theatre will play host to the Australian premiere of Howard Barker’s play Judith, from 13 October, 2011.   Presented by The Impending Room, in association with Tamarama Rock Surfers, Judith details a complex power struggle between the sexes based on the Apocryphal Jewish tale of an Israelite heroine made perhaps most famous by Caravaggio’s artwork Judith Behading Holofernes, the piece that directly inspired Barker’s creation of the play. Starring Luisa Hastings Edge (Baal, Taming of the Shrew) as Judith, Anna Houston (Tender Napalm, Beyond the Neck) as her loyal servant, and Benedict Samuel (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Paper Giants) as Holofernes, the play opens on October 13 and will run through to November 6 2011.  Director Cathy Hunt, who has been working towards staging the piece for over a year, calls it “highly charged”, and says that a two week workshop last year working on the “incredible language”, culminating in a reading for friends, inspired herself and producer Bec Allen to take the piece further and onto the stage. Howard Barker, a radical British dramatist and Artistic Director of the acclaimed Wrestling School theatre company in Britain, shapes his plays in his “Theatre of Catastrophe” style, which he describes as an “irritant to consciousness like the grain of sand in the oyster’s gut”; this style is a rejection of the idea that art should be instantly explicable. Barker’s works are not often performed in Australia and with the inclusion of Judith in the Tamarama Rock Surfers’ first season at the Pavilion, this is a rare opportunity to experience something fresh, daring, and new. For more information, visit www.rocksurfers.org