TODAY: White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, Pop Up Theatre 3, 130 Murray Street

WHITE RABBIT,RED RABBIT
By NASSIM SOLEIMANPOUR

Hobart Premiere, Pop Up Theatre 3, 130 Murray Street
Thursday, April 23 – May 9, 2015 | 8pm

With Gavin Baskerville, Anne Cordiner, Bryony Geeves, Ryk Goddard, Guy Hooper, Samuel Johnson, Mel King, Jane Longhurst, Hamish Michael, Kate Mulvany & Katie Robertson.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has been celebrated worldwide as one of the most astonishing evenings in a theatre where both audience and performer as a whole create a performance about the ties and tensions between freedom and conformity. The play has been performed around the world, including in Edinburgh, Cairo, Melbourne, Toronto, London, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Boston and Chicago.

Now eight Tasmanian performers are joined by three high profile mainland actors including ex pat Tasmanian Hamish Michael (star of TV’s Janet King and Crownies and the Baz Luhrman film The Great Gatsby) and Samuel Johnson (best known as Evan in The Secret Life of Us) who is playing Molly Meldrum in the upcoming TV telemovie, Molly.

Each performance is a world premiere. No rehearsals. No director. No set. A different actor reads the script cold for the first time at each performance. A thrilling, informative, highly individual and extremely entertaining encounter with a young writer who has more questions to his (fictional) audience than answers emerges, almost like magic.

Imagine being 29 and unable to leave your country. Having refused military duty as a conscientious objector, Iranian Nassim Soleimanpour had no passport to travel the world. He was unable to experience the success celebrated by White Rabbit, Red Rabbit around the globe until the beginning of 2013 in Australia. Having been retroactively discharged from service, Soleimanpour finally was able to receive a passport.

Instead, he has distilled the experience of an entire generation in this wild, utterly original play. He turns his isolation to his advantage. The playwright becomes his own global instrument of communication.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a unique theatrical experience and has been celebrated worldwide as one of the most astonishing evenings in a theatre where both audience and performer as a whole create a performance about the ties and tensions between freedom and conformity.

“The playwright slyly examines the desire to submit to authority and the ways in which that impulse can be exploited by the clever and the charismatic. Soleimanpour, who was 29 when he wrote the play, translates these dark and disturbing themes into an outrageous parable involving vials of poison, rabbits and cheetahs, oh my. It’s an intoxicating stream of consciousness from the heart of Iran that will leave you at once amused and alarmed.” (San Jose Mercury News)

Presented by the Tasmanian Theatre Company in association with Aurora Nova.

Tickets at: www.tastheatre.com or at Centertainment
Katie Robertson