Bring The Noise

Billed as a hilarious in-marriage tete-a-tete, Dance Of Death, as Holloway explains, has a fascinating history. August Strindberg penned the distinctly Swedish, late 19^th century original of the same name, which was then translated by Freidrich Durrenmatt into the mid-20th century Play Strindberg, and inspired the Edward Albee classic, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 

Holloway has responded most directly to Durrenmatt's take. Whereas Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “is about a kind of warring couple tearing the arms and legs off each other metaphorically,” Holloway explains that his version “is kind of that, without the metaphor.”

“It's a dark, grotesque, black comedy. It's kind of a dark clown version of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. The two leads in it are becoming this hilarious, absurdly brutal married couple. Both wonderful and frightening to watch,” he explains. 

Holloway's understanding of how stories work is eloquent and erudite. He's aimed to capture the absurd situation of the modern Western experience that Durrenmatt did so well. “Now we just take it for granted that there is nothing and we're stuck with nothing,” he says. “In some ways they have absolutely won the war, the absurdists, with their existential angst and their search for nothing; it's what we just take as the norm now.”

“[The play is] really very funny and kind of dirty. But then there are just these moments where a character articulates some brutal, lonely truth about existence and as you've been laughing along hysterically for five or ten minutes, suddenly you're just left feeling like, 'Argh, that's so true – what on earth have I been laughing at?'”

On the surface, it seems vastly distinct from some of his other work on the Port Arthur massacre, or Forget Me Not, another new one which opens the same night as Dance Of Death at Sydney's Belvoir St, about the British-Australian child migration scheme. But Holloway explains that humour is not disconnected from these kinds of stories. “I've been amazed how much people have talked about the role of humour and laughter in their tragedy. That's taught me that anything can be made fun of if it's done with the right intentions.

“Any work that you take on you have to take seriously. It's about creating a world that makes sense. Whether that is a comedy with lots of fart jokes, or something else.”

Holloway seems to know the delicate balance that lies at the heart of humans coming together. Dance Of Death's dynamic team is no different, with Matt Lutton directing and Jacek Koman and Belinda McClory as leading players. Holloway says the rehearsal room experience is “joyous” and that the ache from laughing is almost too much to bear. “And that's going to be the hard thing for an audience with this show,” he says, “not needing to go to ER as soon as the show has ended because they've burst a kidney or something. I think it's really going to be distressingly funny.”

WHAT: Dance Of Death
WHEN & WHERE: Thursday 18 April to Sunday 12 May, Malthouse: Beckett Theatre