Pottering Around

In 2011 Oxford Universitiy's Ashmolean Museum played host to Pots and Plays, a festival curated by The Onassis Programme and Oxford Playhouse who commissioned a host of poets, playwrights, composers and choreographers to create new works in response to the Greek pots and antiquities being exhibited. Among their ranks was Australian playwright Van Badham, then living in the UK, who was to write a two-hander audio play based on a piece of pottery that could be listened to while people walked around the museum.

That original piece of pottery was a man staring at a bull, Badham looked not just at what the pottery depicted, but also asked “Where did it come from, who owned it? What happened to them? How did this object end up in this collection and why are we looking at it?”

The audio play was complete, and then the story got really interesting. “I wrote the audio play and I didn't think much about it, I'd been living in London and then I got my dream job in Melbourne and my relationship with this British guy ended and so I was in a new city and going through relationship bereavement and was crying and thought my life was over and eating Nutella out of the jar and one of my friends from Melbourne, a playwright, was going through a break up as well, he challenged me as a way of mending my broken heart to write out the story and see if I could find a way that there would be a happy ending,” explains Badham, “So that was the challenge.”

Combining the Pots and Plays experience with her own break-up The Bull, The Moon And The Coronet Of Stars emerged. “I'd made the point that every single artefact in the museum carries a story, and because every article tells a story I started really thinking about the way that relationships and things that happen to people they end up in museums as well, because they end up in memory,” says Badham.

The play was picked up to be workshopped via Playwriting Australia, and soon after programmed at Griffin, Hothouse and Merrigong theatres, “I guess if I was a teenager it would be like me writing heaps of emo poetry and Penguin calling and saying, 'Hey we would like to publish it!'” laughs Badham.

From the Ashmolean to a museum of relationships, Badham has continued the thread of two characters telling the story through examining exhaustively the histories of objects, “In the original radio play it was the piece of pottery,” says Badham, “here it is Marion's sketchbook, a container full of cupcakes, a trench coat… The story begins with a couple who find themselves dangerously attracted to one another and then, you know, chaos ensues...”

Having accepted the challenge set by her friend, a strange new love story emerged for Badham, inspired by the Greek myths of Ariadne, Theseus and Dionysus, The Bull, The Moon And The Coronet Of Stars shows Michael and Marian exploring histories on display while learning to live through a broken heart.

WHAT: The Bull, The Moon And The Coronet Of Stars
WHERE & WHEN: now to Saturday 8 June, SBW Stables