Slippery When Wet

On Friday 26 April, the last episode of Days Of Our Lives to be aired by Channel 9 graced screens, ending the show's 45-year run on the network. But fear not, for those of you that need 'your stories', there's another channel for hyper-dramatic heartache – the stage. For five weeks last year, Belvoir hosted B Street, a theatrical soap opera, in their foyer for a five-week run, and in coming weeks more stages will get the suds treatment.

Cale Bain is one of the founders of Full Body Contact No Love Tennis, a collective of improvisers, with a rotating roster of cast and directors with a bunch of the best improvisers from around the city. After a six-year history of performing competitive improv competitions on stages to win a tennis trophy Bain found in the trash, the collective have turned their hand to soap opera with The Days Of The Bold And Generally Restless.

“We were playing around and we had super fun doing soap opera and being super melodramatic and looking for a reason to make out with each other and slap each other on stage and be highly emotional and basically play out all of our daily anxieties in character,” Bain explains of the impetus for the show, which has played out on the stage at Glebe's Roxbury Hotel, and staged its season finale as part of the Comedy Festival at the Seymour Centre.

For Sam Atwell and the talented creative team he has assembled, getting soap on the stage was merely a matter of transporting it – Atwell as director and co-writer, the rest of the writing team and actors have for the most part been plucked from one of Australia's best known soaps, Home & Away, for SET, a whodunit murder mystery that takes place behind the scenes on the set of an Australia soap opera.

“Nick Bolton the producer and I were just chatting and we wanted to do something funny and silly and make a good night out at the theatre and I've always liked murder mysteries,” explains Atwell, confessing to an early obsession with Columbo and high energy camp teen thrillers. “And I work in television where there is a lot of colourful characters and we just thought, 'Well, why don't we do something about that?'

“I've only been writing for television for the last couple of years; I was amazed at how it all fits together, you know? You've got ten or 15 people who have their two cents worth on every episode that goes to air, if not a lot more, and I thought that would be really interesting to bring into the theatre so when I asked some of the in-house team in the script department at Home & Away and they all said yes it was really exciting. All the cast have worked in television as well so we're kind of having a joke at our own expense.”

As for how well the over the top form translates to the stage, well, Bain makes a strong point: “We're of course missing the extreme close ups on the eyes but I think the hyper melodrama actually works better on stage sometimes than it does for television, especially for comedy, because when you're watching on television you can sometimes believe the ham, you're like, 'Oh my goodness, I can't believe she told him that her baby is her father's baby', but when it happens on stage the audience is in on the joke, so it's a lot more cosy for everyone.”