Heavy Stuff

Arty weighs 400 kilograms. It's the kind of weight that makes you housebound, the kind of weight that's unsettling, the kind of weight that could be deadly. Approached by a television company, he is offered the money for the expensive gastric bypass surgery he requires on one condition: that they can film a reality TV show about his journey through weight loss.

Shannon Murphy has been at the helm of some great productions in the last few years – This Year's Ashes and Porn.Cake for Griffin, the delightful trauma of Trapture – but Beached has tested her mettle not just as a stage director, but as the director of something all together more sinister: reality TV.

“It's like directing a play and a TV show at the same time, so it will be a lot of work, but that's what's really interesting about it, I think,” says Murphy. “And also this idea of what happens to people when a camera is turned on them and they invite it into their home, how does behaviour change, and what are people allowing us to see; what side of themselves are they exposing to the rest of the world and what are they keeping hidden from us?”

Utilising a mix of traditional staging methods and more adventurous live camera feeds, Murphy is conducting a collision of these two forms for Beached, and has cast the production with the actors' ability to switch between more nuanced screen performance and stage acting in mind. Blake Davis, who plays Arty, found prominence with his role in The Slap; Kate Mulvany has appeared in the likes of All Saints, Blue Heelers, and The Chaser's War On Everything; Gia Carides is an AFI nominee; and Arka Das has appeared in Tricky Business for Channel Nine. The show's designer James Browne even did a stint as a contestant on a reality show.

Bubnics's play examines the culture surrounding reality television, and our cultural obsession with it. In order to properly appropriate the tropes of the genre on stage Murphy and the creative team undertook extensive research, and she says she's been a little surprised by the power of the new tools in her directorial arsenal.

“I get excited about it, that's what's quite sick about it all,” Murphy admits. “You get excited as a director and as a creative team when you realise that the sting that you've put on a particular line or the music that you've put in a particular monologue is actually causing the audience to laugh or feel more for a character, you are actually pretty impressed with how that technique is so obviously influential and it's actually quite a thrilling feeling that you can actually manipulate people so easily and I can actually see how people would get a kick out of that.

“These kind of very constructed reality TV shows do try to get you to often feel emotions that aren't necessarily there, and they do that by underscoring it with very particular types of music to manipulate how you're feeling – and it works! And that's the kind of genius of the artform of reality TV, it does really manipulate you.”