Twisting Fiction

One of the biggest buzz-issues around Melbourne's theatre traps is embodied, and maybe created, by Simon Stone. The award-winning founder of The Hayloft Project, and director of Thyestes and The Wild Duck, has rocked the boat with his drastically different adaptations of classic texts, the talking point being the tenacity with which he claims the play is 'by Simon Stone'.

Everyone, it seems, has something to say about whether Stone's the devil, or one of llluminati. One person in a prime position to tell which way to vote is Eloise Mignon, who has performed in the Stone-directed shows Strange Interludes and The Wild Duck previously, and now plays the strong, fascinating and infatuated Anya in The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekov's last play about an aristocratic family on the brink of collapse.

“Simon's so clear about what he's doing,” she says. “That's not to say he comes into a production with a sense of exactly what the play's going to be. He runs with a sense of what's going on in the rehearsal room, and he's just as curious about what it's going to become as everyone else is.

The Cherry Orchard is often read as social satire on pre-revolutionary Russia, with its crumbling class boundaries and stifling of human emotion. Its comedic and tragic, enhancing this feeling of humans being stuck in the middle of structures larger than themselves. Stone's process, Mignon explains, explores what these essentially might be, and how they can be brought out to connect directly with a contemporary audience.

“Some of the discussions we have around the room are really expansive,” she says. “They're about the text, but then we throw the text away. I really find it interesting. I think I've had trouble before, questioning text. Like, if something happens in a play or a story, I just accept it – I can't find an alternative. Like, 'Oh, that just happens, they die at the end'.

“Everything I need to know about the character or the story is in the text. But then, when you do a process like this, not only is the text being interpreted by us, but we're also improvising and coming up with new stuff. It keeps overlapping.

“There needs to be that implicit trust if it's going to work,” she continues. “Someone needs to be guiding the process and alert to the detail of what's going on. It's like god! To really explore what the text can be, and pull all the potential directions of it into something that makes sense.”