For the cast of Play On! the challenge at every performance will be to make sure life does not imitate art. Rick Abbot's comedy, which opened on Tuesday at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, is about an amateur theatre company struggling to put on a play despite a multitude of problems. In particular, the cast and crew suffer from the interference of the first-time author, Phillip (played by Bradley McDowell), who is constantly rewriting the script of his play, Murder Most Foul.
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"He believes he is just going to revolutionise theatre," McDowell said. But for Phillip, the cast aren't up to his level of inspiration and aren't able to incorporate the brilliant new ideas he keeps coming up with fast enough.
McDowell, 20, in his first lead role since college, said he was modelling aspects of his character on Play On!'s director, Jarrad West – but not, he hastened to add, the most annoying ones, just mannerisms such as "the way I talk and very high energy movements".
Also modelling his character on someone else was a more seasoned performer, Tony Turner, whose amateur and professional career spans five decades. He plays veteran company actor Henry Benish, cast as Lord Dudley in Murder Most Foul.
"I've based him on Jasan Savage, who was a very colourful actor in amateur theatre here in Canberra. He did a lot of plays at Rep and at Papermoon and had a very colourful background he insisted was true including understudying Laurence Olivier."
Turner said Play On! was a very funny play that was full of all the things that could go wrong in theatrical productions, from muffed lines to botched sound effects. He said one of the worst things that ever happened to him on stage was in a production of Romeo and Juliet when he was playing Friar Lawrence and awaiting the crucial entrance of Friar John.
He didn't appear, even after Turner went offstage to look for him – twice. It turned out the actor playing him had become paralysed by stage fright.
"Eventually he tumbled on because the stage manager pushed him on."
Another veteran, Liz Bradley, plays Gerry, the director of Murder Most Foul. She said it was an unusual experience to be acting mostly offstage with her back to the audience, given she spent much of the time "directing" the other actors, and took some adjustment.
Her own stage disasters included falling flat on her face in a dramatic entrance during a production of Camille ("I just got up and kept on going") and turning to expect, and talk about, a hanged body in Female Transport only to find it wasn't there.
"We had to improvise."
And if anything goes wrong in Play On!, the cast will just have to deal with it. The audience might not know if it's a genuine mistake, or just part of the show.
Play On! is on at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre until May 21. Bookings: 62856301 or theq.net.au.
