Dr Stella Kent's musical Marjorie Unravelled (chronicling the life of Tasmanian housewife superstar Majorie Bligh) will premiere on September 9, kick-starting our pop-up festival Word of Mouth. In this podcast we gain a tantalising glimpse of what goes into the making of such a play, one of fifteen she has written. The award-winning Tasmanian writer has taught at the University of Tasmania’s school of performing arts and has been a Playwright in Residence at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, where she produced Tamar Tidings, a community play produced on a specially built barge with a cast of 130. In this talk, originally delivered to the Friends of Theatre North, Dr Kent reveals the secrets employed to seduce an audience into disbelief, including an analysis of how such narratives as Oedipus Rex, Hamlet and Star Wars all fit the archetypal patterns of the human brain. Drawing on her PhD research and the writing of her own plays, she reveals how dramatists create an alternative reality, and how our awareness of the devices used to make theatre so enduringly bewitching still fail to stop us from being caught up in the magic of a darkened auditorium, swept away as the curtain lifts.
