Premiering at the Explosives Factory in St Kilda, this November Melbourne audiences are invited to a science fiction pirate horror comedy like no other. Brought to the stage by renowned actor David Tredinnick and writer Adam Browne, this new Australian work promises a very big story, in a reasonably small setting.
The work, Bladderwrack, was created from a story that Adam Browne penned in 2006 but, in coming full circle, it originally began life as a play. “There was some competition or call-out, and I tried to write it as a script, but it was too long to fit the criteria, and it ended up as a short story, published by Cat Sparks nineteen years ago,” says Browne about the genesis of the work. “Then the Theatre Works opportunity came, and it was inevitable that the story become a script again. I think I said to David Tredinnick that if we collaborated, we could try to raise some money, but I completely forgot about that when Theatre Works said yes. I’m a total noob. I was so excited I just went for it and now my friend, who felt obliged to tag along, is suffering for it.”
A few decades in the making, this new genre of play has brought both creatives much joy and humour when discussing the process from initial idea to finished work.
Says Tredinnick, “Twenty leagues. There were some choppy seas, sea monsters and sea monsteresses, and some unseasonal shifts in typography, but as a wise old sailor once said, “Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm”. We’re better individuals for it. Well, I am. I can’t speak for Adam.”
Says Browne: ” Ars longa vita brevis. The challenges have all been opportunities. For all its difficulty, having actors perform something you’re writing is an excellent way to trim the fat and otherwise shape the story. I recommend it to any writer.”
For Tredinnick, the greatest pleasure he derived from creating the work was working with Browne. “It always reminds me how much fun it was to work with him the last time and makes me ponder why we don’t do it more often. Then I check our blood pressure monitors, and it all starts flooding back.”
Browne shares similar thoughts attributing his greatest pleasure to working with Tredinnick “Such a fantastic friendship.”
While an unequivocal comedy – apparently giving Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles baked beans scene a run for its money – both men share their views on themes and what the play might be saying outside of the obvious.
Says Tredinnick, “Hopefully the themes are most prevalent in the execution of the play. It’s about the seriousness of play, the importance of random juxtapositions, and the irrelevance of most things masquerading as straight narrative.”
Says Browne, ” The work isn’t work but play. Its genre is nonsense in the canonical way. Like Lewis Carroll, that tradition. It says what all nonsense says – by means of telling the story of a pirate who is slowly turning into a ventriloquist dummy.”
As for the writing, well, says Tredinnick in his now familiar style, “We divided it into two piles, and then I gave my pile to Adam, thus proving that 1 + 1 = 1. It was a pedagogical moment. The process worked best when I let Adam do all the work and then harped on incessantly about the few bits that didn’t quite gel until he fixed them. James Patterson gets his name on book covers for doing a lot less.”
Tredinnick has been, and continues to be, busy in other ways, it would seem, has he has not only co-written (see above :)), but will co-direct with Browne as well as act in the piece. He concedes the whole thing to be immensely difficult saying, ” I am a human, not a hatstand. I know this now, but it may prove to be too late.”
And what of actor- self and director-self?
“I let actor-self do what he wants until he is wholly distracted by alcohol and drugs, and then director-self swoops in and fixes everything. Of course, actor-self has seen none of this happen and believes he is entirely responsible for all the onstage thespic magic. Which is as it should be.”
A number of interesting yet seemingly disparate styles are being used to tell the tale. Unsurprisingly, the style of the play has been inspired by the likes of The Goon Show, Spike Milligan, The Ship of Theseus, James Mason, and the pirate stories of Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake. There will be puppets, an opera singer, pantomime and absurdism. In amongst it all, one wonders what could possibly have been left out of this heady mix that could possibly put Macbeth’s witches to shame.
Not to disappoint Tredinnick explains that there were ads, an actor stunt-double competition, a pin-the-tail on James Mason game but all these were sadly jettisoned. “Which is why we’re now left with this paltry mishmash of theatrical forms. I’m most pleased that the whole piece is a promo for the book of the play. The tale is one that eats itself, repeatedly, and the various elements reflect that. I think. Or it could be that we just like to distract ourselves endlessly.”
Browne concedes that one thing Tredinnick and he have in common is that they’re maximalists. “David has hundreds of hilarious ideas during our meetings, but he mutters them; I have to pay attention and make sure to write them down. One was the idea of having an ad break in the play, advertising some real concreting or landscaping business.”
Also, says Browne, they both love puppets. “I grew up on Nigel Triffitt and Snuff Puppets. And he’s got an amazing history with puppets. I don’t know if it was inevitable that people like puppet makers Emma Jevons and Julian Chapple would get involved, but we’re happy they did.”
And as far as how the two now legendary friends met – ” We were the only two left standing at the end of the party, jokes Tredinnick. “The party was called the 1980s. But hang on – now I think back, we may have been the only two people at the party to begin with. There was another party going on upstairs but neither of us had been invited.”
Browne adds, “Friends of friends, before almost anyone reading this was born.”
A heady mix of opera, monsters, and pantomime, Bladderwrack is the tale of two ancient pirates: Saucy Jack and Bagfoot. Dwelling in the chilldrippery of a sunken galleon, their lives are sustained by the ecosys tem that has overtaken the bilge around them. Thanks to the bile-green phosphorescent bladderwrack that thrives in the ship’s bowels, their air refuses to run out – and thanks to the eyeless, dark-adapted ghastlies that swim among those weeds, their food also refuses to run out. They have existed there for decades. But there’s something still worse to come: the unveiled memory of why they’re down there at all…
See it, because says Tredinnick, “You will die of scurvy if you don’t. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Leaving the last and sonorous note to Browne: “If nothing else, they might attend in order to witness the longest, most lyrical fart they could ever wish for.”
November 5 – 15
Bookings: www.theatreworks.org.au/2025/bladderwrack
