Melbourne-based independent theatre company The People make experimental, personal, politically current, accessible and deeply moving performances that celebrate our collective humanity. The latest offering from this unconventional collective is a real-life attempt at Utopia. Peacemongers is documentary theatre at its most absurd, and an act of rebellious and delusional hope. Witness a group of ordinary people who set out to write a play about an ideal society, one in which bigotry doesn’t exist. With the show’s focus on societal polarisation, they’ve made it a musical to lighten the mood.
The action all happens over dinner, with audiences served a family-style meal as part of the experience. Dinner will be hearty yet simple, prepared by Moon Rabbit, an environmentally innovative social enterprise café by not-for-profit organisation Bridge Darebin.
Bringing this show to life are the creatives behind The People, director and co-creator Katrina Cornwell (La Mama, Malthouse Theatre) and writer and co-creator Morgan Rose (Melbourne Theatre Company, Red Stitch). Driven by a shared queer lens, Cornwell and Rose use theatre to deconstruct systems of power and expose the inner worlds of individuals, beckoning the audience to look within. Self-professed pop-culture fanatics, Katrina and Morgan are fascinated by the collision of theatricality, mass-media and everyday life
This attempt to create Utopia started as an exercise in rehearsal, spiralling into a years-long endeavour, ending with this seminal piece. Featuring an extraordinary cast of co-creators including Sonya Suares, Samuel Gaskin, İbrahim Halaçoğlu, Kate Hood and Zachary Pidd, the show brings together some of Melbourne theatre’s finest independent artists to imagine a way forward from this critical cultural moment.
Morgan Rose, writer and co-creator said of the show “Peacemongers was born from deep conversations about the world we live in, how we inhabit it, and how we endeavour to improve it. We, as a group of artists, have extraordinarily different artistic practices: from musicals, to storytelling, to community practice, to contemporary theatre experiments. This show is the collision of this varied expertise and our hope for a better world.”
The People welcome you to dinner, and the final stage of this quixotic undertaking, in which a powerful, integral and unexpected company of artists attempt to answer: What do we do with people we disagree with?
April 24 – May 5
https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/whats-on/event-calendar/2024/04/peacemongers
