With a new work (by a prodigious and award-winning Australian playwright) seeing its world premiere next week, X-Press caught up with actor Jo Morris to talk about this very ambitious play with one of the longest titles we have heard.
“Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon An Ocean Floor is a new work by a truly amazing playwright called Finnegan Kruckemeyer, who has a bit of a love affair with words. His plays all have a similar signature, as they have long titles. This is a man that is very much a poet. With the way he writes there are no boundaries, which is very much why he often writes for young people, as they have no boundaries. In that realm he loves words and marries them together beautifully.” Morris considers for a moment, and then laughs, “ Although when advertising, you forget what an impact such a long title will have outside The Blue Room. There’s no space for that title, we just had to put Those Who Fall In Love…, but we’re going to embrace it.”
Jo Morris met Kruckemeyer while working on a previous play of his, This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing (it really does seem to be a signature). After several seasons of the play, and a few drinks at The Bird, Morris, Kruckemeyer, and a few other members of the Perth theatre scene (theMOXYcollective) had decided that they wanted to work together again. As a result, a couple of years of hard work and funding chasing later, and the writer of over 70 plays across five continents and numerous languages is premiering his latest work in the Perth Blue Room.
Morris finds it liberating to be involved in something completely new, and to put her own interpretation on the various roles. “I love working on new works. There are no expectations or limitations. You can throw yourself in head first.”
In fact it does seem a work that encourages that enthusiastic commitment, “We have four characters each and they are from all over the world.” With three actors portraying 12 differing characters, Those Who Fall In Love… does promise to be a very challenging performance. Add to that the play takes place over a number of locations, as diverse as a Cold War Russian submarine, and the Appalachian snowfields, and the Parisian streets, and across various times in history, and the task becomes Herculean. Yet with careful set and costume design allowing for a seamless change between locations and eras, and under director Adam Mitchell, they have risen to the challenge.
“It’s an incredibly dense script for something that takes place over one hour and 10 minutes, but at the heart of it, it is about love and time. It is an incredibly romantic story full of that magical realism Finn is very well known for. At the end we see time manipulates and stretched so the characters bang into each other. It’s…. ambitious.”
DAVID O’CONNELL
Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon The Ocean Floor runs at The Blue Room Theatre from November 11 – 29. For tickets and session times, go to blueroom.org.au.
