Matthew Higgins

When director Lucas Stibbard gathered the group that has evolved to be The Breadbeard Collective in 2010, we set our attention to Romeo and Juliet, which resulted in a showing late that year. After three years of incubating our talents on other projects and graduating uni, The Breadbeard Collective is excited at the opportunity to sink our teeth into the work that first brought us together during a second period of creative development, allowing us to inform the work using their own experiences, influences and responses to the text.


La Boite Indie & The Breadbeard Collective
with the support of QPAC present

><R&J

13 - 30 November 2013
La Boite Theatre

Ten people aged 18-25 gather in a room. They play, dance, fight, kiss and talk about life, love, violence, sex and death. Taking Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, they remix the work by hanging new meat on the skeleton of the story. As the tale takes hold, the party dies down and the group sees the bloody consequences of their experiments.

Helpmann Award nominee Lucas Stibbard leads a cast of Brisbane’s bravest emerging artists in this deconstruction & reconstruction of the greatest love story ever told.



Using a series of forms including; dance, live music, projection, narration, commentary [live and mediated] and acting, ><R&J interrogates Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and examines its parts. Characters are shared and swapped blind to continuity and gender. Part classical text, part contemporary performance ><R&J is a mixtape that investigates the most well-known love story of all time.

As a contemporary treatment of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with a strong postmodernist influence, this production will provide an engaging and exciting access point, especially for school students, to engage with a classic text in a highly contemporary context.

Connect with us

Our three main obstacles to success are:

SET DESIGN

We need the finances for our set designer Yvette Turnbull to design and realise our set. Yvette is based in Melbourne, finishing her degree at VCA therefore we face a communication challenge. We love Yetti and like any long distance relationship, we are going to make it work – thankfully we live in a world where digital technology exists and where distance is no longer an issue thanks to the internet and Skype.

The design concept for this production places emphasis on utility and transformation. It will honor imagination over dictation of time, place and space. Articles appear as they are necessary for the performance. This production occurs in a theatre, not a street in Verona and no effort should be made to disguise that.

The elements of the set design must meet three criteria;

1. Something that the ensemble can sit on,
2. Something that the ensemble can build with,
3. Something that can be projected on.


TIME

We go up on 13 November 2013. Time is against us. We are busy and there are many of us - we all balance full time, part time or casual work or university outside of this project but thankfully we have a team of scheduling nutters who are making it all happen, getting us in the room, building extensive albeit colourful schedules and timelines in excel ... but things are tight.

WE ARE NEW

The Breadbeard Collective is a brand new theatre company. Well new in a sense that we are new to most people (we ourselves have known about us for the past three years). For the general public, this is our first solo professional production as a company now complete with brand identity, logo, website and all the social medias.

While our body of work is relatively small, we made that up with our numbers, setting out sights on entertaining a diverse cross-section of Brisbane audiences (high school students, young corporates, lovers of Shakespeare and literature, tertiary education students, fans of Lucas Stibbard, LGBTI community and friends & family) with our kick-arse production of ><R&J.