22.02.24
Dear Grif-friend,
Ang here—I’m the Content Producer at Griffin, which means I produce lots of content, including shooting and editing videos to pop on our social media channels, copywriting for everything from our season brochure to our website and putting together this very newsletter for you to wrap your peepers around! What can I say… I love me some juicy content! Especially when Griffin, my favourite theatre company in the whole world, is my beloved subject.
I’ve worked here for six years this month and I’m proud to say I’ve loved every minute of it! Over the years I’ve seen colleagues come and go, many many amazing Australian stories on stage and it’s hard to believe that the end of an era is upon us, with The Lewis Trilogy by Louis Nowra heralding the closure of my second home, the SBW Stables Theatre.
I imagine the word ‘eras’ has been uttered by Sydneysiders much more than usual this particular week, with Taylor Swift and hundreds of thousands of fans, myself included, about to brave the weather at Accor Stadium for the eponymous Australian tour. But there’s another Eras tour-de-force happening right here at the SBW Stables Theatre, too!
The Lewis Trilogy is also a tour—a tour through several eras of playwright Louis Nowra’s career and through decades of Australian history (a 60s Melbourne housing estate, the protests against the Vietnam War in the 70s, and the grungy ‘now’ of Kings Cross). Costume designer Melanie Liertz has perfectly captured the colour palettes and contexts of the three plays in her dressing of the ensemble. Louis and Tay-Tay (bear with me here) are both keen observers of the people and situations around them and draw their poetics from real life. Both even write about their exes!
I have seen The Lewis Trilogy and I can confirm that it is one of the best productions I have seen in all my years at Griffin. While Summer of the Aliens is my personal favourite era (clearly as a Swift fan I am a sucker for a coming-of-age narrative), all three plays will gift you something about Australian theatre, about empathy, love, or about your own life. I know this sounds cheesy or cliché, but it’s true!
The Lewis Trilogy opens this weekend after a couple of weeks of previews and I can’t wait to see how audiences receive it in the now—in 2024. I’ll treasure this one because to me, it symbolises a lot more than the work of any one playwright, any one director, any one production team. It truly is the end of an era for anyone who has ever walked through those Stables doors.
Maybe I’ll see you in the foyer—or at the Taylor Swift concert!
Love from
Ang
Ang Collins
Content Producer
