The Confessions

The big question is: How to honour a life? (Alexander Zeldin)

1958. A school prom in provincial Australia. Three teenage girls. One of them, Alice, wants to make the jump and escape from the small backwater of her childhood to study; wants to leave the humble, limiting circumstances of her parental home behind. But her first attempt at university fails and she is forced to return to her old life. Her mother suggests that she might get married instead; the world is full of hard surfaces and only with a husband can she be truly secure ...
In »The Confessions«, British director and playwright Alexander Zeldin works with an Australian-British ensemble to explore the story of an Australian woman against the back-drop of the second half of the 20th century. Based on an extended series of conversations he had with his mother and her peers, he deploys large and tranquil tableaux to create a panorama of her »confessions« which span almost eight decades. Alice is born in 1943 into an Australian working-class family. We experience her in her youth with her aspirations to become educated and independent, her rebellion and how it faltered, her new beginning as a divorced woman in London and the founding of her own family. Her journey takes us through the major social upheavals of the second half of the 20th and the early 21st century. Her story is one of personal as well as collective emancipation and the persistent attempt to live in a self-determined manner—with all the traumas and humiliations experienced along the way, which Alexander Zeldin empathically weaves into an intimate portrait of a life.

WITH: Amelda Brown, Jerry Killick, Lilit Lesser, Brian Lipson, Hannah Morrish, Pamela Rabe, Gabrielle Scawthorn, Jacob Warner, Yasser Zadeh
SET AND COSTUME DESIGNER Marg Horwell
CHOREOGRAPHER AND MOVEMENT DIRECTOR: Imogen Knight
LIGHTING DESIGNER: Paule Constable
COMPOSER: Yannis Philippakis
SOUND DESIGNER: Josh Anio Grigg
CASTING DIRECTOR: Jacob Sparrow
DRAMATURGS: Faye Merralls, Sasha Milavic Davies
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR: Joanna Pidcock
INTIMAX CO-ORDINATOR Kat Hardman - EK Intimacy
VOICE DIRECTOR. Cathleen McCarron
DIALECT COACHES: Louise Jones, Jenny Kent