The Butler

Sorry, this event’s been and gone

When:

Wed 5 Dec ’07–Fri 14 Dec ’07

Where: The Loons, 16 Canterbury St, Lyttelton Show map

Website:

www.theloons.co.nz

The Butler is a funny, sexy, visually stunning, bitter satire, opening on 6 December for 10 performances at The Loons.

Written by Joe Bennett and directed by Mike Friend, The Butler is a circus show with a difference, first devised with CircoArts students in 2005 and re-created at The Loons with a hand picked cast of circus and theatre professionals.

Mike has worked in theatre for some 30 years, and is impressed at the commitment and talent of The Butler’s cast. “The energy and focus in the room during rehearsal has been amazing….This is one of the most talented groups I have worked with,” he said.

The Butler has tested The Loon’s versatility as a performance venue, demanding a complex, reinforced, rig for aerial work.

Inspired by the Peter Greenaway film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The Butler takes a hard look at the social manners and conventions of western culture, with often bizarre results.

The butler is the central character. He presides over a dinner party, standing apart from the action, having seen and heard it all before. His introductory and closing asides reverberate with literary allusions from the heritage of English-speaking civilisation – drawing on Eliot, Larkin, Shakespeare, Glover, MacNeice. Thus he sets the whole event within both a cultural milieu and a bleak universe.

In contrast to the butler’s gloom, the dinner party guests are all exuberance. Brittle as biscuits, they wind every social convention up to the pitch of parody and beyond. Every trivial event – the taking of hats and coats, the saying of grace, the polite chit-chat, the serving of hors- d’oeuvres, expands by natural progression into grotesque and outrageous circus antics.

The resulting action is chaotic and delightful, but underlain with an emptiness that the characters must defy. It’s like nothing seen before, but it is instantly recognisable.

The Butler runs from 6 to 14 December (preview 5 December) - bookings recommended. The show starts at 8pm and audience members are advised to arrive at least 15 minutes early - latecomers will not be admitted. There will be two performances on Saturday 8 December at 7pm and 10pm. No performance Monday 10 December.