New Monologue Series Tells Five Unique Women’s Stories

New Monologue Series Tells Five Unique Women’s Stories

“But oh how love would take me on a most perilous journey.”

A powerful and thought-provoking new one-woman theatre show will have its world premiere season at Auckland’s Basement Theatre from Tuesday 24 May, 2016.

Starring Natalie Medlock (Shortland Street, Funny Girls, Yeti, The Almighty Johnsons, Auckland Daze) and written, directed and self-funded byJodie Molloy (The Jaquie Brown Diaries, Play 2, Play 2.3), The Voice in My Head is a brand new work which confronts the topic of abortion through five unique and engaging monologues.

Five train rides will take the audience on a journey through a spectrum of comedy and tragedy, moving in space and time from Victorian era Europe to mid-Century Brooklyn, into the depths of WWII and from modern-day Melbourne to an imagined future in 2045. Each monologue reflects on the character’s perceptions and experience of relationships and motherhood and subsequently her morality. No character is the same and each piece is designed to illuminate different points of view not often explored.

Playwright Jodie Molloy developed the idea for The Voice in My Head while completing her Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Cambridge University in the UK. The show is a first in what Molloy hopes will be a long-standing, annual series of monologue work, each instalment featuring a different female issue.

“The inaugural piece features a narrative theme of ‘abortion’ and while this remains a contentious social issue, the work itself has no political statement to make other than encouraging dialogue. One in four New Zealand women have experienced abortion and yet it’s still not something we talk about naturally or easily.

“I’m exploring this common yet perniciously taboo experience from the perspectives of five very different characters, from past, present and future. I hope the audience - irrespective of personal dogma - can contemplate and respect the journey each character takes.”

Each monologue is framed by the use of stylised audio visual elements crafted by media guru Paul Casserly (Eating Media Lunch, Birdland,The Unauthorised History of New Zealand) and sound design by acclaimed musician Paul McLaney (Gramsci, Play On at the Pop-Up Globe). Veteran theatre and television actor/director Oliver Driver worked as dramaturg during the Basement Theatre’s Play Science! script development workshop for this new theatre piece.

What binds the work and the stories isn’t the abortion event itself but the universal experience of loss that each person faces either before or afterwards. And by following women from Victorian England through to the future, this compelling new work inevitably examines how far society has come in treating this subject matter not just socially, but politically and bio-ethically.

The Auckland premiere season of The Voice in My Head runs from Tuesday 24 May to Saturday 4 June, 2016 at The Basement Theatre. The play will then have its international premiere at the prestigious Corpus Playroom at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge, United Kingdom on June 10 and 11.

The Voice in My Head

Tuesday 24 May to Saturday 4 June, 2016, 6.30pm

Basement Theatre, Auckland

Tickets: $20 - $25, www.iticket.co.nz

ends

© Scoop Media