Eisteddfod interview unpublished.

The lunchtime foyer air at The Malthouse is thick with smoke from the new smoke machine the Sleeping Beauty techs are testing next door and the sun pours in through the ancient brewery windows throwing industry tough shafts of light onto the beautiful people below. Deliberately unaware of their artfully chosen locale, not quite in not quite out of the light, they debate re-blocking the last act, suck down creamy weak coffee and wave five dollar salad and goats cheese baguettes at each other.

Through this crowd that says “Look but don’t touch”, comes an unassuming and dishevelled guy who looks more like one of us than one of them. As much as Stuck Pig’s Squealing’s Chris Kohn has the career that we all wanted, national and international tours, fringe awards out the wazoo and a constant stream of critical successes to his name, ya just can’t hate the guy.

Right now he’s remounting his former Melbourne hit The Eisteddfod in the Malthouse Tower room, while assistant directing Criminology as part of his day job (artistic associate at Arena Theatre) also at the Malthouse.

The Eisteddfod, written with the inimitable Lally Katz, first premiered at The Storeroom, received a Green Room award for best independent production, toured to new York to play at Vallejo Ganter's PS122 and Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and has just come back from Sydney after playing Downstairs at Belvoir.

See what I mean?

Danny asked Chris how things went in Sydney.

“The show itself went really well but we had trouble getting audiences. We had three really good reviews that all came out the week we opened, the buzz was great, but by the second week we were playing to ten or fifteen people a night. Those were also two of the rainiest weekends ever in Sydney; everywhere was flooded and there were warning signs up saying don’t leave your house if you can avoid it.”

Which only proves Sydney audiences don’t know what’s good for them.

Danny was among the hip few who saw The Eisteddfod’s original Storeroom production back in 2004 and wondered how different the remount in The Tower was.

“It’s pretty much the same apart from the small things we wanted to tighten here and there. There were scenes that we thought weren’t pitched quite right and Jethro (Woodward) has been working on the sound design. It’s mostly just fine tuning, we weren’t trying to re-invent the wheel. When we took the show to New York we didn’t have the full set and we’d made it fifteen minutes shorter to make it neater dramaturgically. This time we looked back over the DVD of the original and decided we liked the slight messiness of the dramaturgy, so we’ve taken it back to the original.”

The set Chris is talking about is one of the highlights of the play, a self contained unit that operates using all the clever theatrical devices Stuck Pigs are known for.

“The set was developed along side the play. We had it before we even had the completed script.”

One of the obvious changes is the replacement of Jessamy Dyer with Kath Tonkin. Danny can never resist the gossip and had to ask what happened?

“Jess is studying full time to become a speech pathologist and this is her final year, so there was no way she could do it. We looked around and were lucky enough to get Kath on board.” So now everybody knows and it’s no where near as gossipy as we’d all secretly wondered.

So, Chris, why should a jaded Melbourne Theatre goer come see The Eisteddfod at The Tower?

“A lot of people haven’t seen it really. The last time it was here was three years ago and The Storeroom only holds something like sixty, so the season here gives us a chance to reach a whole new audience. Also you get a very different audience to The Tower than you do to The Storeroom or a basement in North Melbourne. It’s a really intense, sad, funny little piece. It all happens so quickly it’s like a roller coaster. It plays with expectations of the audience. I’ve never gotten bored of it myself and I’ve seen it hundreds of times. I dunno. People might hate it.”

Danny doubts that. He’s sure, even if the rains start washing up oil tankers on Williamstown beach, Melbourne audiences are a damn site tougher than Sydney, and won’t let global warming make them miss out on what is a damn fine production.

Danny Episode