Three women, exiled from their homelands, find their lives are woven together across continents and decades…
Shortlisted for the 2013 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award, Katherine Lyall-‐Watson’s play Motherland heads for the stage with emerging director, Caroline Dunphy, and a stellar cast including Barbara Lowing, Kerith Atkinson, Rebecca Riggs, Peter Cossar and Daniel Murphy. Metro Arts’ Season of the Independents presents this epic story, which spans the twentieth century, World War and the Russian Revolution.
Motherland is a story about three remarkable real women: there’s Nell Tritton, of Brisbane’s Tritton furniture emporium, who married Russia’s deposed Prime Minister, Alexander Kerensky, and helped him escape from the Nazis in the Second World War; there’s Nina Berberova, a Russian writer living in exile in Paris with her lover, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich; and there’s Alyona, a Russian museum curator stuck in Brisbane at the height of the Fitzgerald Inquiry when her Australian husband’s business goes bankrupt.
The three stories are woven together into a rich tapestry that plays with history, as it reveals the price of betrayal and the lure of forbidden love.
After four years of research and writing, Katherine Lyall-‐Watson is still just as intrigued by the real people at the heart of the play as she was on the day she started writing. “The best and worst thing about researching history,” she says, “is that it’s never finished. It’s been four years and Nell is still an enigma. Her family helped shape Brisbane and her life was extraordinary, but history has forgotten her. Writing Motherland has been a way to bring her back to life and to re-‐imagine some of the moments that defined her.”
Timeframes and locations collide and interweave as the actors play multiple characters in this fast-‐paced and passionate 90-‐minute theatrical depiction of true stories. Caroline Dunphy’s direction brings rigour and fierceness to this contemporary staging.
Metro Arts is proud to present the premiere production of Motherland. Liz Burcham, CEO of Metro Arts says, “Katherine Lyall-‐Watson is an extremely proficient playwright and we are honoured to co-‐present the very first production of her writings. Her plays need to be seen.” Book here.
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