Concrete Playground

Keen for some new, independent, contemporary, edgy, British and/or devised theatre perpetrated by young people? ABitOnTheSide Productions, an emerging theatre company formed by Sydney-based cool-kids Carolyn Eccles and Felicity Nicol, are launching themselves right now at the Pact Theatre in Erskineville with a double bill of Sarah Kane's Crave along with a new devised work based on the story of Lot's Wife.

Crave is an ambitious work which strives to find hope in the darkest of corners. By taking our world and turning up the volume, Kane creates a cacophony which fearlessly shines light on all that is glorious and torturous about being human. Through the haze of this polluted world, Kane ultimately leaves us with a message of hope and comfort, for what we seek is closer than we think. At least half the theatre-inclined young people in Sydney are quietly yet desperately nursing secret drama-crushes on anything to do with Sarah Kane, even in spite of (and perhaps because of) her ability to paint the bleakest of worlds and leave you so depressed you'll want to tear your own eyes out like that guy in Event Horizon.

And if a shot of hardcore + edgy is what you're after with your theatre, it doesn't get more hardcore than the Bible. I'm talking the Old Testament, not its more recent, nancy, love-preaching cousin. Watch Carolyn Eccles ride rough-shod all over it as she uses the story of Lot's Wife (Remember? The angels told her not to look back? But then she looked back and got turned into a pillar of salt?) to examine the very human experience of remaining trapped in the past. Eccles is keen to develop the tradition of devised theatre within the Sydney theatre scene, believing that the process of improvising and then refining leads to the creation of surprising images and ideas.