Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

What happens if you mix a prestigious Premier’s Drama Award-winning play with one of the most infamous drama subjects of all time? The world premiere of Queensland Theatre Company’s Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a play by local playwright, Daniel Evans, at the Bille Brown Studio's The Greenhouse.

With Sophocles’ 2,500 year-old story about Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother at its core, Evans’s work ponders what would happen if Oedipus’s exploits happened in your neighbourhood today and were judged by that unforgiving modern machine known as social media. The result is a dark and savagely funny work where we’re told to “think Kath and Kim meets Games of Thrones where Australian suburbia crashes head-first into a world of violent mythology.”

The ancient Greek tragedy is transplanted to the outer suburbs where you might run into Jocasta shopping at the local supermarket, and where the main characters are the bystanders, a contemporary chorus of young people giving their own accounts of Oedipus’s downfall

Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is directed by acclaimed Queensland actor and director, Jason Klarwein (who played Macbeth last year) and boasts four excellent young actors – Ellen Bailey (Macbeth, 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche), Emily Burton (A Tribute of Sorts), Joe Klocek (This Hollow Crown) and Toby Martin in his QTC debut.

The play won its award unanimously from a field of 121 entries, with QTC’s Artistic Director, Wesley Enoch, describing it as “speaking to a new audience with a young and vital voice… it’s exciting, heartbreaking, thrilling and uncomfortable – everything great theatre should be.” 

Says playwright Evans (The China Incident, I Want To Know What Love Is, and I Should Have Drunk More Champagne), “This is a work about how we respond to tragedy in 2015. How we swallow it, how we sell it, how we ignore it, how we inflict it (often on the ones we love most), how we celebrate it, and how we move on (…or, scroll on, perhaps to a cat meme).”

Good to know: very high coarse language, adult themes, high level of violence, strobe lighting, smoke and haze.

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Warning: Very high coarse language, adult themes, drug use, high violence, strobe lighting, smoke and haze.

By Vicki Englund