The Kin Collective and fortyfivedownstairs present the Melbourne premiere of
by Tim Winton
24 May – 18 June 2017
fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
SHRINE is set above the rocky headlands of the South Coast of Western Australia, between a forest and the sea. It’s wine country, and a privileged young man, Jack, has been killed driving friends back to Perth from his parents’ beach house.
Jack leaves in his wake a wreck of a father, a shadow of a mother, and the promise of a love affair that never quite happened.
A year later, Jack’s father Adam meets the small town girl, June, who shared a strange and life changing night with Jack hours before he died. Domestic heartbreak transcends into mythology in a landscape inhabited by ghosts.
After Rising Water and Signs of Life, SHRINE is the third play by Tim Winton about the iconic Western Australian landscape and its inhabitants.
Tim Winton’s awards are too numerous to list. He is the only author to have won the Miles Franklin Award four times and was shortlisted twice for the Man Booker Prize.
SHRINE director Marcel Dorney stated: “It‘s a story about ordinary people enduring something which is intensely private and incredibly hard to speak of, and SHRINE asks that the people who stage it, enact this, examine this, in public. And I think that’s really close to one of the oldest functions of drama.”
The cast for the Melbourne premiere season of this production are Chris Bunworth (Adam Mansfield), Alexandra Fowler (Mary Mansfield), Christian Taylor (Jack Mansfield), Tenielle Thompson (June Fenton), Keith Brockett (Ben), Nick Clark (Will). Direction by Marcel Dorney, set design by Leon Salom and lighting design by Kris Chainey.
