Menagerie – Daniel Schlusser Ensemble

Overview

The Daniel Schlusser Ensemble, headed by the 2012 George Fairfax Memorial Fellow, Daniel Schlusser himself, have a way of exploding classics into tiny pieces and then placing them back together in a hyper-realist format for a modern audience.

What does that mean exactly? Usually it means lots of sex, violence and strobe lights used to create a potent, bold and contemporary re-telling of a story that often seems familiar to us all.

In Menagerie, this story surrounds a family living in squalor, each harbouring personal desires that threaten to escape through the cracks in their inner worlds to permeate their collective exterior. It’s based on the life of Tennessee Williams, one of theatre’s greats, and will kick off the Melbourne Theatre Company’s NEON 2013 season. In it's first year, NEON invites Melbourne’s top five independent theatre companies into the renowned MTC space, allowing them complete curatorial control; something that sounds like a pretty wild ride in the hands of Daniel Schlusser.

Image via Sarah Walker Photography