Something Just Happened

Overview

Nine young people, high on life — maybe some drugs, definitely some alcohol — spill out on to the warm Sydney streets one summer night. They dance, they kiss, they party and then they suddenly stop. Someone commits a crime, and no one is sure of anything. Something just happened.

Something just happened is the Sydney University Dramatic Society’s major production for 2011. Ambitious young theatre-maker Harriet Gillies is leading a fresh cast of undergraduates/party animals to reach out and take audience members by the hand. This piece of devised multi-media theatre is designed to bend and twist the performer-audience relationship and bring them closer than ever before.

“Too often I see a piece of theatre and I feel like the show would be exactly the same whether the audience was there or not,” Gillies explains. “The point of this play is not the crime or the criminal. We want to remind the audience that we know they are there, we like them, and we want to play.”

This production began with a boozy night out. After developing their characters and relationships, the cast set out at dusk to put the party in to action. Now, they will recreate that blurry evening with an emphasis on immediacy and story-telling. Staged in Erskineville’s open-plan PACT Centre for Emerging Art (site of the recent Tiny Stadiums Festival), something just happened will unfold in a reconstructed student share house. The audience will move freely around the space as each actor delivers their version of recent wild events; performers and audience all share the same space and interact freely.