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 Thursday 27 Sept, 2007
One of the problems of having your website overrun with bloody Daleks is that you find your other stuff being pushed aside to make room for their beastly squawking and exterminations. A Dalek for Mayor! Honestly! Whose silly idea was THAT?
Anyway, just because Snowdon and his horrible pals are taking up the front page here doesn’t mean that the theatrical stuff has to stop, so we’ve set this part of the site aside to keep you informed on our latest project.
We’ve talked for a couple of years now about making it over to Norfolk Island to take part in their annual One Act Play festival. This year, we have thrown caution to the winds, booked our tickets and first thing Sunday morning we are on the Air NZ flight to Norfolk.
Oh yes.
You can see the Norfolk Theatre’s website here ; We are taking two plays to perform in the festival. They make up a set that we have called Silent Stages. The individual plays are Dark Night and Pack Out. We’ll tell you more about them as we go on. Both plays have been in the writing stage for a while and we’ve been rehearsing them for a couple of months.
The team going to Norfolk Island consists of Helix Daunting, (dashing young thespian currently sporting a revolting beard for his role), The Cat Herder and The Lord Of Misrule.
Linds Redding, (who has yet to develop an R&V title but it will happen soon I’m sure) will be joining us there on Wednesday as he has to go to Sydney first to judge in a TV awards.
At this stage we have NO IDEA of what to expect. What will the theatre be like? Will people actually come to see it? Will the competition be, as they say, stiff?
We have no way of telling. All we can do is jump right in and see what happens. And as we do, you, dear reader, will be carried along too, for we shall keep this page going as a sort of diary of our trip.
So what of our destination? Three of us have never been there, though we have heard lots from The Lord Of Misrule who went there ten years ago to fix up the local brewery. We’ll let him tell you what he knows;
Norfolk Island was first colonised by the prison ships of Australia’s first Fleet. Captain Cook had visited there and noted the value of the native pine trees for ships masts. (That turned out to be a fiasco)
The island became a prison to which re-offending convicts from Sydney could be sent. It was dreadful. The historical accounts of the behaviour of the succession of tyrannical military officers, sadistic martinets and barking mad civil servants that were chosen to run the place are truly unspeakable.
The colony was abandoned for a while, and then reopened. Finally, it was closed for good in 1855.
However, the following year the island was given to the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island, the descendants of the famous Bounty Mutiny. All one hundred and ninety four of them arrived there on June the 8th 1856. Some grew homesick for Pitcairn and returned there. The rest stayed and their descendants are there to this day, making up about half of the island’s population of two thousand. With a total area of just 34 square kilometers, Norfolk is about a third of the size of Waiheke!
There is much, much more to tell about this island, but we’ll get into all that as we go along.
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