DISNEY OFF ICE

From Writer Oliver Gough: The idea for this play came from a late-night conversation that lurched from joking to speculation to borderline conspiracy-mongering. I don’t think we genuinely thought a thawed Walt Disney might be unleashed upon the future and wreak havoc, but the concept was too strange not to keep playing with.

 

 

What has ultimately emerged from a playwriting course at the University of Queensland and a long-standing collaboration with Lachlan Driscoll and Observatory Theatre isn’t necessarily a play about the man Walt Disney, or a serious consideration of cryonics, but what I hope is a weird and surprising satire of regressive pop culture and nostalgia.

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As we speed further into a future shaped by nonsensical profit drive and recycled, low risk cultural output, I wanted to present a world where the bizarre and savage trends of late capitalism are taken to their current endpoints. Would a strange miracle like working cryonics quickly become a cut-throat industry? Is our system pushing art towards safe and individualised entertainment? Would Walt Disney emerge in the future to an eagerly waiting, possibly violent cult ready to enact his vision on the world? These are questions that I hope the play will make you feel are interesting. The last one does seem a bit wild, granted, but so have the headlines on politics, media and the environment for quite some time.

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Maybe we’re already living in the absurd future, and you’re about to dive into a piece of realism. Whatever your stance on this, or Walt Disney and his current temperature, I hope you enjoy the play.

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From Director Lachlan Driscoll: This is a play that I have been developing with Oliver through the Telescope New Writing Program. When he first pitched the idea for the show, I jumped on it straight away. I thought to myself, I have never really heard anything like it before, let alone seen anything like it on stage.

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What gripped me about the concept was how it took a well-known public figure, one who is loaded culturally and politically (all of the ‘ally’s really) and exploded a myriad of ideas, questions and debates about the future we are heading into as a society. It truly has been fascinating to explore. Theatre doesn’t get much more thought-provoking or unnervingly relevant as this, I think.

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As you will discover, the play is about many things, but what really stood out to myself, the cast and creatives were the references to the cost of living crisis. In this late capitalist world of the play where everything can be commodified (even your own body), the gap between the wealthy and the working classes is exponentially larger. Those who are influential and successful can afford to freeze their body, be revived when they wish, and presumably live forever, while those who have not been given the opportunity are left behind. As Oliver puts it, “The cycle continues”. Of course, the parallels with our world  are not hard to place. The play presents to us a festering and disturbing system, a frightening vision of what it might mean to exist in such a twisted, warped world.

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Thanks to Oliver for our work over several years and writing this ripper story. Thanks to everyone who encounted the play in development and for their feedback and laughter. I’m very proud of the journey it has been on.