POV

★★★★ “The latest mash-up of theatre and film from re:group performance collective is a hilarious and profound family portrait.”

ABOUT THE SHOW

A kid with a camera. Two adults. No rehearsal.

Enter the mind’s eye of Bub, an 11-year-old girl who’s obsessed with documentary filmmaking. In the aftermath of a family breakdown, she turns to dramatised re-enactments to try to figure out what happened.

In each performance of this latest docudrama experiment from re:group performance collective, two new, unrehearsed adult actors join a young performer onstage. As she guides them to re-enact her personal experiences, these brave (or foolhardy) performers discover the story on the night, negotiating difficult questions about parenting, agency, mental health and how we speak to children.

Bub wants to get to the bottom of her mum’s erratic behaviour. Can these two adults answer the tough questions of a child?

After indie flick (Coil) and sci-fi (UFO), this is re:group's playful, urgent and live version of a documentary, blurring the lines between personal history, performance and human connection.

POV begins long before the audience arrives on the night of performance. In advance of the season, the most exciting actors the host location has to offer are contacted and cast. They know almost nothing of what the show will be. Only that they must have a Working With Children’s Check and arrive at the theatre an hour beforehand. 48 hours before their slot, they receive an email asking them to do some simple preparation, ACTOR 1 must prepare a Werner Herzog impersonation, while ACTOR 2 must do general research into Bipolar Affective Disorder. On the night, they are met in the foyer by the chaperone and their experience begins.

The audience enters the space to see these two unprepared actors. The child performer - Bub - enters and gets the actors ‘into character’ as Bub’s parents. Bub explains she is making a documentary. She leads the actors in repeating key phrases and details in order to reenact scenes from her family life. The narrative is initially playful, making great use of the audience’s awareness that these two adult actors are unrehearsed. The actors are directed to read from printed scripts, and screens around the space, as Bub films them with her camera to create the reenactments she needs for her documentary.

REVIEWS

“POV is an extraordinarily inventive piece, one sure to send audiences out into the night with minds burning with questions about the theatrical form, and with hearts relit with compassion for those who suffer.”
- Theatre Red

“The irreplaceability of the show is perhaps its most remarkable aspect. The intimate audience is witness to an ephemeral display of emotion, invention and dialogue.” 
- Honi Soit

★★★★ “Every little thing about POV feels fresh. From the topic it’s tackling, the way it chooses to handle it and the unrehearsed nature of two thirds of the performances. There is the thrill of the unexpected at every turn.”
- Cultural Binge

Participant / Audience Feedback

“LOVED that show last night. How beautiful. Crazy to be IN a show and also be an audience member at the same time. I was really moved by it and found it very profound”
- Ewen Leslie

“Beautifully constructed work…My wife and daughters came along, and they loved it. Moved and engaged in equal measure. I think it’s a great example of theatre as ultimately an act of empathy…brilliant being involved. It should get another season at a festival, I reckon”
- Steve Rogers

“A lovely coalescence of good writing, tech savvy and dramaturgical precision…we left, buoyed by the creativity but gloomy about the ending, which, in the end, I think one should be”
- Keith Gallasch

ABOUT THE COMPANY

re:group performance collective is an independent theatre company comprised of dear friends who work together to make live cinema and contemporary performance. We are Mark Rogers, Solomon Thomas, Malcolm Whittaker, Steve Wilson-Alexander and Carly Young. We are based between Sydney and Wollongong. Our growing body of work includes:

• 'Coil' (2022-2023), which draws on our collective memories to pay tribute to the glory days of the video store and commemorate the communities we made within them by using our own video-DJing technology to shoot an entire movie live on stage with one actor performing all the parts,
• ‘POV’ (2024-2026), wherein a child performer makes a documentary film on stage with unrehearsed adult actors performing reenactments under her direction to create each show, and
• 'AUTO-TUNE' (2024-2026), our rock opera about a man in a wolf-mask with strange superpowers.

These works and others have been made and presented extensively across the country, in both regional and metropolitan contexts, as well as in cahoots with major organisations and festivals, including Sydney Opera House, Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir St Theatre, Griffin Theatre Company and RISING Festival.

Production Image credit: Taylah Chapman. 
Banner Image credit: Lucy Parakhina