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NIGHT LETTERS
$15.00
An Australian man, recently diagnosed with an incurable disease, leaves his home, his lover, their life, and travels through Europe in search of answers to unanswerable questions.
On his journey he encounters extraordinary people who share with him extraordinary tales. And then, reaching Venice, every night for twenty nights he writes a letter home, to his lover in Australia.
Through the totality of its various fables and narratives, its conflicts and dramas, as the man’s world becomes increasingly colour-filled with characters, struggling as he is struggling – with desire for intimacy and escape, for understanding and meaning, for any way to beguile time – Night Letters begins to soar across time and space, from the personal to the global.
At the pinnacle of his search for answers, standing there, in a foreign world groaning under the weight of human decay, his own body riddled with disease, this Australian man finds his mind suddenly wandering back – home to his love, home to a piece of pristine bushland on the outskirts of his city, home to another way of living.
Inspired by the novel by Robert Dessaix. {{PlayboxLogo}}
- magical realism
- 180
- 10 total
- 5 female identifying, 5 male identifying
- lgbtqia+
- 18+
- adult
- Australian Script Centre
- MONOLOGUES
- GALLERY
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- PRODUCTION HISTORY
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Peter
Male | 40s | 3 to 5 minutes
Starts on page 18
EXTRACT: Before you woke me I was deeply in an odd dream. I was holding the dog. And he was dead. “We will do this together, bury himâ€, you said. I carried him against me and he was warm. I went through a latched gate into a childhood garden that spread out before me larger and with a distance I didn’t remember. As I walked, the Edwardian order began to untangle and I entered a place of tall trees, rocks and shade. I thought you were lost. Sadness started like a second skin covering my body, drenching like a mountain mist.
Adult themesRobert
Male | 40s | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 24
EXTRACT: I’m an affront. If I go out there, they’ll sniff at me. Know I’m rotting. And the terrible thing is I’ve never felt more alive in my life. Every sound, every flicker of movement, every skerrick of meaning in every word, I hear it, I see it. When you touch me, I feel it. It’s like a cut. Like I’ve lost three layers of skin. And I don’t want you to touch me and I do want you to touch me. And I want your love and I don’t want you to love me. And it’s all unbearable.
Adult themesNOT STRICTLY TO THE LETTERS
ROBIN USHER, THE AGE, 5 APRIL 2004
Chris Drummond talks to The Age about adapting Robert Dessaix's novel, Night Letters, to the stage.
REVIEW: NIGHT LETTERS
HELEN THOMSON, THE AGE, 6 APRIL 2004
"Night Letters is an extraordinarily accomplished work of theatre: it is moving, engrossing, intriguing and very beautiful."
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