THE END OF WINTER
This is a new work for the stage that speaks to our current climate crisis. Written in the wake of the devastation of the 2019 bushfires it asks: What’s happening to winter? In hot, bushfire-prone Australia, our winters are becoming warmer and shorter. Will climate change eventually erase the season, leaving it to exist only in paintings, fairy tales, and historical accounts? The End of Winter is about loss and resilience. From the award-winning team who created Good With Maps comes another sinewy, poetic, and thought-provoking piece.
Writer // Noëlle Janaczewska
Director // Kate Gaul
Assistant Director Hayden Tonazzi
Production Designer // Soham Apte
Lighting Designer // Becky Russell
Composer // Nate Edmondson
Co-Composer and Sound Designer // Kaitlyn Crocker
Production Stage Manager // Fiona Harding
Publicist //Victor Kalka
Cast // Jane Phegan
Photography // Clare Hawley
ARTS HUB ★★★★
“The success of the work depends in a large part on Phegan’s performance, which consistently achieves the right proportion of whimsy and melancholy to suit the mood. Her voice, taken by itself, would give Janaczewska’s words an extra dimension but combined with the set, lighting, and music, it becomes something richer and deeper.”
STAGE NOISE ★★★★
“The Stables stage is made darkly cavernous with a model house – ski lodge, perhaps, or an inundated home – set in the middle of a gleaming, reflective surface that could be water or infinity.”
REVIEWS BY JUDITH
“It’s a bravura performance from Jane Phegan…a complex final image and the ghostly sway of the curtains on occasion, leads to a mimetic and stringed conclusion which creeps those icy fingers towards the heart. Too much to take away from The End of Winter, too much for one viewing yet not a play for reading. As crisp and clear as a frosty night, it is a theatrical experience of bonewarming depth and of hope.”
AUDREY JOURNAL
“Exquisitely written … directed with light touch by Kate Gaul, it is one woman’s cerebral, deeply personal, eco-poetic odyssey, in which she travels through the realms of childhood memories and forgotten histories, science and art, folklore and myth to present a paean to winter, sung in the key of anticipatory loss.”
