Based on the novel Au Bonheur Des Dames by Emile Zola.
Presented by Parnassus Den. The Old Fitzroy Theatre. Sydney - 2005
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Octave Mouret Christopher Tomkinson
Denise Baudu Isabella Dunwil Pépé Baudu Kit Brookman Henriette Desforges Fiona Press Clara Marguerite Aurélie Rebecca Turner Madeleine de Vallagnosc Kirrily White Paul Baudu Jonathan Hardy and Jonathan Elsom |
Director Christopher Hurrell
Producers Sam Hawker & Drayton Morley Production Designer Tim Kobin Lighting Designer Stephen Hawker Music Composer Sarah de Jong Graphic Designer Cameron Baird Assistant Director / Choreographer Velalien Special Effects Irma Gustaityte Musical Director & Pianist Paul Geddes Violinist Patrick Wong Make-up Artist Velalien Design Assistants Carry Bradley & Shelley Clarke Stage Manager Cherie Stewart Publicist Kar Chalmers Springtime Salon Co-ordinator Alice Gage |
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Director's Notes
A black comedy about the irresistible nature of capitalism.
Justin Fleming is one of the most strikingly original and poetically inventive of modern Australian playwrights. The Department Store is his free adaptation of Emile Zola’s Au Bonhuer Des Dames. In his hands, this classic of 19th century French Literature is transformed into a modern theatrical parable of globalization and corporatisation and their impact on individuals and sense of community.
Octave Mouret is a retail entrepreneur with the golden touch. His charm, skill and insight are irresistible. He is apparently the perfect coporate conquerer – making money and bedding women with equal speed and ease. His rich rewards flow from his unerring ability to see the needs and desires of those around him even before they are aware of them themselves.
His target – the Baudu family – are small-time shopkeepers and their struggle is the emotional centre of the drama.
Mouret and his coporate behemoth are symbolically interchangeable – both are irresistible through their limitless capacity to grant the desires of those who come into contact with them, but both must be humanized. Thus the play is a parable for a powerfully modern paradox: the dilemma faced by both individuals and of modern society as a whole, in the wake of globalization: how to respond to the seduction of consumerism and limitless availability while preserving a human dimension in work and life.
But in Denise Baudu, Mouret has unexpectedly met his match. Her own capacity for human insight is prodigious – though untrained, and untainted by greed. He finds in her the purified version of himself and so falls in love. Denise is seduced as much by her desire to humanise the operation of the company as by the irresistible Mouret himself. First she goes to work for her Uncle’s apparent enemy, then she moves into management, and ultimately she marries Mouret.
THE PARADISE: Mouret’s eponymous department store presents a symbol for the familiar dilemma of de-regulation and globalization.
This story focuses on the human interaction. In this wicked, seductive, greedy world, there seem to be no bad people – just many people who commit bad, foolish, ungenerous and manipulative acts. We understand and sympathise with them all – thus placing us in the crux of a moral dilemma – and dominating everything is the sense that actually none of these people, including Mouret, are in control of their destiny. Rather a system – implacable because it responds so perfectly to human desire – is gradually encroaching on the humanity of all present. Mouret’s expansions are only possible because a faceless figure above him is planning to shatter one of the world’s great cities with a massive boulevard. A teeming mass of humanity must be rent asunder in the name of ‘progress’.
The original nineteenth century setting is ostensibly preserved in the script though re-imagined with a contemporary sensibility. The era is useful to us for the elegant absurdities it provides but moreover because the story is a fable of the birth of consumerism – born in the slipstream of the industrial revolution, to later flourish and run rampant in the twentieth century.
We created an imagined nineteenth century Paris that is in reality a mirror for 21st century Sydney. This facilitated the unique linguistic experiment that Justin Fleming undertakes. He developed a verbal style for the piece that offers a pastische of 19th century epigrammatic dialogue and romantic melodrama – combined with a 20th century absurdist/expressionistic dramaturgy, and refined with a sensibility that is international in outlook but Australian in its irreverent flavour.
The production responded to this style in order draw out the work’s central paradoxes. A world both seductive and threatening, facile and passionate, rich and empty, merry and dark.
Audaciously those paradoxes are not merely the subject of the drama but also its own nature as a piece or writing. It tempts you to be seduced by a rich and fantastical melodrama that ends in the traditional marriage, just as the department store tempts you to engorge yourself on emptiness. I developed a choreographed physical style, live music, and even deployed stage illusion – to seduce the audience then surprise them, drawing them into the fairy tale then returning them with a crash to a modern reality and consequence.
It is key to this approach that the staging engaged the audience’s imagination and invites them to draw the direct parallels between the world of the story and our own, the goal being to empower the audience with a newly honed vigilance against the seductions of luxury and gratification.
Justin Fleming is one of the most strikingly original and poetically inventive of modern Australian playwrights. The Department Store is his free adaptation of Emile Zola’s Au Bonhuer Des Dames. In his hands, this classic of 19th century French Literature is transformed into a modern theatrical parable of globalization and corporatisation and their impact on individuals and sense of community.
Octave Mouret is a retail entrepreneur with the golden touch. His charm, skill and insight are irresistible. He is apparently the perfect coporate conquerer – making money and bedding women with equal speed and ease. His rich rewards flow from his unerring ability to see the needs and desires of those around him even before they are aware of them themselves.
His target – the Baudu family – are small-time shopkeepers and their struggle is the emotional centre of the drama.
Mouret and his coporate behemoth are symbolically interchangeable – both are irresistible through their limitless capacity to grant the desires of those who come into contact with them, but both must be humanized. Thus the play is a parable for a powerfully modern paradox: the dilemma faced by both individuals and of modern society as a whole, in the wake of globalization: how to respond to the seduction of consumerism and limitless availability while preserving a human dimension in work and life.
But in Denise Baudu, Mouret has unexpectedly met his match. Her own capacity for human insight is prodigious – though untrained, and untainted by greed. He finds in her the purified version of himself and so falls in love. Denise is seduced as much by her desire to humanise the operation of the company as by the irresistible Mouret himself. First she goes to work for her Uncle’s apparent enemy, then she moves into management, and ultimately she marries Mouret.
THE PARADISE: Mouret’s eponymous department store presents a symbol for the familiar dilemma of de-regulation and globalization.
This story focuses on the human interaction. In this wicked, seductive, greedy world, there seem to be no bad people – just many people who commit bad, foolish, ungenerous and manipulative acts. We understand and sympathise with them all – thus placing us in the crux of a moral dilemma – and dominating everything is the sense that actually none of these people, including Mouret, are in control of their destiny. Rather a system – implacable because it responds so perfectly to human desire – is gradually encroaching on the humanity of all present. Mouret’s expansions are only possible because a faceless figure above him is planning to shatter one of the world’s great cities with a massive boulevard. A teeming mass of humanity must be rent asunder in the name of ‘progress’.
The original nineteenth century setting is ostensibly preserved in the script though re-imagined with a contemporary sensibility. The era is useful to us for the elegant absurdities it provides but moreover because the story is a fable of the birth of consumerism – born in the slipstream of the industrial revolution, to later flourish and run rampant in the twentieth century.
We created an imagined nineteenth century Paris that is in reality a mirror for 21st century Sydney. This facilitated the unique linguistic experiment that Justin Fleming undertakes. He developed a verbal style for the piece that offers a pastische of 19th century epigrammatic dialogue and romantic melodrama – combined with a 20th century absurdist/expressionistic dramaturgy, and refined with a sensibility that is international in outlook but Australian in its irreverent flavour.
The production responded to this style in order draw out the work’s central paradoxes. A world both seductive and threatening, facile and passionate, rich and empty, merry and dark.
Audaciously those paradoxes are not merely the subject of the drama but also its own nature as a piece or writing. It tempts you to be seduced by a rich and fantastical melodrama that ends in the traditional marriage, just as the department store tempts you to engorge yourself on emptiness. I developed a choreographed physical style, live music, and even deployed stage illusion – to seduce the audience then surprise them, drawing them into the fairy tale then returning them with a crash to a modern reality and consequence.
It is key to this approach that the staging engaged the audience’s imagination and invites them to draw the direct parallels between the world of the story and our own, the goal being to empower the audience with a newly honed vigilance against the seductions of luxury and gratification.
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Justin Fleming's The Department Store exploits many conventions and excesses of melodrama to create a delightfully theatrical journey through Au Bonheur des Dames, by the French novelist Emile Zola.
It is highly ambitious to explore the contemporary politics of workplace relations and corporate greed through the appropriation of a flamboyant theatrical style from yesteryear. At times the fluency, wit and density of sexual allusion in the language recall the social satire of the Restoration era. That in the playing some scenes elicit spontaneous applause is a tribute to Fleming's vision and the excellent production.
Sydney Morning Herald
A new play from Justin Fleming is always welcome.
Fleming's script, a free adaptation of Emile Zola's novel Au Bonheur Des Dames, is pure froth: entertaining… coyly erotic, positively orgasmic.
Sun Herald
It's one of the most entertaining, eccentric and unusual works to be seen at the Old Fitzroy Theatre or anywhere else in Sydney, for that matter.
With melodrama, dastardly events, a spry script and much burlesque and tragedy, The Department Store is somehow effervescently French and deliciously silly, as well as politically apposite and weirdly relevant.
Fleming's script is playful and witty… Intransigent honour versus implacable pride is an underlying theme in a tango of commerce and comedy.
Sunday Telegraph
Fleming raises the audience’s awareness of attitudes that we seem to take for granted.
Winner of the inaugural Mitch Matthews award, The Department Store is an amusing look at Consumerism Consuming the Consumer. There is tragedy, of course, and redemption, and a well-deserved downfall or two - an entertaining look at retail therapy
Broadway Australia
- A comedic treat.
Vibrwire
An inventive and colourful melodrama…
Fleming’s script creates a sparkling narrative and captures the florid excesses of the women lured into the retail clutches of Paradise. Yet more evidence of the theatrical invention now apparent in Sydney’s independent theatre sector
The Sydney Star Observer
It is highly ambitious to explore the contemporary politics of workplace relations and corporate greed through the appropriation of a flamboyant theatrical style from yesteryear. At times the fluency, wit and density of sexual allusion in the language recall the social satire of the Restoration era. That in the playing some scenes elicit spontaneous applause is a tribute to Fleming's vision and the excellent production.
Sydney Morning Herald
A new play from Justin Fleming is always welcome.
Fleming's script, a free adaptation of Emile Zola's novel Au Bonheur Des Dames, is pure froth: entertaining… coyly erotic, positively orgasmic.
Sun Herald
It's one of the most entertaining, eccentric and unusual works to be seen at the Old Fitzroy Theatre or anywhere else in Sydney, for that matter.
With melodrama, dastardly events, a spry script and much burlesque and tragedy, The Department Store is somehow effervescently French and deliciously silly, as well as politically apposite and weirdly relevant.
Fleming's script is playful and witty… Intransigent honour versus implacable pride is an underlying theme in a tango of commerce and comedy.
Sunday Telegraph
Fleming raises the audience’s awareness of attitudes that we seem to take for granted.
Winner of the inaugural Mitch Matthews award, The Department Store is an amusing look at Consumerism Consuming the Consumer. There is tragedy, of course, and redemption, and a well-deserved downfall or two - an entertaining look at retail therapy
Broadway Australia
- A comedic treat.
Vibrwire
An inventive and colourful melodrama…
Fleming’s script creates a sparkling narrative and captures the florid excesses of the women lured into the retail clutches of Paradise. Yet more evidence of the theatrical invention now apparent in Sydney’s independent theatre sector
The Sydney Star Observer
Sydney Morning Herald - November 2, 2005 – Mark Hopkins
The Department Store
Exploration of workplace relations or old-fashioned rags-to-riches melodrama?
Old Fitzroy Hotel Theatre, October 28 until November 19
The kiss that seals a marriage proposal concludes a new Australian play with all the unashamed sentiment of classic melodrama. Justin Fleming's The Department Store exploits many conventions and excesses of melodrama to create a delightfully theatrical journey through Au Bonheur des Dames, by the French novelist Emile Zola.
While the narrative is built around the arrival of the first major department store in Paris, the action is driven by conflict between the values and principles of an impoverished shop assistant, Denise Baudu (Isabella Dunwill), and the mega-store entrepreneur Octave Mouret (Christopher Tomkinson). A paradise of commercial enticement on a perverse scale weighed against individual integrity.
That love triumphs over such irreconcilable division is curiously unsatisfactory on an intellectual level and yet disturbingly satisfying within the emotional context on stage. Fleming is playing provocatively with the appeal of a story of one person's happiness and a contradictory concern for the misery of the multitude hurt along the way.
It is highly ambitious to explore the contemporary politics of workplace relations and corporate greed through the appropriation of a flamboyant theatrical style from yesteryear. At times the fluency, wit and density of sexual allusion in the language recall the social satire of the Restoration era. That in the playing some scenes elicit spontaneous applause is a tribute to Fleming's vision and the excellent production.
The director, Christopher Hurrell, has ensured every resource is put to highly creative use. The text's theatricality is celebrated with inventive design (Timothy Kobin), original composition (Sarah de Jong), live musicians (Paul Geddes and Patrick Wong), witty choreography (Velalien) and performances that balance presentational panache and emotional sincerity. Jonathan Hardy establishes a command of stylised language and character that the entire cast never lets slip. Tomkinson and Dunwill are charismatic throughout, captivatingly supported by Fiona Press, Rebecca Turner and Kirrily White, all precise in their comic exaggeration.
While by play's end a feeling lingers that a novel's scope has not yet coalesced into convincing dramaturgical unity, even the resulting ambiguity of thematic emphasis is stimulating. The Department Store received the inaugural Mitch Mathews Award and sets an impressive precedent as the first production of Parnassus Den.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/the-department-store/2005/11/01/1130823204357.html
The Department Store
Exploration of workplace relations or old-fashioned rags-to-riches melodrama?
Old Fitzroy Hotel Theatre, October 28 until November 19
The kiss that seals a marriage proposal concludes a new Australian play with all the unashamed sentiment of classic melodrama. Justin Fleming's The Department Store exploits many conventions and excesses of melodrama to create a delightfully theatrical journey through Au Bonheur des Dames, by the French novelist Emile Zola.
While the narrative is built around the arrival of the first major department store in Paris, the action is driven by conflict between the values and principles of an impoverished shop assistant, Denise Baudu (Isabella Dunwill), and the mega-store entrepreneur Octave Mouret (Christopher Tomkinson). A paradise of commercial enticement on a perverse scale weighed against individual integrity.
That love triumphs over such irreconcilable division is curiously unsatisfactory on an intellectual level and yet disturbingly satisfying within the emotional context on stage. Fleming is playing provocatively with the appeal of a story of one person's happiness and a contradictory concern for the misery of the multitude hurt along the way.
It is highly ambitious to explore the contemporary politics of workplace relations and corporate greed through the appropriation of a flamboyant theatrical style from yesteryear. At times the fluency, wit and density of sexual allusion in the language recall the social satire of the Restoration era. That in the playing some scenes elicit spontaneous applause is a tribute to Fleming's vision and the excellent production.
The director, Christopher Hurrell, has ensured every resource is put to highly creative use. The text's theatricality is celebrated with inventive design (Timothy Kobin), original composition (Sarah de Jong), live musicians (Paul Geddes and Patrick Wong), witty choreography (Velalien) and performances that balance presentational panache and emotional sincerity. Jonathan Hardy establishes a command of stylised language and character that the entire cast never lets slip. Tomkinson and Dunwill are charismatic throughout, captivatingly supported by Fiona Press, Rebecca Turner and Kirrily White, all precise in their comic exaggeration.
While by play's end a feeling lingers that a novel's scope has not yet coalesced into convincing dramaturgical unity, even the resulting ambiguity of thematic emphasis is stimulating. The Department Store received the inaugural Mitch Mathews Award and sets an impressive precedent as the first production of Parnassus Den.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/the-department-store/2005/11/01/1130823204357.html
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