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Port Macquarie Theatre Festival
In July 1990, Wyong Drama Group sent two plays to the Port Macquarie Theatre Festival held at the Players Theatre in Port Macquarie. They were both written by Peter Kocan, along completely different lines. The first serious play was directed by Bonnie Bryant, and called Home Fires Burning. It was performed at Port Macquarie at about 10am on Sunday 29th July 1990. This play is about an Australian family in the 1920s who are visited by some outsiders allegedly involved in what would today be termed terrorist activities in the bush "out the back of Wisemans Ferry". The play is incredibly moving, and Bonnie would end up directing it a number of times, in April 1983, August 1993 and most recently in 2004 for the Encore TheatreFest. (On that page we actually have a micro-video of the entire performance). Such was the quality of Peter's work, the ABC bought the play to be adapted as a radio play. It won the Best Actor Award for Adrian Adam as Tossa. The other play was a lot more on the lighter side, entitled The Walking Stick of the Desert and directed by Maxine Morris. It was performed at about 3:45pm on Saturday 28 July 1990. For his performance, Peter Kocan won the Best Supporting Actor award. The two plays were presented at Wyong as a specially catered night (by the Jolly Pelican Seafood Restaurant, incidentally) and with pieces at the piano by Bill Strain. The programme for this presentation is online, as well as the full programme for the actual festival at Port Macquarie, hosted by Port Macquarie Players. An interesting piece of trivia about this preview night was that "The Jolly Pelican" seafood restaurant had an order in for the catering which was pre-paid. Someone got to hear about this, apparently, and fancied obtaining a large quantity of fish and chips. They went into "The Jolly Pelican" that night, knew enough about the order to convince "The Jolly Pelican" they were from Wyong Drama Group picking up the fish, and made off with the entire order! When the real people came to pick up the order, they were told it had already been picked up. I'm not sure exactly what happened then, but I'm sure the problem of catering would have been solved in some way!! Port Macquarie Preview Night Programme (pdf file, 337,670 bytes) Port Macquarie Players Festival Programme (1990) (pdf file, 705,469 bytes) Bush Bash
The Walking Stick of the Desert was also used as the one-act play for our 1990 Bush Bash (the third one). The Bush Bash was held on 14th July 1990 (Bastille Day) with the band being The Lantana Brothers. 1990 Bush Bash Poster (pdf file, 174,358 bytes)
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