THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO BONDI FESTIVAL’S POSTPONED OPENING. FOR MORE INFO, PLEASE SEE OUR LATEST NEWS.

“Ban Shakespeare is unlike any other company making work in Sydney right now – subversive, irreverent, challenging and important.” – Rachel Chant, Festival Director 

World Premiere

Cool Pool Party 2: Graduation – a sequel to the (mostly) unseen Cool Pool Party (Philip Parsons Award, Belvoir 2020).

Written by Antoinette Barbouttis, this ‘comedy’ centres around the death of 17-year-old school captain, all-round legend and swimming champ, Cameron Goddard. In the thick of the HSC, hormones and Drama exams go awry. When the Puberty Realm opens up on the night of the Year 12 Formal, humanity is set for ruin.

Or is this ridiculous narrative just an artifice? Are the actors searching for the comfort of youth through theatre or just filling the void of what it is to… graduate?

Cool Pool Party 2: Graduation explores the desperate landscape that clouds the lives of drama school graduates. The “out-of-work” actors’ thirst for professionalism sees 10 NIDA 2020-cohort-grads play a bunch of puerile, hormonal teens on the brink of graduating Year 12. But as the narrative unravels, so does the show’s framework.

“And then, there is a moment of grace: that unforgettable instant in a work of theatre that takes your chest and cracks it open, where the feelings rush out and the light streams in.” The Guardian

“The work is unnerving in its modernity. Some will find it unbearably awkward, and others will find it a gleeful delight, but the show insists that everyone who sees it, will have to be intellectually engaged on some level.” Suzy Goes See

Presented by:

Ban Shakespeare

Writer/Director Antoinette Barbouttis
Assistant Director Jason Jefferies
Dramaturg Kate Gaul
Set Designer Bella Saltearn
Costume Designer Rita Naidu
Lighting Designer Martin Kinnane
Sound Designer Fiona Lloyd
Cast
Matthew Alexander
Gabe Alvarado
Anna Clark
Tom Dawson
Micaela Ellis
Ashan Kumar
Nathan Langworthy
Tom Loveluck
Albert Mwangi
Jess Spies
Alex Stamell

Additional Support Joseph Althouse, Daya Czepanski, Daniel MacKenzie, Woollahra Council, NIDA

Originally developed by Antoinette Barbouttis and Zoë Hollyoak

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO BONDI FESTIVAL’S POSTPONED OPENING. FOR MORE INFO, PLEASE SEE OUR LATEST NEWS.