Interview with Natalie Bochenski | Speed: The Movie, The Play

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Natalie Bochenski about her new work Speed: The Movie, The Play, which will be performed as a part of The Brisbane Powerhouse's Comedy Festival in March.

VIRAG: I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that someone would transform such an action-packed cult classic film franchise into a theatrical work. But, you've done it and from the review I've read, it appears that you've done a pretty spectacular job. Therefore, I'm very, very excited to see it take form at the Powerhouse in March.
As creatives, what hooked you to giving Speed a life on the stage? Did it have to do with personal connections to the movie when it came out?

NATALIE: The idea for Speed: The Movie, The Play was possibly the greatest brainstorm Dan Beeston, Gregory Rowbotham and I have ever had. We had a long history together of creating and producing comedy shows - both improvised and scripted theatre. We were tossing around ideas of the kind of shows we personally would love to experience - fun, immersive, joyful and silly. We talked about how fun it could be to adapt a serious movie into a comedy, and for some reason we came up with the 1994 Keanu Reeves blockbuster Speed. We'd all loved that film when we were young, and the concept of staging it on an actual bus sparked a wave of inventive ideas.

VIRAG: I've read that the show revolves around and in an actual vintage Volvo. I have to ask, how did you secure such a picturesque bus?

NATALIE: By a stroke of luck, I happened to pop to the Teneriffe Festival just two days after we'd had this great idea for "Speed: The Movie, The Play". We'd been pondering where on earth you actually find vintage buses, and then bam - there was a beautiful orange and white bus parked right outside the festival entrance. I ran up to a group of men standing under a marquee with information pamphlets and squealed "Is this your bus? How can I get this bus?" They turned out to be members of the Queensland Omnibus and Coach Society, an organisation of bus enthusiasts who raise money to restore and preserve these beautiful treasures from Queensland's transport history. Thankfully, they did not dismiss me as outright insane, and so began our wonderful partnership. With a bus secured; all we had to do was write the show!

VIRAG: What was the process of creating such a site-specific work?

NATALIE: Although the Leyland Panther was the first QOCS bus I saw, we actually wound up using a 1978 Volvo B59 for our first ever season in March 2015. She was the perfect set - intimate but with enough room for our actors to move. We created the show to be as immersive as possible; our audience members are the passengers onboard the bus that Dennis Hopper has rigged with a bomb. They spend the bulk of their time with our hero Keanu, as he tries to keep them all alive.

We wanted to create a rollercoaster-like experience on a shoestring budget, so we have a lot of fun replicating the big special effects from the movie. We employ all manner of inventive props as obstacles that bombard the bus, and we deliberately keep the pace and the humour fast and furious. You cannot help but be completely engaged in the show, as Keanu calls on help from the bus passengers constantly.

We were looking forward to bringing the B59 back this year, but alas! She was the victim of freak flooding in that big storm Brisbane copped just before Christmas. She'd been parked at Woolloongabba awaiting a fresh coat of paint when water submerged the engine. It's a crying shame, and the B59's future is still uncertain.

Luckily QOCS has back-up buses, and we're thrilled this time to be staging the show on a Leyland Panther! It's something of a full circle moment, and it's just as charming a set as the Volvo.

VIRAG: In creating a work such as this (and as your previous works) do you find it challenging to translate a popular film script onto the stage? Are you ever scared of losing the essence of the movie or disappointing the fans?

It helps that we're big fans of the movies we've chosen to base these shows on (Act/React has also staged "Titanic: The Movie, The Play" and "Die Hard: The Movie, The Play"). We revel in finding the comedy in these very earnest films, and we call the shows "loving parodies" for a reason. We inject our own humour and commentary along the way, putting in jokes and references from the world of pop culture. We have had overwhelmingly positive responses to our shows, and we hope we can continue getting the right mix of celebrating the subject matter - and taking the mickey out of it.

VIRAG: How would you like the audience to leave the show?

NATALIE: We want them to scream "Again! I want to do that again!" just like kids after rollercoasters or waterslides. We want them to have sore stomachs from laughing, and we want to leave them in a great mood for the rest of their week. There are so many ways people can spend their hard-earned dollars, and we want to give them the best bang for their buck.

Speed: The Movie: The Play | Presented by Act React

Photography by John Marshall

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