Montague Basement's VIDEOTAPE To Reopen Kings Cross Theatre

A new Australian thriller redeveloped and set during lockdown will reopen the Kings Cross Theatre (KXT) in January 2021, the first production to take the stage since the theatre was closed as a result of COVID-19 government restrictions in March.

Written and directed by Saro Lusty-Cavallari, Videotape follows Daniel and Juliette, a seemingly-perfect young couple isolating together who start receiving mysterious videotapes that have somehow recorded deeply private moments. Are the golden couple really ready to get to the bottom of who or what is sending them these tapes? After all, what could they possibly have to hide?

"The play was inspired by films like David Lynch's Lost Highway and Michael Haneke's Hidden," says writer and director Saro Lusty-Cavallari. "I think there's something fascinating about how reckoning with one's guilt intensifies when placed into the material reality of media like a videotape."

"In the past few years, when we've had a reckoning with the kinds of gendered and racial violence that prop up the systems that many of us benefit from, it felt like a perfect time to reappropriate that trope."

Starring Jake Fryer-Horsnby and Lucinda Howes, with video performance contributed by Laura Djanegara, Videotape was originally written and programmed for KXT before the pandemic and has been readapted to reflect lockdown in Australia.

"This was always a claustrophobic play about two people stuck in their apartment with nothing but each other's growing mistrust and discomfort," says Lusty-Cavallari. "When it was time to revisit the script towards the end of lockdown we realised that integrating the pandemic into the text wasn't just easy to do, it actually strengthened the underlying mechanics of the script."

Running in January and February, Videotape is the first of a programme of works intended for production in 2020 that have been reprogrammed for 2021 by KXT bAkehouse.

"This will be one of the first plays in the Sydney independent sector in which the shared experience of the pandemic will be felt throughout the entire show," says Lusty-Cavallari. "I hope it makes the play an incredibly vital beginning to a year of a hopefully revitalised independent sector."

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