Hibernation World Premiere for Adelaide

Playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer’s large-scale futuristic drama Hibernation will have its world premiere at Dunstan Playhouse in August.

Under the direction of Artistic Director Mitchell Butel, this theatrical epic imagined by award-winning designer Jonathon Oxlade will take audiences across the globe in three acts as it conceptualises what might happen to the natural world if humans were to hibernate for a year.

The cast includes Chris Asimos and Ezra Juanta (Ripcord), former Artistic Director Rosalba Clemente, former STCSA Ensemble member Rashidi Edward, Elizabeth Hay (The Gods of Strangers), Mark Saturno (A View from the Bridge), Ansuya Nathan (Hotel Mumbai), James Smith (Euphoria) and former ADT performer Kialea-Nadine Williams in her STCSA debut.

With shades of Black Mirror and An Inconvenient Truth, Hibernation is set during a time of environmental calamity 10 years from now, where the entire global population is ordered to hibernate to combat the effects of climate change - and hopefully save the world and themselves. An anesthetic gas is launched into the atmosphere and the human population is plunged into a deep sleep, leaving the natural world to reset. When the world wakes up, citizens must forge their lives in a new wilderness.

Hibernation explores the climate crisis and the pressures inflicted upon the earth by humanity, and on a macro level navigates the impact of individual actions and the concept of stillness as a movement.

Finegan Kruckemeyer, who developed the concept in 2019 and was writing the play as COVID-19 took hold worldwide, says Hibernation draws eerie parallels to the lockdowns that have defined our past year.

“The idea that had roused me from dreams, was about a world falling into them. And the writing of that world, strangely became the witnessing of it, as 2020 slowly mutated into what we now know it to be – something both epic and intimate, conceptually foreign and definitively local,” he says.

Director Mitchell Butel believes that Hibernation will become a “landmark Australian play.” “Boldly ambitious in form, urgent and imperative in content, dazzling in reach, Hibernation will be an unmissable event,” Butel says.

Hibernation is at Dunstan Playhouse, 13-28 Aug, statetheatrecompany.com.au

Writer: Finegan Kruckemeyer / Director: Mitchell Butel / Set & Costume Designer: Jonathon Oxlade / Lighting Designer: Gavin Norris / Sound Designer: Andrew Howard / AV Designer: Matt Byrne / Associate Costume Designer: Ailsa Paterson / Assistant Director: Clement Rukundo / With: Chris Asimos, Rosalba Clemente, Rashidi Edward, Elizabeth Hay, Ezra Juanta, Ansuya Nathan, Mark Saturno, James Smith, Kialea-Nadine Williams

Image: Cast of Hibernation. Photographer: Matt Byrne.