Everybody wishes that at one stage of their life, their experiences could be performed as a play or a movie. Not everybody has this wish fulfilled. One of the rare few to do so is Australian actor PETER HOUGHTON. With his award winning play THE PITCH about to hit Brisbane, he takes the time to talk to LINDSEY CUTHBERTSON.

Have you ever had a job interview and stuffed it up so badly that you wanted to bury your head in the dirt, listening to fingernails on blackboards for eternity as penance? Peter Houghton has had a similar experience. And better yet, he wrote a play about it. But wait, it gets better. Houghton’s performance about stuffing up a screenplay pitch has actually been a blossoming success.

The Pitch has been an international hit, with Houghton performing the show to audiences in Scotland and England to welcoming receptions, as well as Australia. Winner of two Green Room Awards (think Australian theatre’s version of The Logies without the token American Television star who’s burnt out), The Pitch is a one-man comedy that most people can relate to – even the most perfect of human beings has failed at some point in time. Houghton, four times winner of a Green Room Award, as well as the writer and performer of the piece, is ecstatic at how such a debilitating experience turned into a triumph.

“I wrote a screenplay seven years ago and had about half the budget locked down and in the bank. I got myself into this situation where I was telling each of the backers completely different things,” Houghton reminisces with a quiet chuckle. “We had a meeting where I had to pitch the screenplay to them all at the same time and it was a debacle. The VCR chewed up my video, it was horrible.”

Needless to say, the screenplay was canned. It wasn’t until Houghton moved house several years later that he came across old drafts of the script. Speaking from Perth in the middle of his five-month Australian tour, Houghton explains how The Pitch was as much a therapeutic piece as it was a play at first.

“I decided I had to find a positive out of the experience,” Houghton says. “I had all of the old scripts in front of me, so I rewrote it as a play. I thought it would come out as a serious piece but it has turned out to be quite comedic.”

Houghton has won rave reviews for his one-man piece, though it isn’t easy performing a solo play for five months on end. Without other actors to feed off, Houghton admits that keeping motivation and energies high are the key ingredients to a good show. “Otherwise, it’d be very easy to just go through the motions,” he says, “and no one wants that to occur!

“I used to run lines of The Pitch before I went onstage because I was so anxious about performing it,” admits Houghton. “But now I don’t do that at all. The last thing I want to do is to be too comfortable with the performance.”

Houghton’s desire to keep things fresh is essential to a tour of such lengthy proportions. With Brisbane shows looming on the horizon, he knows that it is imperative to keep the audience enraptured. With Houghton’s history, there is no way that he will let himself go through another failed pitch.

Go see PETER HOUGHTON’s one-man masterpiece THE PITCH when it is performed at The Powerhouse from September 16-20. Tickets from www.brisbanepowerhouse.org/events/view/the-pitch

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