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 SEANNA VAN HELTEN talks to The Suitcase Royale creator and performer MILES O’NEIL about “junkyard theatre” and THE BALLAD OF BACKBONE JOE.
The Suitcase Royale became a theatrical road show almost by accident. “We started out as a folk band,” says Miles O’Neil, one of the group’s three founding creators. “We only made a theatre show on the side to fill in a double bill for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. We ended up being a lot better at making theatre, at that time, than we were at making music, and the theatre thing took off.”
With fellow group members Joseph O’Farrell and Glen Walton, O’Neil and The Suitcase Royale began touring to theatre festivals around Australia, and then international festivals in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada (the Montreal press described the trio’s style as “David Lynch meets Wallace And Gromit”).
The Suitcase Royale now brings its most recent production, The Ballad Of Backbone Joe, to Brisbane’s inaugural World Theatre Festival at Brisbane Powerhouse. And, O’Neil says, with this latest show the group has come full circle: “With this show we’re actually bringing the band back into it, so it’s a live music slash theatre show,” the performer says.
Set in rural pre-war Australia, The Ballad Of Backbone Joe tells the story of a small-town boxer, an apparent murder, and the private detective trailing the mystery to its source in a remote Australian settlement. “It’s like an Australian gothic take on film noir,” as O’Neil describes the show, “mixing up early Coen brothers’ films with 1940s classic film noir with our own romanticised view of outback country towns.”
The tale is pieced together like a “jigsaw puzzle,” incorporating narrative, song, film, lo-fi technical effects, slapstick, plus a carnivalesque rag ‘n’ bone soundtrack scored by the internationally acclaimed trio. “All three of us perform and also play. Joseph is a drummer, Glen plays the double bass, and I play guitar,” says O’Neil.
The performers also manipulate, from the stage, most of their own sound and lighting effects. “That idea was born out of our first show. We wanted it to look really lo-fi and do it all ourselves. As the shows have gotten bigger we haven’t been able to do all our own lighting but we still do about half of the light and sound cues on stage,” says O’Neil. “It started out as necessity but it’s become our form of comedy because it invariably fails,” he deadpans.
The overall, pieced-together aesthetic that has become The Suitcase Royale’s trademark style is self-described as “junkyard theatre”: “We started calling it that because to begin with all our sets and props were sourced from hard rubbish,” explains O’Neil. “Now it lends itself to the fact that the shows have a bit of everything in them – a bit of comedy, a bit of music and a bit of theatre.”
O’Neil explains that, in this way, when the group begins work on a new show, all the elements evolve holistically. “There are no rules, really,” he says. “This show came out of what is now the main theme song of the show, a film noir murder ballad ... The shows generally have a theme but they never end up anywhere near what they started out as.”
The same could be said for the performers themselves: “We weren’t ever expecting to be making theatre and touring,” recalls O’Neil. “But at the same time we all met during a drama degree! I guess it’s a bit like what seems to happen with everybody. You end up where you probably thought you were gonna be, but didn’t aim to be – or something like that!”
THE BALLAD OF BACKBONE JOE plays in the Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, from February 10–13, as part of the World Theatre Festival. For bookings and for full festival program, phone 3358 8600 or visit www.brisbanepowerhouse.org.
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