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LEAR, Wollongong Theatre Company, 255 Keira St, Wollongong, April 29 to May 9
The region's newest theatre company has no home - and that's OK with them.
Tim Allen created the Wollongong Theatre Company with the aim to present plays in non-theatrical settings.
Allen says he got the idea during a stint in London five years ago.
"I'd just come back from the UK and I'd seen a couple of shows at the Regent's Park open-air theatre," he says.
"I thought, this is crazy - if they can do open-air theatre in London, why aren't we doing it in Wollongong? We've got such a nicer climate."
That thought led to his involvement in the Eaton Gorge Theatre Company production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing at Wollongong Botanic Garden.
More recently, Allen has joined with some like-minded performers to create a theatre company he hopes will fill a niche between amateur groups and the performances of Merrigong Theatre.
The group's first production is Lear - an abridged version of Shakespeare's King Lear, which will be staged at Project Contemporary Artspace.
The plan is to use non-theatre venues to give people a different experience and also to try to make theatre less snobby and more appealing to a broad audience.
"I've loved theatre for a long time and have been involved in it since I was a kid," he says.
"But I've always thought it was a bit of an elitist art form, unlike cinema which is more of the people."
While he does acknowledge Shakespeare may seem an unusual choice for a group taking such a non-elitist approach, Allen hopes the performance will give people an understanding of the playwright's work.
"Some people's first experience of Shakespeare was reading it in year 9 class with people who didn't know what they were doing," he says.
"Of course that has a really bad effect on you. But then you go and see a Shakespeare production that's really, really well done and you go 'oh yeah, that's actually really good'.
" I'm hoping we can do that."
They have removed the subplot of the original play to reduce the complexity and the running time. Allen says in the group's read-throughs, the whole play went for three hours and 50 minutes. It's now two hours with an interval.
"That was important because we wanted people to go away from our show thinking 'wow that was great' rather than 'wow, that was long'," he says.
Allen has no problems with tinkering with one of Shakespeare's plays, because they both have the same aim.
"I trained as an actor and the more I read about Shakespeare and how his plays were performed, they were very much for the people," he says.
"They were popular plays. He wrote for all different sorts of people he expected to get in his audience.
"I do treat Shakespeare with a great deal of respect but he's still a playwright.
"I'm doing this play for people to watch and they need to be engaged and interested and part of the action all the way through. If chopping a few lines or even a whole subplot is going to help, then I'm very happy to do that. And I'm sure he'd understand."