Ben Ellis' The Captive at the Finborough

All you Aussie expats and holiday makers in the UK, here's another opportunity to check out the work of an Australian playwright (and director) on the UK stage. 

London's Finborough Theatre is staging the world premier of Ben Ellis' new play, The Captive in November, directed by John Kachoyan.

Head over to the Finborough's website for dates and booking details.

The Captive is a stark and poetic tale of the dispossessed struggling to find a homeland, and the savagery with which they impose their ideas of civilisation on an ancient land and its people.

How far will a man go to call a place ‘home’? In a land of immigrants, who are the dispossessed?

1840. A ship is wrecked on the uncharted coast of colonial Australia. On evidence of a female survivor, Angus Mitchell, an enterprising Scottish immigrant, is employed to search for her amongst the Aboriginal tribes of a wild and foreign land, beyond the new boundaries of his own civilisation. But does a savage land turn a man savage? And what exactly is Mitchell hunting for? A real woman, a myth or some kind of redemption? As the search becomes ever more desperate, Mitchell must choose between his humanity and the land he desperately seeks to make his home.

" Does this land turn us savage? Until we tame it, yes. Our country was taken away from us there and we will take it back here…”

About Ben Ellis

Ben Ellis is a Gippsland-born playwright and columnist now based in London. His recent work includes an adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis for a Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre (Melbourne) co-production (2005). His Poet No. 7 was selected for the 2006 Dublin Fringe Festival after its premiere in London in February 2006.

Currency has published three of his plays: Falling Petals which attracted furious debate in Australia—including fist-fights among audiences—for its depiction of an unsentimental and hypocritical rural community; These People, concerning Australian responses to the stories of asylum seekers in detention centres in their deserts; and Post Felicity, a black comedy which satirises the obsessions of baby boomers which won both the Patrick White Play Award and the inaugural Malcolm Robertson Prize.

Read Ben’s blog: 'Parachute of a Playwright'

Also by Ben Ellis