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May 20, 2025 15 mins
Laura Irish and Ollie Howlett chat to Subculture about The Barden Party's upcoming performance of Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Well, listeners, there is a very exciting theater show coming
to Chapel Off the Chapel very very soon. And I
thought this is one that we actually want to get
some people on the phone to chat about. So we've
got the members of the Barden Party, Laura and Ollie
on the phone right now to chat about this very
special Shakespeare double bill that's coming to Chapel Off Chapel.

(00:23):
Welcome to the program, Laura and Ollie.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Thank you so much for having us.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
No worries now. We are so excited that this is
coming to Melbourne. Because of course, this is a show
that you've taken right around the world. You've done ninety
shows going right around New Zealand and Australia. So I
was wondering if you could start off by telling us
a little bit about how the Barden Party idea first
came about.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
Sure, So in twenty twenty one. It was during kind
of the heat of the pandemic, and as a professional
actor and director, I constantly out of work, and so
things would pop up and opportunities would come up, specifically
in New Zealand, and then they would inevitably get canceled,
and I was kind of panicking and struggling to make

(01:14):
ends meet. And so one day I was standing in
my backyard and we were at a point in New
Zealand where we could have social gatherings of up to
fifty people and then eventually one hundred people, but outdoors
and with people that you knew. And so I was
standing in my back garden one day and I just went,
I could do a show here, and so I gathered

(01:37):
a bunch of other actors and musicians. Shakespeare you don't
have to pay any rights to kind of adapt it
and change it. And I'm a big Shakespeare fan and
I've studied Shakespeare for a long time. So I taught
a bunch of musical theater actors how to do Shakespeare,
and we started performing basically a guilty pop version of

(02:00):
A Midsummer Night's Dream. And we did one show in
my back garden, and then the next day I got
nineteen bookings other people's gardens, so that so it kind
of just blew up from there and we ended up
doing fifty private shows across New Zealand that year.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
Yeah, so you are a real life couple. So, Ollie,
when did you become involved with the Biden party as well.

Speaker 5 (02:28):
So I joined up with the company in its second
year and we were doing a rockabilly version of Much
Ado About Nothing.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
So we toured that show around just.

Speaker 5 (02:40):
New Zealand at that time, and then as that show
was kind of coming to a close, myself, Laura and
our other producer Caleb were trying to find, you know,
what to do next? Where do we go next? How
do we keep this keep this ball rolling? And we
set up another little show called Cocktails, which was just

(03:01):
Caleb and I making cocktails for people. Caleb played William
Shakespeare and I played Edgar Allan Poe and we kind
of hosted a fun arts party in bars or people's
lounges where they could drink cocktails and listen to music
and pretend to be dead people. Almost as soon as
we opened that show, we essentially got the green light.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Forsts in funding to do.

Speaker 5 (03:28):
An immersive theater show on a souper yacht in Auckland,
which I mean, that's a story of its own, but
that sort of carried us through the winter that winter
of twenty twenty three. And then as we were doing
that show out in Auckland for a few months, Laura

(03:51):
and I started writing Romeo and Juliet together, adapting the
script and I put.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Music to it.

Speaker 5 (03:57):
And then immediately after that show closed, we started touring
Romeo and Juliet and that was the first tour we
decided to take to Australia and we lopped across, did
little seasons in Melbourne and in Sydney and Brisbane, and
then we went to the Adelaide.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
For inter Festival for the first time.

Speaker 5 (04:22):
And happened to come away after our little it's a
five or six day stint with the Best Theater Award,
and then popped back over to New Zealand and.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Then finished that tour and started working on the next show. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:39):
We haven't stopped touring really in about two years.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Wow. Yeah, but yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:44):
All he joined the company during much Ado and just
sent in a video audition and then a couple of
shows into into his his joining the company, we we
ended up becoming a.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Couple this time around as well. You've got the double bill,
you've got Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, And being a
Shakespeare found myself, I have to ask how difficult or
how easy is it to actually bring music to these
productions and what style can we expect for Macbeth and
Romeo and Juliet this time around.

Speaker 5 (05:24):
So I do all of our musical arrangements, and both
Laura and I picked the songs. And it's interesting, like,
because Shakespeare has such a lyrical quality to.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
It, it's often quite easy as you're reading through a scene,
cutting things and adapting to kind of feel out where
you know, a character's emotion or the emotion of a.

Speaker 5 (05:49):
Scene kind of does in that classical musical theater way.
You know, the words stop being enough to express the
emotions of the characters feel like they have to sing.
So quite often finding the spots for the songs is
really easy. And then it's the finding of the songs

(06:10):
themselves is the challenging part, because we use essentially covers
for these shows, so that audiences who aren't super familiar
with Shakespeare and the story can have these sort of
signposts of the emotional beats of a show as it

(06:30):
goes through with these recognizable songs that they know or
have heard.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
See.

Speaker 5 (06:35):
It's find songs with lyrics that fit and feel like
something the characters say is the challenging part, more so
than shitting music. And I think Shakespeare really lends itself
to music.

Speaker 4 (06:52):
I think Macbeth is the most interesting case study we've
done in adding music to Shakespeare, because we chose bluegrass
Americana music, and so it's things like Mumford and Sons,
Dolly Parton, Noa Kahn.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
And.

Speaker 4 (07:08):
The music of bluegrass and Americana has very similar, eerily
strangely similar themes to Macbeth, all about betrayal and revenge
and these stories of ghosts, these stories of ambition and
magic and witchcraft, and so those songs that we've chosen,

(07:31):
some of them are super dark, but some of them
are really fun, and so the audience gets this kind
of surprised delight throughout the show when they recognize a
song or I won't spoil anything, but my favorite song
in the show is a song that the witches sing.
And the witches in our version are a couple of

(07:52):
hillbilly brothers, and so it's very fun, very exciting music
to be thrown into Macbeth, and the themes just fit magically.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Definitely.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
If you're talking about the.

Speaker 5 (08:07):
Scope of what sort of songs make it and Macbeth,
you've got everything from you know, classics like wagon Wheel
all the way through some really heart wrenching, you know, beautiful.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
Month and some songs like Ghosts that we knew. There's
even some Hosier in there, yeah, the.

Speaker 5 (08:27):
Little Hosier song Noahkaham throwing some dolly parting for good measure.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Well, I'm excited to see as well that you're taking
Macbeth this year to Scotland, to the Edinburgh Festival as well.
Tell us a little bit about that. How excited are
you about being able to go over to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
We're very excited. We're so grateful.

Speaker 4 (08:52):
We've had a very very generous sponsor from New Zealand,
a person who has had a preside show every year
since we started performing with the Barden Party, and they
just thought we needed to go this year. We tried
to go last year with Romeo and Juliet because Romeo

(09:12):
and Juliet is filled with all Kiwi and Australian music
and we thought that would be a really great showcase
of what we can do, but also bringing a little
bit of Australasia over to Scotland. But unfortunately we just
couldn't make it work financially. It's too much of a risk,
and so when this opportunity popped up this year to

(09:32):
take Macbeth, the Scottish play to Scotland.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
We thought we have to jump at this chance.

Speaker 4 (09:40):
It's a little bit daunting to take the Scottish play
to Scotland, but I don't think they will have seen
a version like this. Yeah, so we're really excited.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah, just going back to what you said before as
well about how the Witches this time around a heel
billy brothers and things like that. When you sit down
and work on a new show like this, how do
those ideas come to you, like when you read the
original Shakespeare and then you think, okay, how can we
change this up? How do those ideas come to you

(10:13):
to do something like that.

Speaker 4 (10:16):
Well, the interesting thing with Macbeth is it kind of
came about in a really strange way this year. So
ever since I started The Barden Party, I've directed all
the shows, but I've also every time played a role
in the Barden Party show, a minor role that I've

(10:37):
played before for another company. And so as an actor,
I was getting bored. As a director, the work we
were doing was really exciting because it was you know,
spins on Shakespeare and putting my own kind of little
magic into the direction of it. But this year Allie

(10:58):
suggested we do Macbeth.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
And Laura's favor Shaea. It is my favorite Shakespeare.

Speaker 4 (11:05):
And he suggested we do Macbeth. And I said, oh,
I love Macbeth, but I really don't want to play
Lady Macbeth again, like, Lady Macbeth is one of my
favorite roles, but I just need a new challenge, so
let's do a different play. And he said, well, just
play Macbeth, and I went, what, Okay, let's get it

(11:29):
a go. So so that's what we did, and we
were like, what would happen to the play, what would
happen to the relationships, what would happen to the story
and the characters if we did make that change? And
then if I am in Macbeth, what does that say
about the hierarchy of the rest of the world that

(11:51):
we're creating. So in our version of Macbeth, all of
the would be kings like Duncan, Macbeth, Malcolm aren't actually us.
And in our version, in our world of the story
that is the royal heart hierarchy, only women can become
the supreme leader essentially. So yeah, so it's come with

(12:15):
some interesting, interesting changes, but really exciting and changed a
lot of the It kept the essence of the show
and kept the essence of all of the characters and
the relationships, but really needs some of the language come
alive to us definitely.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Well, I know a lot of our listeners out there
are going to be very excited to be able to
head along to these shows. So if you are listening
and you want to head along to see the double
bill of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet is on at
Chapel Off Chapel which is in Peran from the twenty
sixth of May to the first of June, and we'll
have a link to buy tickets up on our website
as well. And if you're one of our international listeners

(12:56):
and you happen to be in Edinburgh, Macbeth will be
at the end Bar Fringe Festival from the first to
the twenty second of August and tickets will be available
for that very soon as well. Laura Ali, I guess
to finish off, what would you like to say too
our listeners out there before they grab tickets to these
amazing shows.

Speaker 4 (13:18):
I think one of the things that I would like
to highlight is that what's exciting to us at the
moment is brings shows back to back we've never done before,
but also doing Romeo and Juliet. The cast both casts
are the same, and that's meant that a couple of
people have had to change roles in Romeo and Juliet,
which means that Ollie and I are both playing Romeo

(13:41):
and Juliet and Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
So I think that will.

Speaker 4 (13:47):
Be interesting to see like a real life couple playing
both of these iconic kind of romantic roles and seeing
the dynamics of the relationships with a real life couple
in them that back will be fun. But also the
cast is incredible. They are so fun, so vibrant, a

(14:08):
lot of connection with the audience. So I think this
is going to be an experience that that is different
for a.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Lot of people.

Speaker 5 (14:16):
Yeah, we find a lot of people when they come
and see our shows, you know, if they've they've been
dragged along by a friend or that sort of thing
and they're not really that into Shakespeare, or they you know,
they read a play in high school and didn't really
like it.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
We get a lot of people.

Speaker 5 (14:33):
Saying that this is the first they've enjoyed Shakespeare and
really connected with it and understood why people love it
so much.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Who had theaters in New Zealand to tell us that we're.

Speaker 5 (14:47):
The only Shakespeare though they'll have.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
For anyone listening. If you're not a Shakespeare fan, this
is the Shakespeare for you.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
Definitely well, I cannot wait to head along and check
it out in Melbourne and for our listeners out there again,
if you are in Melbourne, you'll be able to go
and see the double bill of Macbeth and Romeo and
Juliet at Chapel Off Chapel in Peran from the twenty
sixth of May to the first of June. Ticket sales
are up on our website at the moment. There's a
link there so you can go straight through to the
ticket sales and if you're an international audience listener, Macbeth

(15:23):
will be on in at the Edinburgh Fringe from the
first to the twenty second of August.
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