Acknowledgement of Country

UK Premiere: promiscuous/cities
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, 22 – 25 June 2022

Written by playwright Lachlan Philpott, directed by his long-time collaborator Alyson Campbell.

Can you feel the city’s pulse, how it rushes through your veins like a drug?

He’s in trouble, she’s falling in love, they’re cheating, she’s trapped, he’s alone. But let’s keep moving, connecting, since we mustn’t fall behind.

promiscuous/cities composes a symphony of a night in a big city. Within this city, we each create the myth of ourselves. Yet underneath the vision we sell on social media – like! – is mile after mile of distance between us.

Boldly probing the rapid adaptation needed to survive urban life today, promiscuous/cities shines a light on what happens to those who don’t keep up with change: the losses of gentrification, the chasm between the rich and the poor, lost neighbourhoods, lost histories, lost corner shops, lost lesbian bars. At the same time this is replaced by a rapid-fire onslaught of social media filling our visual frames, our mobile screens, the sonic world around us.

In promiscuous/cities there is a central image that holds fast and keeps things swirling around it like the heart of a centrifuge: this is the Dancing Girl, who promises: I Can Free You From All This.

She is homeless – but she seems more grounded than all the people scurrying around her trying to get to somewhere else.

Playwright Lachlan Philpott asks us to take this city – any city – and ask us to see, and hear, it differently. And in doing so, he asks us to pause to look at ourselves too.

Queer Performance: A Roundtable Discussion
30 June 2022, 6.30om – 7.30pm
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

This roundtable discussion marks a collaboration between the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) as part of the British Council’s UK Australia season. Springing from the staging of the UK premiere of Australian playwright Lachlan Philpott’s play promiscuous/cities as part of the Season, the roundtable brings together queer performance makers to talk about what preoccupies queer performance at this moment and how queer performance responds to current pressing issues. The discussion will then zone in on how queer performance sits within the training of performers. The roots of queer performance are present in the non-conformist, the antinormative and the anti-institutional. Despite these resistances, queer performance has found a strong concentration within the academy and is increasingly present in performer training. This discussion looks at this paradoxical homing, asking if it is a process of ‘domesticating’ queer performance by wrapping it into frameworks of learning and training.

Roundtable Participants

• Professor Alyson Campbell – Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Director promiscuous/cities
• Dr Stephen Farrier – The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Reader in Theatre and Performance
• Dr Nando Messias – performer and Lecturer, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
• Dr Vanessa Macaulay – performer and Lecturer, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
• Meta Cohen – PhD candidate, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Composer and dramaturg, promiscuous/cities
• Amelia Cavallo – PhD candidate, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, co-founder of Quiplash and exceptionally attractive Drag King.

More Info

About the Collaboration

promiscuous/cities is the first part of a two-part exchange between two of the world’s finest performance-making institutions, the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (CSSD), University of London.

The project brings the UK premiere of a work by one of Australia’s hottest playwrights, directed by his long-time collaborator Alyson Campbell. Together they have worked as queer assemblage wreckedAllprods for 20 years.

A series of public talks on queer and Australian performance will accompany the UK premiere of promiscuous/cities.

About the Partners

wreckedAllprods is a queer performance collective formed in 2000 when Alyson Campbell and Lachlan Philpott met on an outreach program for at-risk LGBTQI+ young people. Their work is distinct because of the queerness and complex subtlety of its aesthetic. wreckedAllprods gives theatre a queer poke up the arse.

The Victorian College of the Arts, part of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, offers a conservatoire and atelier-based education that fosters critical confidence and creative risk-taking. It is situated in Melbourne’s Arts Precinct, on land occupied by more than 1,000 generations of Australia’s First Peoples.

The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama is a federal college of the University of London. Central offers a model of cross-disciplinary learning and training for specialist roles within the performing arts, including theatre and performance for a social purpose, and using drama outside of traditional theatre to empower communities.