Premiere: Melbourne Theatre Company (2009)
Directed by Simon Phillips
Synopsis
Jem Glass is an untroubled little boy until his seventh birthday when he suddenly announces that he is really a grown man named Danny who died seven years ago. But how can a lost soul find his way home?
With a mix of new and well-loved songs by Tim Finn, Poor Boy is a supernatural story of loss and redemption.
Reviews
“If you’re a fan of Finn’s songs, it’s a must-see… the phenomenally talented Guy Pearce is a magnetic presence… a pensive and haunting performance … a standing ovation from its opening night audience.”
THE AGE
“Seductive… Director Simon Phillips at his best… For breathtaking visual sumptuousness, it’s hard to trump.”
THE AUSTRALIAN
“A brilliantly written story… shrewd and clever dialogue… First-rate.” –
THE HERALD-SUN
“Poor Boy is a unique experience… words don’t do it justice; it has to be seen.”
ARTS HUB
“Cameron has the eloquence and concision of Shakespeare… but it’s Finn’s inimitable stake-through-the-heart songs which steal the show… director Simon Phillips has done a sterling job… Unforgettable.”
AUSTRALIAN STAGE
“Evocative staging, powerful performances… Finn’s songs are as hauntingly beautiful as ever… Director Simon Phillips crafts many moments of theatrical magic… a beautiful production.”
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
“Sumptuously visual… boldly experimental… a highly original piece of theatre.”
THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD
“Brilliant… Nothing short of magical… All the signs of a hit.”
RADIO NZ
Premiere: Melbourne Theatre Company (2004)
Directed by Peter Houghton
Synopsis
Afraid of the dark and plagued by power failure, Henry Quealy is living in the shadow of terror. Returning one day from his job as a door-to-door salesman selling doors, Henry discovers a hitherto hidden portal in the wall of his home. The government declares Henry a shadow of his former self — literally — and he is taken away through the mystery door. Hinterland is a satirical comedy about the divided self and the paranoia of the insular state.
Reviews
“Matt Cameron’s latest play is a political comedy that sparkles with wit and energy… Hinterland cloaks its message in laughter rather than homily. In its exploration of bureaucratic bullying and the repression of the individual there are shades of Kafka, George Orwell and even Arthur Miller’s desperate Willy Loman, but the politics is softened by Cameron’s quirky humour.”
THE AUSTRALIAN
“From the enthusiastic audience response to Matt Cameron’s new political comedy Hinterland, I think this playwright has built himself a strong fan club among theatregoers. His idiosyncratic mix of the surreal, the comic and, in this play, the political, offers a variety of satisfactions, including the element of surprise, since the unexpected frequently occurs… it is the quirky imagination of the playwright that appeals so strongly: he takes us to strange places and then makes us laugh with appalled recognition… pure farce, hilariously laced with political satire…”
THE AGE
“…a very dark and very funny play… evoking spontaneous laughter and applause… Hinterland is a feather in Cameron’s cap.”
HERALD-SUN
“…Cameron’s sensitive and alert eye can only be of benefit to Australian theatre… he has an unusually endearing theatrical pen.”
SUNDAY HERALD-SUN
Playbox Theatre Company at The Malthouse (2003)
Directed by Aidan Fennessy
Synopsis
It begins like a fairytale but how does it end. In picture-perfect Flaming Tree Grove, a little girl called Ruby sets off to visit her grandma at the end of the cul-de-sac. But she never arrives. Her parents spiral into suspicion and sorrow as they search for answers to the haunting mystery. And then a strange and chilling package appears on their doorstep… Ruby Moon is a fractured fairytale from the dark heart of suburbia.
Reviews
“As with his other works, Matt Cameron’s latest play is an excursion into the unexpected and surreal… Ruby Moon is inventive and mischievous, striking an easy balance between grief, surrealism and black humour.”
THE AUSTRALIAN
“In Ruby Moon there is a marvellously achieved complexity of effects. It is a densely layered, evocative and richly imagined work that produces its effects on many levels, including the subliminal… the magic of the play lies in its creation of its own world… it succeeds not only because of Cameron’s writing but also through stunning performances… the play is a wonderful demonstration of the endlessly protean possibilities of theatre, of its capacity to create something genuinely new, and in this case something also unsettling, weird, fascinating and moving.”
THE AGE
“Matt Cameron’s cunningly written play manages to be sensitively, yet grimly, funny… Ruby Moon is a must-see.”
HERALD-SUN
“…Matt Cameron’s captivating play… seems to belong to a twilight world… a fine sense of comedy and its tragic fringe.”
SUNDAY HERALD-SUN
Melbourne Theatre Company (2001)
Directed by Simon Phillips
Synopsis
The local balloon man declares the outbreak of an alarming trend: citizens are spontaneously bursting. With its diminishing population, this is a town inhabited by not-quite-together people who are constantly in analysis. Elliot, a hapless balloon enthusiast, struggles to uncover the cause of the random implosions and convince everyone they need help before they all disappear. Man the Balloon is a satirical and absurd parable of an insecure, small-minded society unwittingly bent on self-destruction.
Reviews
“Man the Balloon is typical of Cameron’s work – full of jokes, both verbal and visual, but with its streak of nonsense shadowed by some black humor… lots of laughter to be had from this first-rate production… in Cameron we have an excellent playwright.”
THE AGE
“Man the Balloon captures the funny and the peculiar. The dialogue is crammed with witty references to exploding people, death, God, psychoanalysis and crises about existence.”
THE HERALD-SUN
“…writers with a developed sense of the absurd are a rarity in the theatre, in Australia at least. All the more reason then to hail Matt Cameron and his new and quirky comedy Man the Balloon… the new work is rich in metaphor and allusion… the humour is gentle and innocent with touches of whimsy, in the tradition of Ionesco.”
THE SUNDAY SUN
“…a hilarious new farce from Australian playwright Matt Cameron. There is a social message somewhere in this play, but it is the wit and sparkle of the text that make this production a hit… droll doesn’t come near describing this writing. I can’t spoil all the jokes, but it brought the house down.”
THE AUSTRALIAN
“This is an extraordinary work… I found this an absolutely fabulous farce. I loved it. I thought it was completely surreal, it was constantly entertaining and yet it was very observant of human frailties.”
ABC RADIO ARTS
“…it’s called a comedy but I think that’s a bit too simple for this play. It is a very, very funny play but there are some very serious ideas and subtext in there.”
ABC RADIO
Neonheart Theatre at The Malthouse (2000)
Directed by Aidan Fennessy
Synopsis
In an icy, treacherous wilderness, a small town has lost its entire population of men. Minnie Aodla is an object of desire; a fashion model living alone in the polar ice, where she orders household furniture items from a catalogue and seduces the delivery men. They are never seen again. Enid dispatches the delivery men and waits for her lost husband to return. A photographer arrives to capture beauty. Pedro, a travelling peddler, ventures into the town to sell bottled emotions to the grieving widows. The Eskimo Calling is a macabre and absurd fable of lust, loss and consumerism.
Reviews
“Matt Cameron is easily one of the most fascinating young playwrights in Australia today. His work is a multi-layered treasure trove of ideas, images, themes and archetypes gleaned from ancient Greek tragedy right through to current media events and anything in between… anti-naturalistic and brimming with surreal imagery, his latest work The Eskimo Calling takes place in a comic netherworld where the everyday detail of life melts away and the absurdity and universality of human experience is exposed… the result is a modern day fable of great power.”
THE MELBOURNE TIMES
“…we know from Cameron’s previous work that he is a very good – at times excellent – writer. And the writing in his latest often sparkles.”
THE SUNDAY AGE
“The Eskimo Calling is clever, entertaining and certainly well performed in this lively production.”
THE AGE
Art & Soul (2000)
Directed by Peter Houghton
Synopsis
On his last day, an old man — any man, every man — walks the streets — any street, all streets — in search of the point of his existence. Zed is a filing clerk. He has just been retired and is faced with an empty day. He encounters emotions in human guises (and in alphabetical order) that have been long filed away. Whispering Death is an absurd and burlesque journey of self-discovery and impending mortality.
Reviews
“…in the MTC program of seven short plays… by far the most successful is Matt Cameron’s Whispering Death. The writing is witty and ironic, clever and often hilarious.”
THE HERALD SUN
“Cameron’s Whispering Death is a gem, a deft mix of absurdism, The Goons and early Stoppardian cleverness… It’s mostly written in rhyming couplets and contains some brilliant lines.”
THE SUNDAY AGE
Playbox Theatre Company at The Malthouse (1998)
Directed by Simon Phillips
Synopsis
Titus is found unconscious and sunburnt in a desert with no identification and no memory. The same day, a burned woman waits at the beach for a plane to explode overhead and fall into the sea. Titus is listed as a passenger on the flight. Tear from a Glass Eye is an absurd tale of random fate, the inevitable crash and human debris.
Reviews
“How rewarding to rummage through Matt Cameron’s mind. What a find. A true original. Dig in and explore the tortuous paths of his thought processes. Definitely an interest in surrealism, echoes of playwrights of the Absurd movement, yes. But there’s something else. A very 1990’s fascination with the violation of personal space, the fear of commitment and wariness towards all intimate connections… entertaining, quizzically philosophical and thought-provoking.”
THE AGE
“…a wonderful new play by the Australian dramatist, Matt Cameron. A metaphorical mystery story; an existential memory play; a psychological study of blank indifference; a pitch black jest – Tear From A Glass Eye manages, beguilingly, to be all of these things and… achieve a brilliant artistic unity… strongly recommended.”
THE INDEPENDENT
“The surrealistic title of this fascinating memory play by the Australian Matt Cameron signals its liberation from tired conventions of realistic theatre. The play itself climbs to wild heights of dream, fantasy and memory… remarkable imagination.”
THE EVENING STANDARD
“Cameron’s nervy, almost jazzy play is a sharp reminder that plenty of interesting new theatre writing is taking place beyond these shores… Cameron is a really distinctive new voice. I predict we will hear more from him in British theatres.”
THE GUARDIAN
“…an intense and prickly philosophical thriller… it rings with striking images – the title is one of these – and shows a gift for resonant phrasing which marks Cameron as a writer of originality.”
THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
“An intellectual, comic mystery… the humour of the Goons, the game-play of Stoppard and the imagery of Magritte, all under-pinned with the grim existentialism of Beckett.”
THE SUNDAY AGE
Premiere: La Mama Theatre (1997)
Directed by Peter Houghton
Synopsis
Sex. God. Hate. Desire. Floods. Faith. A tale of Noel, his ark, and the people who didn’t make it on board. Noel is a boot maker and religious zealot who wills God to wipe out his morally corrupt village: including the brothel owner, his foreigner wife, the village idiot she is having an affair with, the prostitute who never has sex and the mad woman who is emptying the river with a bucket. Noel wants to start the world again, with himself as the chosen one. Footprints on Water is a darkly comic modern parable of belief, belonging and judgment.
Reviews
“…this superbly constructed play… seductively comic… Cameron plumbs some very dark depths of humanity… Top-class Australian plays are rare. Strong thoughtful productions of them are even rarer. This is both.”
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
“Although it deals with dark issues of the human psyche, it is a very funny piece with a broad streak of Cameron’s characteristic absurdity… Footprints on Water is riddled with disturbing images… powerful and intense theatre.”
THE HERALD-SUN
“Award winning playwright Matt Cameron’s parable is a timely exploration of racism and xenophobia in a small, almost medieval community. Well-crafted and well-structured, it’s a mixture of the quirky and passionately dramatic, drawing heavily on absurdist theatre with a strong dash of The Goons.”
THE SUNDAY AGE
“If Footprints on Water is any indication, Australian theatre is in safe hands. Matt Cameron has created an anonymous, xenophobic village eating itself up with hate. In order to find the light, we are taken into their hearts of darkness. This makes for an absorbing night in the theatre.”
THE AGE EG
“…exudes a palpable sense of apocalypse. In terms of character, Footprints on Water is Cameron’s finest play… absorbing, disturbing, frequently hilarious and very satisfying.”
THE AGE
Premiere: Griffin Theatre Company (1995)
Directed by Ros Horin
Synopsis
A hermit, living with two other hermits, in a lighthouse without a light. Passing ships crash on the island’s treacherous rocks and they store the wreckage… until a runaway circus clown inside a suitcase is washed ashore along with a curious package. Mr Melancholy is a surreal comedy of solitude and sorrow.
Reviews
“Cameron is a natural young humanist who… seems to be heir to the existentialism of a Samuel Beckett, the absurdities of a Goon Show and the hauntingly melancholic whimsy of cartoonist Michael Leunig.”
THE BULLETIN
“The Melbourne writer Matt Cameron has produced with (Mr. Melancholy) the type of new Australian work which is sadly too often absent from stages in Sydney. He has written a piece which is thoughtful without being ponderous, looks at the tragedy of the human condition with deadpan humour and touches the emotions without being trite… its beauty lies in the fact that the messages are universal.”
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH MIRROR
“…this potent and moving absurdist-style play… the work’s wrenching overall mood is all the more powerful for the existential notions underpinning it… in an environment dominated by realism and tawdry kitchen-sink concerns, this Melbourne-based writer steps out on his own into bold, fresh territory.”
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
“Matt Cameron is a playwright going places. His touch with language is dangerous yet sure. He juggles words into beautiful patterns… turns literal phrases into enchanting images. (Mr. Melancholy) is a fairy tale, a morality play, a love story and a profound statement about human loneliness but, above all, it is an exquisite piece of theatre.”
THE COURIER-MAIL
“Very clever… full of funny one-liners and smart twists and turns.”
THE AUSTRALIAN