Lone Fears

Milk Crate Theatre is a rather unique entity. Established 12 years ago in association with the Darlinghust Theatre Company, it was a platform for creative projects looking at creating a piece of theatre to advocate around the issue of homelessness. Now a fully independent entity in their own right, Milk Crate is both a theatre company and a community, uniting people who have experienced homelessness and/or social marginalisation in their ensemble and working towards common creative goals.

“Now it's a fully independent theatre company that generates lots of workshops that go into the welfare community, drama workshops, in order to promote wellbeing, working collaboratively with others, a sense of community, a sense of building something creatively, using your imagination. I was employed as the Artistic Director and CEO about November 2010 and since then I've really pushed the affective level, and taking our work out to the wider community,” says Mirra Todd, who also wrote and will direct the latest work as part of this mission, Fearless, proudly.

“I've also been pushing to get the work generated by the Ensemble, because I'm a firm believer that diversity in the arts really requires a unique way of seeing the world and I think our ensemble has very, very unique ways of seeing the world because of their experiences, and to not harness that in a creative way, to find the meat and the substance of the work, just seemed insane to me, so that's where I've put a lot of our energy over the last two years.”

Using the Ensemble and their experiences to create new work has led Todd to a creative examination of themes of loneliness over the last year, and in a sense that culminates in Fearless – a 'street musical' that observes the life-changing or altering moments of 11 people – where Loneliness, as a character, will grace the stage.

“We do one-hour plays that are written and generated to be very interactive with the audience to get them to discuss a theme or an idea, so this whole year is devoted to loneliness as experienced through the homeless experience, and we've had several plays looking at that from different perspectives. We did a studio showing at Carriageworks in June, which was called Belonging – the opposite of loneliness – and Fearless is a play that is literally looking at loneliness – we actually have the character of Loneliness played by Christa Hughes, a cabaret singer.”

While drawing heavily on the personal experiences of the Ensemble to write the work, Todd ensures that the theatricality of the story, and a sense of empowerment in the face of the loneliness in Fearless, shine through. “A lot of what we develop in a creative development – especially around a theme of an emotional world such as loneliness – a lot of it isn't what we would call playable, a lot of it is just raw horrible stuff. In theatre and in drama, it's how we fight against those things, that's how we write a story. It's not by having people talk about what it's like to be lonely, it's by having people struggle against that.

“You still want to tell a story, at the end of day, and you want to ask questions that the audience will walk away wanting to discover the answer to.”