RATS - Creative Development Showing

‘What lengths will we go to, to keep our community and spaces safe?’

Set in Surry Hills, RATS re-imagines Sydney’s first ‘known’ queer bar. The play is an exploration of the complex relationship between the queer community and the police in the late 1930’s Australia. With dwindling numbers of gay and lesbian bars, RATS asks us to remember and revaluate the importance of queer spaces for community.

The play also explores the role of women in Australia, the power struggle of gender, what it is like to not fit the lesbian binary of ‘femme’ or ‘butch’, and the independence that being a sex worker gave women in the 1930s and how these themes resonate today.

• Written by Laneikka Denne and directed by Julia Robertson.

• Performed by: Mikey Sakinofsky, Shayne, Jim Williams, Craig Baldwin, Madelaine Osborn, Dominic Lui

RATS is inspired by scenes from Fiona Kelly McGregor’s novel Iris, which dramatised a clandestine Sydney 1930s nightclub colloquially known as 'Black Ada's', or ‘The Avenue Club’. This space was run by a Black/Blak Australian whom research suggests was likely to have been Samuel Roy Pearce aka Ray Sayles (1898-1976).

What to expect

• This showing will involve the performance of all or excerpts of the working script and community discussion about themes, the writing and the storytelling mode, with the goal of improving and further developing the work.

A SPINELESS WONDERS | RACREATE Co-production. Produced with the support of the City of Sydney Creative Grant for the Imaginative Recreation project.