Bartenders are traditionally good listeners — but, for a change, audiences can listen to a bartender talk about his own life. Or is it?
After sell-out performances last month, RARE BIRD ensemble’s one-man show Love & Forgetting: Tales from a Young Mixer returns to the Ambrosia Lounge in July and August, presented by the Mill Theatre at Dairy Road.
Performer Jack Martin plays a young bartender whose story carries audiences from the Riverina to the Big Apple.
“It’s a kind of Australian Billy Elliot story, a regional kid who starts tap dancing when he’s young … and moves towards an ambition to be an actor,” director Jeremy James says.
“The storytelling is written in a way that it reads as though it’s somewhat biographical. It’s as though the bartender is telling their life story to this point in their life.”
The character borrows elements of Martin’s life — he comes from the Riverina, trained at WAAPA, and has worked as a bartender — but also draws on films (from Casablanca to Lost in Translation and Fellini’s 8 ½), Beckett, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Homer, musical theatre and cabaret.
“There’s a theme of love,” James says. “It’s a bit of a love story to theatre, to cinema, to place.”
The performance begins almost invisibly: Martin works alongside the venue’s staff, hums along to jazz, becomes increasingly theatrical, retreats into his job, but then gradually takes command of the room.
“We constantly are playing with what’s real, what’s not real. Have we begun? Have we not begun? Is he the performer? Is he not the performer?” James says.
James said the idea grew from watching Martin work behind a bar and recognising that a lot of bartenders are themselves performers.
“A good bartender has learned to read a room and read a customer in a way that a good actor should be able to do,” James says.
“They almost, without knowing it, become like a dancer or a kind of physical performer. There’s a lot of performance happening in [bars] without thinking of it being theatre at all.”
The show has been on tour for over 18 months across NSW, VIC and ACT. The bar staff and architecture become part of the performance.
“We adapt to the environment each time,” James says. “The essential storytelling doesn’t change, but the sense of the work changes, and the bartenders and the hospitality team we’re working with change each time. They’re all part of the performance.”
At Ambrosia Lounge, only about 20 people attend each show, allowing Martin to make eye contact or interact with almost everyone.
“He as a performer needs to make each person feel that they’ve had a moment with him,” James says.
“After you see the show, you probably won’t look at a bartender in the same way.”
Love & Forgetting – Tales from a Young Mixer, Winter Residency with The Mill Theatre & Ambrosia Lounge, Dairy Road, 17–19 July & 7–9 August, 7pm Friday and Saturday and 2pm Sunday. Saturday 18 July sold out.
