TRANSCENDENT LOVE - 2025
WRITER/PERFORMER’S NOTE
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DIRECTOR’S NOTE
Growing up, myself, my brother Matthew, and my sister Esther would frequently play a video game called Zeus. In Zeus, you were tasked with building and managing a city in ancient Greece. If you were able to gain favour with a god, they would appear in your city and bless your buildings. That personification of the Greek gods was where this all began.
Over the years, bits and pieces of scenes started to gather and during the COVID lockdown I decided to complete the play. With friends at my mercy, I organised two private Zoom readings and was able to further develop the play.
In 2023, as I was planning what to do for Sydney Fringe, Atlas Adams, who was a significant contributor to the play through his background in murder mystery design, suggested staging Death in the Pantheon and that’s how the ball started rolling.
Our Sydney Fringe production was designed to be a test run to see how the script would work. I was mostly concerned about whether the dramatic elements I had written would hold up to the comedic elements. In that production we had mostly the same cast as this production with the exception of Atlas Adams and Kat Tait last year (who played Ares and Dionysus respectively) and Edward Frame and Daniel Moxham this year (who play Ares and Dionysus respectively).
Our Fringe run went very well where we received a four star review and a nomination for Best in Theatre at the Sydney Fringe. On the back of that performance I pitched it to Kate and Siobhan and they programmed us for Flight Path’s 2024 season.
In the original draft there were a few scenes that I cut due to time for Fringe but as we continued development this year, several actors were interested in revisiting them. In particular these were the Poseidon and Hades chambers scenes as well as some extended conversations between other characters. We found that we enjoyed them and they added more depth to the relationships. I was able to further rewrite them to give them greater significance and thoroughly incorporate them into the play.
While I originally began with a classic comedic juxtaposition between the power and magnanimity of the gods against their pettiness and immaturity, I strongly felt I need to justify why this play now. I wanted it to present something challenging hidden somewhere in there. It’s too easy to mock those in power as imbeciles and write their concerns off as simply greedy. If we don’t humanise our enemies, then we fall into the trap of self-righteousness: our enemies only do evil because they are evil therefore we only do good because we are good. Understanding and having empathy for the people we hate means that we also don’t become misguided in our own quest for what we believe is right. It isn’t excusing their evil but it allows us to learn about ourselves.
There are still many gods that walk amongst us today. They are the things we worship and sacrifice for: ideas, beliefs, relationships, identities. But many of these gods we cling to are no longer helpful to many of us. As someone who is mixed-race and spent their formative years overseas, one of those gods that I feel we worship to the detriment of us humans is nationalism. The idea that Australia could be one coherent identity that we can target and market to for corporate interests. It erases the history of the indigenous people of this land and makes those it deems ‘un-Australian’ into the other, allowing them to be fetishised or ignored.
And I want to acknowledge that killing that god will be very painful. It always is. Right now, it’s been very painful for older generations to live in a world that has become foreign to them. We often make fun of older people who are out of touch but for them, the world they’ve been living in and identify with is being taken away from them and they don’t understand why. That’s why worshiping our own gods is not enough. That’s why we need compassion and mercy.
“And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck.”
Special thanks to:
Kat Tait for performing in the production last year
james hartley - writer/director
James Hartley is an award winning director, writer, and actor of theatre and film. The short play, "The Fox and the Hunter" which he directed and performed in, won Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Writer at Short+Sweet Sydney 2013.
His short films have been screened around the world in almost 100 cities in over two dozen countries; "First Love," was awarded the Audience Prize at the Festival International des Très Courts.