PRESS RELEASE

NOW YOU CAN EAT
FATHER CHRISTMAS

 ROLAND ROCCHICCIOLI in his own,
riveting story, of a woman’s struggle
for survival…and the child who watched it

The most surprising – and one of the most disturbing – plays of 2003, was Roland Rocchiccioli’s NOW YOU CAN EAT FATHER CHRISTMAS. Written by, and starring, Roland Rocchiccioli, and directed by Jennifer Hagen, NOW YOU CAN EAT FATHER CHRISTMAS will be touring late in 2005.

Part autobiography and part biography, the play stunned several thousand theatregoers who saw it during its 9-week season at the Athenaeum last year. It revealed a Rocchiccioli no one knew. The eloquent and elegant man about town, the comic actor on The Footy Show’s House of Bulger, the sophisticate who counts actor Debbie Reynolds, author Jackie Collins, television colleagues Sam Newman and Ed McGuire, and Liberal party powerbroker Michael Kroger, among his friends, he emerges in this play as a man who has survived a harrowing and often heart-rending upbringing in a succession of Outback shanty towns. An early life that would crush most of us.

Yet the enduring theme of NOW YOU CAN EAT FATHER CHRISTMAS is inspirational. At its core is the true story of Roland and his mother Beria, struggling in poverty in a dying goldfields town in outback Western Australia. Now 91, and living with Roland in Melbourne, Beria has lived an almost unrelentingly bruising life.  Rocchicciol’s tour de force telling of it, had audiences laughing with her, and brushing aside tears as the lights went up for interval. By the play’s end they were on their feet applauding an uplifting and unforgettable 90 minutes.

‘The mother’s tale is extraordinary,’ said The Age. ‘Rocchiccioli is the “Ronnie” in the background glimpsed as a startled onlooker [of]…the details of Beria’s hard life, from the many beatings she endured to her learning to perform abortions on herself, but never a note of self-pity is sounded.’

‘Her story proceeds in … a stream of neighbours, men, occasional friends, and the little boy who longed to be able to eat the sugar Father Christmas that always sat on the top of the cake.

 ‘In the end we have witnessed an act of love on the part of that son.’

 Rocchiccioli plays himself as he is today and 30 other characters including his mother and himself as a child, and the action of the play takes place in a painstaking re-creation of the kitchen he ‘lived in’ as a child.

 ‘The kitchen was in fact one of many – all identical, with the same furniture – that Beria and I lived in. The various homes, in the north-eastern goldfields of the West were mostly sweltering tin or Hessian dwellings, but the kitchen always was the same. You can see it on stage – and in reality, in Gwalia, now a ghost town.

 “Gwalia died when the Sons of Gwalia mine closed down in 1963 and many of the townspeople just packed up and moved on. My father was one of them and he left everything – including the kitchen sink and the kitchen furniture. Forty years on it’s still in the same place, even the lino. Strangely, the old washhouse and the dunny are gone!’

 Writing the play, he says, ‘was interesting. On the one hand it is a fascinating and heart-rending story of a woman and her survival struggle: complex, brutal, pathetic, determined and humorous. But it’s also about shattered child/parent relationships compounded by painful and emotional circumstances.

 ‘As I wrote the play I was fascinated by what I discovered about those distant times and conditions. The circumstances under which I grew up are so far removed from life today I can hardly believe it happened. Yet they did, and the events, some of which were devastating, remain crystal clear. I wouldn’t have missed it for all the gold in Kalgoorlie!’