Launceston Players to stage an all-female A Clockwork Orange

Meaning remarkable, zammechat is the perfect word for the theatre companies' all female staging of A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music, coming to the Earl Arts Centre.

A stage adaptation penned by Burgess himself after the widespread success of his 1962 novel of the same name, A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music is his stylised prediction of "what dystopia might look like".

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And in the Players' rendition - directed by northern Tasmanian theatre stalwart Leigh Oswin - dystopia is distinctly female.

"I've had an all-female Clockwork Orange on my wish-list for a while now, and the Players have been the first company brave enough to push it forward," Oswin said.

"Reading the script, it's already an interesting and challenging work. There's dance and singing and fight choreography, and that seething ultra-violence.

"But what does violence - often perpetrated by men and especially in Orange - look like done by women? What does it express?"

The stage-play - much like its novel counterpart - circles the life of a delinquent 15-year-old, Alex, who commits extraordinary acts of ultra-violence and is eventually convicted and tortured by the state in experimental treatments to lessen his violent tendencies.

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Its key difference is the tagline of a "play with music" - the production includes song and dance, most prominently rewritten symphonies of Beethoven.

With heady themes of youth, free will, human nature and government control, Orange as a novel and play is an oddly humorous work that has been adapted several times - the most well-known of them Stanley Kubrick's, though Andy Warhol and the Royal Shakespeare Company took their turns, too.

In Launceston Players' version of Burgess' work, many of the all-female cast members will play multiple roles, changing costume at the drop of a bowler hat, aside from Alex, who is always played by Nikia Breen.

And none of the characters are gender-swapped; the female cast are playing men, which Oswin said "might require a bit of mental gymnastics".

That doubling up presents a challenge for costume designer Janie Molineux as well, who also plays several roles in Orange.

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"We're not hiding the fact that these are women playing men, but we've done it in a clever way," Molineux said.

"There's a lot to unpack for the actors - particularly how to play hyper-toxic masculinity - and for the audience, but we've done a fantastic job.

"We're not being caricatures here: we're scary people when we step on that stage and become these characters."

The performers have another thing to contend with as well: the fictional language which Burgess created for the novel, Nadsat, which was influenced heavily by Russian and add a spice of difficulty to line readings.

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Oswin said the ambitious production is certainly challenging for its viewers, but also intriguing; that it all comes together on stage in a story that has proven the test of time.

"We have these really strong thematics running through Orange that make it worthy of watching over and over," Oswin said.

"It comes with baggage: we have institutional abuse, male violence, Russian influence and control - but this is a production that's extraordinarily relevant.

"It's the riskiest show the Players have ever done, and we can't wait."

A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music will run at Launceston's Earl Arts Centre from Thursday, September 7, until Saturday, September 16 and is recommended for mature audiences.

Tickets are available at the Theatre North website.

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