From 1979 to the early 1990s a number of small, professional companies in Melbourne took theatre out of dedicated buildings into places where their audiences lived, worked, travelled and played. Deriving from independent filmmaking, 'happenings' and political street theatre, these self-described 'location plays' were performed on busses, trams, and riverboats, as well as in tents, houses, cinemas, pubs, galleries, prisons, parks and gardens. What became known through 8 iterations as "The Tram Show" was staged over a dozen years on light-rail vehicles in both Melbourne and Adelaide, trambulating a total distance that would have taken its combined nightly audiences halfway around the world. These early forms of site-specific theatre immersed spectators in their places of performance in ways that liberated a whole suite of new sensations - beyond sight and hearing - to include touch, taste, smell, balance etc. In this way they moved the 'art of theatre' into literally new territory. Here the practice broke through not only theatre's 4th wall (between stage and audience), but the 5th wall (between individual audience members) and 6th walls as well (between the play as a whole and a random outside audience sometimes looking back in). In the example of the Tram, Bus, and Boat Shows spectators could even witness the events of the play through a kind of 7th wall: that of their own reflection in the vehicle's night-time window: watching themselves watch the play as it spread from its 'really moving' stage out onto the streets beyond...
About the Author: Paul Davies is an award winning screenwriter, script editor and playwright who has written for a dozen drama series from Homicide and the Sullivans to Something in the Air. He helped spark the site-specific theatre movement in Melbourne in the 1980s with TheatreWorks' production of his first play Storming Mont Albert By Tram (1982) on board a 'really moving' Melbourne tram. What became known as "The Tram Show" played over a dozen years to packed trams in Melbourne and Adelaide, generating around a million dollars at the box office (on today's figures) and trambulating a total distance that would have taken its combined nightly audiences halfway around the world. The Tram Show's success lead to an outbreak of 'location theatre' in Melbourne throughout the 1980s including three other plays: Breaking Up In Balwyn (1983, on a riverboat), Living Rooms (1986, in an historic mansion) and Full House/No Vacancies (1989, in a boarding house). Paul has co-written five feature films Neil Lynn (with David Baker in 1984), and Traps (1985), All That is Solid (1988) and One Way Street (1990) - all with John Hughes. He wrote and directed the short feature Exits (with Pat Laughren in 1980) and has published numerous articles, reviews, stories and interviews in Metro, Cinema Papers, Cantrill's Filmnotes, Australasian Drama Studies, Community Theatre In Australia, The Macquarie Companion to the Australian Media and Theatre Research International (Cambridge University). His latest book Really Moving Drama is an account of the site-specific plays and how they came about.