Media Release
STATION TO STATION
Sons, lovers, and the End of the World.
Writer and actor Michael Gavin takes to the stage this July for the first time in a decade to perform in his darkly funny new play, STATION TO STATION. The Bruce Mason Award winning playwright – best known for his longrunning television role as Chris Warner (Shortland Street’s perennially popular Dr Love) – is part of a stellar cast that includes Mark Ruka, Ilona Rodgers, and Outrageous Fortune star Antonia Prebble.
STATION TO STATION is directed by Cameron Rhodes, whose iconoclastic Christmas production of The Reindeer Monologues sold out last year, with music by Geoff Maddock, the songwriting talent behind Goldenhorse.
International events collide with personal passions, as a charismatic television presenter turned religious zealot (Galvin), and his beautiful sidekick (Prebble), take a mother and son (Rodgers and Ruka) on a rollercoaster ride from Kiwi suburbia to Jerusalem. Caught in a thrilling, dream-like journey, the foursome negotiate a bewildering world in which nothing is quite what it seems - and the most innocent actions can have explosive consequences. At the heart of Galvin’s play is the premise that life cannot be squeezed in to a set of rules (religious, cultural or otherwise) without harm being done. The four people are caught in an ever-rapidly unfolding nightmare of their own making, like characters trapped in a story, desperate to ‘believe’ in a happy ending.
“Living a full and worthwhile life requires a desire to see things for what they are and not what we want them to be, a willingness to learn and to change, and an acceptance of your own powerlessness,” he says. “Faith – belief in the unproven – seems to me to do the opposite. It promises power over death, over the accidents life throws at us, and values an imaginary world over the one we actually live in. It is my hope that STATION TO STATION examines the place faith occupies in our lives in an original, compelling and stimulating way at a time when this issue could not be more relevant.”
Galvin’s underlying ideas may be serious, but the play promises to keep the audience on the edges of their seats. Like his other plays, STATION TO STATION is witty, iconoclastic, moving and absurdly entertaining. Galvin, a lapsed Catholic, draws parallels between the characters’ journey and the Stations of the Cross, a motif he ‘stole’ from David Bowie; ‘like any idea of value in my life.’‘
“I read an interview with Bowie a long time ago where the interviewer asked him about the title of his album Station to Station, assuming it was a reference to Bowie’s then transient lifestyle, to which Bowie replied ‘Actually, it’s about the Stations of the Cross’. So that’s one ingredient in the play,” says Galvin. “
STATION TO STATION is Galvin’s third full length work for the stage. His second play, The Ocean Star, had a successful 2006 season produced in Auckland Theatre Company, who were involved in the development of STATION TO STATION, and won Galvin the prestigious Bruce Mason Award. He is currently working on a new play, War Hero, based on the life of Archibald Baxter, father of James K Baxter and a conscientious objector in WWI.