Five Minutes with Coleman Grehan From Edit

Edit tells the life story of Stephen Dedalus, the semi-autobiographical protagonist of two of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and Ulysses. Edit loosely follows Stephen’s life as written in Joyce’s work, though it does deviate from Joyce’s novels to accommodate wishful fantasies from my own life.

What attracted you to working with Joyce’s characters?

In 2014, I created a show called Him that I performed along the east coast. Later, the play was retitled Portrait Of A Young Man and restaged with a different actor. The reason for the change was to acknowledge the autobiographical elements of the show, and how they were similar to Joyce’s novel. In a sense, I became a pseudo-Joyce creating a show with my own pseudo-Stephen.

The play is very lean – it only has one performer, and runs for an hour. What attracted you to that stripped-back quality?

Edit is indeed a one-hour solo-performed show with little to no lighting or set design except for the use of, and interaction with, a projected image. Enforcing this strict limitation on ourselves was very deliberate as it permitted us to explore the wide range of stylistic choices in Edit without getting too cluttered.

The work is being performed as part of the Sydney Fringe. What do you think makes the Fringe special?

I think Sydney Fringe is a really important festival for the cultural landscape of Sydney. First and foremost, fringe festivals encourage artistic experimentation and creative innovation, but more importantly, I find that Sydney has a decentralised independent art scene, more so than other Australian cities. Sydney Fringe’s artistic hubs and focus on holding all events within one larger area brings together this distributed community in one space.

What do you want the audience to walk out of the play thinking/feeling?

In a world inundated with great romances and epic sagas, it’s easy to get carried away and disappointed by the mediocrity of reality. I want audiences to become aware of their own embellishments so they can be at peace with the monotony of everyday life and discover the beauty in the unrefined and uncurated chaos.

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