Mary Angley

Passionate Bites

Mary Angley – Passionate Bites – Adelaide Fringe 2021 – Ep 015

Grief Lightning: A Satire In 78 Slides – Click for Tickets

Part-theatre, part-standup, part-PowerPoint Presentation. One lecturer desperately tries to prove a popular ‘Grease’ fan theory: that Sandy drowns in the opening beach sequence and the rest of the film is her coma fantasy.

Over the course of 13 scenes, 78 slides, and a flood of custom animations, the lecture warps. Lost in a storm of conspiracy, the lecturer drags the audience down into a world of wigs, jackets, and surreal projection.

Through this postmodern journey through Reddit, film, and academia, ‘Grief Lighting’ explores ideas of gender, pop culture, and obsession. If ‘Grease’ is nothing more than a fantasy, is Sandy’s narrative really the best we can hope for?

This work has been assisted by The Helpmann Academy and the SA Government through Carclew and The Adelaide Fringe.

Passionate Bites Podcast is our short form version of Things People Are Passionate About. Quick little podcast episodes around current topics, ideas, events or people.

Mary Angley is an emerging theatre-maker and a recent graduate from the Victorian College of the Arts’ Master of Directing program. She is currently working on Kaurna land. A child of The Internet, in her practice she reveres the unique properties of both live and digital performance. Mary cut her directorial teeth working with Symposium Productions and The Raw Shakespeare Project on various Fringe shows including ‘When There’s No Strength In Men’. She received First Class Honours from Flinders University for her practice-led research project: an immersive adaptation of ‘Timon of Athens’. For her Masters Showcase, she developed a new work, ‘Hedda GablerGablerGabler’, exploring how game-play can be used to disrupt gender biases in the theatrical canon. In her most recent work, ‘LEAR: A Livestream’, she created a durational, digital performance exploring notions of artistry, privilege, and productivity in the age of Covid-19. She has interned with the Melbourne Theatre Company and with live art collective, Field Theory. In 2019, she created Paper Mouth Theatre as a forum for bringing together emerging creatives to work on experimental projects within a Queer, Feminist framework.

Currently, she is developing a new solo performance, Grief Lightning: A Satire in 78 Slides for the Adelaide Fringe, while readying herself for a residency at the University of Melbourne’s Science Gallery in 2021.

Mary’s work has received support from The Helpmann Academy, Carclew, Splash Adelaide, Science Gallery, and La Mama.