Last Train To Freo

The Fremantle Theatre Company is thrilled to invite audiences to a hit West Australian play as the first in the Wind in our Sails season, with the 20 year revival of the Patrick White Award winning play, The Return by Perth’s own champion of the theatre, Reg Cribb. Retitled as Last Train to Freo for this fresh edition of the work, which is destined to speed and spark its way down the track. Reg is also taking the driver’s seat as the director, ensuring this thrilling show gets a dynamic new staging!

LAST TRAIN TO FREO is set in the claustrophobic, sealed tin-can of a Perth train compartment, where two rough and wayward misfits take advantage of a guards’ strike to terrorise the occupants. The play is an exhilarating one, all action and no intervals. An inspired, richly layered, dramatic story, that resonates for anyone who’s ever commuted in this town or dared a wild night out on the grimier side of town. It is where themes dissecting the nature of candour, trust, solidarity and integrity, both personal and creative, collide.

The agendas of those on board twist together as they travel ahead, unavoidably intertwined and unravelling as one, complicating with every kilometre the train hurtles closer to its destination – like a crash you can’t take your eyes off! And all inspired by events witnessed personally by the play’s author on his own home-town train rides. The work tackles the treaty of brotherhood and revenge, from two very different angles. It asks what is owed to those that hold our fraternal bonds, while it unpacks what we expect from those we consider so different from ourselves.

Influenced by the author’s own experience of loss, the main theme of the play explores the ever-present violent element in society, and our fragile sense of relative security and/or vulnerability. Of course, Last Train to Freo also deals with the other side of this shiny coin; how the socially disenfranchised feel eternally on the outer of mainstream society. The play is a ticking time-bomb, winding-up-and-up energetically, as the train approaches its final
destination: Fremantle. At each new stop, more is revealed about the passengers aboard and the tensions that unite them. And along the way, the work tears open some key discourses that rippled through the Perth social climate at that time, and quite unsurprisingly, continue to do so now.

Featuring awesome live-music from the killer punk-band and Freo locals M.K.Ulstrasound!
Running time: 80 minutes, no interval.
Warnings: Violence, bad language, sexual themes.