Keating’s Republic – MICF 2019

Written by award-winning playwright Neil Cole whose controversial play “A Noble Cause” sold out at La Mama in 2018, brings you Keating’s Republic. The play we had to have to revitalise the Republic that Paul Keating envisaged as Prime Minister in 1992.

On the almost 26th Anniversary of Prime Minister Keating’s famous “Cultural Cringe” speech, comes the World Premiere of “Keating’s Republic”. Could the campaign for the Republic be aroused at the Comedy Festival? If not anywhere else.

Paul Keating said of a Republic: "The Liberals don’t want a Republic, because they are too busy tugging the forelock to the British establishment."

Keating’s Republic is a journey down memory lane, tracing the first speech by Prime Minister Paul Keating about Tories tugging the forelock, to his meetings with the Queen (Elizabeth Parisi) saying she was no longer relevant to Australia. The play includes not only his fight for a republican flag, it includes our movement to Asia and an obsession with French Republic Clocks. The play explores his economic theories, his upbringing, and classical music.

The play will be told with the assistance of Kerry (Shannon Woollard), as he journeys through the life of Paul Keating, (starring Sean Paisley Collins). It includes quotes from the Liberals of past, like Robert Menzies—"I did but see her passing by, but I will love her till I die." To Keating this was the stuff of the Menzies Torpor where subservience to a hereditary title was more important than a French Republican Clock.

All the great quotes like "I want to do you slowly" and "The soufflé rising twice" are in there as the play engages in a comic tour de force of Paul Keating and the Republic. The only people who will be allowed into the theatre are those that sign a petition that will be sent to the Prime Minister demanding a Republic.

Don’t miss this hilarious and long overdue attempt to create a Republic in this country.