Lambert House Enterprises (who have given us so many successful productions in the last two years (Jasper Jones, The Credeaux Canvas, The Shape of Things plus a slew of on-line and live benefit performances during lockdown) have announced that KID STAKES will be performed live streamed on Saturday evening 25 September. 2021.

Following the success of their Zoom reading of Nick Enright’s St James Infirmary and their earlier live Anzac Day rendering of Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year – both to aid the Actors Benevolent Fund – the company returns with a new fund-raising rehearsed reading of a great Australian play to support actors in financial trouble… especially those caught in NSW and unable to return to their home states after big productions shut down due to Covid restrictions.

This time they present Ray Lawler’s classic play KID STAKES the first of the iconic DOLL TRILOGY also in honour of the playwright’s 100th birthday! The play was written as a ‘prequel’ many years after the internationally acclaimed Summer of the 17th Doll and focuses on the central characters of Roo, Barney, Olive and Nancy as they meet up for the first time and begin the alliance that follows for seventeen summers.

“The Actors Benevolent Fund does amazing work in our current long and difficult period for actors, helping those out-of-work or stood down by the lockdown,” said producer-director Les Solomon,
“so another evening to benefit this wonderful organisation seems very appropriate. The event is sponsored by that equally great supporter of the arts and actors – the SB&W Foundation.”

The cast this time will be headed by celebrated and much-loved Aussie actor VALERIE BADER as Emma, the cantankerous but kind-hearted woman working herself and her daughter through the depression and taking boarders into her house in Carlton, Melbourne in 1937. Valerie starred in the highly praised 1995 production of “The Doll ” and is thrilled to once again be performing the classic, inimitably Australian words of Ray Lawler.  Ray himself is thrilled to see his famous play being read for such an important cause.

Supporting Valerie will be a cast of established young professionals including Rachel Marley, Lachlan Beck, Madeleine Wighton, Isaac Broadbent (2019 Glug award for “Best performance by an actor under 25”) and Callum Slater. Samuel Welsh once again features as narrator. 

KID STAKES will be performed on Zoom on Saturday September 25TH AT 7PM.

Bookings can be made at http://www.trybooking.com/BUAIR.

Featured image : Leading Australian playwright Ray Lawler