BRETT IN THEATRE

Brett has been in various plays in the theatre, I have managed to find the following information about roles he has played, but I expect there are others aswell.

Crazy Brave (2000)

Its story concerns a group of socially-concerned misfits who perpetrate acts of public nuisance to throw a spanner into the works of the Establishment. These are not committed revolutionaries, and their actions amount to little more than elaborate pranks. Into this setting steps Jim Morgan (Brett Climo), a much harder activist who's been disabling mining machinery up north and has plans for the Melbourne band. Although he dismisses two of them as lightweight, his interest in Alice (Alison Whyte) grows as they plan a truly dangerous deed.

On the periphery of this are Nick Feast (Paul English) and Harold Hoffman (Bruce Myles). Nick, a jounalist, has tracked down Harold for a radio series on activists of the past. Harold, once a radical lawyer, has faded into obscurity but has struck up a relationship with Alice.

Judith Cobb's set is creative and appropriate to the setting, comprising fragments of Melbourne buildings framed by the halo of Luna Park. James Wardlaw and Fiona Todd play the two other activists with an engaging sense of playfulness. Climo gives Morgan a powerful understatement appropriate to his character.

The Lady In The Van (2002)

Alan Bennett (Talking Heads, The Madness of King George), a master of comic characterisation, brings us an hilarious and poignant new autobiographical play.

On stage with Miss Shepherd (Jennifer Flowers) and assorted other characters are two Alan Bennetts (Brett Climo All Saints, A Country Practice and Dennis Olsen The Seagull, The Mikado), the man and the writer, one who participates in life and one who sits back and watches.

This play is based on the real life story of Miss Shepherd, a vagrant who actually lived in a van in the driveway of London playwright Alan Bennett, for 15 years.

Bennett chooses to dramatise the experience by presenting himself as two characters, with stirling performances by Brett Climo as Alan Bennett the younger and Dennis Olsen as Alan Bennett the more mature.

The Ishmael Club (2003)

Set in the early 20th century, The Ishmael Club - a club of "outsider" writers and artists - tells of the life and death of the friendship between artist Norman Lindsay and political cartoonist and war artist Bill Dyson, who married Lindsay's sister Ruby Lind, also a professional artist.

The play would be noteworthy for its character portraits alone, which are extremely well fleshed-out by Brett Climo as Dyson, Robert Menzies as Lindsay, and Asher Keddie as Ruby.

Menzies's fine acting reveals both sides of this character, but he is not the hero of the play. It is the socialist, Dyson (played with sympathy and sincerity by Climo), who recorded the horrors of World War I as an official artist, an experience that deepened his left-wing sense of the plight of ordinary men and women.