WORK, BUT THIS TIME
LIKE YOU MEAN IT
by HONOR WEBSTER-MANNISON
Canberra Youth Theatre
Canberra Theatre Centre 2024
Director Luke Rogers
Designer Kathleen Kershaw
Lighting & Video Designer Ethan Hamill
Sound Designer & Composer Patrick Haesler
Stage Manager Rhiley Winnett
Cast
Georgie Bianchini
Tom Bryson
Hannah Cornelia
Kathleen Dunkerley
Quinn Goodwin
Matthew Hogan
Sterling Notley
Emma Piva
Photography Andrew Sikorski
World Premiere
I might spend my last moments asking someone if they want large or regular chips. I might die in this polo shirt. Oh my God I might die in this hat. They will find my fossilised remains and then carbon test me and find out that I was wearing this hat.
Neon lighting has dried out your eyeballs. The grease has permeated your sneakers. You think you can hear salt. A group of fast food workers are just trying to get through another shift. They’re underpaid and overworked and the customers keep coming and time is moving backwards and they need to stop working.
Work, But This Time Like You Mean It is a darkly surreal comedy about young people’s first experiences in the workplace. It’s about having a good work ethic on less-than-minimum wage. It’s about perseverance when you just want to curl up under the counter and cry. It’s an unhinged, deep-fryer-dive into deeply human relationships, forged within the most alienating of circumstances.
It’s fricken tasty.
Work, But This Time Like You Mean It was the winner of Canberra Youth Theatre’s 2022 Emerging Playwright Commission.
Nominated for Outstanding Original Work at the 2023 Ovation Awards
“Rosieville is a delightful, life-affirming play offering endless interpretive possibilities for youth theatre companies and others seeking creative challenges with which to delight audiences. This production by Canberra Youth Theatre does it proud, and caps off a year notable for the number of new plays successfully premiered by the company.”
– Bill Stephens, Australian Arts Review
“Rosieville is a quite splendid 70-minute piece about life, families and a pigeon…The triumph of the script is in the way it swings between the social realism of some scenes and the surrealism of that giant exuberant pigeon brought to life so well by Imlach in Rose’s dreams. In the process it deals succinctly with the characters’ problems, not by supplying pat answers but by showing a path to continue on. This is all given strong and unsentimental purpose by a perceptive cast.”
– Alanna Maclean, City News
