Surfing and acting might seem as different as, well, chalk and cheese. But Chris Pitman, who combines his love of both the ocean and storytelling in his playwriting debut Shore Break, reckons the two have some things in common.
“I think John Malkovich said [of acting] that you have to put a fire in the belly but at the same time you have to be relaxed enough to go to sleep.
“And it’s the same with surfing – you have to be able to see everything that’s going on around you, you have to have that relaxed kind of feeling, but you also have to be fired up ready to go.”
Having grown up in Adelaide, Pitman has been around the ocean all his life and surfing since the age of about 16. The waves took a back seat while he was establishing his acting career in Sydney – including through stage roles and in television shows such as All Saints – but he began surfing more when he returned to South Australian in 2008.
The inspiration for Shore Break came from the actor’s trips to various surf spots and the encounters he had with people in remote camping grounds, especially on the Eyre Peninsula and Great Australian Bight.
“It’s like a culmination of people who have kind of turned their back on community and communion, and made a decision to live a solitary existence on the edge of the world, resting their eyes on the ocean,” Pitman explains.
“It [Shore Break] is a story about this person who has done that through lack of being able to connect to relationships over his whole life… he’s trying to work out what he did to cause himself to be here and how he’s ever going to get back to the world.”
A solo work performed by Pitman and presented by Brink Productions, Shore Break is described as a blend of storytelling, poetry and performance that depicts the vulnerability of masculinity. Sitting in a place sandwiched between the desert and the ocean, the play’s solitary character has the space to deal with the memories that return to him. He’s forced to unpack the past, with the synopsis promising “an emotional sucker-punch you won’t see coming”.
Pittman says the play is about people “being stuck”. He tell InReview that many of the men he met at remote campgrounds, especially those who were older, seemed to lack emotional literacy. That made it difficult to connect with others, establish or maintain relationships, and function well in society.
“They were unsure what had happened to them because they just couldn’t work out what had gone wrong in their lives,” he says, explaining how these encounters fed into the unnamed character in his play.
“He’s a culmination of my own experiences and the people I saw, and there’s a fair bit of my own imagination in there as well. It’s not a documentary by any means, but I feel it’s authentic.”
When he’s not on stage, Chris Pitman might found riding a wave. Photo: supplied
The ocean plays a central role in Shore Break. Pitman, who lives in the coastal town of Normanville, sees it as “a place where you can really rest troubled thoughts” – somewhere that can offer a balm during times of emotional turmoil.
“It’s the ocean that allows this person, by giving him a bit of space, to try to work out what happened so he can find some answers…
“I’m drawn to the ocean for that same reason, I guess… it’s been my meditation, my grounding, a place that I go to heal from the joust of living. I’ve always found that a soothing thing. So when I saw these people out there living like that, living a far more extreme version of what I was always chasing, that really fascinated me.”
Chris Pitman in Shorebreak. Photo: supplied
Shore Break, directed by Chelsea Griffith with Chris Drummond, was first presented for a short season at the Goodwood Theatre last year and will play at the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Space Theatre from September 3 to 7 in its return season.
The writing has changed only slightly since its first outing, but Pitman feels like he inhabits the character more fully this time: “That’s the biggest change – that I’ve got under the skin of it a lot more… which is really fun.”
Although he says the story incorporates lightness and humour, it does go to some dark places. You might imagine that would be challenging for a performer who is on stage alone for 75 minutes.
“I’ve never done any solo work before,” Pitman says. “It’s terrifying at the beginning; it’s like you’re being forced to jump out of an airplane without a parachute, but then when you get into it, it’s really satisfying.
“This particular play is very intimate… it’s very intimately telling these stories to the audience. It’s an exchange. It’s very much a transference of energy between the actor and the audience back and forth, more so than any other play I’ve done, so I find that very exciting.”
The actor has performed in many other plays – including with State Theatre Company SA, Belvoir St Theatre, and Sydney Theatre Company – and started out his career in a Neil Armfield-directed production of Cloudstreet. He left the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) six weeks early to take up the Cloudstreet role in Sydney and toured with the show across Australia as well as to New York and London. It was, he says, an incredible experience, especially given it was his first job. Every performance earned a standing ovation.
“I was so green, I thought that’s what theatre was about. I thought that you did a play and then people came and watched it and they stood up and clapped, but I soon learned that wasn’t the case.”
He comments in a biography note that after returning to Sydney on the back of Cloudstreet he realised that “some plays bored audiences to tears”.
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Asked how a theatre work might avoid inducing such boredom, Pitman laughs.
“Well, it depends what audience you’ve got. Some people just want to be entertained… they just want to have a laugh and forget their life. And there are other audiences that want to be moved and want to feel changed when they leave the theatre.
“I think if a play is authentic and real, it can connect to your own experience – it’s the old thing of theatre holding up a mirror to yourself and what you’re going through. If something’s real and therefore universal, it also becomes part of your own experience. That’s what engages you in a piece of theatre. And that’s what I hope this does.”
Brink Productions is presenting Shore Break at the Space Theatre from September 3-7 as part of State Theatre Company SA’s Stateside program.
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