Camelia

Join us for a work-in-progress showing of Camelia with composer/writer Ian Batterham. Your chance to see new work in its early stages of development and join the conversation about new work being made in Canberra!

Camelia
Written and composed by Ian Batterham
with music arrangements by Daniel Brinsmead, Patrick Baker, and Leonard Weiss

Camelia is a musical work set in Egypt 1946-1950 based on the true story of an affair between King Farouk and an actress/singer with the stage name Camelia, set at a time when the state of Israel was being established and Egypt was in a period of difficult transition.

You’ve got to break their hearts, they want you to.

Camelia traces the remarkable rise and tragic end of Camelia, actress Lilian Victor Cohen,  and her relationships with the two men who shaped her life, King Farouk and impresario Ahmed Salim.

Camelia is sixteen and working as a waitress; she dreams of escape. By a stroke of luck she is noticed at a café by Ahmed Salim, an impresario. Captivated by her he offers her a movie contract – with strings attached. Camelia negotiates a better deal for herself and they leave for Cairo where she lives with him and she learns the craft of movie acting. When Salim takes her to a nightclub she is noticed by King Farouk, who asks her back his palace and offers to put in a word for her with his connections in the movie world. However behind the lives of Camelia, Farouk and Salim are tensions, both religious and political and this love triangle becomes ever more complicated and pressured.

At the present time, when the Middle East is being demonised and set apart by the west, it is important for us to tell stories that humanise its people and help us understand how the current situation came to be. It is through an understanding of our common humanity that we are brought closer together. Camelia is one such story.

With Tobias Cole and Ylaria Rogers
Chamber Choir: Moving Parts
Director: Dianna Nixon
Music Director: Leonard Weiss
Dramaturg: Indigo Trail

The Playwright/Composer
Ian Batterham  is an early career writer/composer and Canberra-based theatre practitioner. His musical background is in variety of Canberra-based musical groups often providing original musical repertoire. He has written a set of short choral pieces for his work choir titled The Four Canberra Seasons part of which was performed by SCUNA in 2012. Camelia is his second full musical theatre work.