Based on her best-selling memoir, Hello, Beautiful! Hannie Rayson will be performing her brilliant one-woman show at Byron Theatre on Saturday August 6 as special Feature Event for Byron Writers Festival.
Hello, Beautiful! is written and performed in the style of David Sedaris, Nora Ephron and Spalding Gray – true stories from a life, spiced with wit, social observation, and intimacy. Hannie road-tested the content from Perth to far north Queensland during her 2015 book tour. From country town halls to woolsheds, to prisons and theatres, audience members said, ‘You should do your own show.’
So she did.
Hello, Beautiful! the play opened in Melbourne at The Malthouse Theatre in May, directed by Malthouse artistic director Matthew Lutton.
Hannie trained as an actor at the Victorian College of the Arts and, although she has spent her working life as a playwright, she found herself wanting to bring together the writer and performer in her own show. Hannie says, ‘In writing the memoir, I imagined my audience, the reader, tucked up in bed, laughing out loud. I wrote as though I were talking to a friend.’
With Hello, Beautiful! her one-woman show, Hannie further develops this quality of speaking directly and eloquently to an audience. ‘This seems to satisfy a desire on the part of audiences for the stories of real lives and real connections,’ she said.
Hello, Beautiful! is personal, truthful, tender and hilarious.
Tickets $30 each from www.byronwritersfestival.com.
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