VA ID 0:02
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Matthew Erdely 0:04
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations with emerging and experienced, creative voices in our community. I'm Matthew Erdely, and our guest on today's program is Eddie Morrison, a stage and film actor, musician, playwright, fringe performer, puppeteer, theater company creator and much more. Eddie Morrison has appeared on TV in danger five, the infamous Adelaide sketch comedy group for Golden Fung, played double bass and sung for his band haystacks Calhoun, and has appeared in countless stage shows, including, but not limited to double bass, me and my mates, drought, turgid and maximum breakdown. As well as being a performer, Eddie also rescues cats from trees. Welcome to the program. Eddie Morrison, hello.
Eddie Morrison 1:10
Thank you very much for having me. I don't rescue as many cats as I'd like to these days.
Matthew Erdely 1:14
Eddie Morrison, can you tell the emerging writers listeners about yourself and what you do?
Eddie Morrison 1:20
Right? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you covered it in great detail, but I suppose I mostly, I would say I'm a an actor. That's mostly what I do. And that's sort of from where everything else I do kind of radiates out from. I studied at the Center for Performing Arts. Well, actually, was called AC arts. At the time I studied, they changed the name Adelaide College of the Arts in light square. I studied acting there, and since then, you know, I've worked largely in theater. That's sort of my one true love, I suppose. But, you know, you try to do everything you can, and you sort of have to, you know, branch out if you want to work a lot, which I do. So, yeah, and I've tried my hand at a bit of everything.
Matthew Erdely 2:03
Are you able to tell us about the range of projects you're currently working on?
Eddie Morrison 2:08
I'm currently working on a big writing project for a solo play. I'll tell you about it. It's called Paladin, and it's about a weird loser who takes it on himself to investigate what he imagines is a grand conspiracy, and in the course of it ruins his life in through his own incompetence and hubris. And hopefully, we'll be able to finish it before this year, and optimistically, we can perform it, you know, this time next year, but you know, best laid plans and everything like that. But otherwise, I'm also working on a show with zero theater collective, which are a group that I'm sort of founding member of. We're working on a show called Tulpa, which I've also sort of written, but Well, I mean, I wrote the first draft, but I suspect the actual finished piece will be a very collaborative kind of thing. So I guess I still will be the writer, but, you know, won't just be me riding on it. So there's a lot of theater stuff. And in addition to that, I'm always like performing music with my band, haystacks Calhoun, who you talked about, and some other projects. And actually, I play bass in a pirate themed punk rock band called Captain hellfire and the wretched brethren. And we're currently recording a little EP to put out very soon. We hope of pirate themed punk rock songs, Captain hellfire and the retro browser. They are amazing to watch live. So whether you are able to get to a gig yourself, or, you know, you look for their music on like Spotify, wherever you can find it, yeah, do it. It's a good time. Yeah, there are a lot of fun the gigs are. We put a lot of effort into making the gigs a real event, you know? So, yeah, come on down.
Matthew Erdely 3:49
Now, as alluded to in the intro, you've performed in many stage shows. Could you tell our listeners about what it's like performing in one person shows, versus, say, ensemble cups?
Eddie Morrison 4:01
Sure, the challenges of a solo show, I think if you have never done one, you might look at a solo show and think that's really hard because you're on stage by yourself and that, you know, it's very exposing. And that's true, but I think a regular performer will probably say that the real difficulty, or at least, in my opinion, the real difficulty of a solo show is that you're by yourself, and it's very lonely before and after the show. So being by yourself on stage, as long as you know the material, is one thing, because you don't have to worry about another actor stuffing it up for you, you know, or if you stuff it up, it's easier for you to find your way back into it, because it's just you. You don't have to worry about anyone else and messing up their track of the show. But like I, toured a solo show called the double bass, and that was a show that was quite. It's by Patrick Suskind, that play, who wrote perfume story of a murderer, the novel which you might have heard of. And that show was quite it was quite long. It was quite wordy. It was fairly difficult technically to perform, and also it was a real emotional journey. And so I'd be sitting backstage by myself just waiting to hear the music cue. That meant it was my time to go on stage. And I'd be there in the green room, you know, for 45 minutes, just waiting, sort of like clawing at the walls. You know, I'm the kind of performer who likes to talk to people, and so before a show, and that sort of my warm up. And so doing an ensemble piece is like you can just hang in the green room with the other actors and sort of talk to them and get in the zone. That way. It's a lot. I just find it a much more what is the word? Much easier, more organic, I guess, kind of process of just talking to people and then that sort of gets you ready to step out on stage, whereas if you buy yourself the you by yourself, there's a problem where you might sort of disappear into your own head, a bit much so that is difficult. And also the performing style is quite different. You You know, with other people, the cliche, there's old cliche, they always say that acting is it's not acting, it's reacting. And so with other people, you really have to listen to the other performer on stage and the nuance of what they're giving to you, because it might be different every night, you know what I mean. And so you want your reaction to be informed by what they're giving you, and you're sort of bouncing the ball back and forth like that. And so it's kind of a different challenge, where, when you're doing it solo, that's more I suppose, sometimes you might be doing it for the audience, if the audience is present in the show. Some shows they're not like, you know, they talk about the fourth wall being up. So sometimes you acknowledge the audience in a solo show. Sometimes you don't. So yeah, there are just little quirks, but then, yeah, the main one is the loneliness of touring a solo show. And because some people, like comedians and stuff, might or, you know, season touring shows might go out and be on the road for months and months and months by themselves, and I just hope that they have a really good stage manager or crew on tour with them.But the performing a solo show is a lot of fun because you're by yourself and you can tweak all the variables and stuff yourself. You know, it's kind of a bit megalomaniacal in that way. I've seen, you know, a bunch of French shows and theater shows. There's a different it's a different energy. Of course, when you have an ensemble cast, you have, like you said, you're reacting, you're bouncing off others, energy and what they bring each night. And so, respect, respect. Um, solo shows so much. But, uh, yeah, the different challenges, definitely different challenges, yeah.
Matthew Erdely 4:24
And on the flip side, there's different, you know, forms of elation and and joy and that you can go through.
Eddie Morrison 7:33
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. They are kind of their own beasts, in a way, yeah. And I think in two you've done one, it can like what you think might be difficult about a solo show versus an ensemble show is not necessarily what you find difficult. In my experience. You know, acting is very personal. You know, other people might have a very different experience, but that was me, my experience. Yeah.
Matthew Erdely 7:56
In a world where it's increasingly difficult to get theatre made, you've created your own company, along with others, yeah, Zero Theatre Collective
Eddie Morrison 8:06
That's right.
Matthew Erdely 8:06
Can you tell our listeners more about this? The website address, how it came to be its mission, and anyone else who was involved?
Eddie Morrison 8:16
Sure, yeah. So we started a couple of years ago, and the ZeroTheatre Collective is myself and then a few other actors of my vintage who have been around for a long time. So Alby, Grace D Easton, Peter Korda, [?Sauce and Andrew Croupy]. And we call ourselves a collective because we mostly want to work with other people, but we recognise that, as you said, it's so difficult to make theater. So we thought, well, the five of us, you know, as we're a bit older, we're not sort of younger, we some of us have other commitments and stuff, so surely five of us can band together and do the boring, hard work of putting on a show, like producing and scaring up money from somewhere, and timetable management and all that sort of difficult, boring stuff, and we want to work collectively with other artists and sort of, you know, in some small way, take on some of the burden of being difficult, the difficult stuff. And yeah, we started partially out of that, and partially because we saw, at the time, there are a lot of new theater companies now, but they're all very young, like the members are very young. So there's groups like cram or rock punked, who I think are great. They're really, really good. And it's really exciting that we started to see young theater companies happening again. But in Adelaide, particularly, it's it's really difficult for artists. Once you get out of the sort of emerging age bracket, you know there are a lot of funding and opportunities sort of dry up, and it becomes very difficult, particularly, you know, if you have children, as you get more more obligations as you get older, it becomes very difficult to give the amount of time and energy to making theater. And so we as a bunch of you know, artists approaching middle aged kind of theater artists who it's not our primary source ofincome. Largely, we were like, Well, we want to... make art too, and we want to find a way forward that is sustainable in our practice, so that maybe we only do one or two, one show a year, or one show every two years or something, and we rehearse twice a week for six months or whatever. But we canstill, you can still make independent art, unfunded, sort of independent art in Adelaide. So that's the Zero Theatre mission, in terms of, like, how we work. And if you want to find out more about us, we've got a Facebook page, Zero TheatreCollective, Facebook and Instagram. We also have a website. The website is probably unhelpful for any actual information, because we kind of made it a deliberate art project. So the website is, I made it myself to kind of you can tell I made it myself as well. But we just saw a lot of theater companies had very slick websites, and we thought, well, what if we had a website that looked like a GeoCities website from 1999? I can't guarantee if you use, like a sort of a text to speech program to view the web, because we deliberately made it with janky old technology. I'm not sure if how well it'll interact with that sort of stuff. So we are working on making it more more friendly for people who use those sort of things. But because I started it myself, and the code is a nightmare, I tell you, what if you could see that under the order of our website? So Facebook and Instagram is to keep track. But the main thing we do at the moment, while we're working on developing shows, is we wanted to have nights where artists could present excerpts of work they've written, sort of in progress, and we would have actors there to read it, and they could sort of get feedback from audiences and stuff like that, and see how things were working. So we regularly hold those. We call those the page zero nights. So that's the main thing we're doing at the moment. We hold this. Try to hold those once every two or three months, and they've been really great for us. We wanted to have, like community. We've unfortunately had some institutions in Adelaide closed down, which have meant that we don't have as many meeting places or gathering places as we used to as well. So that's sort of the zero mission in a long, rambling summer. If you have the technology to be able to do it, please access the website. It's very, very funny, and it's a good time for everyone involved.
Matthew Erdely 12:11
Eddie Morrison, yes, could you please tell our listeners, and you have to a degree already, the Zero Theatre Collective website, but how can they follow you and your career as a progresses?
Eddie Morrison 12:27
Sure. So if you want to follow me, I have a page which is sort of, I guess, what I laughingly call my professional Instagram, which is at Eddie Morrison all one word, underscore actor, and that's where I sort of post about projects I'm working on and things like that. You can also follow my band, haystacks, Calhoun, that's Calhoun, C, A, L, H, double, o, n, that's on Instagram and Facebook. And those are mostly where I post about creative stuff that I'm doing, and also just pictures of me dressed in crazy costumes from being on set and stuff like that. So you know, please do check it out. Excellent.
Matthew Erdely 13:14
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program, Emerging Writers. Our guest today is Eddie Morrison - actor, musician, playwright and theatre company founder. Let's get onto the topic of television. Okay, you appeared as an extra in the famous Australian action surreal comedy series danger five. Could you tell us about how you managed to get that role? What it was like filming on set, and share any other insights from the experience.
Eddie Morrison 13:45
Sure, I actually I first got the right I was originally in season one as like a bad guy in a YouTube only episode that never got shown on television. And then they asked me back for season two as an extra, which was a significant downgrade, but it's what I deserve, to be honest. And I originally got the role. So I went to high school with David Ashby. He was a couple of years above me, and we did the school musicals together. And he, you know, he was a really nice guy. Kind of think looked out for the younger kids and stuff like that. And we, we hit it off really well. And then, you know, he graduated, and I hadn't heard from him, and then you just see him around the traps. But I think he knew I was an actor, and just gave me a call one day out of the blue to be like, do you want to be in this thing I'm filming? And it was both seasons were great. The first season of danger five, the episode ends with me being shot by a machine gun. So I have, I had this bulletproof vest on covered with squibs, which is, like a squib is like a small explosive with, like a bag of fake blood on top of it. So they would go action, and the guy would shoot the machine gun at me, and all the squibs would all explode and, like, spray blood. And then I collapsed backwards and died. And that was really cool and nerve-wracking, because we could only do one take of that, and if it stuffed up, that was it, it would be my fault. This show was ruined forever. So that was great fun. And then they asked me back to be an extra in the second season. And I think in the second season, you can see my arm in one shot. And that was good, because I got to hang around, and they gave me lunch, you know, and I got to be on the set and see the show. But, yeah, it was great fun, and it's Danger Five. People love comedy. They love to laugh, yeah, stand up, comedy, improvisational comedy, or improv for short, yeah.
Matthew Erdely 15:36
But Australia also has a rich history in sketch comedy. Could you tell us about your time in the Australian sketch comedy group, the Golden Fung, the golden what was the crave process like? Or what were some of your favorite sketches, if you remember them, because it's been a while?
Eddie Morrison 15:52
Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, the Golden Fung, I think we, we will. We originally met. We all went to acting school together, and Roy Fung and put the group together. So of course he got to name it. And he named it the golden form, which is based on an inside joke that will take too long to explain, and the payoff isn't worth it. But yeah, so Roy got the golden film together. It was on me. Eddie Morrison, Pete quartersos, Andrew Krupi, Lucy Machiavec, Graham Self and we originally had a another friend of ours called Tom Fitzsimons, who left the group when he left the country, but it was the first thing we did. We graduated from acting school in 2008then in 2009 Roy was like, Let's do some sketch comedy, because he and I had worked on a project while we were at AC arts. We got to do a sort of year long project for third year and one, and he wanted to do sketch comedies, and I sort of helped him out with that sort of writing and putting ideas to paper and stuff like that. And so, yeah, we got together and did that, and we had a show in the fringe in 2010 and it just went really well, like beyond their wildest expectations. It was super low fire, super low budget. There's a lot of stuff in it that, you know, is pretty embarrassing, now pretty cringe, but we had a great time, and it launched us. So then, until about 2015 we did a fringe show every year. We took one year off to film a web series. And I mean, I attribute the golden form to, first of all, I made a lot of really great friends during the golden film. You know, I still, some of the guys don't live in Australia anymore, like some of them have moved overseas season stuff. We're all pretty good friends still, and we see each other a lot, and I still collaborate with heat and creepy. Obviously, they're very good friends of mine and Roy and we, you know, they taught me a lot about just making work and, like, not being too precious about work, and how to get stuff up in front of an audience, how to still sell stuff to an audience. And there were years there where, if I hadn't been for the golden film, I wouldn't have been doing any acting or creative stuff at all, you know. So it really, I was lucky to have that project and meet those people at the time, and my one of my favorite sketches, let me think, I think, well, I had this character I used to do called Duck Manton, and he was, like, I said, really out of touch aristocrat who I would come on in this robe, and I would deliver these insane monologs about crazy stuff he'd been up to. So that was a good one. And also I really liked this series of sketches that Graham self wrote called Thesaurus PI, about a private detective who would just speak in synonyms all the time. And he introduced all these, all these other characters. Like we did a series of these sketches. They were a lot of fun, those sketches. So look, I won't be arrogant to say that we kick started a sketch comedy scene in Adelaide, because there were groups that sort of proceeded and had nothing, took no influence from us at all. I think, I don't think there's a lot of it around now that I'm aware of is the other point, because I'm old and out of touch. So maybe there are heaps of young people doing heaps of cool sketch comedy, and if you know of that, do get in touch. I'd like to see some.
Matthew Erdely 19:11
Now the next question is a little vague and esoteric.
Eddie Morrison 19:13
Sure.
Matthew Erdely 19:14
What does theatre mean to you?
Eddie Morrison 19:15
What does theatre mean... ? The great theatre theorist Peter Brook said in his book, for theatre to exist, all there needs to be is someone walking across a room and for someone else to observe them, right? And to me, I think, yeah, theatre is you just kind of need a space and an audience, right? And in an age where sort of film and screen is so dominant, I think theater should make the most of its advantages, which is that you're in the room with the actor. I really love stuff that's in a small room, you know, intimate, what they call site specific theater sometimes, which is where it's rehearsed and devised to take place in a certain place. And you kind of... can't do it anywhere else without totally changing the show. Yeah? So that's what I think it is. It's being in the room with an actor and it happening live in front of you. And when it's great, it can be amazing. Yeah, that's what I think it is.
Matthew Erdely 20:13
I love that you gave a definition of what theatre is...
Eddie Morrison 20:17
The connection with the audience. That's what excites me so much about it is that you're in the room, and, you know, you can audiences bring their own thing. They influence the performance, not as much as the actors on stage influence the audience, but, you know, like the reaction of an audience can change, and like the feeling in a room can change how you perform. And it's kind of a two way street, and it's sort of, it's a bit overused to say it's communal, but in a way, it is, and it can be, you know, and I'm very passionate about that, I think. And it's why I kind of am so hard on, why I see us so much terrible theatre these days, is because it like, it can be so amazing, and it just, it's sort of not treated with the respect that you would hope that theatre makers would have for the art form, but, yeah, I mean, that's what that's what it is. That's what it means to me, is like, it's the most pure form of like, as an actor, I think it's the most pure form of of art because your audience is right there, like you're facing them, and they're interacting with you, and you're breathing the same air, and you're all that can be really magic. Doesn't have to be either, if they made it sound very pretentious, sometimes it can just be like, Oh, that guy fell over, hahaha. You know, there's room for that. Acting as a nuanced and highly skilled profession.
Matthew Erdely 21:33
You've touched on a little bit of where you've studied, yeah, but just generally, once again, how did you become an actor? Maybe a bit more on, like say, what was why some of the challenges you've faced and anywhere that comes to mind?
Eddie Morrison 21:46
Yeah, well, I studied at Adelaide College of the Arts, but there's also Flinders University. They offer a four year degree in acting in Adelaide. And it seems to me that for professional stage work, you kind of need to have come from one of those two schools, because they will kind of screen you out, unless you're, like, very, very experienced elsewhere, they will kind of screen for professional qualifications, which is maybe unfortunate, I think, but there are a few technical things you need to learn to be a stage actor, about, like, your voice and stage craft and stuff like that. But for film, it's much more wide open. You can just join a facebook group of like film auditions, and people will be like, I'm looking for actors for my student film. Do you want to audition? And you can just go and... advice I would give aspiring actors in any discipline. When I got out, I just sort of said Yes to everything, no matter how shlocky and ill advised it seemed. And I did learn a lot. And I would say maybe have more judgment than I did, be a bit more discerning than I was when I came out, like, if something's giving you the scam alert, or, you know, obviously if something makes you feel uncomfortable, don't do that. I'm not saying you should push through that sort of thing, but I think just doing it a lot will teach you. It'll make all the... it won't teach you more than you would have learned in acting school, but it will make everything they taught you that you thought was stupid make sense. Yeah, just do it a lot, is my advice. Do it as much as you can. Make excuses for you to do it. That's why we started to put on The Golden Fung shows. You know, make your own work as much as you can, except that maybe you won't make any money from it, and just work within your limitations to create something and work on something and work as much as you can, because that's how you learn how to do it. And be willing to fail is another thing that is easy to say, it's just you know, but hard to learn that lesson be willing to fail and then learn from your failures in a constructive way. Try and think of a constructive lesson you can take from a failure. I think, yeah, yeah. In some ways it's not a complete failure. If you do learn from something you know you don't, you shouldn't follow what people what you think people want. You should try and make people want what you want to do.
Matthew Erdely 23:58
Eddie also performs with his dad, local and iconic abode musician, singer songwriter, Don Morrison. What's it like performing with dad? And can you tell us a bit more about Haystacks Calhoun?
Eddie Morrison 24:11
I'll start by talking about my dad, but he's been a musician... I mean, before I was born, playing in a band called the Bodgies in the 70s and 80s in Adelaide, which some of your older listeners might know, as a kid, we always saw Dad. Dad was always going off to gigs, and we would go and watch dad perform and stuff. And it kind of meant that when my brother and I came to have our own sort of performing, my brother's a musician, and came to have our own sort of performing arts careers, it was just like, oh yeah, of course, that's what you would do, because we'd grown up seeing my dad and my mother was is an accomplished musician as well. She just doesn't perform publicly. So again, I'll give her her due. The first gig we ever played was with our dad, me and my brother and my dad had a band called Prawn Head when I was like 13, yeah, and we would play really fast country versions of pop songs, and we'd busk in the market. But someone saw us busking one day, and was like, Do you want to come and play at a gig at the Lion Hotel on Melbourne Street there, because the head distiller of Wild Turkey bourbon is coming to town, and we're looking for a band. And so we were like, all right. So we our first gig was playing, yeah, for the head distiller of Wild Turkey bourbon and all these Wild Turkey executives. So yeah, we've been playing with our dad, you know, in different sort of things, for years, and he's a really good singer songwriter, as you mentioned, in the vein of Paul Kelly. It's really great being able to play with your family. It's kind of, you know, an excuse to catch up with your family or whenever, and they're a lot of fun. And, yeah, it's just really good. And because we're all family, it's a lot easier than you know another band would be, or, like, meeting strangers or people you don't know, or whatever. Like we we can just do it very casually, and we don't have to practice very often, and and so on and so forth. So yeah, we're still doing that. Don Morrison's Raging First, we've just released a new album called Dreams, and it's, in my opinion, it's the best one yet. So look, I sat, I think it's on bandcamp. You can listen to that. And as for Haystacks Calhoun, that's my own band, also with my brother. And then two people I know from acting school, Matt Gregan and Antoine Jelk. They're also actors, but great musicians as well in their own right. And we're the strongest band in the world, is what we say. Because really, there's not a lot of testing to see who is the strongest band. So we thought we'll just say that. I reckon probably there are some middle bands, you know, those guys all lift weights and stuff. So that would probably be stronger than us, but they've not called themselves that. So until someone can prove it, I'm gonna say that we are. Yeah, I've just always really liked rockabilly, like 50s, rock and roll and stuff like that. And I play the double bass. And largely, it's an excuse to justify just seeing a double bass, you know, I've got it now. I play it in gigs and stuff like that. But that's a lot of fun. We're very fun. We're very like high energy, you know, kind of a bit punky. We just played at the pirate, pirate life 10th anniversary gig. They had us there, and that was a lot of fun to finish.
Matthew Erdely 27:09
Eddie Morrison, could you please tell us about how our listeners can follow your career, how to get involved with theatre in Adelaide, and also any other mentions and shout outs that you'd like to share with us?
Eddie Morrison 27:21
Sure. I mean, you can follow me on my social media, Instagram and Facebook. I've got public professional pages. Eddie Morrison, underscore, actor, Zero Theatre Collective. Zero Theatre Collective dot Art is our website. If you want to check that out, or you can find more helpful information on Instagram and Facebook, and if you want to get involved in theatre in Adelaide. Look. I mean, it depends on how you want to get involved. We always need more audience members. I tell you, what, if you, even if you want to be an actor, do also go see stuff. It's just the best way to learn about that sort of thing. If you can't do a three years or four year degree at a conservatory style acting school, there are places you can go like there's a group called Tabhu - T, A, B, H, U, and they run classes for adults or young people. And I'm sure there are other sort of theatre schools. A lot of age acting agencies run classes and stuff like that. So there's stuff you can do to get involved. And also amateur groups. You know, you don't have to be a professional. I'm sorry, I'm talking like professional theatre mindset, which is a little bit different. But there are amateur groups where you can go and you can get straight to the fun stuff as being in a show. Yeah, hit up a local amateur theatre group. That'd be great. They'd be happy to have you, because it's just fun. Ultimately, you know, if you don't want to be a professional, perfectly understandable, but it's just fun to make art with your friends. Be creative in your life.
Matthew Erdely 28:38
Thank you. Eddie.
oh, no worries. Thank you.
VA ID 28:41
Our guest on Emerging Writers today was Eddie Morrison -actor, musician, playwright and theatre company founder. This program is produced in our Adelaide studios, and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia Radio, VA radio on digital, online at varadio.org - and also on Vision Australia Radio Podcast, where you can catch up on earlier episodes. Thanks for listening to this. Vision Australia radio podcast, don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit varadio.org for more.
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