Serving up the atmosphere – lighting the Malthouse’s Game. Set. Match.

A new two-person play at the Malthouse promises to crack audiences up and thwart their expectations.

Amelia Lever-Davidson, the lighting designer of Game.Set.Match., who is no stranger to the neighbourhood, spoke to Southbank News about the production.

There is a great dynamic between the actors in Game. Set. Match., according to Lever-Davidson.

“As a two-hander it’s so reliant on the chemistry between the performers, and they’re just such a fantastic pair. They’re very, very funny,” she says.

Among a variety of comic roles, the playwright and lead actor Megan Wilding made an indelible impression as a ludicrously haughty aristocrat in the ABC’s 2023 series Gold Diggers.

She has also appeared in Top End crime drama Mystery Road, a range of serious theatre productions and her 2019 autobiographical play A Little Piece of Ash.

Game. Set. Match. is another work close to the Gamilaroi artist’s heart which she has been developing for nearly a decade.

It has a twist in the tail, Wilding says, that she hopes will leave audiences laughing, crying and “so stunned they can’t speak”.

Lever-Davidson reckons that it is “quite an incredible sort of piece” for Wilder to both write and perform in.

In 2021 it won her the Griffin Award for new Australian playwriting.

The lighting for the show starts off “real world” but as things progress “tends to move away from the realistic … into a more kind of esoteric space,” Lever-Davidson says.

Playing opposite Wilding in the “rom com with a twist” is (TV show) Offspring star Rick Davies, whose involvement is also noteworthy, as stated by Lever-Davidson.

Aside from the stage manager, Davies is the only male involved in the production, although Lever-Davidson thinks this is “serendipitous” rather than deliberate.

For the freelance lighting designer, who studied her craft at WAAPA and in a “fantastic now defunct ‘performance creation’ degree” at the VCA, returning to the Malthouse for the new show has been something of a treat.

In 2014 she did a placement at the Sturt St venue as part of the Besen Family Artist Program, which she was “really lucky” to have been selected for, which introduced her to lighting designer Paul Jackson and the theatre’s former artistic director Matt Lutton.

Lever-Davidson also participated in education programs and the independent Helium festival at the theatre and went on to design lighting for a double handful of different shows there.

“So it’s always really amazing coming back and working with them, because the workshop’s so strong, the technical management team and the technical department are so strong, and what they can pull off on the smell of an oily rag is kind of incredible.”

The 40-year-old first got interested in lighting doing theatre studies at high school.

“It’s about colour, it’s about direction … it can be emotive, it can be painterly,” she says.

“I really responded to that, and I had some fantastic teachers who encouraged me.”

Since then, she has designed lighting for around 200 shows.

After setting up Game. Set. Match. she will switch to Julius Caesar at the Fairfax Studio, followed by Losing Faith with the Melbourne Theatre Company.

Although freelancing can be pretty hand-to-mouth, one thing she really likes about it is that “every couple of months, you actually get to work with a whole new group of people,” Lever-Davidson says.

“I think that’s what I actually find the most exciting and creatively fulfilling – that you actually get to be in lots of different companies, lots of different rooms, with lots of different people, it’s the diversity of the teams and the plays and the work.”

Game. Set. Match. is playing until May 23.

malthousetheatre.com.au •