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QUT School of Creative Arts 2025 Acting Graduation Show | July-October 2025
PROFESSIONAL TEAM
Writer: David Burton
Director: Wesley Enoch
Production Designer: Madeleine Barlow
Production Manager: Aaron Jeffery
Intimacy Coordinator/Producer: Andrea Moor
Fight Choreographer: NJ Price
Sound Designer: Morgan Francis
Lighting Designer: Wes Bluff
Performed by graduating QUT acting students
Designed, stage managed, and assistant directed by QUT technical production, drama and dance students
PRODUCTION DESCRIPTION
On a mining vessel the size of a city, love is everywhere – and so is danger. When a catastrophic explosion rips through the station, hundreds are dead and suspicion spreads. Lovers fight, friends fracture, gods and economists debate, and a security agent races to uncover whether the culprit is malfunction, sabotage, or something far stranger. Funny, raw, and devastatingly human, Space Cowboy is a theatrical ride through sex, violence, betrayal, and devotion in the vacuum of space. At its core is one urgent question: can love hold us together when everything else falls apart?
My immediate interest in this play came from the central questions that arise throughout and the representation of wide ranges of love, in a form that isn’t traditional. The episodic format of the play allows for the exploration of many dynamics without limiting the play to a specific storyline. Space Cowboy explores the complexity of relationships, and reflects many aspects of relationships in every generation, especially Generation Z,
After discussions in the early table reads, I wrote notes about what I believed the central question of the play was, and my personal thoughts. They all centered around love, the complexities behind it, and how humans always search for love, no matter where they are.
As this play had two casts where the scene partmers swapped to each other’s roles for half the shows, Assistant Directors were assigned 3-4 scenes each to direct the swapping of casting, having creative freedom over the scenes and a basis of blocking from the alternate scenes blocked with the Director.
When working with actors in our rehearsals, we explored themes of cheating, domination, toxicity and non-traditional relationships. As the direction of these scenes came from a member of Generation Z, the contexts rein true to real relationships among young people, allowing audiences to feel seen and reflecting aspects of their experiences on stage.
I found this experience incredibly mentally stimulating as each scenes subtexts and given circumstance’s entirely changed depending on what gender was in each role, or what personality was presented.
This allowed me to explore my personal interest of the female experience in a wide range of scenarios, focusing on the reasoning for their character to be in the position they are in.
Within the tech week of Space Cowboy, one of my scenes was rewritten to better fit into the play. This required re-blocking and a new exploration of what the scene means. I was given the opportunity to re-block both version of the scene, changing the overall circumstances of the event. We managed to do this in an hour, and the scene benefited immensely from this new counselling format, over an interrogation.
I’d love to work with you! Please email production work inquiries and opportunities if you’d love to work with me!