Full House/No Vacancies: Last Night achats At The Linga Longa by Davies, Paul Michael

Full House No Vacancies is a "location play" set in a run down St Kilda boarding house that was once a splendid Victorian mansion . On arrival at the front door to the audience are divided into three groups who rotate through bedrooms belonging to three of its residents where scenes are performed simultaneously (so that each audience group witnesses all the events of the play but in different viewing orders). These are the living spaces of Sheila (a semi-retired actress and chantreuse), Freddie a failed stand-up comic, and Rosie a professional masseuse. Into the mix come Liz, a pregnant friend of Rosies, Gareth a deregistered Welsh doctor who has saved Freddy from being bashed up at his latest failed gig, and Nick, one of Rosies clients (who turns out to be a developer intent on turning the Linga Longer into a car park for his latest highrise monstrosity next door). Over-lording the Lina Longa is its caretaker Morrey, a nervous, constantly irritated little man with one eye and less patience for anything. As the residents endeavor to save their "home" from destruction, characters wander from room to room, hiding secrets and plotting strategies. The story concludes with a "happy hour" in the main dining room out the back where Freddy finally gets to be funny, Gareth ties the knot with Liz, and Rosie has her sweet revenge on the heartless developer.

Paul Davies is an award winning screenwriter, script editor and playwright who has written over a hundred episodes of TV series from Homicide to Something in the Air. He also helped spark the site-specific theatre revolution in Melbourne in the 1980s with TheatreWorks production of his first play Storming Mont Albert By Tram (1982) on board a really moving Melbourne tram. What became known as "The Tram Show" played over a dozen years to packed trams in Melbourne and Adelaide, generating around a million dollars at the box office (on todays figures) and trambulating a total distance that would have taken the production and its nightly audiences halfway around the world. The Tram Shows success lead to an outbreak of location theatre in Melbourne throughout the 1980s including three other site specific plays by Paul: Breaking Up In Balwyn (1983, on a riverboat), Living Rooms (1986, in an historic mansion) and Full House/No Vacancies (1989, in a boarding house). Paul has also co-written five feature films Neil Lynn (with David Baker in 1984), and Traps (1985), All That is Solid (1988) and One Way Street (1990) - all with John Hughes. He also wrote and directed the short feature Exits (with Pat Laughren and Caz Howard in 1980). He has taught screenwriting at a number of universities and published numerous articles, reviews, stories and interviews in magazines such as Metro, Cinema Papers, Cantrills Filmnotes, Australasian Drama Studies, Community Theatre In Australia, The Macquarie Companion to the Australian Media and Theatre Research International (Cambridge University).