It is the day of the opening of the annual school play at Brissenden Secondary College.
The play’s lead, Babette, has been called up to the principal’s office, together with her mother, for swearing at a teacher.
Meanwhile, the male lead, Emo, together with his father, is seeing the school counsellor, in an effort to deduce the cause of falling grades.
Another ordinary day, it seems, until Cynthia Churchill – the music teacher – is shot dead by a rooftop sniper whilst visiting the latrine.
The SAS descends upon the school, which suddenly finds itself in lockdown.
In an extraordinary, sweeping, machine-gun narrative, building to an utterly eviscerating crescendo, Helicopters takes a merciless blowtorch to the entire edifice of modern parenting.
Using pseudo-puppetry, music and Shakespeare via real-time Facebook entry, the piece weaves an intricate, dense, multi-layered long day’s journey into a nightmare of our own making.
Ron Elisha is both a playwright and a practising GP in Melbourne, Australia.
His stage plays include In Duty Bound (1979), Einstein (1981), Two(1983), Pax Americana (1984), The Levine Comedy (1986), Safe House (1989), Esterhaz (1990), Impropriety (1993), Choice (1994), Unknown Soldier (1986) and The Goldberg Variations (2000), A Tree, Falling (2003), Ladies & Gentlemen (2004), Wrongful Life (2005), Controlled Crying (2006), Renaissance (2006), The Schelling Point (2010) and Carbon Dating (2011). He has also written a telemovie, Death Duties (1991), two children’s books, Pigtales (1994) and Too Big (1997), and many feature articles and stories in a variety of publications
His plays have been produced throughout Australia, New Zealand, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, Israel and France, and have won a number of awards, including four Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, the Mitch Matthews Award (2006) and the Houston International Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay.
Certificate Of Life had its World Premiere in Tel Aviv in 2010, and 2003’s stage success, A Tree, Falling, is being adapted by Ron for the screen.
