The Armidale School Foundation presents
production
of
NORM
AND AHMED
by Alex Buzo
Director:
Aarne Neeme | Cast: Craig Meneaud & Laurence
Coy
The
Armidale School Hoskins Centre
Friday September 25 @ 1pm, Saturday September 26 @ 7pm,
Tuesday September 29 @ 11am
Tickets: $15 | Call TAS reception for tickets: 6776
5800
Read the article in The
Armidale Express
about the tour
“a
revelatory production...a fine revival of a great
classic”
(The
Australian)
(Above L to R: Calrossy students after a Q&A
session on ‘Norm and Ahmed’, Laurence Coy with students
during a workshop on ‘Norm and Ahmed’,
Craig Meneaud, TAS student and Laurence Coy during the
workshop)
THE BUZO FAMILY AND ARMIDALE: A RICH HISTORY
by
Emma Buzo, September 2009
Emma Buzo,
the Director of The Alex Buzo Company and daughter of
pioneering Australian playwright and author
Alex Buzo
(1944-2006)
is delighted to be working with
The Armidale School
to present this limited season of Buzo’s play
Norm and Ahmed
for the greater Armidale community at the TAS Hoskins
Centre. Most excitingly, this collaboration highlights the
shared history of the Buzo family and Armidale.
Buzo’s iconic
Norm and Ahmed,
an encounter between a middle-aged Aussie bloke a young
articulate Pakistani uni student, was the play that gave
contemporary Australian theatre its front page debut and
has been studied in schools and universities around
Australia and produced across Asia since its 1968
premiere. It is currently a
NSW HSC Drama Text.
The character of “Ahmed” was directly influenced by the
experiences of Alex Buzo’s father Zihni Buzo OAM. A highly
educated Civil Engineer, Zihni escaped Mussolini-occupied
Albania in 1939 and came to Australia. After a number of
wartime engineering jobs, Zihni moved to Armidale with his
Australian wife Elaine and two sons (Alex and Adrian) in
1951 to take up his position as Designing and Chief
Construction Engineer on the Oakey River Hydro-Electricity
Scheme. Zihni Buzo was well-known in Armidale through his
community work for Rotary, Austcare, and many other
organisations which saw him awarded an honorary Master of
Science degree from the University of England in 1986 and a
Medal of the Order of Australia in 1991.
Alex Buzo attended Ben Venue School and then The Armidale
School “where his English teacher, Brian Mattingley, opened
him to the wonder of drama, the joys of Shakespeare and the
majesty of the language”
(SMH Obituary
2006).
Alex has also written about the wonderful experience
provided by one of his masters at TAS, D.L. Graham, who
organised an end-of-year revue which saw the future
playwright pen his first scripts for performance.
Alex Buzo left Armidale after completing his Leaving
Certificate at TAS and went to Sydney where he attended the
University of New South Wales. It was in Sydney that he met
and married Merelyn Johnson. Merelyn also grew up in
Armidale and was the daughter of Walter and Marjorie
Johnson. Curiously though, the pair never met during their
youth in Armidale.
Alex Buzo died in Sydney of cancer in 2006 only a few
months after his father Zihni passed away. Alex’s family
recently brought his ashes to Armidale, where they feel he
would have wanted to be laid to rest.
Above:
the site of Alex Buzo’s ashes, Armidale NSW,
Australia
