Tapping the memory hive

APARENT'S suicide can have a devastating impact on children. Playwright Tim Stitz was a teenager when his father died and his attempts to find out more about his life has led to long talks with his 90-year-old grandfather.

While he admits much of his grandfather's life is so different from what he knows that he is unlikely to ever fully understand him, he is so intrigued by what he has discovered over the past eight years that he has turned the material into a one-man play.

"He is an Aussie bloke who has battled throughout his life and seems happy to all intents and purposes," Stitz says. "I can't fathom it, but I have to accept that his approach is just so different."

Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper is Stitz's distillation of what he has learned, based on his grandfather's return to beekeeping on the outskirts of Brisbane after bad investments led to the loss of his superannuation accumulated as a mining engineer.

"The bees were something of a family tradition that extended back to his childhood and which he always associated with happiness," he says. "The play is meant as a joyful celebration of Lloyd's life and his lifelong romance with bees."

Stitz lists some of the events his grandfather has been forced to deal with: the loss of his baby granddaughter in a car crash, his son's suicide, the loss of his investments and the destruction of his diseased pawpaw plantation that he operated alongside the apiary.

In the play, the story is told by Lloyd (played by Stitz), with the author intervening to try to find out more about his father after his 1996 suicide. "It seems my family has been beset by tragedy, but every family has to deal with grieving at some time," Stitz says.

He sees his father's death as the ultimate consequence of a fatal car accident in the 1980s in which Stitz's baby sister was killed. "The only way to work through grief is to talk about it," he says. "That's what the rest of Dad's family does, but I'm sure there is so much more we still do not know."

Beekeeping and the other rural aspects of Lloyd's life are a long way removed from Stitz's Melbourne life as a Green Room award-winning actor and writer, but the hives used to intrigue him on his childhood Queensland visits.

"I think Lloyd put his feet on the soil and the roots grew up into him," he says. "Beekeeping is inherently beautiful because it is so in tune with nature. Beekeepers say that 50 per cent of their work is all about the flora because they have to know when the nectar is flowing. It is a very enviable philosophy."

Stitz made sure he went to visit his grandmother in Brisbane when he learned she was dying three years ago. "I was robbed of the chance to say goodbye to my father, so I found it one of the most beautiful things to be able to tell her how much we loved her. It is natural that people will age and eventually die, which makes it so different from suicide."

The first workshops of the play were being held at the time.

"Perhaps I never got the response I wanted from Lloyd but I learnt to accept what he gave me," Stitz says.

Lloyd now lives in a Brisbane nursing home, recovering from a knee operation that prevents him from travelling to see the show.

Stitz hopes to take the play to Queensland.

"My only hesitation is that there is a little question-and-answer segment with the audience and I know if Lloyd got a chance like that he would take it over," he laughs.

Stitz, who is on the Green Room Awards judging panel for independent theatre, spends a lot of time watching theatre and is turning the La Mama theatre into his grandparents' granny flat for this show. Audience numbers will be restricted to 30 and they will be welcomed in the theatre's new enlarged courtyard and offered a drink of beer or tropical fruit juice, such as mango or pawpaw. The audience will even be able to smell the tropical aromas, thanks to technology developed by Jodie Ahrens.

"We are used to sound and lights in theatre but new technology allows us to extend the range of what we can offer by using what's called a smell machine," he says. "The sensory experience of the production will include taste, touch and smell."

The play is directed by Kelly Somes, who worked extensively with Stitz in devising it. "I took my idea to her based on Lloyd's stories that I had recorded. But I was determined to re-create the flat. The result is a performance installation that has a play inside it," he says.

It is accompanied by music from his grandfather's era, as well as original compositions by indie musicians Liz Stringer and Neddwellyn Jones. "Some of what they play catches the sound of the bees. It is a big improvement on what I have in my iPod."

Lloyd Beckmann, Beekeeper opens at La Mama tomorrow. Until February 14.