Alice Body

What role can or should art play in a country’s understanding of a national tragedy? Just as Red Stitch is preparing to launch their season of Tom Holloway’s Beyond The Neck – a play dealing with victims of the Port Arthur massacre – news is flooding in that Sydney-based artist Rodney Pople has controversially won the Glover Prize for Port Arthur, a work already being discussed as ‘the Martin Bryant painting’. Red Stitch’s imminent production is the premier showing of Holloway’s play in Victoria, and the fact that Beyond The Neck’s season kicks off within a week of Pople’s $35,000 win will surely be a catalyst for some discussion.

For Beyond The Neck actor Emmaline Carroll, the ability of art to distil and explore emotions and perspectives, thereby framing and reframing public discussion, is important for a country to come to terms with such an event, and perhaps under-utilised. “There’s really not a great deal of material out there,” she says. “There are books and documentaries, but there have been no plays or things like that.” She adds that a couple of members of the cast and crew were from Tasmania: “They’ve both told anecdotes of how it’s still a very hush-hush thing. People really don’t like to talk about it.”

Carroll is of the opinion that Beyond The Neck has been important in addressing the Port Arthur Massacre in several ways. “It’s a play. It’s theatre. Theatre is not always there to educate or anything like that, but [the shooting] was pretty important in our lifetime as Australians. I remember the event and most people do, but I really can’t recall many of the details – and a lot of people don’t – because we weren’t really told many details.” Bearing in mind that the shooting happened fifteen years ago, before the floodgates really opened on the Information Age, the lack of prevalent detailed information certainly reflects on a certain discretion. “It was so private,” Carroll asserts. She references those men and women with real-life accounts of the massacre who agreed to be interviewed by Holloway, for the purposes of writing the play that would interweave these accounts: “I think it was a cathartic experience for those involved in that collaborative process of telling their stories and being heard.”

Beyond its sensitive subject matter, Carroll believes Beyond The Neck is an exciting piece of theatre in its own right, an opinion reflected in the play’s 2007 debut as one of only ten chosen to be part of the Royal Court Theatre’s International Young Playwrights’ Festival in London. “The play is called a quartet on loss and violence, and it’s written like a quartet with an overture, first and second movement, and a coda,” she explains. “There are four characters – not all of who have a direct link to the Port Arthur Massacre – but they’re all experiencing their own journey of either tragedy or loss and they come together at the Port Arthur site. And I think that’s refreshing. It’s not like: ‘We’re going to do a play about persons A,B,C and D who were affected by the Port Arthur massacres.’ It’s really just stories about people who are experiencing extreme things and how they deal with that.”

Inpress Magazine, Issue #1216

“There’s a cat outside!” Despite the interview having just ended, MKA’s Artistic Director Tobias Manderson-Galvin has declined to immediately plunge back into rehearsals (he is directing half of the theatre company’s upcoming double-bill, Nathaniel Moncrieff’s Tinkertown) in order to call back with this announcement. “A cat just jumped down here and is watching us.”

The information is relevant (more or less) because, two minutes prior, Manderson-Galvin is closing the interview with the promise that MKA would offer discounted tickets to those audience members who brought a cat along to the shows. “Well, MKA puts on the sort of plays you can bring your cat to,” he explains. “If it’s a black cat, just don’t tell us, as theatre people are notoriously superstitious. But I’m happy to offer discounted tickets for people with cats. I wouldn’t say free,” Manderson-Galvin is bone dry here. “By discount I mean, about twice the cost of a normal ticket.”

Tinkertown (the other play making up MKA’s double bill is Bridget Mackey’s Hose) certainly seems set to tick those boxes Manderson-Galvin thinks will satisfy cats, including “a bit of action” and “people suffering”. The play follows Chester as he visits his teenage daughter on his first day out of prison, accidentally shoots his ex-wife’s sister and finds himself back on the run from the police, this time in the stark expanse of the Australian outback with his daughter in tow.

Tinkertown’s playwright, Moncrieff, wrote another MKA production: 2011’s successful Sleepyhead. Manderson-Galvin recounts: “After Sleepyhead, [Moncrieff] said to me, ‘Look, I’ve written this other play, and it’s got all of the most fucked up stuff I’ve ever written in it. The last time I sent it off, I had been talking to a director in Sydney, and they were really excited about it until I sent them the script. They haven’t spoken to me since then.’” Although that particular play has yet to see the light of day (“You don’t want to know about that play,” Manderson-Galvin is adament), he asked Moncrieff if he had anything else, and received Tinkertown, which he describes as being part Australian Gothic and part Cohen brothers-style black comedy. Tinkertown fortunately “ticked all the boxes,” Manderson-Galvin asserts. “It’s a stunning play.”

MKA has done a commendable job of putting out quality productions over the year and a bit that the company has been operating, especially with the closure of their original base. “We have one place on the horizon which we could move into in about three years,” Manderson-Galvin says, “After these two plays [Tinkertown and Hose] we’re tentatively locked into somewhere for a season of four shows, but no. Nothing permanent.”

Despite MKA’s current nomadic existence, Manderson-Galvin has ambitious plans for the company in 2012: “I said when we first officially launched at the end of 2010 that I wanted to connect with South East Asian companies in places like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Bangkok,” he says. “One of the shows that we’ll have later on this year will be from a Singaporean playwright. So I’m excited that that’s happening.”

Sounds like MKA is in for another year of intense – if rewarding – hard work. Manderson-Galvin acquiesces. “I hope so.”

Inpress Magazine, Issue #1212

It is blisteringly humid outside the Malthouse Theatre café when Playwriting Australia’s Artistic Director Chris Mead starts talking, and absolutely pouring down when he finishes. The sudden swing in the weather serves as circumstantial rhetoric for the potential Mead sees in the Australian playwriting community to both develop domestically and stand out in the international arena, potential he believes may be unleashed with the right encouragement.

“New Australian plays represent 15-20% of [average theatre company] repertoire, so it’s scandalously small,” Mead reveals. “What we’re trying to do is push that number up. Of the plays that we support, somewhere between one in three and one in two actually get produced. So we are making a difference, although” – he adds thoughtfully – “I think also the attitude’s changing and more and more companies are wanting to take responsibility to grow artists and get their work on.”

Playwriting Australia is still a relatively young organisation, formed in 2006 and based in Sydney’s vibrant inner west. Mead explains the strategy the company has been employing to support Australian playwrights get their work out there: “When we started we had to take on the Playwrights’ Conference which has existed since 1973. Sadly many of the same problems that were faced in the early 70s – that were the reasons for creating the Playwrights’ Conference – are still in existence now. How do you get your play into a company?”  Mead says, spreading his hands out to emphasise.

“The Conference was broken-backed by trying to develop the plays, but also trying to showcase the plays. So what we did was to try to separate those two things out, so we have a number of programs that work on the development of plays, but there’s no outcome,” Mead says. “We only try to put in front of an audience the plays that are ready for it. Which is not to say that we think of new plays as essentially a problem to be solved. It’s rather: let’s make sure the writer gets what they need at the right time.”

In terms of what this means for Playwriting Australia’s National Play Festival beginning this week: “All of the plays for the Play Festival are good to go,” Mead says. “In terms of the 200 or so that got submitted to us, these are the 5 that we think could be programmed tomorrow and make a great adornment to any season.”

This year’s National Play Festival has a particular focus on Australian plays reaching international audiences, hence its ‘departures’ theme. It is a goal Mead sets for Playwriting Australia in general. “We worked with the Australia Council to figure out how to get more Australian plays produced overseas,” he explains. “And the simplest way of doing that, really, was to bring producers to Australia.” Such a strategy helps explain the presence of some intriguing international participants in the National Play Festival program, including playwrights from Scotland and England.

“Most of the people overseas don’t think of Australia as a cultural producer of new plays and I’d love to think that we’re leading the pack rather than just responding to that,” Mead says. “It’s just a matter of getting them up to speed with what we’re doing, really.”

Inpress Magazine, Issue #1212

Paola Ungur, director of Turtle Lab’s upcoming production of The Drowning Girls, found herself addressing a range of issues on several levels in preparing for the play. Not only is The Drowning Girls a challenging play in both an artistic and technical sense, Turtle Lab is teaming up with the White Ribbon campaign against domestic abuse to put on the play, and effectively exploring this problem as well.

“It’s not an issues play,” Ungur clarifies. “It’s not glaringly obvious that it’s about domestic violence and that it’s bad, but it’s a true story that gets told to a certain degree.” The true story Ungur is referring to is commonly known as the Brides in the Baths, and revolves around a string of murders occurring around the turn of the 20^th century, committed by serial bigamist George Joseph Smith. Smith married his victims, then killed them by drowning them in the bath in order to make off with their money, “It’s really interesting to talk about the differences between 1912 – 1914 and now: what has changed and what is still the same, and what’s still the same because we’re essentially human. We’re not lonely creatures.”

The vulnerability of Smith’s victims is one of the things that drew Ungur to the play, not simply because they were women, but because they were in love: “Regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman, if you’ve got an idea of what you want in life and you’ve decided that it’s not going to happen, once given the opportunity you grab onto it with both hands and pull it fully into your life,” she says. “That makes you really vulnerable. These three women who – certainly not in the modern context would be past their prime – but for the time, they were overdue their shelf life. So when they were offered love and marriage and a companion, they each dove into it, and then of course, there were really tragic consequences.”

Also drawing to Ungur to the play were the several challenges the text posed for practical production. Each actor – there are three – is required to play about seven characters each, including taking turns in playing the psychopathic Smith, and navigating the stage from in and out of bathtubs while kitted out in wedding gowns. “It’s a fascinating piece in terms of what a task it is for the actors,” Ungur admits. “It’s a big ask.”

The Drowning Girls is also a challenge for the director: “There are two different forms that the piece bounces back and forth between. One is very naturalistic and realistic – you know, people having conversations with each other – then there are moments that are entirely abstract and lyrical. So, how do you balance realism with abstraction, and still tell the story?”

Presumably the stage will get a bit messy: “Yeah, messy is one word for it,” Ungur laughs. “Water gets dragged around the stage. Basically it’s like water is the fourth actor.” She elaborates: “It’s a bit of an X-factor… There are some things that you have direct control over, the choices you make as a performer and a director, and there are some things that are juts going to happen, because the water’s there.

“I hope the whole thing will be beautiful and artistic as opposed to accident-prone!”

Inpress Magazine, Issue #1210, p39

“I just graduated from VCA about three or four months ago, back in November. So it’s been the first time in a couple of years that I’ve had to work solidly to be able to support myself,” Rory Kelly, guest actor at Red Stitch and cast member for director Kaarin Fairfax’s adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, is talking finances, and more particularly the constrains they place on people’s lives. “The other night, I got home at about 11 o’clock and it was two days before payday and I knew that rent was coming up. I just thought, ‘You know what, I’m just not going to have dinner tonight, because I don’t entirely know whether that’s possible or not.’”

Provided he can continue to feed himself, such experience puts Kelly in good stead to tackle the play. Money troubles help form the backbone of Good People, a play that follows Margaret, a woman struggling to support her disabled daughter and generally make ends meet. The financial squeeze typical for young actors furnishes Kelly with the ability to relate to Lindsay-Abaire’s latest characters, which is furthermore a good thing as the playwright wasn’t about to provide anyone with a moral compass.

“That’s kind of the draw of David Lindsay-Abaire,” Kelly says. “Things never seem to be black and white. The characters and the story never preach a message so much as they present a whole bunch of people who are three dimensional, or as three dimensional as we can get them. [Lindsay-Abaire] throws them into some kind of situation, which then, as an audience, you can literally make up your own mind about the morality of the characters and what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s something that actually makes you think, and reform your own values and judgements of the world. For such a naturalistic writer, he has such an incredible capacity to make an audience think, or at least give you an option to.”

For Kelly, Good People has got him mulling over what it takes to be a good person. Kelly’s character, Stevie, Margaret’s boss at 20-30 years her junior, “is somebody who is controlled – like everybody, really, in this world – by that financial system, and basically by where the money’s coming from,” he muses. “Stevie particularly is the only one who can literally afford to be a good person. Essentially you need to eat and you need to have a roof over your head, you’re still trying to be a good person but if the only way you can do that [afford food and shelter] is by like, selling bits of your morals, at what point do you make that choice?”

Keeping in mind that Good People ultimately explores a theme (managing money concerns alongside everyday living, especially following the Global Financial Crisis) relevant to some extent to anybody and everybody, it seems pertinent to ask why Red Stitch didn’t transpose the setting of the play to a working class Australian suburb. Kelly thinks keeping Good People in their South Boston suburb makes the point that these experiences are indeed universal: “You don’t necessarily need a story to be in your own backyard for it to still be relevant.”

Inpress Magazine, Issue #1209, p35