WINDOW, CRICKET BAT

Some objects possess mysterious powers. They can take us back in time. They can remind us of someone. They can make us emotional. 

Objects imply drama. When you hear the words 'window' and 'cricket bat', what do you think of? Especially if that window is stained-glass and the cricket bat is Harold Pinter's?

A unique collaboration with Griffin Theatre Company, the Australian Design Centre's Happy Objects exhibition is a celebration of the things that are often imperfect, but always deeply symbolic of the lives we lead. A centrepiece of the exhibition, Window, Cricket Bat is a short chamber performance for a solo actor and a curious audience, who become luncheon guests at the table of the great playwright.

Co-presented with Australian Design Centre

Part of Sydney Festival 2022

Written by Hilary Bell

Featuring Lucia Mastrantone

Directed by Jennifer Rani

For further information, visit the Australian Design Centre or Griffin.

Bright Sparks

On Friday June 4th 7-ON released a collection of works entitled Sharp Darts, published by Currency Press. It was subtitled “Chamber Plays by 7-ON” and contained 15 short works for theatre and/or audio. 

The blurb on the back of the book referred to the fact 7-ON had “collaborated over multiple projects” Reflecting on this event, a few days later, I realised that although as a group we had indeed collaborated (for example, early on, as a group we created a script using Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ that was developed further and produced at the University of Wollongong) in actual fact our most successful projects were those made up of separately written works, perhaps under an umbrella theme such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (conveniently 7, we wrote the names on bits of paper and drew them out of a hat) which was our first project. The seven plays were picked up by Sydney’s Griffin Theatre and were performed one at a time before a main play, and upon the set that had been created for that play. Mine (Vanessa's) was first, entitled Hunger and set in a garden, it was performed on the set of The Night Watchman by Daniel Keene. I remember looking at the set of Keene’s play, the design contained words stencilled onto the floor using ashes or sand.  The word “garden” could be seen clearly and I remember musing on the coincidence. 

The seven individual plays were also published, amongst other short plays commissioned by then Griffin Theatre’s Artistic Director Nick Marchand, by Currency Press under the title Short Circuit.

7-ON has been in existence for a mighty sixteen years. We began the year before my baby was born. As a group we have created many plays, mostly containing short works under an encompassing theme, but there have been many meetings, projects that went nowhere, scripts stashed in drawers, a week-long residency with Sydney Theatre Company’s young actor Residents using scripts inspired by Peter Doyle’s book of early 20th century Sydney police photographs: City of Shadows. Our project-in-response was called Long Shadows. It was never produced.

In reflecting on 7-ON, output, creativity and collaboration and sixteen years of feeling supported and encouraged by playwrights you respected,  I thought about the effect of being surrounded by such collaborators. It had to be positive, I thought. There was lots of encouragement and admiration, there was very little envy (although Noëlle winning that fabulous Windham-Campbell Prize from the USA might have niggled ahem). As a group we could try any writing style, we could float ideas, we could express disappointment to an empathetic crowd. We listened to readings of each other’s works, we signed petitions, we gave notes and we didn’t get offended if they were ignored. And, like a Catherine Wheel,  old fashioned firework causing widespread delight, spinning and shooting off coloured sparks in all directions, we could find inspiration and support in this environment, and then rocket out our own works and words, writing new works, new words.

Talking to Yet Another Playwright about not theatre or 7-ON but Billy Joel, piano-man musician and pop star, we discussed an interview Billy did in the 1980s about artistic success. Success of course is a much thought-about topic amongst scriptwriters and here was Billy Joel chatting about success and how he always knew he would achieve it. How? Joel explained that he knew he would be successful because he was competent. He could play piano, he could write songs, he could sing songs. He would achieve success. And the trick it appeared, was as long as you could work alongside competent people you would succeed. This made me think about the Catherine Wheel and 7-ON again. If you write and create in an environment of creative people, competent people, the energy that can be created, whether collaborative or individual leads to success. And indeed, there has been. Not just 7-ON branded works but individual projects, creative outcomes.  Exhibitions! Kids! School Triumphs! And on we go ...

Since 2005 I’ve had one large scale puppet piece produced, a full length puppet adaptation of a children’s book, several short plays produced, two 30-minute radio pieces, four full length plays produced, one full length play re-produced, an adaptation of a book for children that toured for several years, three full length plays published, academic article and a number of poems and stories published, an audio guide to an major art installation, and started and completed a PhD. I guess I've been busier than I’d thought. 

-Verity Laughton

Since 2005: Three AWGIE winning radio plays produced; one AWGIE award and Griffin Award winning play produced, read in Santiago and LA, and on HSC drama syllabus. A play in Melbourne and Brisbane Festivals and at Sydney Opera House. Doctorate got in 2017. Taught at Uni of Wollongong 2012-2019. Lots of dramaturgy. Lots of mentoring, teaching, workshops. Narrative writer at Royal Commission. Two plays published by Currency Press. Numerous plays in short works events. Still writing, still dreaming.

-Donna Abela

Plays long and short; audio works across drama and nonfiction; performance essays; poems, prose, books--one a mix of environmental history, poetry and memoir, the other my first poetry collection. Practising my toor dahl and ginger cake recipes until—well, pretty close to perfection.

-Noëlle Janaczewska

As life has gone on, I am overwhelmingly obsessed with the visual arts. (Sometimes I think I don't even like words anymore but one must communicate...!) I studied at the National Art School and since then I've been in both solo and group shows. I've also had paintings shortlisted/ finalist in a few art awards. In the world of words, I have had numerous radio and short plays commissioned and produced. Full length plays have had support and development, a film script optioned and another shortlisted for an IF Best Unproduced Award. Like many of us I have more than a couple of works that would love to see the light of day.

-Catherine Zimdahl

16 new plays produced (and some re-produced), and a few still waiting in the wings; 8 new musicals/song cycles;  a handful of screenplays, treatments, TV and digital eps; 2 radio plays and 3 museum audio guides; an exhibition, publications of 4 plays and 4 picture books, a fellowship and 4 awards. Sundry articles, introductions, teaching, mentoring, readings and workshops. And 2 beautiful kids launched into the world.

-Hilary Bell

school triumphs?

I survived! 

-Ned Manning

Oi - haven’t you published both books and articles about drama and education somewhere there since 2005? What about Alice Dreaming - publication and productions? What about that awesome blog that straddles art, education, theatre and poetical advocacy? What about all those kids shepherded through their Drama HSC? Credit where it’s due Ned! 

-Verity (to Ned)

In my own case there has been several produced and published plays written (full length and shorts), a web series, researching and screenwriting episodes on various television shows, produced audio scripts, a literary non-fiction book, forays into directing, the start of a PhD, the quite intense rearing of a child into a young man.

Like my collaborators I am still on the wheel, still writing, still working, still thinking, still sending off sparks into the night sky. 

Of course, the other meaning of the Catherine Wheel is a very nasty medieval torture device. 

Yup. Life of a writer, eh?

- by VB

AWGIE nominations

Congratulations to our Donna and Noëlle for their 2015 AWGIE nominations.

Donna's play Jump for Jordan, produced by the Griffin Theatre Company in 2014, is one of 3 nominees for the Stage Award.

Noëlle's ABC nonfiction feature The Other Polish Explorer is nominated for the Radio Award.

Jumping for Joy

Doris Younane, Sheridan Harbridge, Camilla Ah kin, Alice Ansara in Jump for Jordan

Photo by Brett Boardman

A wonderful coincidence occurred last month. Alison Lyssa's 1981 play Pinball was revived in a production by Duck Duck Goose at The Tap Gallery. Within days, my play Jump For Jordan premiered at SWB Stables Theatre, produced by the Griffin Theatre Company. Let me tell you why this coincidence was wonderful. 

Pinball is about a woman fighting the prejudices of her family, her friends, her ex-partner, her same-sex lover and the courts to keep custody of her child. It used a complex and deliberate clash of style and genre to boldly take on an uncharted debate, and went on to enjoy international recognition. However, in downtown Sydney, all the critics could see was some sort of feminist affront. Brian Hoad, writing for The Bulletin, dismissed the play as "yet another piece of crude and tedious female chauvinist piggery". Back in '81, this big-hearted play about tolerance could not be tolerated. 

Fast forward to 2014. The premiere production of my play Jump For Jordan opens, and is embraced by critics and audiences. It's about a young lesbian who has been disowned by her strict Jordanian mother. It uses a feminist aesthetic to open up conversations about how we negotiate identities and relationships within overlapping cultural frameworks. In that intimate theatre, one of my joys has been to watch punters watch the whole show with smiles on their faces, then fill the foyer with their own comparable stories.

Pinball was ahead of its time. But decades later, instead of fearing or denouncing difference, there is an appetite for stories drawn from the many threads in our social fabric. The coincidental programming of Pinball and Jump For Jordan, the welcome that these plays have received, and the overdue recognition Alison received for her ambitious and intelligent writing, are mighty things to celebrate. Thank you trailblazer Alison. And thank you director Iain Sinclair, the amazing Jump for Jordan cast and crew, and the faith-filled team at Griffin. 

Donna

Sal Sharah and Doris Younane in Jump For Jordan

Photo Brett Boardman

Woo Hoo, Donna!!!!

7-ONs wonderful year just got a bit more wonderful. Our Donna won the Griffin Prize 2013, with her play, Jump For Jordan. Of course not all of us could be there to cheer her on – if we can just nail a 7 in Brisbane and Perth we’ll have the country covered! – but we hear from Our Vanessa (also on the shortlist for the Prize) that Donna delivered a corker of a thank-you speech.

And, when perused, it is…so here it is for the rest of you. Some really great points, well-made.

"Jump For Jordan is inspired by a real experience which excited my abiding interest in themes of migration, displacement, exile, and clashing cultural expectations. However, I was equally curious about the anxiety and paranoia that gripped my friend, and how assumptions, internalised racism and moral panic could eclipse actual events. For this reason, Jump For Jordan is also set within the main characters’s fluctuating levels of consciousness: memory, reconstructed family history, paranoid fantasies, and insomnia-induced conversations with the dead. 

The main character is a would-be archaeologist. But her dream of unearthing antiquities in the Middle East has been derailed by the disturbance caused by anxiety and family conflict. In Jump For Jordan, I wanted to explore dramaturgically this idea of disturbance by embedding it within the form, so I structured the play as if it was a disturbed archaeological dig site; strata of occupation collapse in on each other; that is, scenes are constructed from layered fragments, from non-sequential story shards that intrude upon others and that span a period of thirty years. There are a hundred story shards in this play - that’s a lot of plot - but Jump For Jordan is primarily a language-based play, using associative and dialogic structures to create comedy, dramatic irony, connective comment between and within the scenes, and to unify the fragments into a poetic whole. It is also a bi-lingual play written almost entirely in English, with Mara’s wilful mistranslations causing further disturbance as the narartive unfolds. 

Why did I write the play like this? Because of my passion for treating form as content, as important as content, as invested with values and force. When content is woven into the form of a play, I believe that such plays can support greater complexity and work viscerally upon an audience. 

I wanted to tell you all that because I want to repeat a remark that David Berthold rmade in his blog this week and say that playwrights are not merely content providers. I’m paraphrasing Peter Craven now by saying that one can ask two questions: what can the play do? or, what can I do to the play? I love his first question - what can the play do? - because it understands that a play is an open system... working hard, on many levels, with many strategies, in different ways, in different productions. And to throw my own comment in here about the adaptation debate, I just want to say that for me, the difference between an original work, and an adaptation, is terror. Adaptations don’t scare me. New works do. And I applaud Griffin for supporting me and so many other playwrights, supporting our ambitions and our lurch into the unknown to come back with a play born of this place and time. " Donna Abela

p.s. and while we're about it, check out Donna's article in The Guardian Australia .

Congratulations & Loose Gravel ...

Huge congratulations from 7-ON to Lee Lewis who has just been appointed Artistic Director of the Griffin Theatre Company.

I’m in Brisbane at the moment—this is Noëlle, BTW—and in case you are too, I’m presenting a version of my performance essay Loose Gravel—a poetics this Thursday 30 August at 4:00 pm at the Geoffrey Rush Drama Studio, University of Queensland St Lucia campus. The piece lasts just over half and hour and it’s free, no need to book.

Here’s some info about the piece:

Loose Gravel—a poetics is about gravel and its kin. About ripping stuff out of the ground, and the language that moves in to fill up the gap. It’s a funny and philosophical performance essay about uncertainty as a defining feature of contemporary life. About the materials of the imagination, and the pitfalls and rich disorder of being an associative thinker. It’s about crap places, and growing up in a crap place whose best-known exports are Cliff Richard, Victoria Beckham—and yes, gravel.

The Playwrights' Muster at Griffin Theatre Company

Last Monday night – 6^th June - 7-ON gave a (sort of a) keynote speech for the recent Playwrights’ Muster held at Griffin Theatre in Nimrod Street. Vanessa and Verity officiated and Hilary rang some invaluable bells (hijacked from Vanessa’s four year old son’s stash, in fact. Thank you, Tristan!). We promised we’d make (most of!) the text available on the blogsite for anyone who might be interested to check it out. So…here it is!

…7-ON has been asked to give a bit of a run down on the past year of playwriting in Australia.

We thought we’d do it via the 7 Deadly Playwriting sins. Obviously not all of 7ON are here and probably that’s quite lucky because we can get a bit rowdy and also seven writers means seven different opinions and that’s 49 takes on the 7 deadly sins and that’s a long night.

We all took a sin. We all wrote something in response.

We don’t pretend to know the answer to the questions that came up over the year. Instead, we invite you to reflect on these and chat further wherever you see fit.

SIN THE FIRST: GLUTTONY

That’s it. The food thing – all the chocs you eat while you write – addictions to the little canapés at opening nights, free asparagus on toast, baby meringues – or, or….any time any of us may possibly have over-indulged in a substance that may have led to a degree of dis-inhibition … … exuberance, for example… at any or indeed every… Playwriting Australia Conference? Or - indeed - Facebooking while drunk. All valid examples of playwrights and gluttonous behaviour. Here’s what the first 7ON sinner had to say:

“Gluttony is an interesting proposition for a playwright in Australia, since we are the lowest paid of all the performance writers. Write 15 minutes of children’s TV, you get $4,000: write 15 minutes for the stage you might get a well-scrounged $500. But more likely you’ll get a couple of comps and a carrot stick dipped in hummus. So the idea of a playwright having the money to gorge on anything is…quaint. Figuratively, of course, gorging on self doubt or paranoia or isolation are obvious sins. But in a lot of the debates that have raged this year, I’m sadly aware of a systemic sin – ‘midcareer’ comrades who feel chewed up and spat out and deemed no longer edible.

Meaning, in some real sense, our theatre community seems to have had its fill of writers who are quite probably in their prime. Why? Faddishmess? Lack of imagination? Perceived conservatism and aesthetic dullness of anyone over 35? The impossibility of being the Next Big Thing twice? Who knows? I mean when Caryl Churchill writes something new, the world rejoices. She’s 73.

Is there a Churchill among us? We may never know. Playwrights decades younger than Churchill…are walking away- into the grateful arms of TV, poetry and academia. Why? To keep their joy. To not let it be devoured and spat out by the gluttonous beast of prevailing appetites and tastes. We sacrifice a lot to do what we do, but we must never sacrifice our joy. Which might mean knowing when to take your talent and training and expertise and insight elsewhere.”

So. Question: How many Australian playwrights are now finding their joy elsewhere?

SIN THE SECOND: SLOTH

Wikipedia defines SLOTH thus: Spiritual or emotional apathy, neglecting what God has spoken, and being physically and emotionally inactive

…through inactivity, one invites the desire to sin. "For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." Blah blah blah…There was a whole lot more of this sort of thing but frankly we couldn’t be bothered cutting and pasting anymore.  Here’s our second sinner:

Sloth may seem an obvious playwright’s sin. Plop on your ug boots, ignore your emails, heat up yesterday’s coffee in the microwave, read the papers or go to the daytime movies for “research”.  Loll about in front of the computer and write some shit but first you might see what’s happening on facebook or twitter. Read someone’s blog.  Have sex. With someone else. Or yourself. Or just think about it for a bit and then go and eat some chocolate.

No need for makeup, for gym membership, let’s face it - barely any need for clothes really.

And apart from the writing bit which as we all know is incredibly relaxing and really really easy, there’s the what… phone calls to theatre companies? Emails to literary managers? Smoke signals to agents?Feeble attempts to set up meetings with artistic directors?

Half baked grant applications?

There’s a fair bit of postage involved yes, unsolicited scripts, competitions, so that’ll involve a walk or drive, a monetary transaction, shoving things into slots and of course there’s Officeworks, great lollyshop of a timesuck, biro-porn, sloth haven that it is. Hum de dum de dum…

Recently Australian quarantine were made aware of two animals being smuggled into Brisbane from Singapore, two small furry animals, terrified, clinging to each other, staring out with wide eyes and wondering what happened to their Southeast Asian jungle.

They were Slow Lorises. Not a sloth as such, the Slow Loris is smaller, cuter and seemingly has a far more miserable life.  They’re highly sought after as pets thanks to youtube and their general cuteness. To make them pettable, they have their teeth cut off with nail clippers. Maybe 2% survive this. Not surprisingly, they’re endangered. And the two found on the flight to Brisbane were put down because there was no documentation to say that they were perfectly healthy in the first place.

.

So maybe it’s better to be a sloth after all. Or even a playwright. Unlike the Slow Loris we don’t have our teeth cut off and we’re rarely smuggled in tubes on international flights. But we are cute. And sometimes slow – to get active, to get angry, to get moving.And we don’t mean to be slothful, in fact there’s only two situations where I become a sloth. One is when I’m writing – because nothing else matters. And two is when I’m depressed. Because then I feel like nothing else matters at all.

But if you want to fight the sloth fight, remember it’s not just playwrights who are guilty of ignoring their emails…

QUESTION: Are playwrights the Endangered Species of Australian literature?

SIN THE THIRD: WRATH

There’s been a fair few angry moments in the last 12 months, haven’t there? A number of questions raised in our 7-ON email-go-round anyway. Among other places.

Of course, playwrights are generally not known as being… wrathful. We’re actually quite gentle creatures. This last year however, as a species, we went birko, ballistic, postal, spakka, off our nut. We got the pip, the shits, the red rage. We were quietly indignant,

ferociously vehement, deeply hurt, and really really pissed off.

And these were some of the questions being asked:

1.     Where are the women playwrights?

2.     Why was there an attitude that Australian plays were not worthy of being awarded the Ministry prize in 2010?

3.     Why are the main companies doing more adaptations than new plays?

4.     Where are the women playwrights?

5.     Is this the era of the director not the playwright, and should we all just suck it up?

6.     Are we (i.e. theatre generally) losing our audience or are they (the audience) evolving?

7.     Is the writer as personality/celebrity becoming at least as important as the actual play they write?

8.     Where are the women playwrights?

Here’s our third sinner’s response:

The Blank Screen by…one of us.

Subjects for poems:

Avoid the royal family like the plague, same for yucky disease, but rats have possibilities, even fleas. Cats have been done by T.S Eliot. Death is reliable. Love works best when it’s lost or unrequited. Be careful with melancholy, no one likes a whinger. 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' blah, blah, blah. Age has stood the test of time. Old photos, old people, old vases. Ditto nature: autumn, tulips, the rain in Ireland. Keep found text for emergencies. Don’t try to be funny. Comedy belongs on the stage.

Subjects for plays:

Men and war. Love and murder – ideally seta against a backdrop of war. The zeitgeist in local accents. Snapshots of here and now. Juxtaposition is OK, allegory is not - unless you’re Arthur Miller. Leave poetry to Shakespeare. Important men, men at war with themselves, men with their feet on the ladder going up. A culture is remembered for the splash of its art not the durability of its sewer system. History is borderline, but war is guaranteed. No matter the drama, characters should be 34 years old.

QUESTION:  What if  I never get a play up again? What if that was the last production I’ll have? What if I never get a first production? What if that was my first and last production? What if?

SIN THE FOURTH: ENVY

A letter from…one of us…  

I know all about playwright-envy. A few years ago I was living far away and had two babies, no family, no money, so my theatre-going activities were confined to reading reviews, often of my peers' plays. My resentment of their getting productions was only alleviated by the schadenfreude of bad notices.

When the opportunity arose to form an alliance with six other playwrights, I saw it as a chance to air grievances and rejoice in their success. And that, for me, was the impetus behind founding 7-On.

I still take the name of the Lord in vain when I get a rejection letter, I still covet other people's awards, but being part of this playwrights' company has helped me to sin less. Salvation has lain in sharing both the triumphs and the humiliations of my colleagues. Generosity is an integral part of creativity, and envy is paralysing. I'm hoping by our next forum, we will be able to speak from experience about the Eleven Virtues.

QUESTION: When the pie is so small, how can our community ensure that everyone who deserves a piece gets one?

SIN THE FIFTH: LUST.

It would be ever so easy to get the wrong idea with our next sin, to be inappropriate or untoward, to speak disparagingly of actors, to be steamy and smutty and complain about dampness of the nether regions (due to rising sea levels) and finally insist the whole thing is, to quote Tony Abbott, “crap”. But in fact we’re not here to talk about climate change.

Instead, we move onto sin number 5 which is surprisingly brief. Perhaps because playwrights know what they want, what they really really want:

Here are what we thought were the top 7 lusts for a playwright

1.     A director who has an ear for language and an eye for an elegant and hard-working design. And a great manner on the floor.

2.     A producer who combines hard-nosed pragmatism with a passion for art.

3.     A  cast who will push for clarity in rehearsal and perform with generosity right through the season.

4.     A critic who will review the play in terms of the task and style it sets itself instead of the one she/he would have preferred it to.

5.     An audience that gives standing ovations every night. (We did say ‘lust’!)

6.     Publication, enormous sales and not to be pulped

7.     A box office that surrenders rivers of gold - or at least enough to pay the bills.

And stationery. Good stationery. We’ve mentioned one third of the Bermuda Triangle For Playwrights i.e. Officeworks, the other two being of course Smiggle and any shop stocking Moleskins. Even as we put this speech together, let the records show, one of our playwrights who shall remain nameless brandished their very new, very expensive, very lust-worthy pen.

It was a yellow fountain pen with black ink.

And it was lush.

QUESTION: What more could any playwright want?

SIN THE SIXTH:

It comes before a fall, it’s a U2 song, a parade, a bunch of lions, half a Jane Austen novel.

It’s number six, it’s PRIDE

Well, listen. Maybe some sins aren’t so sinnish at all. Maybe we can have a different take on Pride. Listen to this:

“Creativity is a life blood for people. We’re not talking life blood for artists – although of course it is that – we’re talking about communities, people”. Mike Leigh.

“Artists create a vocabulary for the future." Wesley Enoch.

‘The role of the artist I now understand as that of revealing - through world-surfaces - the implicit forms of the soul’ Judith Thurman.

This is a hard gig. I think one can be justifiably proud to take it on. We’re proud of our productions and publications, we’re proud of our camaraderie and the fact we’ve stuck it out this long, we’re proud to welcome such a talented bunch into this community and to watch them grow. Like Edward Albee said, we’re proud to swim – whatever the strokes we have made or will make - in the same river as Albee himself, as Shakespeare and Churchill and the Greeks.

QUESTION:  Aren’t you?

 SIN THE SEVENTH: GREED

Gordon Gecko famously said Greed is Good. He was actually talking about money and everyone knows that playwrights don’t do it for the money, they do it for the glamour.

This quote was from a movie in the eighties and we also know that the eighties was quite a reasonable sort of time for a working playwright.

It should also be pointed out that geckos in general are not endangered species.

At least they didn’t seem to be in Penang, in the eighties. Honest to god the little rascals would shit on everything and the noise they’d make when they were going for it…talk about lust….

But back to greed:

Here’s a rapid response to the sin of greed :

"I'm greedy for a revival of regional theatre companies because it's my firmly held belief that one of the reasons it is so hard to get our work done is the death by a thousand cuts of regional theatre companies like the Q (now a venue), the Hunter Valley Theatre Company, Theatre South, The Riverina Trucking Company, Mainstreet Theatre, Junction Theatre, Theatre ACT and the New England Theatre Company I could go on but whoever is reading this might run out of breath and faint and provide one of you with the turning point for a new play which will then compete with my new masterpiece which i haven't yet written but might if someone funds regional theatre again..."

QUESTION: Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry? (Boy George, circa 1982)

We want to end with a little extra. A bonus sin if you like. When we first started talking about tonight and what we might talk about in relation to the seven deadly sins, one of us wrote this:

“On Facebook tonight, someone asked. “Why do you Write?”  Why do you  write?

It reminded me of the time in my life when I did decide to give up on writing. I had basically just been told that I had missed out on a place in AFTRS after a long and horrible interview, following a long and intensive application. I was living in a caravan in Wollongong. It was cold and rainy and I was devastated by this latest rejection. I decided I needed to follow my father’s advice to “GET A REAL JOB”. Writing was too hard and too soul destroying and I wasn’t cut out for it.

Anyway I wandered Wollongong CBD crying to myself and I was freezing and I decided, spur of the moment to go into a cinema and see whatever film was on. And I realised at a time when I felt really low and about to give up, that actually I needed to see and to hear…a story. I was comforted by story and character because above all else I actually am a writer no matter what, if my writing is fashionable or not, if it is performed or not, if I am successful or not.

This realisation was strangely comforting. Because I realised… I have no choice.

I am a writer I must therefore write.

And it occurred to me tonight that the greatest sin of playwriting is not wrath or envy or lust or gluttony or sloth or pride or greed but despair. Giving up on your species.  Giving up on the whole idea of Australian playwriting. Australian storytelling. . Not just individually as playwrights but collectively as an industry.

As playwrights we wrestle with all the sins all the time but this last one, the defeat of hope, the triumph of despair is probably the biggest of them all.

And it’s not just the writers who suffer from it, time and again we hear others in our tribe, the other theatre makers, indicate that basically they have given up. On us. For whatever reason they like to give, they make us believe that our stories are not worthy of being told.That’s not everyone, of course. But enough to make us feel gluttonous and angry and greedy and envious and lustful and slothful and proud. 

It feels bad sometimes. Being a playwright.  It feels fucking terrible sometimes. And every now and then it feels sublime. No matter what,we write. Because we have to. Because we’re writers.

So if you are a playwright, don’t give up. Fight for that joy, find the places where your voice will be heard, where your stories can be told. They’re there. Somewhere.

And if you’re everyone else, don’t give up on us.

No questions.

END