Bowerbird: The art of making theatre drawn from life

The Art of Making Theatre Drawn From Life

Alana Valentine

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781925359336
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

'Mostly it feels like you don't know—like you're reaching for something that you can't quite grab. Some writers talk about their fear of the blank page, but the playwright who draws work from life can have the opposite problem. Spoilt for choice. Presented with myriad possibilities and competing ideas of how to condense the source material or arrange it in a theatrically dynamic, original and compelling way. Lost in a sea of options, yet perversely obsessed with the interview not done, the perspective not transcribed, the final piece of the jigsaw forever elusive. And it's not about a lack of confidence, although that can hum away in the background for longer than you might expect. It's about not trying to have clarity. It's about waiting until you do.'%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%So begins Bowerbird, a journey through the life and plays of Alana Valentine, as well as the creative process behind the plays. One of Australia's most inventive playwrights, Alana shows the power of bringing new audiences into our theatres to share the space with traditional audiences, detailing how to gather and transform lived experience into compelling drama. In Bowerbird she reveals the motor of her artistry by combining stories from her life with observations from her experience.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%'Bowerbird is written with all the humanity, wisdom, humour and generosity that we recognise and love in Alana Valentine's work. This is much more than a guide for aspiring writers: this is a book for anyone who loves theatre, its power and its people.' — Neil Armfield AO

1
Flushing out the ears

As a child I regularly had my ears flushed out. The doctor would fill a large metal syringe with warm water and gently squirt it into my ear canal while I held a small metal kidney-shaped dish at the side of my head to catch the discoloured wax lumps that obscured my hearing. Now I say warm water because that’s how he described it, but to my sensitive childish skin it may just as well have been boiling oil. The first time he did this procedure, the doctor told me it would be ‘uncomfortable’. He was wrong. It was painful. The ear is not an orifice you ever want anyone to put anything into. Ever. Think of being in rough surf with a fistful of ear buds being simultaneously rammed into your brain.

The cause, he said, was my ‘irregularly shaped’ ear canal which caught the wax and allowed it to build up instead of flowing onto the pillow as it did from the more regularly-formed ear canals of the children in our neighbourhood. My aural disability meant that I could look forward to a lifetime of inner ear washouts, the liquid rattling around inside my skull, surging against my brain and sometimes trickling down my throat.

The upside of these aquatic canaloscopies was emerging from the doctor’s surgery with the most glistening, shiny new, clean-as-a-whistle hearing. The auditory world would rush in and suddenly I could hear everything – and I mean everything – in the most exquisite detail. The orchestra of summer cicadas, deafening to your common or garden variety ear canal, sounded to me as if they were physically inside my head, their legs and noisy thoraxes dangling out of my ear hole. The traffic roared, speech was a shout, the shower was a thunderous waterfall. I could hear the sound of a fly’s legs rubbing as it scuttled across the kitchen table, I could hear the neighbour’s washing machine in its spin cycle two houses away, I could hear the thwack of the leather ball on the wood of a cricket bat in a front yard two suburbs over.

I attribute my early love of audio art to this experience of a world going quieter and quieter and then, post-procedure, ringing with presence. I did not grow up listening to the radio. My grandmother had a transistor but it was always tuned to the races, so I had no nostalgic relationship to what she called the wireless. But I first expressed myself as a dramatist in the then old-fashioned medium of radio, not in the more generationally appropriate medium of film. And from radio I learned an early love of superb diction in that most beautiful and lyrical medium for artistry, the actor’s voice.

I have used this story, this revelation about my warped inner ear, as the starting point of my ruminations about my life as a playwright to illustrate the necessity of becoming a good listener. It is the foundation of all that I am and all that I still might be. Listening. Carefully. Attentively. Hyper-sensitively. And also to tell you that being a good listener is not about being silent. I mean, some of it is about being silent, having the self-discipline to shut up and let someone else talk. But good listening is an active process – a cat-and-mouse game where you draw out your subject by convincing them that in some ways you have become an extension of their own brain. So that when you speak you say something with which they either agree so entirely that it is a surprise to them, or something that articulates, in a distilled way, everything they have been trying to say.

Isn’t that kind of conversation just the most inspiring, most world-shaking thing to do? To talk, really talk with someone and in that hour, in that forty minutes, be able to externalise all that has previously been residing only in their own consciousness. That is your aim in every interview. You have to listen closely, carefully, because this has to be the most interesting, most revealing, most self-revealing conversation that your interviewee has ever had. You are tuned to the tiniest clues about who they are, you are armed with the most sophisticated insights into how human nature works, and you are listening – with your ears, with your spirit, with your mind, with your gut. And when they pause for breath, when they stumble in their monologue, you will make the one salient point that will set them off again into new territory, saying things they didn’t know they knew, had not consciously thought before. You will spin a spell over them so they are fully alive in the present moment – not recalling things they thought before, or relating stories they have already digested – but jumping synapses in their brains to new thoughts, new insights, new revelations. And when you type that up and put it on stage, an audience will hear a person on the horns of a dilemma, on the brink of understanding, in the dramatic moment of self-knowledge. And that’s what will make it good theatre: transformative storytelling, instead of dry, pre-digested, factual analysis.

So flush out your ears. Concentrate on what people around you say. You’ll realise that people are more elliptical, incorrect, inaccurate and obfuscating than you knew. We are seduced by faces and tones – if someone looks friendly and speaks gently we think they are being honest with us. You need to ignore the persuasions of a person’s external appearance or voice. If you listen to what they generalise about it will tell you their value system; listen to who they bitch about and you will know their fears.

Agatha Christie is perhaps the last person you might expect me to invoke as a literary role model, a worthy writing instructor. All those uber-polite, abominably-genteel BBC crime shows; all that appalling expositional dialogue and creaky plotting. And yet Agatha Christie, while not esteemed as such, is one of the world’s most successful writers for theatre. Her play, The Mouse Trap, in continuous performance since 1952, is the longest running work of theatre in London’s West End. Personally I don’t much like her writing or the excruciating television adaptations of it. I don’t wish to be Anglo-centric or genre-validating either, or to suggest that commercial success is the ultimate arbiter in valorising her. But I do want to choose an unlikely, unnoticed female playwright (she wrote more than twenty plays) and boil down Christie’s main premise, her overarching message – which is ‘pay attention’. Observe the signs. Watch carefully, listen carefully. Look at things in new ways, believe what you see and hear yourself, not what other people tell you. Don’t judge by façades. See through people and their smokescreen defences. Pay attention.

2
Captivated by reality

In the preface to Aftershocks, Paul Brown’s play about the aftermath of the Newcastle earthquake, the author quotes one of the early proponents of verbatim theatre, Derek Paget. Verbatim theatre, says Paget, is ‘the form of documentary drama which employs (largely or exclusively) tape recorded material from the “real life” originals of the characters and events to which it gives dramatic shape’. Paget further characterises verbatim theatre as theatre in which ‘the firmest of commitments is made by the company to the use of vernacular speech’; as work based on ‘painstaking, protracted and scrupulous use of historical evidence’.

By this definition I have only written one verbatim play – Run Rabbit Run, produced by Company B at Belvoir St Theatre in January 2004. The play is about the struggle of the South Sydney Rugby League Football Club to be reinstated to the National Rugby League (NRL) competition. It depicts the struggle of a determined inner-city working-class team and their supporters through the courts, against the considerable corporate resources of News Corporation and the NRL. The club lost an injunction and a federal court case, but won the case on appeal. Researching and writing Run Rabbit Run was one of the most ambitious, draining and exhilarating works of my career as a dramatist. The work extended and fulfilled me as a creative artist in many ways that I struggle to articulate but at the heart of it, I suppose, is the intense impossible faith of the people I met and interviewed.

I simply did not think it was possible for me to be persuaded of the revolutionary efficacy of what might pejoratively be called ‘people power’. But it became my task as a dramatist to honour the fierce courage of this small, impoverished football team and their struggle to stand up to the combined juggernauts of change and corporate greed. In attempting to dramatise, not the goodies versus the baddies, nor the Evil Empire against the battlers, but rather the sincere sense of right with which even the most onerous of participants acted, I was stretched as a writer and artist in ways that I had not been before. The stakes for me were high in my need to ‘get it right’ – not only because of the confidence that Neil Armfield and Company B had invested in me in 2003, but because the South Sydney community also trusted me to honour their story. There was also my own personal history growing up in Sydney as a fierce Souths supporter and then leaving it behind to live in a middle-class theatre world which sometimes sneers at the significance of football in Australian culture and resents the attention it gets. To make known the nature of this struggle – to explain why it is about much more than sport and goes to some deeper sense of Australian community values – caused me to ‘pull out all the stops’ as a dramatist. When in 2005 I won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Best Drama script for Run Rabbit Run, I described to one of the other winners that the work was verbatim. ‘Oh, so you didn’t really write it’, he said. I resisted the temptation to launch into a long tirade, and instead laughed, with a small tight smile, and begged off to get another drink. But the perception persists. If I am using the words of participants then it’s documentary not drama isn’t it? If I’m using the words of real people then it’s not literature. Or is it?

In any work of drama the writer must decide what story they are going to tell and why. What problem do they wish to interrogate, what conundrum do they wish to articulate, what impossible truth do they wish to examine in all its complexity and contradiction and mystery? There is an assumption with verbatim theatre that the writer, armed with a tape recorder, computer and printer, merely reaps the truth that is already out there. But how do you, as the writer, decide where to point your interest and your microphone? I could have focused on the internal politics of the football club, or told a more biographical story of legendary Souths’ player and chairman George Piggins; it could have been from the perspective of Lachlan Murdoch, then a News Corp executive. Instead I chose to tell the story from the point of view of the fans, a story not about football but about the spiritual and philosophical motivation for the fight. The play explores the moral courage it takes to continue to act even when your own security and self are threatened and the contradictions, imponderables and unsolvables of these questions. That is why the play is ‘by Alana Valentine’. I use the South Sydney story to investigate their drama from my entirely personal perspective.

Such a proposition flies directly in the face of many people’s notion that verbatim is a more ‘authentic’ form of theatre. Indeed, when I presented this idea to a group of students at Macquarie University in Sydney I took real pleasure in the outraged cry it provoked. One student said, ‘But you’re manipulating the real story to your own ends’. It was an entirely satisfying wake-up call to those who think of verbatim writers as oral historians rather than playwrights. The mantle of ‘truth’ is no guarantee of dramatic credibility. Perversely it is quite the opposite. The dramatist’s work, as that of all writers, is to make credible, believable and feasible the entirely unfeasible, incredible and unbelievable machinations of the real world. In real life people may be unrepentant, sadistic and entirely selfish. In drama such characters are inert and uninteresting and, worst of all, ‘unbelievable’.

Dramatist Jimmy McGovern at a Sydney Theatre Company forum in March 2003 put it like this: ‘I usually let participants take all the time in the world to come to my conclusions’. He was talking about his community-based television dramas Hillsborough and Dockers, both feature-length verbatim works. As this remark affirms, however ‘verbatim’ the project, the playwright shapes the material to their dramatic needs.

After Run Rabbit Run, my next play for Belvoir was Parramatta Girls, which I described as ‘massaged verbatim’. This fully dramatised eight-character stage play tells what happened to Australian children between the ages of 13 and 17 at the Girls Training School, Parramatta, between 1947 and 1974. It is a shaming story. The play is based on interviews I conducted with more than thirty former inmates and also what I learned from going to the hearings of the Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care. The report of those hearings, Forgotten Australians, found that upwards of half a million Australian children experienced care in an orphanage, home or industrial school during the last century. That made it probable that a majority of Australians today either experienced childhood in an institution, or know someone who has. In writing the play I invited an audience to bear witness to the experience of these mothers and grandmothers. Certainly they suffered, but they are also some of the funniest, toughest, most loving women I have ever met.

One of my intentions with Run Rabbit Run was to surprise audiences with the lucidity, philosophy and courage of people too often stereotyped as ‘uncultured’ footy fans. And a pure verbatim play enabled me to assert this lucidity and philosophical sophistication because I was quoting their actual words. In effect, I had a dramatic rationale for using the direct quotes. But in Parramatta Girls my aim was to tell the bigger story about Australia’s history of incarcerating children. Because the importance of individual experiences was their part in this bigger whole, I collapsed multiple stories into eight characters whose journeys transcended being victims to a punitive system. Instead, they had the control and volition that all characters must have in any truly complex work of dramatic fiction.

I mentioned in the Prologue my conception of ‘close work’ writing, by which I mean writing which may be drawn from interviews or archives, from the imagination or the zeitgeist of being alive in a particular time and place. In the deepest place of my creative inspiration, the term ‘close work’ more accurately describes the value system of my body of work than ‘verbatim’ does, though I often use verbatim material. In my terms one may be a ‘close work’ actor, a ‘close work’ novelist, a ‘close work’ designer, a ‘close work’ choreographer. All of these would be creative artists who commit a large part of their time and creative energy into engaging a community, through detailed, meticulous work that goes beyond standard research and not only gets close to the source but keeps that source close in the process. It embraces a broad awareness for the philosophical theories informing present lives, which today includes intersectionality, environmental awareness, cultural sensitivity, pluralism, democracy and post-modernism. ‘Close work’ playwriting in fifty years will have different philosophical and cultural contexts as living artists writing close to their times reflect the context in which they live, and dredge ‘found’ material from oral, written, visual, physical and other sources. I am not positing that ‘close work’ is superior or more valid than any other form of dramatic writing. I only hope it will make public sense of my private struggle to articulate what motivates my writing. Most of my work cannot be accurately defined as ‘verbatim’, although it shares with verbatim an impulse to reach into a community and reflect its voice.

For instance, in my play Ladies Day, the character Lorena is a writer collecting stories of gay men living in Broome, just as I did in reality. But Lorena is both me and not me. As a character Lorena allowed me to disclose an aspect of my own story that these real men forced me to see, as well as to examine ideas about my process of making theatre. The play is like ‘subverted’ verbatim; it begins with a consciousness of the form but then interrogates and ultimately inverts it. While based on research and including some transcript material, Ladies Day travels further towards fiction, not only to protect some sensitive stories but also because the junction where truth and artifice meet is of increasing interest to me. So the audience’s context for the play has determined its form. This context includes other drama in early 21st-century Australia and the value of my subjective experience, the public discussions about sexual assault, along with assumptions about verbatim theatre, the unreliable narrator and questions about post-truth. The American cartoonist Alison Bechdel conjectures that for Virginia Woolf ‘what fiction achieves … [is] a deeper truth than facts’. In Ladies Day I allowed the truth to push me out of my comfort zone and give me the backbone to become vulnerable as an artist so I could offer that vulnerability to audiences.

When I visited Broome for Ladies Day I got to know the smell of diesel fuel, the hum of air conditioning units, the flip-flap slap of thongs and the late night laying awake can’t-get-to-sleep sweetness of the dark. I conducted my interviews in the grounds of my Broome Hotel, where the pool was a hot bath, e...