I recently received a review request from a theatre company I'd done a review of a few years ago. I liked the concept of the play enough to offer to do an interview. Here it is in full. It's long, but it's perfect. I love the close, the quote from the play. I love having the opportunity to talk to artists about their art.
How
has your day been? What have you been up to?
By
7.15am I was on the 18th
floor
of a Collins Street multinational. This play about homelessness is
largely being funded by my corporate clients – this is the reality
of being a writer in Australia. There was a homeless man setting up
in front of Dior as I came back down the hill – even Collins Street
isn’t trying to hide the problem any more. I went home to two
sleeping cats, a pile of washing and a few hours spent on MWT
projects; I run Melbourne Writers’ Theatre and we have two shows
coming up, plus one in Fringe, which is exciting. Then a newspaper
had asked me to write an article on TRASH so I did that. This is a
typical day for me – business mixed with creative pleasure,
constantly switching from one to the other like a coin that keeps
flipping over. I love it.
How
are you feeling leading up to opening night of Trash
Goes Down The River?
To
be honest, I haven’t had much time to think about it. I handed this
script over to my director (Elizabeth Walley) at the first rehearsal,
and I feel like it’s hers now. I saw her a couple of days ago and
she said she had changed some lines, and hoped I would be okay with
the changes – I just said I trusted her and then went back to the
task of marketing. TRASH is a product now; it needs to be sold.
Actors are entitled to perform in front of good houses – apart from
which, if your audience numbers are low, there’s almost no point
having written the play because the thing you wanted to say with it
won’t be heard by enough people. Having said that, if I take a
moment out from it all to look ahead to opening night, I do feel
quietly excited. TRASH will be opened by Simon McKeon AO, who is
respected for his contributions to social justice in this country and
currently holds an advisory role with The
Big Issue,
and for our guest speaker we are honoured to have Vicky Vacondios
(‘You Can’t Ask That’ – ABC iview), a formerly homeless
mother-of-three who now speaks publicly about issues relating to
homelessness. So yes, now that you mention it, I am definitely
looking forward to 14th
June.
Rehearsals
have been going well? What can you tell us about the cast and crew?
I’ve
put them in a nice rehearsal space – it has a marble stairwell and
leadlight windows and natural light flooding in. TRASH has a cast of
three – Alec Gilbert, Emma Cox and Clare Larman. They’re all
highly intelligent, all erudite and articulate. This is perhaps
another reason why I have detached from the script; these are smart
actors and thinking human beings and I trust them with my words.
Clare Larman, who will be playing Trash,
posed for a very long time in a city doorway on a freezing Sunday
afternoon to give us that striking image. She doesn’t seem to
flinch from things. Alec (Rich)
has a real power to him but also a tenderness in the way he deals
with people, which is quite similar to the character he is playing.
Emma (Melody)
is unbelievable. She read the part of Melody at the public reading we
did of TRASH at La Mama Courthouse back in 2015, so she has lived
with this character for a while now and there’s no one else I would
have asked. Our Lighting Designer is Bronwyn Pringle – she has
worked at Bluestone before and likes its spiritual ambience; well, it
is an old Wesleyan church – and Left Bauer Productions are
producing this show, which I am happy about as they intuitively
understand theatre like this and have a lot of vision. My
director is ELIZABETH. Capital letters. Elizabeth is also Resident
Director at Melbourne Writers’ Theatre. Slick, stark, intelligent
direction, always.
Have
you re-worked the play much since the readings at La Mama a couple of
years ago? If so, in what ways?
Gosh
yes – it’s a different play. From memory, after receiving the
feedback from that reading I churned out a few drafts that were
fairly interchangeable, but late last year I did a further draft
which pretty much constituted a rewrite. A dramaturge who had
happened to read the script had flagged a problem with Trash. In the
earlier drafts, Trash was a silent character who conveyed all of her
thoughts and intentions through actions, mime – I wanted to
reinforce the fact that the homeless have no voice. But this
dramaturge said quite bluntly, ‘Your character doesn’t work in
her current state – for an audience to relate to her and feel for
her, she needs a voice,’ and in case she’s reading this I’ll
name her: Emilie Collyer. Thanks Emilie. It was sound advice which I
took on board, because Trash now talks. This puts her on an equal
footing with her co-stars, and really, with society.
You
wrote the play before the Flinders Street homeless were moved along
earlier this year. How did it make you feel when action was taken to
remove them?
You
know, it was a bit dreamlike to watch the police and the City step
in, and then the protests and the scaffolding going up along Flinders
Street. That was the only thing I hadn’t predicted, the scaffolding
– everything else had been forewarned by Melody in TRASH. I was at
a chess tournament when the protests around the Australian Open broke
out and I picked up a newspaper that one of the players had finished
with – I’d seen a headline relating to the homeless camps along
Flinders Street, something about them being broken up. I texted
Elizabeth and said Have
you seen today’s paper?
The
events came thick and fast after that; every day there was a new
headline, a new travesty. I took a collection of these newspaper
articles along to the first rehearsal and laid them across the table,
so that we could all understand where TRASH had come from – in the
end, it wasn’t just plucked from the air.
Homelessness
is obviously a serious problem, but evicting homeless people, so to
speak, has only displaced them, hasn't it? It hasn't really solved
the problem.
As
I see it, the solution to this problem lies in the provision of
affordable housing and a LOT more of it. And to be fair, the City’s
disbanding of people sleeping rough in the CBD has been delivered
with a fair degree of transparency and an emphasis on finding
solutions. COM staff don’t roam around the city at dawn looking for
homeless people to dislodge – to some extent they are still turning
a blind eye to rough sleepers, and their policy is to only ‘move
on’ an ‘illegal camper’ in the presence of a representative
from a recognised charity/housing provider who can provide the
affected person with some kind of action plan and support towards the
next step. But you are correct – eviction without any back-up plan
will never be a solution. It just moves the problem further uptown,
or, in the case of TRASH, further upstream.
It
struck me that there is such sad irony in the fact that Melbourne is
frequently listed as one of the world's most liveable cities, yet we
have such an obvious problem with homelessness. What are your
thoughts on this?
I
was speaking to someone about this recently, someone who has a
broader comprehension of the situation than many of us do. He cited
the widespread lack of affordable housing in Melbourne as the source
of our homelessness problem, and he also suggested some more
contentious reasons for Melbourne’s current homelessness
predicament. The rising number of foreign-owned investment
properties, the rental of which are often mis-managed by landlords,
for instance – it is a fact that there are houses and apartments
throughout Melbourne currently sitting vacant while people sleep on
the footpaths in front of them. There is also a widespread and
accepted lack of scrutiny of both foreign and domestic landlords,
which creates a free-for-all mentality in which landlords can charge
whatever rents they want without any requirement to operate within a
reasonable ratio of what is ‘affordable’ for a low-income, or
no-income, citizen of this city. The problem is not with Melbourne,
which is indeed a most liveable city – it is with the laws, and the
lawmakers, around and beneath which Melbourne operates.
I
haven't been down to Flinders Street recently. Do you know what it's
like down there at the moment?
There’s
really not much there at all – it’s barren. The train station is
covered in scaffolding, from the Clocks right down to the Elizabeth
Street entrance, and this is reinforced by cyclone fencing that
covers half of the footpath. So the life that was there has vanished
– to where, I’m not sure. Homeless people tend to look for better
cover when the weather cools down; those who were camped along this
street in the heat of the summer are possibly now living under cover
a few blocks away, or it’s possible that the scaffolding has broken
their resolve. I suspect, as do many, that it was intended to do
this. It was also perhaps intended to restore Melbourne’s
reputation as the World’s Most Liveable City for the tourists who
serve as our weekly retainer. I think if they saw Flinders Street
right now, they wouldn’t bother sticking around for the City
Sightseeing tour but would hop on a bus to the Great Ocean Road.
Apart from commuters and scaffolding, there is very little to see.
I
do remember walking along Flinders Street very early each morning,
during winter, and seeing one particular guy most mornings rugged up
in a thick doona, looking quite snug and protected against the chill.
One morning, his doona was gone, probably stolen. He was in his same
place, but no longer protected against the cold. I took an old
sleeping bag with me to work the next morning but he wasn't there. It
brought home to me how hopeless the situation is. Do you feel it's a
hopeless situation?
I’m
sorry you had that experience, but it’s a profound one to have had.
No, I don’t think this situation is unfixable. For some members of
our population, it’s just going to take a long, long time to break
the cycle. There are many degrees of homelessness, and a man sleeping
in a doona on Flinders Street cannot be put into the same basket, or
offered the same solutions, as a woman in the suburbs who is
couch-surfing with her kids. An infinite number of variables need to
be addressed, not the least of which are the physical and mental
health of the homeless person requiring assistance and the events
which have led that person to this point. Your fellow with the doona,
and the rough sleepers like him, can be helped out of homelessness,
but not with a one-size-fits-all solution. You would not approach a
person living in a house and say, ‘Here is a generic solution to
your problem which I am really hoping will fit you’ – you would
have a lengthy consultation with that person to ascertain her or his
individual wants and needs, strengths and fragilities. Homeless
people are individuals, and individual problems necessitate an
individual approach. Our homeless need tailored solutions, and they
need people who will stay by their sides as they attempt to implement
these solutions. In the end, they just need people.
Have
you been following the situation or any individuals affected by it?
Yes,
I follow Melbourne’s homelessness situation every day. It’s
impossible not to if you have your eyes open. I’ve noticed that the
media coverage of this issue has really dropped off as the year has
gone on – more than one person has suggested to me that June is a
very good time to present TRASH, simply because issues like this fall
off the radar when they lose their ‘spectacle’ factor.
Homelessness in the CBD is not as visible as it was in the summer
months – this is not because the problem has been ameliorated but
because it’s harder for our homeless to live on the streets as
winter approaches. They will go somewhere warmer, perhaps onto a
friend’s couch or into a car or onto a train. I have a friend who
is fortunate to be in public housing now but was on the streets for
some time, and also slept rough whilst pregnant. The child she gave
birth to is beautiful, but my friend’s adolescence is gone – you
don’t get those years back, and you don’t fully recover from
them. When she has to send her kids overnight somewhere, she sends
them with enough clothes and belongings for a week – in case they
find themselves homeless, perhaps. She has described to me very
bluntly how it was and how it is. It’s another planet, the twilight
world of the homeless.
Can
you tell us a little about the main characters in your play?
They
are all trapped in an intricate, three-way social catastrophe. The
happiness of each one depends on how much leeway the others will
allow them to develop the ambition they are desperate trying to
fulfil. Trash,
real name Dianne, is quietly ambitious. The last thing she wants is
to be sleeping on a stretch of concrete on Elizabeth Street – it’s
not how she imagined life at 56 – but a combination of domestic
violence, debt, unemployment and abandonment by family have led her
to this point. A different ambition has led Melody
to
Trash. A perfectionist who is constantly scrutinising her life and
her body to pinpoint the reason
for
her perceived failures, she dreams of a world that is ordered and
clean - of a city that sparkles. Trash, sitting on her piece of
filthy cardboard, is thwarting Melody’s goal, and her husband Rich
seems
to be deliberately sabotaging it. As the Deputy Lord Mayor, Rich has
his own ambitions, his own plans for making Melbourne sparkle again –
unfortunately he is too low on confidence, too much of a
people-pleaser, to fulfil these by himself. To succeed, Rich needs
Melody’s strength; for Melody to succeed, she needs Trash to yield.
For Trash, success will only be possible when this unhealthy,
unhappy, co-dependent man and woman make the decision to support each
other. What these people really need is to stay a long, long way away
from each other and try to make it on their own. But that’s not
possible in this situation. In sickness and in health, for better or
for worse, they are fused together.
How
much research did you do in writing the play and what form did it
take?I
didn’t do any research while I was writing TRASH – the material I
needed was in front of me, in the doorways, and at the time of
writing the first draft back in 2015 there was very little in the way
of a public conversation relating to homelessness, so TRASH was just
an imaginative ‘what if’ story that I had fun writing. That may
sound flippant, given the topic, but it was fun to write about this
uptight, neurotic events manager (Melody) organising her Big City
Clean-Up, her council teams at the ready with their brooms and mops –
I had no inkling that this scene would one day play out for real. I
just wrote a play about what I was seeing as I sat waiting on
Elizabeth Street each night for my tram home, and how it made me feel
– and then how it made Melody and Rich feel. It was just a little
dystopic play. But research, yes – once the very real events of
January and February started to roll out like a grubby red carpet, I
began to research quite obsessively, trawling the daily media for
news relating to Melbourne’s homelessness crisis. Those grim
headlines meant that a lot of the fanciful events described in my
play could now be presented as facts. So suddenly, for example,
Melody had a justification for ordering her Clean-Up of the city’s
homeless camps – because in February 2017 the City of Melbourne
passed a by-law making it illegal for people to ‘leave items
unattended in public’ – and so on. From January onwards, each
time a new initiative, protest or arrest was reported in the daily
media, I would take this information and cede it back into TRASH. I
don’t know what you call that kind of research-in-reverse, but I
hope I didn’t miss anything.
Does
the play suggest any solution or is it more about drawing attention
to the problem and perhaps giving a voice to the homeless?
Melody,
Rich and Trash come up with some cracking solutions to homelessness –
judge them as you see fit. Within this interview, I’ve suggested a
few of my own solutions. I rarely do something just to ‘give a
voice’ to it – I am solutions-driven rather than creatively
driven – but in this case I think my job was to draw the public’s
attention to something that is important and then step back into the
shadows. I have people coming to this show who can tell you what to
do about homelessness. Simon McKeon and Vicky Vacondios, as I
mentioned earlier, and on Sunday 18th
June
Launch Housing will be delivering an address just before the 5pm
matinee. They have concrete answers, and that show is a 100%
fundraiser for Launch Housing. Open Canvas will be displaying artwork
by disadvantaged and homeless artists throughout the TRASH season,
with an exhibition in the space on Saturday 17th;
at any session of the show you can buy one of these pieces of art,
all proceeds going back to the artist, so there is another solution.
And for the show on Thursday 18th
June
we’re collecting funds for Vinnie’s, who have their CEO Sleepout
on the same night, and that’s a third solution.
What
kind of audience do you think will be drawn to the play?
I’ve
thought a lot about this. I’m asking Melburnians to come to
Footscray in the middle of winter to see a play about an issue they
thought they’d dealt with back in February. Even that word is
enough to put some people off: ‘issue’. A colleague who loves
independent theatre and always supports my work looked at the flyer
for TRASH last week and said, ‘Hmm. I don’t know, Clare … I
probably need something more cheerful at the moment.’ I really
think she won’t be coming, which is a pity because she likes comedy
and there are a lot of funny lines in this script. And creatively,
TRASH is fairly out-of-the-box – here are these two women on a
ferry chugging towards Utopia, and there’s barely any set, the set
will be created by Bronwyn’s lighting and a soundscape that is
currently being created. It’s magnetising – a bit hypnotic. There
are frequent moments of beauty throughout the play, too. If that all
sounds too harrowing for some people, I don’t mind if they stay
home, but the rest of you should come.
How
do you think audiences will feel after seeing the play?
I
think they’ll think, ‘That was 80-minutes of very good theatre
and Clare’s done herself a disservice by pitching it as a play
about homelessness. If she’d pitched it as a compelling drama about
three people trapped in a knife’s-edge situation, she would’ve
sold more tickets.’ I know how it’s done – I used to work in
advertising. But remember that we’re aiming to raise awareness of
the homelessness crisis with this play, or rather, to reignite
awareness, and beyond this we want TRASH to raise money for the three
organisations who have partnered with us – Launch Housing, Open
Canvas, Vinnies. To do this effectively, I need to mention the issue
first and the art second. But TRASH GOES DOWN THE RIVER is definitely
art.
Do
you have a quote from the play that best captures its spirit?
At
the first rehearsal, I said to the director and actors: ‘Do what
you want with this play. Change what needs to be changed. But there’s
one line I want left exactly as is.’ Upon arriving at that line,
Elizabeth gave me a look and the actors started shaking their heads
and saying, ‘No, Melody can’t say that’ and ‘I really don’t
think we can have Trash doing that’ and ‘When was the last time a
homeless person did that to you, Clare?’
‘That
was the line,’ I said. It goes like this: “I can remember the
exact moment when I identified that thing in her, that X-factor. She
spat at me, hard – it landed this close to my mouth – and I
thought, “There’s
something about this woman.”
The
last I heard, it was back in. Good.
At Bluestone Church Arts Space, 8A Hyde Street, Footscray 13 -24 June
