The Regimented Muse

When Playwriting Australia (PWA) acknowledges the traditional custodians and pays respect to “elders past, present and future”, its play-acting words are giving thanks for smart offices on level three of a nice address in Sydney’s Rocks—paid for by us. Over the four-year period from 2017 to 2020 PWA will receive two million dollars from the federal government: annual payments of $300,000 from the Australia Council and $200,000 from the government’s Catalyst funding program. PWA also receives other state government funding and generous, tax-deductible, private donations. PWA thanks traditional owners, but its home page does not mention the government funding that pays the rent.

Like other cultural bad things, PWA is presented as a glossy, good idea. Artistic Director Tim Roseman in 2017:

Each year we work with over 100 playwrights to support exceptional new writing. We partner with theatre companies across the country who share our passion. We work with dozens of Australia’s greatest actors, directors and dramaturgs.

The figures seem pliable, for elsewhere the “100 playwrights” shrinks to become thirty plays: “we support the development and promotion of up to 30 new Australian plays, employ more than 120 artists and reach audiences of over 1,500 with public performances, playwriting workshops and masterclasses”. Few of these hopefuls, whose numbers are gender-balanced, will ever achieve serious performances.

The Melbourne Theatre Company, which does not read unsolicited scripts, is wasting $4.6 million to develop its own very similar writers’ programs. Establishment writers it presently has working on play commissions include Joanna Murray-Smith, Michael Gow, Leah Purcell, Patricia Cornelius and Benjamin Law. There is not much room on the MTC’s stages, and no room at all for non-Left ideas.

Sydney-based PWA promotes itself as a national first contact for a playwright with a new script. It offers a range of nice-sounding programs including New Play Development with up to six months individual sessions with a dramaturg or a day-long workshop with actors and “creatives” or even “one or two weeks of creative development”. As an outsider you could wonder why it is necessary for a play to hang around the PWA office instead of immediately passing to a theatre where, if accepted for performance, the play would be better served in the hands of a director and actors before meeting its public. A finished play script needs a speed-dating marriage with a theatre, not a long engagement with an exacting, picky and sterile suitor.

On the PWA site is a link reading “Submit Your Work”. I click. The page that appears informs me that “There are presently no open calls for submissions.” Disappointed, I sadly hit the Home Page key and a new page loads: “WHOOPS! 404 It looks like you are lost.” The site seems to be having a few problems.

In March, after hibernating last year, PWA staged its National Play Festival. PWA has invented an authoritarian “Diversity Pledge” for playwrights which includes this curse on originality: “The cast should reflect the diversity of Sydney, Australia.” Fortunately it’s not a geographic barrier, for PWA’s festival was held in a fashionable small theatre in Darlinghurst—not quite Western Sydney diversity but close to Oxford Street for lunch. In truth, the festival is just another arrogant leftist exercise of privilege and power.

Festival attendees were invited to attend eight staged readings, “A celebration of Australia’s most ambitious new playwriting”:

White Pearl: “Whitening cream is the bestseller for cosmetic firm Clearday. When a leaked racist video goes viral, the millennial management team scramble to deal with the fallout. Casual blackmail, allegations of corruption and a clash of philosophies fuel this dark comedy about toxic ideas and the complexity of Pan-Asian relations.”

Born, Still: “Maggie is a pregnant building-owner tree-changer, overwhelmed with decisions about tiles and taps—until tragedy strikes. Her small, private grief sits alongside the sudden death of the ‘People’s Princess.’ … One woman, with songs, relives a sorrow that impacts countless families in this cathartic, ultimately uplifting play.”

The Disability Slapstick Plan: “A triple-decker narrative of unconventional comedic proportions that navigates the intricacies of access and inclusion. The Disability Slapstick Plan is a daring, funny and complex work featuring artists with perceived physical disability. Examining the right to begin and end life from a polyphony of perspectives—euthanasia, sex, abortion, IVF, suicidal terrorism, and extremism.”

Minneapolis: “‘What if you fell in love with the person who publicly shamed you’. Turning the ‘boy meets girl’ formula on its head, Minneapolis is an ‘almost’ love story set in a world conditioned to hate. Exploring complex questions about privilege and privacy, the play looks at what it means to be a pariah in our clickbait times.”

Cusp: “Elvis wants Rosie. Rosie wants to escape. Maddie doesn’t know what the hell she wants, but it sure isn’t this. Cusp examines the lives of three young adults as they swim against the tides of irrevocable change. How do you move into the future, when your past keeps dragging you backwards?”

From Darkness Whence We Came: “A middle class nuclear Indigenous family, complete with Elder, live an unremarkable life in the Australian suburbs—apart from the occasional visit from spirits, the Birilungs. Unable to communicate with them, the only thing the family knows is that the Birilungs are now visiting 17-year-old Preston. When he finally comes out of his room and reveals the spirits’ plans the family must grapple with a new kind of future.”

True West (three very short plays by three writers): “A unique showcase of contemporary Western Sydney writing, True West is your chance to catch the best and brightest right from the start. Come experience three fresh and dynamic voices before the rest of the world catches on.”

The Fever and the Fret: “‘Grandan, I promise that after the funeral I will take you to the TAB.’ Lizzy and her grandparents have endured, suffered, and even celebrated loss for decades—but now unseen events are tearing their world apart. A beautiful ode to love and memory, The Fever and the Fret examines one family’s tale of resilience as they reconcile small town life with a new, ever-changing world.”

La Mante: “Decades after her capture, a serial killer offers to help solve a string of copycat murders—but only if her son, now a cop, will work by her side.”

I’m lying. I apologise for raising your hopes. The ninth play I added is a promo for the Netflix film I’m going to watch tonight. Sadly, the others are real.

These are only teasers for the plays. Onstage they may be brilliant, but they sound small and unexciting—like the small and unexciting theatre that state funding has nurtured. A theatre ticket to see any one of these plays in performance in a subsidised theatre would cost between seventy and one hundred dollars. It hardly seems like good value yet these are serious works contributed by writers with impressive credentials. Some have studied drama in Australia and overseas, they have won major writing awards and had plays performed and published. There are people here taking part in festival masterclasses they could themselves give. Some of these writers are dynamic individuals who have started their own companies, performed their own work.

If these plays are good they should be going directly into theatres and not wandering around for years being workshopped, being praised, given festival readings, and not being performed. Then, if they do make it onto a stage they deserve more than the pitifully few performances they are likely to receive. PWA praises itself for working intensively over long periods on plays and even monologues that are finally staged for only three or four performances.

Amongst the playwrights are those whose names would be well known to their theatrical colleagues. Some of these plays have already received assistance from the Australia Council, the Malcolm Robertson Foundation and specific theatres. Why aren’t they being staged? This is the question a playwrights’ festival should be asking of the nice people from the subsidised theatres sitting in their audience.

The selection of plays being promoted at the festival leaves out the twenty (or is it ninety?) other writers PWA is assisting this year. Where is their work? Is this selection truly the very best of the plays submitted to PWA, or have they been chosen because their authors fit an algorithm of queerness, sex, race, whiteness or postcode?

You would assume a national festival for playwrights would allow space for some serious discussions. Instead they offer four “Artist Conversations”—training exercises in cultural conformity:

On Whiteness—In this theatre in the heart of gay white Sydney, right thinking on the topic was asserted long before the platitudes were uttered: “This panel examines what we mean when we talk about whiteness and what we can—and should—do about it.”

On Anger—This topic was fittingly discussed by two sophisticated feminists acting mean. Quote: “Your mob wanted my mob to die. It is a hard foundation to think about and it does create a lot of anger.”

On Language—One of the presenters is praised for having written her play “in a dynamic language born of globalism”—in other words, it is predictably foul-mouthed. The discussion examines “the part [obscene?] language has to play, in a global economy and an increasingly cross-cultural world”.

On Queerness—“Two of our leading LGBTQIA+ playwrights … come together for a conversation about this Queer moment and their own missions as gay playwrights.”

A week’s reading of the Fairfax press, an induced bout of Radio National listening or a glance at the Sydney Star Observer would have brought them up to date. More pertinently for writers, they might have asked why their plays are not good enough to be taken up by community theatres, or why theatres don’t even want to read their plays, or whether their boringly self-obsessed work will turn another youth generation away from theatre, or ask the really big question—“What have you been watching on Netflix?”

During the festival a Playwrights’ Program includes another instance of racism funded by the Australia Council, a session “reserved exclusively for First Nations writers”. This event was presented by the award-winning playwright who had an Aboriginal character in her most recent play say, “We start our walkabout just before the leaves start fallin’.”

The inaugural Nick Enright Keynote Address began with a hokey account of pre-settlement Aboriginal life untouched by reality. Unsurprisingly it was given by a familiar voice selling the usual brand of special pleading. Wesley Enoch is an actor, writer, director and arts administrator. None of which excuses the platitudes.

“I can’t help thinking we are conveniently writing, not for the whole tribe and welcoming them in, but for the small number who already agree with us.” From here he progresses to the difficulties of staging works that go beyond “the acceptable and legitimate”—he has no idea what he is talking about—and unleashes a comfortable Left fantasy about three older-generation entrenched playwrights:

I know that it’s not easy. God knows you talk with Patricia Cornelius, Alana Valentine and Stephen Sewell and they will attest to the difficulties of writing the powerful stories of importance to our country and then getting them in front of an Artistic Director let alone an audience.

A reality check. Patricia Cornelius’s plays staged in 2017 included Slut in Woolloomooloo and Darwin, and SHIT in Sydney—part of Enoch’s own Sydney Festival. SHIT also played in Hobart and Perth, and it floated up again for a return season in Sydney. In New York the author was present for a SHIT play reading during the PEN International Play Festival. Big Heart, which PWA lists as one of its supported achievements, premiered at Melbourne’s Theatre Works in partnership with her own production company, Dee and Cornelius. Caravan was performed at the Malthouse as part of the Melbourne Festival. In May Cornelius collected cash from the Australia Council: a $5000 literature grant, and a $45,000 theatre grant for Dee and Cornelius. In November Screen Australia provided Story Development funding for Stolen, a feature film co-written by Cornelius. Earlier, in 2015, Screen Australia had also provided $29,000 for story development and the project had been given $58,000 for early stage development through Screen NSW’s Aurora program. 2018 began with a new play, commissioned by the State Theatre Company, which premiered at the Adelaide Festival. In May, another new play by Cornelius will be on stage in Victoria, commissioned and presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company—even as she is working on still another commissioned play for them. This is only a partial list.

Alana Valentine had two plays staged in November and December last year—one was a premiere in the USA and the other played at Belvoir. Her commissioned play Letters to Lindy is currently on a national tour—made possible by a $56,638 grant from the New South Wales government. In June another new play will be staged by Belvoir. Further into his address, Enoch cited a comment in a new book written by this same successful playwright: “Bad feedback will try to suggest how to make the play more like the one the dramaturg would like to write.” He did not follow this sensible remark by noting that she also works as a dramaturg.

Stephen Sewell is the Head of Writing at NIDA and is also a film-maker. He had a play presented at the Sydney Opera House last year. He is a featured speaker at this year’s Sydney [Left] Writers’ Festival where the program describes him as “one of the most celebrated writers in Australia today”.

The genetic code of leftism doesn’t include self-awareness. “Is it just me,” asks Enoch, “or are we seeing more homophobia, racism, sexism on our stages? And more often than not written by homosexuals, blackfellas and women.” He is concerned that audiences are being subversive and ignoring the irony and sarcasm and enjoying the racism and sexual stereotyping the authors are playing with: “As I sit in the dark engulfed by the sea of white middle class urbania and feel the tide of my own discomfort ebb and flow, I am struck with the thought—what are they laughing at?”

Applying gender selection he named two writers guilty of these sins, and one quickly responded online to point out that his comedy, The Homosexuals, was really and truly “a critique of white gay cis male supremacy”. He also revealed that both criticised playwrights

are currently working together on her newest play, Blackie Blackie Brown for the Sydney Theatre Company. It’s the story of an Aboriginal archaeologist who discovers her ancestors were killed in a massacre by four white convicts. “Blackie” then engages in a blood-soaked revenge against the descendants of these men … But she doesn’t simply stage the trauma. She inverts it. She pisses on it. She robs it of its power, and its power to define her story in contemporary Australia … In Australia there is a veritable movement of artists engaging with histories of [invented?] trauma in this manner.

As the insiders squabble, and it is also a power struggle between privileged generations, the theatre inflicted on us is compulsory and conformist: there are no other voices. At the heart of our government-funded, Left-controlled theatre culture is conformity pretending to be brave little soldiers. “Where,” asked Enoch, “is the play about Treaty and Sovereignty in Australia? Where are the new voices about feminism and inequality, where is the artistic work that will support the #MeToo and Times Up actions? Climate change? Manus Island.” Four years ago he published the same kind of remarks and an admirer of his work called him out in an open letter reminding him that when he was director of the Queensland Theatre Company he had not staged the sort of theatre he complained was not being staged. The essay was titled, “Dear Wesley Enoch, Time to Walk the Walk?”

We have heard from the Left, but where are the counter voices? Where are the missing plays? Where is the play about an archaeologist who learns that her family was massacred by Aborigines and their bodies brutally desecrated and then decides to enact a wildly camp and gloriously blood-soaked revenge on the murderers’ descendants? And would it be commissioned and staged by the Sydney Theatre Company? Where are the plays exposing the Left phonies in the arts? The main-stage play that tackles climate change and the crazies with their extreme and faulty predictions? The play with a positive account of colonial achievements, the fun look at egos feuding for culture funding with elder lefty playwrights climbing on chairs to yell at arts ministers, White Aborigines with dads born in Hitler’s Reich, Muslim homophobes, feminist tyrants, fake refugees, arts makers and administrators who have only climbed into positions of power because of sexual or racial discrimination, and the new privileged class using race, sex and inequality to make careers in the arts? Where is the space for conservative voices? Not here, not in subsidised theatres and not anywhere you find government funding being used to lock down the Left’s ownership of culture.

While the Left dominate it is natural to think of the Right as the opposition. It’s fun to evoke, just to see them panic. The real opposition to Left control of the stage is the other excluded group, practical theatre makers who undermine the great Left project of cultural domination simply by wanting to amuse and entertain an audience far larger than the elitist segment of “middle class urbania” the Enochs control. This could happen with a rebirth of commercial theatre. It is impossible while state funding ensures they are locked out. Dedicate public money to a National Theatre and leave the rest to commerce to create. And a free theatre can’t be created without taking a closer look at unionism and union practices in our theatres.

Again Enoch sought safety from criticism by invoking Aboriginal creators, puppets of their distant urban cousins. Enoch never sees that Aborigines of mixed descent, whose activities in the culture industry are often intended to envenom race relations, are ignoring their unique opportunity for bringing Australians together. Protected by platitudes, he explored familiar waffle bushlands and then, as he perhaps unknowingly challenged the reason for the existence of Playwriting Australia and its dramaturgical interference with new writing, he suddenly discovered a milk bar:

Do collaborators weaken your resolve or strengthen it? To the point eventually we end up getting a banana flavoured milkshake. We learn to accept that it is what it says it is but once you taste the real thing you realise it isn’t really. That stuff never grew in the ground.

The plays we consume, wizzed up with the collaboration of Playwriting Australia, are only fit for playing in subsidised theatres. That stuff would never play on real stages.