Joanna Murray-Smith and Daniel Keene

JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH AND DANIEL KEENE:

Class Oppositions

by Kieran Carroll

Associate Diploma, Writing and Editing, RMIT, MELBOURNE (1991)

B.A, Writing and Literature, Deakin University, MELBOURNE (1994)

Submitted to the Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology

Presented for the Master of Arts degree (by Research)

2007

Keywords:

Australian theatre, urban plays, urban drama, Melbourne playwrights, pageant-play, Daniel Keene, Joanna Murray-Smith.

Abstract:

Joanna Murray-Smith and Daniel Keene are both successful mid-career

Melbourne playwrights. Taking them as a starting point and re-tracing an

Australian theatrical lineage, this project explores new Melbourne narratives in which two branches of the Australian theatrical idiom converge in a single creative work, my play Friday Night, In Town. An analysis of the writing of Friday Night, In Town, authored by myself and presented for examination herein, demonstrates its narratives are structured with deliberate reference to Murray-Smith and Keene revealing a new form of contemporary urban playwriting. The play’s originality, it will be shown, and its contribution to new knowledge, lie in its engagement with these playwrights and their Australian predecessors.

These elements combine with a redeployment of the medieval pageant- play, which is thus reinvigorated as a mode of contemporary playwriting practice. The play text presented herein (Friday Night, In Town) represents 75 per cent of the weighting for this M.A. (by Research) with the exegetical component weighted at 25 per cent.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Keywords ii

Abstract iii

Table of Contents iv

Acknowledgements v

Statement of Authorship vi

Introduction 1

Literature Review 5

Methodology 18

Data Presentation 26

Friday Night, In Town 30

Data Analysis 125

Conclusion 139

Bibliography 141

Acknowledgements:

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Queensland University of

Technology for presenting me with the opportunity to undertake my Masters degree. I am particularly grateful to Errol Bray, Paul

Makeham and my MA (Research) cohort for their guidance and advice, and to Michael Epis, Luke Doxey and Patrick Mangan for their time and patience.

Authorship:

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted

for a degree or diploma at any other institution. The thesis contains no

material previously published or written by another person except

where due reference is made.

Signed……………………………….

Dated……………………

vi Introduction

The 11th of June 1878 saw the premiere of a new play at the Theatre Royal,

Melbourne. Class, penned by the amusingly pseudonymous Mr Grosvenor

Bunster, was dubbed “essentially Australian” by newspaper reviewers. It was, apparently, full of characters who could be recognized on city streets each day.

Class is a comedy about the politics of the day, and attempts to show the extreme divisions of life in the city of Melbourne. Despite its local colour and instantly recognizable qualities, the play lasted only five performances.

Nevertheless, it provides the earliest blueprint for Melbourne playwrights who share a predilection for local writing, and it is also the earliest Melbourne example of opposing social and economic forces - privilege and poverty - at work on a local stage. In these key aspects, Class prefigures the work of

Joanna Murray-Smith and Daniel Keene, the twin subjects of this exegesis.

From 2001, as a creative practitioner, I have concentrated on writing plays.

However, I was first led there by poetry. For ten years, I was published regularly in national magazines and newspapers and eventually had one belated volume published by Canberra’s Ginninderra Press in 2003. Early in 2001, I began writing monologues, duologues and eventually larger cast pieces. It became obvious that one way of thinking about writing had quickly disappeared to be replaced by a more sweeping intent. A line leading to a further line or an ephemeral moment that might lead to the development of a poetic idea was replaced by narrative structure, character invention, multiple voices and a completely fresh and different world of reading. In his diary memoir Days Like

These, Michael Gurr recalls a writers’ workshop where he found himself

1 explaining the need of the writer to question his initial instincts and certainties regarding form:

It does you good to have to justify your work at its most basic level. Before beginning anything, writers should ask themselves: Why is this a play and not a newspaper article? Why is this a poem and not graffiti? (2006, pg.205)

Hence at 33, I found myself at a new beginning, starting again, raw and naïve.

This exegesis then has a dual focus: to create a small body of research into and analysis of the social class aspects inherent in the plays of Murray-Smith and

Keene. The second focus is examining the issue of personal pain as it is rendered through the prism of the class structure. From this foundation, I will be examining how the plays of Murray-Smith and Keene have worked their way into my current creative practice, the six-story contemporary Melbourne pageant-play, Friday Night, In Town which constitutes the central component of my Masters degree (by Research).

Both Murray-Smith and Keene are immensely prolific writers. Both are from

Melbourne, and each made their initial mark in the 1980s. They bring sorrow and sadness to the surface of their plays with issues revolving around fear, love and redemption of the spirit. Murray-Smith’s worlds are composed of cushioned interiors – well-appointed lounge rooms – and polished exteriors of articulate, educated people, who are often hiding something or need to confront the past.

Her drama uncovers the dark secrets between people, and how these characters face the world afterwards. By contrast, Keene’s writing often seems placeless, although the harsh winter effects of Melbourne, even if not explicitly stated, are the backdrop to his imaginative landscape. His characters bring little with them. We often don’t know their history or why they are downtrodden. They

2 are never going to be airlifted to fame or fortune. Murray-Smith’s characters have privilege; Keene’s have nothing. In Murray-Smith's world, pain is middle class and highly articulated; in Keene's it is the inarticulate howl of the disenfranchised. Therefore, my research question asks: How do Murray-Smith’s and Keene’s class divisions affect their central concerns of pain, loss and loneliness? This central question is the main organizing tool of this research enquiry.

In Friday Night, In Town, a cast of characters meet in Melbourne hotels and bars as the weekend begins. While avoiding any overtly imitative structure or derivative plot lines, the play shares allegiances with Murray-Smith and Keene in terms of its concern with location, dislocation, class and relationship conflict.

At one chronological extremity is Class, at the other Friday Night, In Town. The latter’s most direct influence is the work of Murray-Smith and Keene; however, before discussing them, it will first be useful to sketch the intervening decades in which the Australian theatrical voice was shaped. Specifically, the following literature review looks at the politically charged, female-dominated worlds of

Oriel Gray and Dorothy Hewett, as antecedents of Murray-Smith; and the masculine voices of Ray Lawler, Alan Seymour and Richard Beynon that lie behind Keene’s. With this background framed, and by introducing the key works of Murray-Smith and Keene that have influenced Friday Night, In Town, I aim to show a thematic strand of Melbourne playwriting that is echoed in my own creative practice. Arranging this Australian theatrical research into divisions of class with the assembling of Friday Night, In Town has an ultimate goal. That is, a theatre in which there is room for portraying both a knowledgeable middle class, and an inarticulate disenfranchised – and in which the two meet.

3 The exegesis and the play text presented herein are intended to be read and assessed as two components of a single, overarching project. That said, the play text (Friday Night, In Town) is to be 75 per cent of this entire project and is likewise weighted at 75 per cent of the assessable outcome. Consequently, the exegetical component is weighted at 25 per cent.

4 Literature Review

In certain circles in Melbourne, I think middle-class was almost a swear word. You were supposed to write about the working class. (Williamson, 2007)

Beginning with Grosvenor Bunster’s Class, this chapter provides an overview of the Australian theatrical temperament and landscape, and proposes a lineage of Australian female playwrights including Oriel Gray, Dorothy Hewett and

Joanna Murray-Smith. Culminating with Murray-Smith, this review works around and through the national myth that all Australian theatre began with Ray

Lawler’s Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll (1955). Secondly, I will be proposing that the work of contemporary Melbourne playwright Daniel Keene aligns with the masculine, working class battles played out in the major works of Lawler,

Richard Beynon and Alan Seymour.

Grosvenor Bunster’s play Class is a three-act comedy, described in Australia on the Popular Stage as a play ‘which celebrated the new urban Australia just as

English melodramas celebrated the human melting-pot of London’ (Williams,

1983 pg.96). Performed between June 17-21 1878, Class depicts a squatter knight and capitalist ironmonger who both represent Liberal Victorian politics.

Whilst on the same side politically, the social hierarchy of the time and their differing financial fortunes are highlighted when the squatter’s daughter and the ironmonger’s son wish to wed. The resolution of the class conflict has an unlikely source: a bank foreclosure on the squatter’s property lets the ironmonger buy it; and thus the wedding is achieved.

Class was an exception for its era because it attempted a large portrait painting of a developing city. It did not at any point focus on the country or outback – the

5 squatter’s run is the ghost in the machine, the vehicle for the intervention of big

city capitalist affairs, namely, the bank’s foreclosure. However, for all its positive

mirror images and intentions, the people of Melbourne were not prepared nor

openly willing to embrace a play so close to home. It lasted only five

performances.

The urban temperament – ‘the voice of the city’ - was slow to catch on. Even by

1937, almost sixty years after Class, the concept of plays about our cities still

seemed a very foreign idea. That year, Angus and Robertson published Ten

One-Act Plays with an introduction by T. Inglis Moore. Moore points out that the

plays given preference for this volume often had a predilection for an Australian

setting or attempted to describe an aspect of living in Australia. Here, there was

a parochial impulse away from ‘extraneous places and topics’ (Moore, 1937 pg

xi). Moore also suggests that the finest, strongest and most sincere plays ‘would

probably come from our playwrights out of their own experience or the

experience of their own people’ (Moore, 1937 pg xii). Louis Esson’s The

Drovers is praised, as are Vance Palmer’s The Black Horse, and Sydney

Tomholt’s Anoli: The Blind. All are viewed as being of international standard -

but with a cautionary evaluation and a smattering of mild disappointment:

These three plays are also laid in the outback. Over one- half of the people in this continent live in the cities, but city life does not appear to have developed a tradition distinctive enough to be crystallized into Australian literature. (Moore, 1937 pg xiii)

The dramatic tradition prior to World War Two was dominated by masculine voices and values. It was the influence of female playwrights, many writing for radio, and the social and proletarian force of the New Theatre movement, which

6 would begin to redress the outback versus city imbalance. In her study of

Australian women dramatists, Upstaged, Michelle Arrow claims:

As far as Australian theatre mythology is concerned, however, Oriel Gray doesn’t exist. We like our national stories simple, and theatre is no exception. The story runs something like this: in the beginning, there was Lawler, before him, darkness. (2002 pg.11)

It is a point Lawler made himself to Bulletin journalist Jill Lyons in 1958,

reiterating the number of writers before him who had paved the way between

the little theatres and the semi-professional box office successes of 1956-57.

Arrow’s study revolves around a number of women playwrights prior to the

advent of television who were writing drama, mainly for radio, and earning a

living from it while remaining at home to raise families. Another emphasis of

Arrow’s study is the politically charged New Theatre, whose practitioners were

spread across the capital cities, with a concentration in Sydney. Oriel Gray is

one of the women in question. Her play The Torrents was dual winner of the

Playwrights’ Advisory Board Of Sydney playwriting competition in 1955,

together with Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Depicting a woman's

struggle in the man's world of the 1890s goldfields, it enjoyed no major

professional production, due in part at least to Gray's links with the Communist

Party, and was drowned out by the success of The Doll.

Gray’s singular vision of the bold woman up against a male-dominated society

prefigures Dorothy Hewett’s early plays, just over a decade later. It is Hewett

who is the major bridge between the New Theatre women playwrights and the

late 70s origins of Joanna Murray-Smith. Before writing plays, Hewett was a

novelist in the socialist realist tradition, her communist leanings best reflected in

7 her debut novel Bobbin' Up (1959), with its emphasis on working class struggles, ethics and friendships. As a playwright in the 60s and 70s, Hewett was a key figure in the New Wave of Australian theatre, along with Jack

Hibberd, Alex Buzo and David Williamson and others who revelled in a coarse, often bawdy, and sexually explicit vernacular. It was one thing for Australian theatre patrons to feel astonishment at watching male playwrights push violence and sexual desire to the forefront, but another entirely for Hewett to do so.

After This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1972), inspired by radio writer and fellow left-wing novelist Ruth Park, Hewett developed an autobiographical introspection, propelling sexual rebellion and female independence to the thematic forefront via her heroine Sally Banner in The Chapel Perilous (1971).

Leonard Radic, in his recent book Contemporary Australian Drama, states:

Critics and audiences were confused and outraged by her frank portrayal of female experience. In particular they took objection to her independent-minded heroines who flaunted their sexuality, boasted of having had a string of lovers, and openly admitted to having sexual cravings. (2006 pg. 233)

Hewett broke fearlessly through these difficult taboos and against many vitriolic critics. The groundwork laid in the 1960s was bearing fruit. The popular impact of music hall theatre restaurants, which garnered large crowds, influenced theatre-going and the New Wave dramatists. So too did a move towards a more colloquial, sporting crowd vernacular. The Naked Bunyip, the Phillip Adams produced sex documentary narrated by actor-director Graeme Blundell, and the

David Williamson screenplay Peterson described by cast member Bud Tingwell as ‘a bold attempt at contrasting the aspirations and structures of the middle and working classes in Australia’ (Tingwell, 2004, pg.214) startled audiences by confronting sexuality and politics in local settings. The bearers of change were

8 the children of working class families, many of whom were being radicalized at university. The foundations were laid for a recognizable Australian popular consciousness that delighted in its own bravado, vulgarity and often ugly one- upmanship. As Colin Rogers, the movie screen writer of Williamson’s 1987 hit

Emerald City jokingly laments: ‘In the 70s, you could get married, have affairs, traumatize the kids and call it personal growth!’

The larrikin streak was alive and well and had shifted focus into the opportunistic city. Peter Fitzpatrick in his article The Empty City in Australian Drama writes:

The mainstream theatre of the seventies took as its primary focus the styles of living which reflected directly the experience of the relatively affluent, relatively sophisticated middle class that provided the audience for the establishment companies. (1990, pg.49)

It is a sore point, continually levelled at Williamson and later Murray-Smith: that the play, the plush theatre environment and the middle to upper social status of the audience are all smugly intertwined.

Murray-Smith took the lead of Gray and Hewett in pushing women to the forefront of her work, but also enacted a new tangent in Australian theatre. The vernacular is gone. The characters speak an international language. They are people of the city - their dilemmas translate to any Western city, which perhaps explains the success of her work on the London and New York stage. This emphasis on strong, highly articulate, female characters (Sally Banners of the

80s) would lead to what Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney in their book The

Doll’s Revolution have called ‘cosmopolitan drama’. (2005, pg.148).

9 Murray-Smith rose to prominence with her 1990 play Atlanta, after two smaller

Melbourne productions: Takers and Angry Young Penguins. Murray-Smith recalls how a year of primary school in London in 1971 gave her an understanding of ‘poverty and class differences’, and states that questions revolving around justice and morality lie at the heart of her work:

Both my parents had a very strong sense of justice, I grew up hearing them talk about justice, talking about the Rosenbergs... My plays on some level are trying to come to grips with separating truth from pragmatism and prejudice. The moral questioning at the heart of my plays is very reflective of my parents’ priorities. (in Bone, 2004, pg.147)

Although one of her early plays at La Mama, Angry Young Penguins, was about the Ern Malley affair, a defining moment in her father’s literary life, Murray-Smith drew herself quickly into her own generational world. While taking a lead from

Hewett, the certainties of the latter's political beliefs are gone. As Fensham and

Varney argue:

Murray-Smith writes, in part, in reaction to a socialist Australia attempted by her parents’ post- war generation. (2005, pg.113)

The rendering of place, too, is much changed in Murray-Smith’s work. Unlike much of the aforementioned 1970s Australian male playwriting, Murray-Smith resists the backdrop of stereotypical Australian settings – the backyard barbecue, the football club - and instead, places her dramatic action in comfortable lounge-rooms amidst fine furniture. In these rooms, her characters continually ask questions of their personal and business relationships. In

Nightfall, a wealthy couple wonders what has become of their wayward daughter. In Rapture, two people debate the moral implications of an affair after

10 a death, while Redemption sets up explosive arguments about how middle- aged, established couples could best spend their money and time.

On the city streets below Murray-Smith’s finely appointed rooms, Daniel

Keene’s characters live very different lives, with very different concerns. A street, a laneway, a squalid room, a soup kitchen - these settings are the unnerving counter-points of a Murray-Smith night that promises everything, as against a Keene night that has nothing to give. Keene’s landscape finds his characters entwined in a far more desperate version of Murray-Smith’s perplexing emotional dilemmas. Her questions could find only a blank face amongst Keene’s destitute crowd. Brought together, the effect is Melbourne with a split screen that bears both wishful and hopeless promises.

While Daniel Keene has never claimed any major Australian influences, this second part of the literature review traces links connecting three Australian male playwrights who prefigure Keene’s work, especially in relation to social class. These three writers also help to position Keene’s work as distinctly

Melburnian in orientation and sensibility.

In Australian Contemporary Drama author Dennis Carroll discusses the

‘Australianist’ legend. The legend proposes that a man’s life is more authentic if lived in the outback away from the cities and that, above all else, mateship is the building block of male relationships, instilling pride and a sense of community:

The man of the legend was ideally working class, rural rather than an urban type, dexterous at manual skills and sport, laconic, inarticulately loyal, undomesticated, capable of surviving in a hostile landscape and hence heroic – but

11 also egalitarian and hence capable of pledging his loyalty to the group. (1994, pg.6)

Although the ‘Australianist’ legend began to unravel in the middle of the 1950s, and the Australian New Wave both celebrated and lampooned certain aspects of it, Carroll shows that this male world has had an enormous impact on

Australian drama. In Ray Lawler’s Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll, Roo and

Barney are physically defeated by impending middle age and a lack of marital stability. In Alan Seymour’s One Day Of The Year, Alf defends his Anzac position to a cynical university-educated generation. In Richard Beynon’s The

Shifting Heart, Clarrie is ideologically unable to go into partnership with an

Italian migrant, even though he is now family. These are worlds where men have to deny failure. Set respectively in Melbourne's working-class suburb of

Carlton, a Sydney working-class suburban cottage and the tiny weatherboards of proletarian Collingwood, these are plays which test masculine pride in two domains. The territories of war, and the battle of earning an honest living are the fields on which these men struggle to learn where real courage lies. In all three plays, questions of familial change and brotherly loyalty prevail. Their hard-earned value systems are confronted by challenging, new realities – and offer no get-out clauses. In mind, they remain workers but they are only one small step away from slipping a further rung down the social order. Failure for these men is an end point, where one cannot go.

In Keene, failure is the starting point; that is where his characters are. As

Keene points out in his recent Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture (Malthouse

Theatre, Melbourne, Nov 18 2006):

12 I am chiefly interested in a theatre that embraces change and is a reminder of our mortality; theatre that does not confirm, but rather admits fragility, acknowledges failure…

Keene’s men inhabit a more unforgiving landscape than Lawler’s, Seymour’s or

Benyon’s. Work and war gave those men a sense of place and belonging. If some of Joanna Murray-Smith’s characters could be viewed as the confident, educated children of the working class creations of Oriel Gray and Dorothy

Hewett, then Keene’s characters are the opposite. They are the sons that went off the rails and fell through the system after teenage years that could have been spent rebelling against (as fathers) Lawler’s and Seymour’s men. While these men are breaking down through situational and age dilemmas, Keene places his male characters at the breakdown point of themselves. These are men needing the old world values of a brotherhood but have nowhere to obtain them. The bonds possible in the country, in collective work, in nation building, are not available to disenfranchised city workers or the unemployed and unemployable.

Keene’s 1992 play and subsequent screenplay Silent Partner is a depressing variation on the Australianist legend. Two lonely, unmarried middle-aged men race a greyhound in the hope of making some money. They build their meagre dreams around a greyhound. The dog’s racing success will be their vindication.

When the greyhound eventually wins a race but dies soon after from being unintentionally poisoned by them, the men face the next morning with a silent cooked breakfast unsure of what to do or say next. It is this lack of language that encapsulates their sadness and distress. Silent Partner is the savagely comic precursor to Keene’s poverty plays of the late 90s and his 2004 film Tom

White.

13 Keene has only minimalist plots with very few, if any, sub-plot devices. There are few changes in time or cuts to peripheral characters. In an interview in 2002 with Stephene Muh and Christine Bouvier, Keene states that he:

...can come a little closer to what I consider to be the deep core of drama: the individual struggling to come to terms with (to recognise) his/her situation and having to make, finally a choice as to how he/she responds to it. (www.danielkeene.com)

In this way, Keene and Murray-Smith share allegiance. Whether in a centrally heated apartment with expensive spirits or in a cold alleyway with a VB, it's the same: anguished worlds full of torment and continual confrontation. These situations not only nakedly expose distress and breakdown but examine private and public ambitions, however small or large.

It is at this point also, that both Keene and Murray-Smith find a literary symmetry with Andrew Bovell. Bovell is the playwright who effectively spreads his class depictions across both frameworks. From the stark street language of

Trash, his powerful contribution to the Melbourne Workers Theatre collaboration

Who’s Afraid Of The Working Class? (2000), to the irreconcilable tensions and communication breakdowns of After Dinner (1996) and Speaking in Tongues

(1998), to the marriage and money troubles in his collaboration with Hannie

Rayson Scenes from a Separation (1999), Bovell acts as the acute interject between the two. Scenes from A Separation (1999) sees Bovell with one eye on the boardroom and the other exposing infidelities, fragile egos and painful memories. Like Murray-Smith, the play resonates with highly articulate characters exposing middle-class and middle-aged dissatisfactions. At street level, Bovell shares with Keene, the importance of locale as a direct inspiration

14 for character. As Julian Meyrick, director of Who’s Afraid Of The Working

Class? (2000) writes: ‘All you had to do was walk down the street.’ (2000, pg.4)

In this sense, like Bovell’s Trash, Keene is digging a basement or bomb shelter, as it were, below the foundations of Lawler, Seymour and Beynon. His three predecessors gave us vivid depictions of an inner city working class, of the immigrant worker and the returned soldier and of ideological and nationalistic class confrontation. Keene extends this into a branch of sometimes gruff, sometimes ornate Australian naturalism that flowers in resonance with mid- twentieth century European models. In their brevity of dialogue and concentration on a single plot line, Keene’s poverty plays do point to Beckett and Pinter, his preferred fathers. However, Keene is examining and recording with ferocious intensity the back streets of Melbourne, even though he may not be naming them or giving the audience/reader signposts.

It is this other side of the city’s promise that consumes Keene; the giddy view looking up to Murray-Smith’s apartments where the deprived are overlooked amongst the twinkling lights. Nightmares accumulate below as Keene gives us nothing but walls at street levels. It is not that his characters are unrecognizable; it is merely that in Australian theatre, they have not been portrayed before with such visible, persistent intent.

In Melbourne playwriting terms, this intent is closely matched by Raimondo

Cortese’s St.Kilda Tales (2001). Ten mostly vituperative characters play out a day in their lives, constantly criss-crossing one another. Although the play was maligned by many critics, the ABC’s Michael Cathcart was more positive, viewing the work as ‘pushing theatre into a new relationship with the world of experience’ (www.abc.net/rn/arts/atoday/stories/s301333.htm). Via the loud

15 chaotic functions of a contemporary urban ritual that takes place in real-time, the pageantry play device of everybody always being visible, and in the rambling mélange of intersected lives, St.Kilda Tales shares location and generational sympathies with Keene and Friday Night, In Town. Furthermore, in both writers and my play, there is a direct, local line of literary naturalism taken from Melbourne: its boarding and share houses, hotels and public transport stations.

Chekhov's call for absolute truth in literary naturalism comes close to being realized in Keene’s work. The writer ‘is constrained to overcome his aversion and soil his imagination with the sordidness of life’ (in Esslin, 1969, p.17). In answering Chekhov’s call both Murray-Smith and Keene emerge as class documenters of high rank. However, this is not to suggest that Keene is a prime archetype of the working-class playwright. On the contrary, his twentieth century

European penchant for what I feel is a lofty air of existential mystery (All Souls,

The Nightwatchmen, Half and Half), combined with his lack of straightforward technical disclosures, can make for difficult, compressed texts. Although not immediately apparent, in To Whom It May Concern & other plays or Silent

Partner, his narratives can have elusive elements. In this sense, he is not a working-class playwright at all, but paradoxically, a far more high-brow practitioner than Murray-Smith. This position is illuminated by Scottish playwright John McGrath as an artistic position which still embraces a ‘political theatre which is on the side of the workers but expresses itself in the language of high cultural theatre’ (1981, pg.62). McGrath cites this stylistic measure as stemming from Bertold Brecht and being more recently represented by David

Hare. By contrast, Murray-Smith’s art-form is more technically aligned with the earlier European models of Ibsen, Chekhov, and also numerous practitioners of

16 English drawing room drama, such as W. Somerset Maugham, Terence

Rattigan and Alan Ayckbourn, giving way to the numerous inflections of David

Williamson. As with her European predecessors, Murray-Smith’s characters share with the audience an on-going dialogue of situational dilemmas.

Recent European success has seen Keene newly evaluated with high praise in

Australia. He and Murray-Smith currently represent 50 cent of Australian productions overseas. They flow in different streams: Murray-Smith’s cosy interiors find a natural home on Broadway sets, while the strictures of Keene are played out in translation in provincial French cities.

17 Methodology

I undertake this exegesis as a creative writer exploring a central research question through creative practice.

As a creative practitioner, my on-going process is to extend, deepen and refine my playwriting skills. By pursuing that intention and embracing scholarly research throughout this exegesis, I am operating through two paradigms: as a playwright researching a play and as a reflective practitioner supplementing that writing with the processes that have initiated and shaped its formation.

In his presentation paper to the American Educational Research Association,

Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987) Donald Schön is sympathetic to the embryonic uncertainties students have in any reflective practicum. He cites vulnerability, loss of confidence and sense of incompetence as common emotional terrain alongside the adolescent feeling that ‘school is divorced from life’. However, he believes students ‘must plunge into the doing, and try to educate themselves before they know what it is they’re trying to learn.’ This procedure is initially obtained away from the teacher. Schön reveals how six to twelve months later, students will have achieved ‘a convergence of meaning’, where ‘student and coach are communicating through demonstration and description combined’. The term ‘workarounds’, used by Mark K Smith in his article evaluation – theory and practice (2006) is also apparent in this process whereby an educator endeavours to impart further knowledge to students by a blending of ‘linkages between our own activities as informal educators and the general research literature’.

18 Schön’s sentiments directed towards the initially fumbling student defines on three levels this student’s experience of his M.A (by Research): my early difficulties in fully comprehending the exegetical component; the surprising, tangential explorations and deepening illuminations throughout the research process once the exegesis became clearer; and finally, the intellectual development absorbed via that research into my creative practice. Schön’s theory of Reflection-In-Action where ‘the doer can go beyond the stateable rule to new ways of framing problems in order to reach a resolution’

(www.ews/.edu/content/library/problem_solving.pdf) and where ‘He is not dependent on the categories of established theory, but constructs a new theory of a unique case’ (1983, pg 68) have been pivotal devices in assimilating the key works and class alignments between Joanna Murray-Smith and Daniel Keene, and from there, infusing those elements into a contemporary adaptation of the medieval pageant-play. The final result is a compatible marriage where school and life have reunited towards one solidifying goal.

In his recent essay, The Domains of the Writing Process, Nigel Krauth explores the divisions between writers who have ‘an ambition to produce the perfect work of the imagination’ (2006, pg.189) through long domestic hours of sitting at a desk against the writer who ‘launches her body as investigatory vehicle out the study door and into the wide, wild world.’ (2006, pg.189). Krauth recalls his younger self as one such case study; a man delving deeply into all sorts of experience as a way of seeking a resolute fact that ‘the author’s body is the major recording device’ (2006, pg.89). In Krauth’s decision to fully investigate the wider world, he reiterates Schön’s beliefs in The Design Process as Reflection- in-Action from Educating The Reflective Practitioner (1987) where:

19 When a practitioner sees a new situation as some element of his repertoire, he gets a new way of seeing it and a new possibility for action in it, but the adequacy and utility of his new view must still be discovered in action. Reflection-in action necessarily involves experiment. (1987, pg.68)

Of course, one must eventually spend ample time at a desk to produce a work of creative substance - but Krauth’s latter writer with whom he himself aligns himself is the springboard representative of my creative practice, and subsequently this exegesis. The creative decision not to write out of pure fiction – but to embrace one’s own birthplace, ancestry, nationality, class and social history – is articulated by Krauth:

I could never pretend that my experience approximates to that of a Chilean Indian – her ecology is vastly different from mine. But I can with good confidence believe my experience correlates significantly with that of other middle-class, middle-aged, European background, English speaking males in the world – more so with those of my particular nationality, perhaps – but also to a lesser degree with similar males who don’t speak English, or with females who, in every other way other than gender, share my ecosystem. (2006 pg.189)

In beginning this practice-led research through creative practice, the opening challenge concerns itself with the marking of place. The location (Melbourne) in which I have chosen to build a theatrical world aims to be ‘made up of a series of angles and takes and edited fragments’ (Harrison, 2006, pg.240). In following

Harrison’s definition through the creative process and accompanying exegesis, the twin vehicle should rise towards a ‘place now considered as a conglomerate of thought and location and reflection’ (Harrison, 2006, pg.241). Without the initial decision to assign Melbourne as my place of practice, I could not have attempted to intertwine the class demarcations of my central exegesis subjects: Joanna

Murray-Smith and Daniel Keene. Furthermore, I aim to define the elements of class within a place (i.e. Melbourne) and continually foreshadow the inherent

20 emotions of pain, loss and loneliness in Murray-Smith’s and Keene’s key works – as well as my own. Utilizing a general research study of Australian theatre history, and recognizing what my creative work owes to the aforementioned

Melbourne playwrights (not least in our having and depicting a shared locale), I am aiming for a symbiotic relationship between the creative practice and this accompanying exegesis, to create a ‘proximity of the creative and the critical’.

(Kroll, 2002, www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/speciss/issue3/kroll/htm)

In the introduction and literature review sections of this exegesis, I have researched and identified two gender-specific lineages of Australian theatre history. The aim here is to clearly claim precursory Australian influences on the dynamics of the middle-class and disenfranchised at work respectively within

Murray-Smith and Keene, and to present a reinterpretation of aspects of their theatrical ancestry. This intention has been designed on two different levels. For

Murray-Smith, it is work deviating from her paternal socialist upbringing, with her broad universal themes reaching an international audience; a success that is founded upon the difficult gender battles fought by her female predecessors,

Oriel Gray and Dorothy Hewett. Keene, although with European literary influences, is tracing a new line of disenfranchised failure amongst Melbourne men; a step below and a step beyond the battlers apparent in the key works of

Ray Lawler, Alan Seymour and Richard Beynon. Both of these investigations aim to be new research enquiries positioning the writers in broader Australian theatrical contexts, as contemporary influences on my generation of playwrights and to practice Krauth’s assertion that: ‘Writing that stays current in a culture needs more and more exegetical supports as the culture develops’ (2002). As prolific writers cemented in mid-career, the time is right for new cultural and

21 contextual placements and to embrace Lewis Coser’s belief that literature can

‘constitute a key form of social evidence and testimony’. (in Lewis, Rodgers and

Woodcock, 2005, pg.5)

As a creative practitioner, my aim is the writing of a full-length stage play and, from that writing to analyze the play’s stylistic, dramatic and literary effects. Dutch semiotician Anke Coumans succintly defines the language enhancement benefits to the student regarding the inter-relation process between the creative work and the accompanying exegesis:

By asking them exactly what something means, you are asking them to use a different language. (2002)

Her point is one that Edgar Allen Poe contemplated in his Philosophy of Composition (1846):

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be, written by any author who would – that is to say, who could – detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. (in Krauth, 2006, pg.190)

Both Coumans and Poe would approve of the intellectual rigour of contemporary

English sculptor Ian Hunter whose work is analyzed by John Langrish in his article: Not Everything Made of Steel is a Battleship. (2000) Hunter created his own sculptural language practice by working and arguing in tandem with himself.

Conceiving and formulating a fictional character, this character became an

‘observer’ following Hunter around, to see how he operated. Long dialogues evolved between the fictitious character and the ‘real’ practitioner forcing Hunter at every point to exhaustively examine, backtrack and support his sculpting process through an exegetical enquiry of continuous critical dialogue.

22 The first clear view of my own exegetical enquiry interacting with my creative practice developed through my M.A. cohort meetings in the second half of 2006.

The structural group suggestions for both play and exegesis from those cohort meetings are well-defined by Schön, who sees immense value in how students learn together when they are trying to reach the same goal:

We have to take certain things as read. We have to fall back on routines in what previous thought and sentiment has been sedimented. It is here that the full importance of reflection-on-action becomes revealed. As we think and act, questions arise that cannot be answered in the present. The space afforded by supervision and conversation with our peers allows us to approach these. Reflection requires space in the present and the promise of space in the future. (in Smith, 2001)

Prior to this, I was concentrating on reading the plays of Murray-Smith and

Keene alongside other contemporary Australian plays and various Australian theatre histories with comprehensive overviews such as The Making Of

Australian Drama (Rees, 1973) and Contemporary Australian Drama (Radic,

2006). At this point, I was developing my exegesis question by asking how these two writers converge, and diverge, and how they are defined by place through their prolific output. However, my own creative practice, which at the time was six short, self-contained plays, seemed too vaguely connected with the genesis of the exegesis. It was decided amongst the group and with my play supervisor, Dr

Errol Bray, that a new way of approaching the six stories was for them to be re- shaped as a contemporary city pageant-play, with the six stories being interwoven, the exception being the monologue The Wanting which would remain intact. Friday Night, In Town, subtitled ‘A contemporary Melbourne pageant-play’ was born.

23 In its new formulation, writing and collation, Friday Night, In Town comprised a large number of scenes, some very brief, that bring the play’s sixteen characters in and out of narrative focus. Hence, the play and the exegesis now had a defining impetus; the core aim being a mesmeric circuitous effect through a designated series of framing devices that would transpose, integrate and consolidate the research undertaken.

Four centuries after manifold changes in cultural practices, Friday Night, In Town is a distant shadow of the English medieval pageant-play, in which brief scenes and class roles are constitutive. Nevertheless, these works have been integral in shaping both the creative practice and this exegesis, and have suggested to me two new branches of understanding: how my research has turned into self- reflexive acknowledgement of my own creative work; and what that work may signify in a wider Australian theatrical context.

Murray-Smith and Keene are the main authors who have illuminated my own creative practice through class depiction and language influence. They and their predecessors, the aforementioned Gray, Hewett, Lawler, Seymour and Beynon, have contributed not only a rich sense of location but have created a large body of naturalistic convention, fecund argument across generational and class divides and idiosyncratic tropes which have been modified and recontextualized for my contemporary theatrical use. These elements of theatrical lineage, place and language form a new context of established ideas and are the key research findings developed in my own creative practice.

This exegesis also intends, in a small way, to create further fresh awareness of

Gray and Beynon, who were recently recovered by Radic in Contemporary

24 Australian Drama (2006). While the other more prolific playwrights remain highly visible, Gray and Beynon are largely forgotten; more footnotes in Australian theatrical history than chapters to themselves. By claiming them as influences in my creative practice and including them with the more critically evaluated and publicly popular examples, I hope to create a further contribution to their re- enquiry and status.

The practice-led approach of this M.A (by Research) has not only defined all of my recent writing but has already overhauled my future writing plans. The observation, reflection and memory exercised in writing my play, and the teasing out of threads through Australian theatrical history has had a significant result: a maturing understanding of the place in which, and the places from which, I write.

This exegesis has also proceeded one step further from the above; acting not simply as a companion to my creative practice, but now, assuming a creative identity in its own right – a rigorous research-led contribution to my evolving quest for self-improvement with the English language.

25 Data Presentation

The first meeting of my M.A. cohort in the Creative Industries Faculty at

Queensland University of Technology took place in February 2006. Between this initial meeting and the end of May 2006, I began a play entitled Beginning and

Ending the 20s which was abandoned. Having just moved back to Melbourne from Sydney, I began a series of vignettes set in Melbourne bars on a Friday night. These vignettes turned quickly into six, short, self-contained plays. My early intention was that the six plays were separate entities. In terms of production, three of the plays would be performed, followed by an interval, then the remaining three. The idea that all the plays would be brief came from Daniel

Keene:

I write short works for both artistic and pragmatic reasons. Pragmatic: I began writing short works because it was easier to stage short works: they were less expensive to produce, required less cast members, suited smaller venues… (www.danielkeene.com)

I had six working title chapters for Friday Night, In Town. These ran as follows:

Private Boys In Public Bars, Retreat, The First Shout, The Wanting, Two

Richmond Supporters Come To Town and Cocktail Decisions. By the third M.A. cohort meeting in October 2006, the plays were read by actors. It was obvious that clunky staging problems would occur switching from play to play and that a cohesive whole had not yet eventuated.

As discussed in the methodology, through my cohort support and the advice of my supervisor, Dr Errol Bray, Friday Night, In Town was suggested for re- shaping as a contemporary city pageant-play. From this point, the plays were cut,

26 collated and shaped into three or four parts each before finally recomposing into eighteen scenes. The introductory scenes were the longest with the later scenes gradually becoming shorter as the characters become better known to the reader/audience. Even in later drafts, I did not interfere with this early rationale. I returned the play to Dr.Bray in its new form. Through discussions with him, I took the play into deeper territory by more rigorous edits and separations. Two characters, Sammie and Bryan from Retreat would be sprinkled throughout the text into fifteen very short scenes. Quickly, the play gathered more fluidity by evolving into forty-three shorter scenes and evoking the pageantry dimension that was earlier suggested. All of the play’s sixteen characters now remained visible for the entire performance, with the exception of the man performing the monologue, who would depart upon finishing. Importantly, the play is written without utilizing blackouts. This technique ensures that in production, via a dramaturg and/or director, there could be constant movement and action from the silent background characters. At this creative practice point, Friday Night, In

Town had become a gathering of needy humanity, linked by place but immensely disparate in character and intention. Its target was now to aspire to McGrath’s cast-iron stance that:

Theatre is the place where the life of the society is shown in public to that society, where that society’s assumptions are exhibited and tested, its values are scrutinized, its myths are validated and its traumas become emblems of its reality. (1981, pg.83)

These themes, hopes, literary devices and staging ideas are a long way from the opening months of this M.A (by Research). English playwright Richard Nelson provides a valuable insight, not only into my three semesters of playwriting

27 practice, but for the poet and occasional fiction writer who has changed his genre of creative practice:

Unlike a novel or a large work of fiction or biography, a play doesn’t have very many words. A play is, what, eighty pages? And if you write five pages of dialogue a day – what’s five into eighty? So if you write five pages a day you should have a play every sixteen days. It’s madness. The effort of playwriting has so little to do with the physical act of writing. It’s all in the thinking and organizing. (1995, pg.146)

Nelson’s point reinforces Krauth’s sentiments that have been at the forefront of the play’s development:

The pushing around of characters, actions, ideas – similar to the way much of playing chess might be seen as standard strategy. But in the best writing (as in the best chess) the need for creative maneuvering is a constant. (2006, pg.191)

Both Nelson and Krauth define the goals inherent in the shaping, re-writing and editing that has eventuated to make Friday Night, In Town of industry-ready standard. Their advice has also been part of a modern formula in attempting to cohesively merge a number of short individual works into a rotating, moveable whole that bears traces of the chaotic, loud and constantly moving origins of the medieval pageant-play.

In the data analysis section, following the play, I will illuminate the research question and the writing of Friday Night, In Town in two ways. Firstly, by the specific detection of the Murray-Smith and Keene texts that have driven and secured my creative practice. This will be followed by a discussion of the origins of the medieval pageant-play and how my play has achieved its technical effects.

The importance of staging and original music for a pageant-play will also be

28 addressed. Finally, there is a small critical evaluation of Murray-Smith and Keene as playwrights and a closing examination and repositioning of them as influences on future creative practice.

FRIDAY NIGHT, IN TOWN

A contemporary Melbourne pageant-play

By Kieran Carroll (2007)

30 CHARACTERS

Scenes 1, 7, 14, 25, 37, 43 Brett, early 30s Steve, early 30s Jackie, mid 30s Jane, early 30s

Scenes 2, 6, 8, 11, 13, 17, 20, 24, 26, 29, 33, 36, 39, 42 Bryan, early 40s Sammie, late 30s

Scenes 3, 9, 15, 21, 30, 35, 38, 43 Ron, mid 80s Michelle, mid 20s

Scenes 4, 10, 16, 23, 27, 31, 34, 40 Jason, 18 James, 18 Sherry, mid 20s Stiffer, late 20s The Thrash Man, late 20s

Scenes 5, 12, 18, 22, 28, 32, 41 Leigh, mid 20s Emma, mid 20s

Scene 19 Unnamed Man, mid 30s

31 PRODUCTION NOTE

Friday Night, In Town is devised so that all sixteen characters are on stage for the play’s entire duration with the exception of the Unnamed Man in Scene 19 who leaves the stage after his monologue.

The character of The Thrash Man can also be used throughout the play as the glass collector/barman in all of the other hotel/bar scenes.

Although the play is broken up into a large number of short scenes, the intention is to move seamlessly from one set of circumstances to another. Because of this intention, all of the characters should be visible the entire time with the lighting plot highlighting what the audience is looking at. There should be no need for blackouts at any stage.

32 ACT ONE

SCENE 1

Lights Up. A trendy, expensive hole-in-the-wall bar in Melbourne. Two men dressed in jeans and parkas with Richmond football club beanies and scarves are having a drink at the bar. Both work as builders on new housing estates. Near them are two professional women in business skirts and jackets. They are close friends and work colleagues, also in their early 30s, enjoying an after-work drink. It’s a Friday night about an hour before the game.

STEVE: Look at this place, just a hole in the wall. Who would’ve thought

walking down here?

BRETT: Bloody expensive regardless. Few nice birds though, look at those two.

STEVE: Yeah.

BRETT: Fuck I’m hungry. These 7.30 starts are a bit of a rush.

STEVE: Well there’s nothing here, mate. We’ll get a pie at the game.

BRETT: The Tiges better play better than last week. That was a disgrace.

STEVE: One more week of that and I’m giving up.

BRETT: I’ll get us a couple more. These aren’t even hitting the sides.

STEVE: Never ever do, mate, never ever do.

33 As Brett orders the beers, the two women giggle away and laugh unconsciously while swapping work-related stories.

JANE: And then at the photocopier, he looked into my eyes really seriously and

said, ‘Jane, I can really relate to you.’ (laughter)

JACKIE: The poor guy. It probably took him months to work up to that. (laughter)

BRETT (returning with the beers): There you go, mate.

STEVE: Cheers, Bretto.

BRETT: I really don’t mind the look of those two.

STEVE: You wouldn’t have a hope in hell.

BRETT: Oh is that right?

STEVE: Now, mate, I know you like to think you’re a bit of a ladies man but some

things are maybe out of reach. Those two, not in a million years.

BRETT: Let’s drink these and go and have a chat.

STEVE: Mate, I just want to get to the game. Get a good posi before the bounce.

BRETT: C’mon.

34 STEVE: We’re just gonna…

BRETT: C’mon. Drink up. You buy the next round and we’ll get over there. What’s

there to lose?

STEVE: Well, nothing, I suppose. What are you going to talk about?

BRETT: How the fuck do I know - make it up as we go along.

STEVE: I’ll be out of dosh before half-time.

BRETT: I’ll shout the drinks. Don’t worry mate, you’re thinking too much about it.

STEVE: Is that so? Mate, I’d just rather go to the game.

BRETT: How long is it since you’ve had a bit?

STEVE: Oh, about a month.

BRETT: Bullshit and you know it. I’d say over a year - nothing since that bird

called Lisa who worked in the credit union.

STEVE: You wouldn’t have a clue. I’m out there all the time.

BRETT: You never get beyond the idiot box most weekends.

35 STEVE: And who do you think you are anyway, fuckin’ Robbie Williams?

BRETT: With a bit of Elvis. Look, we give it a go and if it doesn’t work we’ve got a

game of footy to see.

SCENE 2

A thin man lies on a single bed, a sheet under him but no blankets or sheets over him. He is shirtless wearing only grey shorts. In the room are a television, clock radio and bedside lamp. He looks at and away from the television. He is drinking beer. The sound is a low murmur but the light of the television keeps the room aglow. The occasional rumble of planes overhead can be heard.

A tall strongly built woman is at a high stool of a hotel drinking glasses of red wine, smoking and flipping through a newspaper. Dressed in a black singlet and knee length shorts, her hair is wet, as if she’s just come out of the shower. She is edgy and distracted and her voice is gravelly from cigarettes and late nights. A Paul Kelly song plays very faintly in the background.

BRYAN: I’ve been here two and a half months. It’s the longest summer I can

remember. It’s April and the city is still at the beach. Cooler nights but

early morning sun beating in. The water’s 20 degrees. This room’s always

hot though. I’m kind of expecting it to feel like summer all year round.

These flats are a bit cheaper than other parts of town. There’s only

factories to look at, a few trees, a bowls club in the next street that hosts

rave parties and lesbian biker gigs on Saturday night to boost profits. By

day, it’s chaotic: the factories bombarded by delivery trucks, the caf on

the corner getting rid of pies, salad rolls and Big Ms like they’re the last on

earth; but after four, everything clears out. I’m left with the hum of a

generator across the road and around midnight, a bread factory opens -

but they stay low-key.

36 SAMMIE: Is it midday yet, mate? Well I know it’s not, but it is for me. You know it is

when you’re serving drinks to Sammie. When you’re ready, I’ll have a

dozen oysters and a bottle of merlot. Got paid yesterday. I’m cashed up

(laughs huskily). These dusk to dawn shifts working at 000 are fuckin’

killing me.

BRYAN: I’m sleeping okay but waking early, but who wouldn’t with the sun and the

planes pushing through my skull and the trucks dropping off whatever

they drop off. Frank, the guy who runs the caf on the corner, tells me if

you want to stay sane and healthy around here, do what he does, get

onto factory times. Go to bed around 8.30, 9, get up 4.30, 5. No worries

then, mate, he tells me, no worries, you’ll feel fine. But I can’t do it. I’m an

after the late news sleeper. I’ve been falling asleep with the television on

and then waking at two or three with some infomercial blaring at me, at

twice the volume of the news. This selling bullshit! Whatever happened to

Blankety Blanks, Prisoner or Mr Ed?

He goes over to the television and turns it off. As he’s walking back to bed, he goes back and turns it on again. He flicks through the stations but turns the sound down to zero. He stares at it, up close.

SCENE 3

Early evening, a quiet inner suburban train station. Two people sit on opposite ends of the bench waiting. On the right hand side is a frail looking man. He is dressed in a neat old suit with hat and tie. He waits in a composed fashion. On the other side of the bench is a young woman also waiting and listening to music through an iPod. She is enjoying the music but also seems anxious for the train to arrive. The two people exchange glances a couple of times in a cordial, non-threatening way. Eventually the young woman removes her headphones and packs them away in her handbag. After some time, the old man speaks.

RON: They’ve been pretty good lately.

37 MICHELLE: Sorry.

RON: They’ve been pretty good lately. The trains. They’ve been on time.

MICHELLE: Oh.

RON: I remember when this line used to be once an hour on Sunday evenings.

MICHELLE: I’ve got to get into town by seven. My boyfriend will kill me. He’s

obsessed with everything being on time and I’m always running late.

(pause)

RON: Aren’t you a little bit cold?

MICHELLE: No, I’m fine.

RON: It’s only going to be seven overnight. You need a coat.

MICHELLE: I always lose them.

RON: Shouldn’t be too long now.

MICHELLE: Hope so. (long pause)

RON: Never many people on this station, even in peak hour. It’s always been

like that. People catch the trams. You mention it to people and they’ve

38 never heard of it. But I’ve lived over there in that house since I was

twenty-two. Fifty-eight years.

MICHELLE: Fifty-eight years in the same house?

RON: Fifty-eight years. Only ever lived in two places. The family house in

Benalla and then my wife and I moved to Melbourne and found that over

there. Rented it for a few years and eventually bought it. We didn’t have

children so there was always plenty of room for the both of us.

MICHELLE: Oh. You know I’ve moved six times in the last two years. It’s such a pain.

Two places I moved from had cockroaches, one had a man who collected

coffins and mice, and the last one the trams drove me insane. Fifty-eight

years in the same house, that’s incredible!

RON: We’d just got married. My wife was a bit older.

MICHELLE (standing up): Oh I think I can hear it coming.

RON: No, I think that’s from the other way.

MICHELLE: My boyfriend’s going to kill me and I’ve forgotten my mobile.

RON: There’s a public phone up there.

MICHELLE: I haven’t got any change.

39 RON: He’ll wait.

MICHELLE: You think so.

RON: My wife was always late. Used to drive me mad. Always worrying too

much about her appearance. But looking back, it didn’t really matter.

MICHELLE: I hate being late and I always am.

RON: Nothing you or I can do about the trains.

MICHELLE: Oh I hate this. I should buy a car. I’d save so much time.

RON: What sort of car would you like?

MICHELLE: Oh I don’t know. You mean, if I had millions of dollars?

RON: Yes, if the money didn’t matter.

MICHELLE: A big American car. A Buick. I’d drive it fast on hot days and get good-

looking men to keep it in the best condition. What about you?

RON: No, I never learnt to drive. Pretty strange really because my mates all did.

I was a bit of a curiosity to them, a man who never learnt to drive. We

couldn’t really afford it early on and then I thought, well we’re so close to

here.

40 MICHELLE: But didn’t you want to?

RON: Yes sometimes. Not so much around the city. But at Easter or Christmas

it would have been good when there was time to go away and you didn’t

have to worry about the trains.

MICHELLE: My boyfriend couldn’t do without his car. I don’t think he’s caught public

transport since school. A couple of times I’ve suggested it but he always

just gets in the car and drives. Sometimes he drives down to the milk bar

and it’s only three hundred metres from where he lives. (anxious) Where

is this train? He’s going to be so mad!

RON: Years ago, I had friends in western NSW; a couple of towns they lived in

only had one or two trains a week. You were in a bit of trouble if you

missed one! (chuckles)

MICHELLE: No, this is it, I’m going to get a car. This is ridiculous. He’s going to be so

mad.

RON: Flies off the handle a bit, does he?

MICHELLE: Yeah, a bit, after a few drinks.

RON: I see.

41 MICHELLE: He’s always getting into trouble. He doesn’t hit me or anything but at

nightclubs and stuff like that. Look I’m going to go to that public phone

and call him.

RON: Do you need more change?

MICHELLE: I could do with some. Sorry.

He reaches into his jacket and gives her $2

MICHELLE: Thank you so much.

SCENE 4

A grimy public bar. Two well-groomed private school boys sit at a corner table having a beer. It is summer holidays with VCE just completed. Both are wearing T-shirts and jeans, which hang low and show boxer shorts underneath. Feeling quite lost in their surrounds, they nevertheless chat away and don’t take too much notice of anyone else around.

JAMES: Shelley Stephens is hot, mate. She’s dating pop stars these days.

JASON: Yeah I bet. I heard she had a date with the drummer from Jet. She’s not

going to be too interested in us.

JAMES: Girls and money hey. I’ve been pizza delivery driving around Hampton

and then hitting the clubs. Start work at four, go till midnight, hit the clubs

by one, and sleep all day.

42 JASON: I don’t know, I think I’m just more interested in bands than you.

JAMES: Yeah probably, but the girls are at the clubs. You’ve got to realize this.

JASON: Yes and no. Well they’re certainly not here.

JAMES: Not ones you want to take home to Mum anyway.

The Thrash Man walks around them picking up empty glasses.

JASON: Weird place for Tone’s band to play. I suppose as they’re just starting

they’re taking anything that comes along. You wouldn’t have been here

before, would you?

JAMES: You’ve got to be kidding.

JASON: Thought so.

Enter Sherry and Stiffer. Sherry wears a tight black mini-skirt and tight purple tank top. She has a mullet, tatts on her arms and is holding a beer. Stiffer’s wearing cut-off shorts, a blue singlet and thongs. He’s also got tatts on his arms and knuckles. He too is holding a beer. Slightly drunk, they arrive over at the table, spotting the boys while looking for chairs.

STIFFER: Mind if we have them two.

THE THRASH MAN: G’day Stiff, Shez, fuckin’ great night for a big one, hey?

JASON: No, that’s fine. Go for it.

Stiffer sits down first and Sherry follows a bit wonkily.

STIFFER: Down you come, Shez, it ain’t that far, you’re used to going down a lot

further! (laughs)

SHERRY: Shut up, Stiffer, or you won’t be coming near me tonight. So what have

we got here?

STIFFER: I don’t know. Couple of out of towners I’d say. (leaning over to the boys)

I’m Stiffer, that’s Sherry. Her mother was an alcoholic. (laughs at his own

joke)

SHERRY: Shut up, Stiffer.

JASON: G’day I’m Jason, that’s James.

JAMES: Hi.

STIFFER: Drunk in The Groucher before?

JASON: Nah, we’re here to see a friend’s band play. Just waiting for the room to

open. We’re a bit early.

STIFFER: Relax boys. They won’t be on for hours. Nothing ever runs on time at The

Groucher.

SHERRY: Sit down and have a drink.

JASON: Okay.

STIFFER (to Jason): Your shout, mate.

JASON: Sorry.

STIFFER: Your shout, mate.

JASON: Hey, oh right.

STIFFER: Just get a jug of Carlton.

Jason gets up and goes to the bar while James looks increasingly

awkward.

SCENE 5

Leigh and Emma are seated at a small bare table. Leigh is dressed in suit pants and a long sleeved shirt, casual but stylish. Emma wears a man’s suit with a white shirt and the top button done up. The mood is tense. Their table should be at a slightly lower stage level to indicate a basement atmosphere.

LEIGH: We haven’t been out for a drink in, God how long must it be?

EMMA: Well I barely ever drink.

LEIGH: No, I know. But still, we haven’t…

EMMA: Well I haven’t wanted to talk to you much now, have I? I think you can

guess the reason. (long pause)

LEIGH: How’s your work?

EMMA: Fine.

LEIGH: That’s good. (long pause)

EMMA: Look, Leigh, I’m feeling pretty tired, okay?

LEIGH: It’s only eight o’clock.

EMMA: What has that got to do with anything?

LEIGH: Oh here we go. Look I’m not in for a fight. I only rang…

EMMA: Did you…

LEIGH: Let me finish. (pause) I only rang because of what happened. I just

wanted to say that I’m sorry but neither of us could help it. It happened. It

had been brewing for a long time. I’m sorry but you must have noticed.

46 EMMA: You won’t be getting some blessing of forgiveness from me.

LEIGH: We fell for each other. It was…mutual.

EMMA: Mutually behind my back!

LEIGH: Emma, we knew…but look now he’s not, um, …oh you know there’s

nothing to stop you…

EMMA: I’m not going to some God forsaken town in Slovakia to beg him to come

back to me.

LEIGH: It made sense in some ways, him leaving. The money to teach English

there…

EMMA: He only did it to get away from you.

LEIGH: I’d say getting away from you might have had something to do with it as

well.

EMMA: He was embarrassed and ashamed by you two getting together. He

couldn’t deal with it so he left and you and I are stuck here to argue out

the consequences.

LEIGH: He wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed. I fell in love with him. He fell…

47 EMMA: Oh please. If it was all so gripping, why didn’t you follow him to Slovakia?

LEIGH: That’s a stupid question. Were you that in love with him?

EMMA (sarcastically): What do you think?

LEIGH: Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.

EMMA: We were in love all the time. Got it. All the time!

LEIGH: You two fought all the time. I know that. You had long stand-off periods,

were always hanging up on each other on the phone, said a million times

that you were never going to speak again and…

EMMA: Our arguments were never serious. (long pause) He’s not gay you know.

LEIGH: I never said he was.

EMMA: And you’re not gay either.

LEIGH: I never said I was. I don’t go looking for men. Neither does he. In fact, I

could really do with a new girlfriend.

SCENE 6

48 SAMMIE: Make it two bottles of merlot; I’ll take the second one with me. I didn’t get

any sleep this morning after the shift. I need something to calm my

nerves. You’d feel like this as well if you knew how messed up I feel.

OOO would do anyone’s head in.

BARMAN: You need to retire somewhere like The Bahamas, Sammie.

SAMMIE: You know, I’ve told you, I got married two years ago but do you think I

can be faithful? Do you think he can? So we agree on an open marriage.

Do you think that’s working? I’m kidding myself. (looking at the

newspaper) Look at the prices of these places. Twenty years ago they

were nothing, when I had money and didn’t just spend it. (laughs)

SCENE 7

Brett and Steve remove their Richmond beanies and scarves with Brett having to prompt Steve initially. They move over to the women who notice them through their laughter but give them uninterested looks. The men notice that they’re drinking champagne.

BRETT: G’day girls. Having a good night?

JACKIE: Sorry.

BRETT: How are ya both? Are you having a good night?

JANE: Fine thanks.

49 BRETT (cutting in quickly): We’re off to the footy to see the Tiges.

JACKIE: So we noticed before.

STEVE: We were just keeping our heads warm.

BRETT: Fancy a drink? A champers? Your glasses look like they could do with a

refill?

JACKIE: No we’re fine thanks.

BRETT: You’re sure?

JACKIE: We’re sure.

BRETT: Do you follow the footy?

JACKIE: Not much. (pause)

JANE: I do actually. I barrack for Essendon. I love James Hird.

BRETT: Ah, a Bomber fan. Do you go much?

JANE: Not really.

BRETT: Steve here could have played for the Bombers, tried out and stuff, just not

quite quick enough.

JANE: Oh really.

JACKIE: A lot of guys say stuff like that. That they just missed out.

STEVE: I wasn’t that good.

BRETT: Good, you were good, mate; don’t worry about that, just a fraction slow off

the mark. I’m Brett by the way and that’s Steve.

JANE: Hi I’m Jane and that’s Jackie.

BRETT: Good to meet you both.

STEVE: Anyway, I just watch footy now. I couldn’t run down a slow bus.

JANE: Look I might take you up on the offer and have a drink if you don’t mind.

Champagne, would that be okay? Could you make it two? We’re not

driving.

BRETT: Another one, mate? I’ll get the round.

Brett turns for the bar.

BARMAN: Can I help you out there, mate?

51 JANE: What time’s the game?

STEVE: Starting soon. 7.30.

JACKIE: We’ll have this but I should be getting home after this one.

JANE: C’mon Jack, it’s Friday night. We’ll get some Yum Cha down the road

after this.

JACKIE: No I should go after this one.

JANE: What for? C’mon we haven’t had a decent drink in ages.

STEVE: Know the feeling.

BARMAN: That’ll be $34 thanks mate.

BRETT: Jesus, there you go. (returning with the drinks) There you go.

Champagne. Champagne. And a couple of Melbourne’s finest. Cheers!

TOGETHER: Cheers.

SCENE 8

BRYAN: One night, a few years back, I was at the end of a night, staring into a

bookshop window like it was a TV. To my right, a German or Danish

52 woman started staring into the bookshop as well. I don’t remember who

spoke first but a few minutes later, we were at a pizza place and I was

speaking really fast out of a sense of relief at having found someone to

open up to and she was doing the same. At that point of the night, I don’t

think I would have been able to find anyone in Melbourne to come out.

Sure it was 2am Thursday morning or whatever but so what? When

you’ve got real friends, they don’t care what time it is. So instead I pour it

all out to a Danish backpacker.

SCENE 9

Michelle returns from the public phone back to the train station bench.

MICHELLE: He’s mad, so mad.

RON: You told him what happened?

MICHELLE: Yeah he told me to get a fucking car. Oh sorry.

RON: Why can’t he pick you up?

MICHELLE: Because he’s in the pub watching some rugby game from Sydney or

somewhere with his mates. No way he’s leaving that. I’m supposed to like

it as well. But I hate rugby. It’s the worst.

RON: Oh. Well it’ll be here soon. You’ll be there in no time.

MICHELLE: I hate getting yelled at.

RON: Couldn’t he have offered to pay for a taxi?

MICHELLE: Mick?

RON: Yes…Mick.

MICHELLE: He’s too tight with his money for that. Only ever spends it on himself.

RON: That’s no good.

MICHELLE: Yeah, like what you earn is yours and nobody else’s.

RON: So he doesn’t shout you ever?

MICHELLE: No, not much. (pause) Actually never. I’m not painting much of a picture,

am I?

RON: He should enjoy spending a bit of money on you.

MICHELLE: Actually he never does when I come to think of it.

54 RON: I bought my wife a beautiful woollen coat for her 30th birthday. Gee and

was it expensive. From Georges. But I didn’t earn the money or save it,

though I told her I did.

MICHELLE: How did you get it then?

RON: I had a big collect at the races. She hated me having a punt. One of the

few things we disagreed on. I’d go off on Saturday afternoons and she’d

give me a thermos of tea and grated carrot and Vegemite sandwiches.

She knew I loathed them. But she always made them for the races.

Sometimes I’d give them to the seagulls and buy a pie.

MICHELLE (laughing and starting to relax): That’s funny. I wish Mick would buy me a

beautiful coat.

RON: She loved it. Any excuse to put it on. Sometimes even in summer.

(pause) I’m Ron, Ron Wilding. (He puts out his hand and she shakes it

softly)

MICHELLE: I’m Michelle, Michelle Moncrieff.

RON: Pleased to meet you. Live close by, do you?

MICHELLE: Just over there as well. Not that far from you.

RON: It’s a good area.

55 MICHELLE: I like it. (long pause) You know, I’m thinking now, you’re right about Mick.

He’s a tight arse. Oh sorry but why couldn’t he offer to pay for a taxi? I’m

starting to not even care if this train comes or not. Do you think I should

ring him and tell him I’m not coming in?

RON: Oh I don’t know. It’s up to you.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I will. I hate rugby and he’s going to be with his friends as well. I get

really sick of them. I hate to ask but would you have any more change?

RON: Well, yes, you need another $2, do you?

MICHELLE: That would be good – sorry.

RON: No good just sitting in my pockets. There you go.

MICHELLE: Thank you. You’re really kind. I’ll be quick.

Michelle departs.

SCENE 10

JAMES: So is this your local?

SHERRY: Four nights a week.

56 STIFFER (yelling across room then back to the table): Yeah good one Thrash Man,

yeah, when we’re not here, the other three, we’re over at The Mermaid.

JAMES: Right. Right.

STIFFER: Drinker, are ya?

JAMES: Yeah, I like a beer.

SHERRY: He’s pretty cute, isn’t he, Stiffer?

STIFFER: Don’t you go getting any ideas about these two Mummy's boys. What’s he

fuckin’ doing at the bar?

SHERRY: You know how it is, Stiffer; serve the locals first even when they’re last in

line.

STIFFER: You’re right, Shez. Shoulda gone meself.

SHERRY (leaning over to Jason): Where you from, darl?

JAMES: Brighton.

STIFFER: Brighton boy, eh? I did a break and enter job there a few years ago. Easy.

Might have been your house! (laughs)

SHERRY: Shut up, Stiffer, you fuckin’ moron.

STIFFER: It was only a joke, Shez. Don’t get so uptight. I’m just enjoying…what’d

you say your name was?

JAMES: James.

STIFFER: I’m just enjoying the company of Jimmy, really, really enjoying it.

SCENE 11

BRYAN: Since I’ve been here, I’ve noticed a woman drinking in the window of the

local pub. It’s one of those pubs that somebody told me was just an old

man’s racing place: cheap sausages and chips and mixed grills, the air

choked with rollies. Then it went like everywhere else: teak tables, bistro

menus, tables on the footpath, large flashy Foxtel screens. In the

mornings, sometimes, when I’d go up the street for some groceries, I’d

notice old blokes tugging and cursing at the door wondering why it wasn’t

open. (pause) Every now and then I have a drink with her - Sammie. She

loves a drink and she holds it pretty well.

SCENE 12

EMMA: Mmm, I’m wondering if this little meeting mightn’t have a whole other

agenda. I don’t think you rang me up tonight to really talk about Damien,

58 or ask for my forgiveness. I think you thought we could just broach the

subject and let it all slide under the carpet. I think you just rang me up

because you’re feeling a bit lonely and haven’t had a boyfriend, I mean

girlfriend for a while and you may have even thought I was a chance after

a few drinks. Maybe just for a night? Am I right?

LEIGH: That’s ludicrous. We’re friends. You really need a drink.

EMMA: Men don’t ring me up unless they want to sleep with me!

LEIGH: Wow no shortage of confidence there.

EMMA: Am I right?

LEIGH: I don’t want to answer for the whole male population of Melbourne!

EMMA: You can’t find any other woman to go out with you on a Friday night, can

you?

LEIGH: Don’t be stupid. We should have a drink.

EMMA: No, c’mon tell me.

LEIGH: Emma, we’ve been sitting here awhile. We should get something. And

anyway I think you’re feeling alright because I’d say you’ve been in

contact with him lately. Am I right?

EMMA: Who?

LEIGH: Oh whom do you think, Humphrey B Bear?

EMMA: No, no I haven’t.

LEIGH: No contact at all?

EMMA: Yeah, yeah, once or twice.

LEIGH: On the phone?

EMMA: He has to call me. I’m not paying for it!

LEIGH: So you are speaking with him regularly?

EMMA: We’ve had a few chats, okay.

LEIGH: For God’s sake, this isn’t the police. Can you be a bit more forthcoming?

EMMA: Are you in contact with him?

LEIGH: Gee, you got out of that quickly. No, I’m not.

EMMA: Good.

LEIGH: What do you mean good?

EMMA: I think that’s appropriate.

LEIGH: Appropriate?

EMMA: Yes.

LEIGH: Because your relationship with him has more validity than mine?

EMMA: Look, Leigh, I know you two were childhood friends. You probably always

had a crush on him for all I know. I don’t even care about the affair

sometimes but you’ve got to get something straight in your head. He’s by

far the only man I’ve ever loved.

LEIGH: I really wish he was around.

SCENE 13

SAMMIE (gulping the merlot): My husband is great in bed. But that doesn’t mean

it’s enough for him or me. We’re addicts, neither of us ever stop wanting it

and when we wear each other out, well we go looking elsewhere. I’d drive

out of Victoria to Gundagai or Deniliquin just for the night if I knew the sex

was going to be good! (Gulping again) I’d even drive to Yass! (laughs

huskily)

SCENE 14

STEVE: Getting on to the first bounce, mate.

BRETT: He’s always anxious before a game. Stevo, you know Richmond do

nothing in the first quarter.

STEVE: Yeah but…

BRETT: We’ll just relax with these ones and get to it. It’s been a long week. We’re

working on these apartments down our way. We’re builders and besides

the early starts, the boss is bloody cranky and we’re all under pressure to

get the job done. So I’m not rushing. It’s Friday night. I’m just taking it

slowly all the way.

JANE: Wish we had something planned tonight.

JACKIE: Not to worry.

JANE: So where do you guys usually have a drink?

BRETT: We live down in Frankston. Sometimes The Pier, sometimes The Grand

in Mornington, only really ever come up to the city these days when the

footy’s on.

62 JANE: Oh.

JACKIE: Frankston’s a fair way out but the beach is nice, isn’t it?

STEVE: Yeah I like it. Grew up there. Always lived there.

BRETT: He’s a sentimental old fella Stevo. Fair dinkum, I took him across the

bridge to Footscray once, he almost wept! (laughter from everyone)

STEVE: And whereabouts are you?

JACKIE: We both grew up in Nunawading but I bought a place in Glenhuntly.

BRETT: Hey hey on the line!

JACKIE: That’s right. Not too far down it though.

STEVE: I heard Glenhuntly is getting a little bit flash, just quietly.

JACKIE: Nah it’s pretty boring. I wish I could have afforded a place in St .Kilda or

Prahran.

JANE: She’d take South Yarra if she could. Or Toorak - bit of a social climber is

our Jackie.

STEVE: Who wouldn’t?

BRETT: St .Kilda and Prahran, hey? Now you’re talking. There’s a couple of

places with some action.

STEVE: Might be time to go, mate. I reckon the first quarter’s important tonight.

BRETT: Yeah yeah in a minute, mate.

JANE: Should be a good game.

BRETT: Yeah it should. (Long pause as everybody has a drink and looks slightly

perplexed as to what to do next) Hey, I might be a bit out of turn asking

this, but do you wanna come along? It won’t be that crowded. North

Melbourne haven’t got any supporters. There’ll be no problem getting a

seat and we can all get the train back from Southern Cross when it’s over.

We’ll be undercover, nobody’s gonna get wet. (pause)

JANE: What do you think, Jack?

JACKIE: No, no. You go, I should…

JANE: C’mon it’ll be fun. It’s ages since we went to the footy and if it’s a bit

boring…

BRETT: You can just leave and get an early train. C’mon, our shout.

64 JANE: No, you don’t have to do that.

BRETT: We insist.

JACKIE: Oh alright. I’ll tag along.

JANE: C’mon, it’ll be fun. I suppose we have to barrack for Richmond.

BRETT: That goes without saying! Let’s go.

SCENE 15

MICHELLE: He was so mad and hung up. I told him the trains had stopped. I’m proud

of myself. I’m not going to be pushed around any more. So many times I

go along to things and I don’t really want to go but I go along because…I

don’t know, like I’m in trouble if I don’t.

RON: It doesn’t seem to be coming.

MICHELLE: That intercom’s not working either.

RON: I might go back home. If the train isn’t running for you, it’s not running for

me.

MICHELLE: I’m sorry. I never asked. Where were you going?

65 RON: Oh it doesn’t matter. Nowhere important. Well, I’ll be going.

MICHELLE: Wait. (pause) I’ll walk too. I mean, we’re almost neighbours, aren’t we?

RON: Yes, I suppose we are… (They stand up to leave and begin walking)

MICHELLE (stopping him): Hey, I know this sounds funny but would you like to have

a drink at the pub? I’m free now and if you’re not…

RON: You’d like to have a drink at the pub with me?

MICHELLE: Yeah, why not? (pause)

RON: All right, that would be good. I’m always a bit thirsty.

MICHELLE: Okay then, let’s go. I’m really thirsty.

SCENE 16

Jason comes back with a jug of Carlton and fills up the glasses of

everyone.

STIFFER: Good work, J Man. Look at that for manners. Your mother would be

proud, son. Brighton boy as well, are ya?

JASON: Nah, Sandringham but we used to live in Cheltenham.

SHERRY: I had a fuckin hot boyfriend in Cheltenham when I was about eighteen.

We used to fuck all night in the cemetery by the train station and then

they started locking the gates but we didn’t care, just made a hole in the

fence.

STIFFER: I don’t want to fuckin hear what you were doing in the fuckin cemetery in

Cheltenham when you were eighteen. And my new mate (slaps James on

the back) doesn’t want to hear it either. He’s from Brighton. They don’t

talk that way in Brighton, Sherry. (long pause)

JASON: What do you guys get up to?

SHERRY: What do you mean?

JASON: Ah, I mean, what do you get up to during the day?

SHERRY: Is he having us on, Stiffer?

STIFFER: That’s a pretty heavy question, J Man.

JASON: Oh right.

STIFFER: Don’t worry about what we do. What do you two do? Ever got your hands

dirty?

67 JASON: We just finished school. James is delivering pizzas. I’ve been working as

a car-park attendant.

SHERRY: Oooh that’s a bit rough. Wouldn’t be for too long, would it?

JASON: Nah probably not. The money’s alright though. Enough to go out anyway.

STIFFER (putting his arm around James): Let me give you boys some advice. Work

doesn’t pay. What are ya getting there? Ten, eleven bucks an hour. You’d

be using your own petrol, wouldn’t ya, Jimmy? Okay, so I estimate, you’re

probably doing at least twenty hours for the same amount of money as

me walking up to the dole office and just slipping that form right across

the counter with the nicest smile I can muster.

SHERRY: You can’t even manage that sometimes.

STIFFER: Shut up you.

SHERRY: I won’t fuckin’ shut up.

STIFFER: Just hold on and let me talk to the Brighton boys. Now boys, do you see

where I’m coming from?

JASON: Yeah, I know what you mean.

JAMES: Yeah I do. (courageously) But it’s good having a part-time job I reckon.

STIFFER: But Jimmy, ya no better off than me.

JAMES: My parents wouldn’t let me go on the dole.

SHERRY: Wouldn’t let?

JAMES: No.

STIFFER: Believe in hard work do they, and that everybody on the dole is a bludger

and that the dole probably shouldn’t even exist? Fuck ya parents, Jimmy,

they’re probably not happy.

SHERRY: They’re probably not even sleeping together. I reckon my parents only

ever fucked once and the time they did they made me!

STIFFER: Get on the dole, boys, save yourself the hassle. Bong on down the beach.

I’ll sell ya some hooch. That is, of course, unless you think you’re too

fuckin’ good for it.

JAMES: Nah, of course not.

JASON: We probably just hadn’t thought about it in that way, that’s all.

69 STIFFER: Hadn’t thought about it. You boys are fuckin’ rich, aren’t ya? Sherry, I

reckon these boys know what a holiday house looks like and it’d be a

bloody long way from a tent in Rosebud!

SHERRY: I reckon they might know a Mercedes Benz when they see one as well,

Stiffer.

JAMES: Ah it might be time to go into the band room, Jase. Nice meeting

you…(James gets up but Sherry corners him as Stiffer gets up and grabs

James’ arm)

SHERRY: But we haven’t even finished this jug. We’ve gotta finish this jug together.

STIFFER: And then, I reckon, it might be your shout, Jimmy.

JAMES: I’m a bit short of money actually.

STIFFER: Short of dosh, a Brighton boy short on dosh.

Jason pulls a ten-dollar note from his pocket and goes to hand it to James but the money is intercepted by Stiffer.

STIFFER: I’ll grab that. We’ll get quicker service that way.

Stiffer goes to the bar.

70 SCENE 17

Bryan gets off his bed and begins pacing the room in an effort to feel better. He jogs on the spot, swings his arms then pretends to be out batting on a cricket field.

BRYAN: A few people thought I could have made it as a cricketer. They said my

batting technique was right up there. As a kid, I was fearless, taking to the

attack, prancing down the pitch, would even laugh at some bowlers as I

smashed them around. I remember one teacher saying: ‘It’s never a

boring day’s cricket with you around Fallon.’ Then one day, I lost my

nerve and gave up. The pitch was wet and they sent me out to open. The

first couple whizzed past my shoulders. One little fucker in slips said:

‘C’mon, Fallon’s as gutless as.’ I remember thinking before the next ball, I

just want to get out and get off. The ball arrived and I didn’t offer a shot,

clean bowled. I walked off, put the gear back in the bag and left the whole

lot on the seat of the train.

SCENE 18

EMMA: He’s running scared you know, running from me, you, his parents,

Melbourne. He’ll probably never come back.

LEIGH: What, so he’ll settle in Slovakia? Not in a million years.

EMMA: He’ll probably marry the first woman that takes a fancy to him. He’ll forget

us eventually. He’ll see us as the first chapter in his life and a chapter he

won’t wish to revisit. You know and I know he can’t write to save himself

71 but he’ll probably try a novel about all of this during those long dark

winters, another Melbourne person living out a great European cliché.

LEIGHS (laughs): Well that’s one thing we agree on. He certainly can’t write. He’s

shocking though he’d love to be good. He won’t disappear forever. What’s

that quote: ‘You can’t shed your skin…even if it itches like hell.’ I think it

might be Patrick White. (long pause)

EMMA: Did you like being with him?

LEIGH: I liked being with him though I didn’t like everything about being so close

to another man’s skin.

EMMA: There were times in our early days when I’d virtually hang by the phone

all day waiting for him to call, and once right at the beginning, before

anything happened, I waited for him for three hours on a train station, you

know the one near the trams, what’s it called, that one that people never

seem to use. Doesn’t matter. I can only laugh now about my hopeless

devotion. I was only eighteen. The first couple of years of being in love

with him, and him not even noticing me, were torture.

LEIGH: I noticed you.

EMMA: I know you did.

LEIGH: But it’s always I want the one I can’t have, isn’t it?

EMMA: Something like that.

LEIGH: Do you remember first kissing him?

EMMA: Of course, it was on St .Kilda Pier. We’d had pizza at Topolinos and the

pizza had too much chilli and we gulped down glass after glass of water.

Then we had gelati and he asked me if I’d like to take a stroll. We headed

to the end of the pier. There was a cold breeze and he wrapped me in his

coat. I’d never really noticed the West Gate lit up until that night and we

lay down for ages at the end of the pier. Two nights later we made love

for the first time at my place. I felt like my life was just beginning during

that week.

SCENE 19

A man that is yet to speak sits on a chair at a table alone. Three empty pot glasses and one full glass of beer are beside him. Dressed in T-shirt and jeans, he drinks slowly, occasionally flexing his arms behind his head. He looks tired, ragged. The full glass of beer is drunk through the course of proceedings.

MAN: He had this second-hand but in really good condition Land Rover. Stupid

car. I hate them but he got it cheap off a guy at work. (pause) It's true

we'd drifted a bit in the last few years but that happens when you've

known each other for twenty-five. And anyway, he'd had kids, all the stuff

that goes with that. (pause) He wasn't completely faithful. There were

one-nighters, something else maybe. Who knows? I didn't like him for

it...and I've always liked Joanne, his wife. (pause) Maybe I’ve liked her a

73 bit too much. A friend of ours said I was the one she should have married

- yeah yeah, I don't know, it's by the by. (pause) I'd be lying if I said there weren't times when I didn't want her. But I didn't keep in contact with him to keep in contact with her. Oh maybe a couple of times I did…I don’t know. (long pause) From like fifteen we were out together all the time. We somehow managed to find girlfriends who liked the idea of a gang. It's like that thing how men instantly relax when the women around them drink beer! It's simple. There's no division. All becomes equal. Rebecca'll get this jug. You beauty! It was amazing. We always seemed to find funny, pretty smart girls who liked beer! Anyway, we trekked around, overseas, went to London together for a year to work but I don't remember much about anything practical. I just remember London spinning of a night in the back of black cabs, us carrying on, going from pub to club, trying to meet English girls unlike a few others we knew there who were just running into girls from Melbourne and seemed to be happy about it. I remember one night after a few pints somewhere, Hunters and Collectors were playing and I said to all these people, forget it, will ya, what's the point? You may as well all be in Melbourne, you homesick freaks!

(laughs, long pause) He wasn't always reliable. Sometimes he just wouldn't turn up for things, no call, not a word. You'd ask him next time you saw him. You'd be angry for a minute and he'd just say 'Nah, couldn't make it!' And I'd just accept it. Sometimes, there was even something relaxing about it. (long pause) I was always too weak, way too weak to get stuck into him about the cheating on Joanne thing. In a few drunken moments over the years, late at night, when I've felt lonely, I've almost felt like picking up the phone and giving her the truth - but I've always pulled

74 back. (pause) Heaps of times I thought we'd lost contact for good but then he'd ring up on a Thursday or Friday night and we'd talk, laugh about something from ages ago or we'd remember someone from way back

(chuckles). The last time I ate with him he had two veal parmas and all the salads and chips as well. I asked him if he was signing up for World

Championship Wrestling! (pause) Fat pig. (long pause) Fat selfish pig.

(long pause) You might think I'm talking about him like he's dead. Well he's not. But he may as well be. Right now, I wish he were. (He becomes extremely agitated then slightly teary before slamming his fist across the table and then standing up) What can you say about somebody you ‘ve known since you were ten, whose parents knew each other, whose houses became each other’s, whose backyards became each other’s, who split the cost of a beach-house down at Rosebud every summer for like fifteen years? What can you say about someone you think you know well, someone you've trusted, even praised to other people? What can you say about someone when you find out that he's been fucking your sixteen year old sister, your sister who's doing Year 11, and that now she's pregnant, scared out of her brain, not knowing what to do and he goes home, hugs his kids, gets into bed with Joanne and like, and like…when Sal rang, she was crying like I've never heard anyone cry before, this high pitched wail. I kept asking: ‘What is it? What is it? What's wrong? What's wrong, Sal?’ I must have said it thirty times. Sixteen. Her first boyfriend. I rang Joanne and said I'm coming around. She said he's not here. I said I'll wait. I'll wait with you. The kids were making a lot of noise. I told her that he wouldn't have any idea that Sal's pregnant, that she'd only told me. Twelve weeks down. (pause) When I got there she

75 was drinking vodka, smoking, eating corn chips, huge tears were falling onto the floor. She knew about things he'd done. She must have or been in denial. How many others were there? And then my sister, that fat pig, her first boyfriend. Fuck. (pause) I waited in the house. Joanne left and took the kids to her mother's place. Eight o'clock, nine, ten; I watched the late Channel Ten news with Sandra Sully having trouble with the autocue and then Sports Tonight. How long has Tim Webster been at it? I drank quickly from his fridge and waited and waited and waited. A bit after midnight, I saw those fat Land Rover headlights come up the drive and rock a couple of pot-plants. Say Goodbye by Hunters and Collectors was coming out of the CD player. How appropriate. I stayed on the couch.

(long pause) When he came in and saw me he tried being casual. 'G'day mate, what are you up to?' I walked up to him and I swear I've never hit anyone in my entire life but I grabbed his throat and tried ramming his head into the wall and I screamed at him: 'Scum, scum, you are scum.

How does it feel to kill two families? Sal's pregnant. Scum, scum, scum...screaming into his face over and over until my throat burnt. But I couldn't throw a punch. Don't know why. Then I said: 'Give me the Land

Rover, scum, give me the Land Rover, fat scum.’ He handed over the keys. He knew how much he’d destroyed. I left him there in the too bright heavily mortgaged house with the oversize TV and Steve Waugh autobiography on the coffee table. (pause) In the car, the Hunters were playing tricks on my memory. As I drove, because of them, just for a second or two, I even remembered him fondly. Can you believe that? I got on the South-Eastern doing about 140, down Brunton Av and took it into the corner of Russell and Bourke. I got out of the car, saw a couple of

76 dodgy looking guys in trakky daks and beanies, one in a Guns n’ Roses

T-shirt, doing whatever, I said: Do you guys get off on joyriding? Well

there it is. Do whatever you like with it. I don't care. I don't ever want to

see it again. As they took it towards Carlton, I imagined it burnt out down

a cliff face or down a muddy hill in The Dandenongs. (long pause)

Wouldn't mind another beer. (long pause) Joanne rang yesterday. Told

me she's leaving him, staying with her Mum for now and doesn't know

where he is. She told me we have to keep this from all the parents, best

we can. Forever. Let them retire in peace. (pause) I rang Sally. What do

you say? I told her to ring me anytime, anytime, day or night. I said I'd pay

for the abortion. What choice is there? She can barely speak, poor kid.

Mum and Dad are still dragging her to the Catholic Church. (long pause)

Tomorrow...tomorrow I'm going to track him down – he'll have to turn up

again sometime somewhere...he'll have to. (pause) It might be time to

throw my first punch. (He departs quickly. The glass collector grabs his

glasses and wipes down the table.)

SCENE 20

BRYAN: For a bit, it felt good quitting. I got away from sport, hung out with kids

who couldn’t even throw properly, listened to my first punk records, got

drunk on Spumante and a mate’s brother’s double strength scotch,

37.5%. I’ll never forget, puked up into a whole lot of letterboxes.

77 SCENE 21

In the pub, Ron and Michelle stand at the bar. Horse racing broadcasts

can be heard.

BARMAN: Ah that’s $6.80, mate. Out for a drink with the granddaughter, are ya?

RON (handing over money): There you go, mate, right on the knocker.

MICHELLE: Thank you. Cheers. I don’t come in here too often. I use the bottle shop a

bit. Mick comes over for a meal sometimes.

RON: About thirty, thirty-five years ago, I had a couple of friends who aren’t

around any longer and we had a little table reserved for us from five to six

on Monday to Thursdays. Just over there, that’s almost the one. Let’s go

and sit there. (They move over to the table just vacated by the man of

previous scene) After they passed on, the pub changed. It’s pretty loud

and bright these days. Then for a while, I wouldn’t come in here because

of the topless girls. My wife said if she caught me over here, we’d be

divorced the next day.

MICHELLE: I get sad watching all these people lose money on the pokies.

RON: Yes, it’s terrible. (long pause) You know, Michelle, you’re the first person

I’ve spoken to today.

MICHELLE: The first?

RON: You don’t get many phone calls at my age and I must tell you something.

Sometimes, I sit at the train station because I can have a chat to

somebody. I was going a bit crazy today by myself. Usually if I do it, I do it

on a sunny afternoon, not of an evening, but there was no one much

around today and I didn’t see people coming and going until peak hour.

MICHELLE: Do you do it often?

RON: No, not often, once a month maybe.

MICHELLE: What about your wife?

RON: Oh she’s away at the moment and she’s got her friends for company.

MICHELLE: Like Mick.

RON: Oh yes, a bit like Mick.

MICHELLE: That’s funny, maybe they’re out with each other and we don’t even know

it!

RON: Maybe. My wife never liked to stay out late. She liked early mornings but I

liked to stay under the covers on cold mornings and listen to the radio and

wait for the fog to go away.

79 MICHELLE: I can’t get up on winter mornings. I’m hopeless. Who wants to get up in

the dark?

RON: Should we have another drink if you have time? Only if you have time. It

will be my shout.

MICHELLE: Sure but I’ll pay. You know, and this sounds crazy, but this is the most

relaxed I’ve felt in ages. I’ve been stressed at work. I’ve been worrying

about money and there I am tonight on the train station, stressed out and

then I meet you and we have a chat and now I feel like everything’s okay.

RON: This is a nice surprise. That’s the thing with getting old. There are fewer

surprises.

MICHELLE: But less stress.

RON: Yes, possibly. Maybe you can be stressed at my age if you think too

much about death and you want to keep living.

MICHELLE: Do you think about death a lot? I mean, I do and I know I’m young but I

still think about it.

RON: At my age, you can’t avoid it but…

MICHELLE: I wouldn’t want to live to five hundred anyway.

80 RON: No that would be awful. Life’s long enough. It’s a good amount of time if

you get to eighty or ninety.

MICHELLE: I can’t imagine.

RON: Neither could I at your age and I think that’s why younger people find

older people hard to talk to because it’s a sign that one day they’ll look

like that and a sign that one day they won’t be here any more. If that train

had of been on time, we would never have spoken and you would have

gone into that pub in the city…

MICHELLE: And had a really bad time, and you would have…

RON: Oh just gone home. (long pause)

MICHELLE: What do you do during the day? Do you have any, ah hobbies or…

RON: Up until about four years ago, I used to swim at the local pool. I had some

lessons and learnt properly and I felt terrific. But I feel a bit long in the

tooth for it now. The other thing I did was I learnt to cook a bit. I started to

watch those Jamie Oliver programs on TV and I got a few tips. You know

men my age can’t cook.

MICHELLE: Don’t worry, men my age can’t either!

81 RON: My wife would have…well, a few nights ago I, I did a mushroom soup and

a baked dinner and finished with an apple crumble.

MICHELLE: Pretty good. You should feel pretty proud of that. Mick’s so useless in the

kitchen. (Long pause where they both attack their drinks) I’ll go and see

that barman and get us a couple more. Did he ask if I was your

granddaughter?

RON: He did yes.

MICHELLE: Well I’ll tell him you’re a billionaire courting me. (pause) I’m only joking,

Ron. (giggles) Another Carlton?

SCENE 22

LEIGH: First night meetings with people you care about are always so vivid.

EMMA: Yeah. I wanted him really badly.

LEIGH: And then I did.

EMMA: Wait a minute. Let’s not start anything here. Don’t think for a moment that

you and I are on an even keel when it comes to being in love with

Damien.

82 LEIGH: I’m not talking about now.

EMMA: Not now or ever.

LEIGH: Emma, we both needed him. (long pause) We needed him. That’s right,

isn’t it? And I walk around at the moment thinking of the places we went

and conversations we had and it all seems like a film from another era.

EMMA: I know. I know. Who the hell put Slovakia into his feeble head?

LEIGH: Not me. I think somebody he was working with at that migrant English

centre. It was so quick between him first mentioning it and then just

leaving.

EMMA: He was so secretive about it. He only told me two days before he left.

LEIGH: I’m sorry. That’s pretty cruel.

EMMA: On top of everything else that happened.

LEIGH: I’m sorry we hurt you. (pause) C’mon, this is stupid. We have to look

ahead a bit. Here we are, Friday night in Marvellous Melbourne, at our

favourite bar, the bar you and I reckon we discovered before anyone

knew about it. God, we haven’t even gone to get a drink yet. Emma,

listen. I like you. I’ll always like you but I didn’t, contrary to what you may

83 think, ring you up to start something. I rang you up because I don’t want

an enemy. Can you see your way forward to a bit of a truce?

EMMA: I need you as a friend Leigh. I’ve missed talking to you. A truce...okay.

LEIGH: That barman is starting to give us evil looks. We should buy a drink.

EMMA: I’m starting to enjoy our audacity in not buying one.

LEIGH: Do you think we can just sit here and not order anything?

EMMA: How rebellious of us!

LEIGH: Now you don’t want to drink to just piss that barman off! (standing up) I’m

not going to the bar!

Emma: (standing up): And I’m not going to the bar!

Both laugh as Leigh moves around the table. They then hug warmly.

SCENE 23

James and Jason drink uncomfortably as Sherry moves closer to them.

SHERRY: Don’t get scared of Stiffer. He’s all bluff. I’ve known him ten years.

84 JASON: No we’re all right.

SHERRY: I might be getting some speed later. You boys could come into the toilets

with me and have some. Stiffer knows someone who does us a good

deal.

JASON: Oh right.

SHERRY: You boys wouldn’t have had speed, would ya?

JASON: No, no we haven’t.

SHERRY: You boys are cute. I think there could be a treat coming your way later.

JAMES: Have you always lived around here?

SHERRY: Why do you want to know?

JAMES: No, no, I was just wondering, that was all. (pause)

SHERRY: He thinks it’s quicker at the bar if he goes. Bullshit it is. He’s such a

bullshit artist. C’mon Stiffer, my new boyfriends are getting fuckin’ thirsty!

THE THRASH MAN (yelling to the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s Born In the USA):

Born in The Groucher, yous were born in The Groucher, yous were born

in The Groucher, I’m the big bad Daddy of The Groucher…(laughs)

JASON: No we’re okay, really.

Stiffer returns with the jug of beer.

STIFFER: Ten bucks on the knocker. You pour Jimmy. Let’s see your technique and

don’t forget to tilt the fuckin' glass. I’ll tell you something about manners,

boys. My old man used to say when going around to a mate’s place, if

you’re not leading with your elbow, don’t bother coming at all! That’s a

good piece of advice, boys. Never go to a mate’s place without a slab on

the right shoulder. Lead with the fuckin elbow!

James pours the beers nervously as Sherry moves closer to Stiffer. To

the astonishment of the boys, they begin to kiss vigorously after some

heavy gulps of beer.

SCENE 24

SAMMIE: I buy him a drink. He buys me one back. He’s lonely. Tells me about the

way he gambled away $20,000, how his wife went back to her own family

and took the kid to England. Tells me how his mother wears skimpy gear

down to the supermarket in Doncaster and has taken up windsurfing and

how she tries to find men around thirty, men heaps younger than him and

how his father remarried and lives somewhere in the country with a spa

bath and a vineyard and his new wife’s mini-fortune. Black sheep, black

sheep to one another. That’s his favourite line.

86 SCENE 25

At the football, Brett and Steve barrack fiercely while Jane and Jackie who are initially reticent to barrack start to warm to the idea as well. Lively crowd noise can be heard. The four characters sit in a row much higher up than where they were previously and also above the other characters to emphasize a grandstand effect.

BRETT: That is a fuckin joke, umpire. That is the worst decision this century!

STEVE: I know why Essendon got rid of you, Buttercup. I can’t believe you’re

playing for Richmond.

JANE: Go Tiges, go!

BRETT: That’s it, Jane.

JACKIE: Yeah go Tigers, go.

STEVE: Now you’re getting it, girls. The Tiges are going to do it. This will be the

best win since the 1980 premiership, I reckon.

BRETT: Mate, that’s a long bit of elastic you’re stretching. You say that after every

win we have.

STEVE: Yeah well, the wins are few and far between.

JACKIE: This is good. It’s so much better than TV.

87 STEVE: All those ads get you in the end. I can’t take it any more. All those

Bunnings warehouse dropkicks going on about how they sell everything

but bread! (Laughter)

JANE: Go Tigers go, go, go!

JACKIE: Who would have thought, me coming to the football on a Friday night.

STEVE: Get ‘em Buttercup. Oh bloody friggin….you are softer than my mother’s

sponge cakes.

JANE: What have you got against that kid?

BRETT: His brother owes him five hundred bucks! (Brett laughs)

STEVE: They were just about the wealthiest people in my part of Frankston as

well. Figures.

JACKIE: What’s the $500 for?

BRETT: You really don’t want to know.

STEVE: Yeah, it’s a long time ago, pretty stupid stuff.

JANE: No, c’mon, you can tell us. We’re not prudes.

88 STEVE: It’s a long story. Well it’s not that embarrassing, I suppose.

JANE: This is sounding good. Men never tell us anything saucy. C’mon.

STEVE: Buttercup’s older brother and I were in the same class at high school. We

both liked the same girl who was in our class. His family ended up making

a lot of money in the building trade and they ended up sending the

younger brothers to grammar schools. Well, Peninsula Grammar where

people like James Reyne went. Anyway, I told his brother that this girl

who was in our class would be going out with me by the end of the year.

Kym Jacobson, her name was. She was a surfie, had this idea that she

could be the next big thing. So the year went on and I finally asked her

out and she said yes!

JACKIE: So you won some kind of bet?

STEVE: Well she said yes. But I got tricked.

JANE: What do you mean tricked?

STEVE: Well one night at the pub before this, I said to Buttercup that I’ll put $500

on the fact that she wants to go out with me. If she says yes, I get the

money. And he agreed to the wager only if I got with her on the first night.

Stupidly, I said yeah, I can do it.

JANE: So you half-won because she said yes?

89 BRETT: Nah, it was a set-up.

JACKIE: A set-up?

STEVE: Yeah they were going out already!

BRETT: A low act.

JANE: But she said yes.

STEVE: They were already going out but I didn’t know that. So she said yes and

we arranged to meet but she didn’t turn up. So he had the last laugh. I still

reckon I’m owed the five hundred. So now every time I see the Tiges

play, I’ve gotta deal with that little Buttercup running around while thinking

of his older brother and Kym Jacobson having a great time on the Gold

Coast together making buckets of money running a gymnasium.

JANE (standing up): Well I don’t want him playing for Richmond either now.

Buttercup, get off. (laughter)

JACKIE: I mean that’s terrible but it’s pretty funny as well.

STEVE: Oh fuck. Buttercup, I wouldn’t give you a game for Seaford and they can’t

even get eighteen players on the field. I still wouldn’t ring you if I was the

coach and my last player was missing an arm. (Everyone laughs

uncontrollably)

JACKIE: The poor little brother.

BRETT: He’s alright. He’s on two hundred grand a year.

STEVE: I’ve gotta admit, the kid’s good.

BRETT: Yeah he’s really good. He’ll probably win the club’s best and fairest.

JACKIE: How long to go?

BRETT: About ten minutes, I reckon. The Tiges have got it, four and a half goals

ahead. That’ll do it.

STEVE: There might be cause for a celebratory drink somewhere.

BRETT: Shall we have one more before the siren?

JANE: Why not? I think the footy’s increasing my alcohol tolerance.

SCENE 26

SAMMIE: You know why I like coming in here early in the evening. I like it because

it’s quiet and I can talk to a barman like you.

91 BARMAN: A good barman is not just there to serve drinks, Sammie. He’s there to

comfort and console like a priest once would have. Sometimes, you

know, the two are not that far removed.

SAMMIE: Bryan, that’s it, Bryan Fallon. Do you know him?

BARMAN: Yeah, we talk cricket sometimes.

SAMMIE: I reckon he would have been pretty good looking when he was young.

SCENE 27

Jason and James are still seated with Stiffer and Sherry as they continue

kissing.

JASON: We’ll just knock this one off and get going.

JAMES: Okay.

JASON: Sure.

JAMES: Emily and Sarah might have arrived. (kissing stops)

SHERRY: Oooh, Em and S. Are they your girlfriends?

JASON: No, no just friends.

92 SHERRY: So you haven’t got girlfriends?

STIFFER: You two poofs or you’re just not sure! (laughs, as he grabs the jug and

drinks straight from it)

JASON: No, we’re just…

SHERRY: They’re not poofs, they just haven’t had much experience…yet.

STIFFER: I hadn’t either, not much, until jail that first time for holding up those

chemist shops. (getting angry and scowling) You two wouldn’t last a

minute in there.

SHERRY: Settle, Stiffer. Forget it for now, will ya?

STIFFER (drinking his beer quickly and then again drinking straight from the jug): I’ll

never forget…

SHERRY: C’mon let it go, Stiff. You two known anybody who’s been put away?

JASON: No, don’t think so.

JAMES: No, no I haven’t.

93 SHERRY: Didn’t think so.

STIFFER: Not unless their old men are into fraud. (Stiffer looks down at the back of

his hands) See these? See these tatts? They’re there for a reason.

(Moves right in close to the boys) See this cross. That one’s for my dead

brother, my dead brother. We spent every day together growing up. He

got into doing the hold-ups first and one night the pigs shot him. You

didn’t hear much about it but he died in hospital a few hours later and

whenever I see a cop, I want to punch their fuckin head in, because they

shot him and they were so close, nobody in the world could miss.

SHERRY: Stiffer, let it go, let…

STIFFER: I’m not talking to you, ya scrag. Go and get another jug.

SCENE 28

Leigh and Emma have had a fair amount to drink making their conversation slightly gushy and sentimental.

LEIGH: It’s great this place serves long necks. I’ve always loved it even if they’re

a bit of a rip-off. (long pause) I should have brought you a gift tonight.

EMMA: A gift. What sort?

LEIGH: Dresses, holidays?

94 EMMA: Holidays, you couldn’t afford a holiday?

LEIGH: This is the beginning of a new phase, whatever a new phase shall bring.

We need to toast ourselves. I don’t know how much we’ve spent at this

stage of the night but that barman is starting to grin pretty hard at us. He’s

loving those tips. We’re turning his night around.

EMMA: I’m going to make him grin further. I’m going to get a couple more. Let’s

splash out and get another cocktail. They do this one called England In

Summer. Can’t remember what’s in it. I just like the name. I’ll order two.

LEIGH: You’re on.

SCENE 29

BRYAN (getting upset): How about I go the full retreat, get on a train this

afternoon to some town way out there, far-north Queensland, find a town,

look for some work, sit early each morning in the dining room of a hotel

and get my bacon and eggs and three bits of toast with hot black tea.

Take in more cholesterol than a truckload of grandfathers put together!

Get a hairy beer gut that drunken old girls at the bar can pat on Saturday

nights! Wind up with a woman who has a couple of kids and find myself

an instant family. I’ve gotta let people know that I’m over my pathetic

attempt at a marriage, that I’m coping with not having access to my

daughter because now she’s growing up in England with the ex-wife’s

95 family, that the twenty grand I worked so hard to save for a home doesn’t

even enter my head when I think of the long days in the TAB gambling it

away. No, none of this matters now, up here with the heat and the TV

static and the smashed phone boxes and the stray cats licking all the

rubbish bags. None of it matters…He leans against a wall and begins to

sob.

SCENE 30

RON: And are you working somewhere?

MICHELLE: Yeah, it’s a pretty boring job in an accountancy office on St .Kilda Rd. I

need a new job. Oh let’s not talk about it. So cheers.

RON: To a lovely evening and a nice surprise. (long pause)

MICHELLE: Hey, after we finish these do you want to go into the room next door?

RON: Oh I’m a bit old for that.

MICHELLE: We could have a dance. How long since you’ve had a dance?

RON: A dance, I can barely walk these days. I’m a bit long in the tooth…

MICHELLE: We’ll just go in for a little while. There are all sorts of people. You might

even know some of the songs.

96 RON: You’re not setting me up for something?

MICHELLE: What do you mean?

RON: Why would a pretty young girl like yourself want to drag an old fella like

me into that room for a dance?

MICHELLE: Thought you might like the idea.

BARMAN (cheekily wandering past): Are you sure that girl’s your granddaughter,

squire?

MICHELLE: Hey mate, it’s none of your business.

RON (ignoring him): Cheeky bugger. I knew his dad. Well I do like the idea but

it’s a bit unusual that’s all.

MICHELLE: That’s why I suggested it. Who would have thought?

RON: All right. I’ll have a go but not for too long. I think I’ll be asleep pretty soon.

MICHELLE: It’s a deal.

They shake hands.

97 SCENE 31

Jason and James are now looking scared and unsure what to do. Stiffer sits back on his chair and examines his hands once more. Sherry comes back with the beer with The Thrash Man now joining them.

THE THRASH MAN: What a fuckin’ shift! Pour us a beer, Shez.

STIFFER: That’s the form. Get it quick. (Sherry tops up the glasses) So boys - a

toast? (Everybody grabs a glass) To keeping out of trouble! (Everybody

drinks)

SHERRY: I’m starting to feel a bit pissed.

JASON: Me as well.

THE THRASH MAN: And me real soon.

JAMES: Yeah.

STIFFER: Oh you two’d be pissin’ white after a gulp. (Stiffer and Sherry burst out

laughing and the boys uncomfortably follow) What do ya mates play

anyway?

JASON: A few covers, a few originals.

98 SHERRY: Do they play Kiss? Do they play I Was Made For Loving You? I get right

into Kiss. Gene Simmons and that tongue.

STIFFER: But it’s nothing on mine. They used to call me The Lilydale Lizard. Get it?

JASON: Ah yeah.

JAMES: Oh right.

JASON: Look we might head off, not worry about the band. They’re always playing

around. We might head into town.

STIFFER: Well I wouldn’t mind a stretch and a walk meself. Alright then, if that’s the

story, drink up boys, fuckin' drink up. Drink it up, drink it up and keep on

drinking it up!

SCENE 32

Emma and Leigh are now sitting on the same bench. They are holding hands drunkenly but tenderly with Leigh becoming very sleepy. The bar is quiet.

LEIGH: I can’t possibly drink any more. Is anyone else here?

EMMA: A couple of couples.

99 LEIGH: How long have we been here?

EMMA: Hours.

LEIGH: Oh boy. God I’ve had it. Englands' in Summers! What a killer.

EMMA: Should we get a cab to my place? It’s much closer.

LEIGH (drowsily): Yeah.

SCENE 33

SAMMIE (Very drunk): So many broken hearts. So many people under the pump.

What we’ve made for ourselves, eh? Why can’t men cope? Why can’t

they do it on their own? I’m telling you, they just can’t. They’re not heroic.

They’re just lost little kids on their own.

SCENE 34

Jason and James are outside with Stiffer, The Thrash Man and Sherry on the footpath. They are trying to move away.

STIFFER: So you boys aren’t really calling it a night with us, are ya? We were just

getting to know each other.

100 SHERRY: Where youse say you were heading off to?

JASON: Just into the city.

STIFFER: How youse getting there?

JAMES: Ah driving.

JASON: No no but I reckon we’ll just get the tram, hey James.

STIFFER: Eighteen and Jimmy’s already got wheels. Some people have it good,

don’t they, Jimmy?

JAMES: Ah yeah.

SHERRY: Why don’t you boys come and have one more drink somewhere else with

us. Just one for the road? C’mon, it won’t fuckin’ hurt.

JASON: Thanks but we’ll be right. We better head off. It’s getting late.

STIFFER: Late, it’s not late. The night’s just starting.

JASON: No, thanks anyway, but we better head off.

SHERRY: Aren’t we good enough to drink with ya?

101 JAMES: It’s not that.

JASON: Nah, it’s not that at all.

STIFFER: I don’t think we’re quite up to the Brighton standards, Shez. I think they

might be trying to give us the flick.

JASON: No we’re not. We just have to head off and meet some other people.

THE THRASH MAN: I’m getting really thirsty waiting out here, waiting for a decision.

I’ve just put in a…

SHERRY: Yeah, yeah, Thrash, we know all about your fuckin’ shifts. We just

need to sort things out with our new friends. Anyway, didn’t think

you had any money left on ya, Jimmy, not money to go out with

anyway.

JAMES (visibly scared): Well I’ve got a little bit left.

STIFFER: Give me your wallet. C’mon. Give me your wallet. (James hands

over the wallet) Now walk with us to your car, don’t fuckin worry

about a tram. Don’t try and run either. Sherry, you take Jimmy’s

arm. Nah, I need something else…(Stiffer grabs James by the

shirt collar). I want your fuckin car keys as well. Give me `em.

102 James gives Stiffer the car keys as Jason looks helplessly on. The five of them walk. The Thrash Man leads from the front with James arm in arm with Sherry behind and Stiffer walking alongside Jason at the rear.

SCENE 35

Ron and Michelle are drinking pints of Guinness.

RON: You want to go easy on the Guinness, that stuff will kill you next

day.

MICHELLE: Ron, I’ve got the constitution of an ox! Time to hit the dance floor.

C’mon.

RON: I couldn’t.

MICHELLE: C’mon. There’s other…

RON: Old ones out there.

MICHELLE: Didn’t want to say that, but yes.

RON: They’re still thirty years younger than me.

MICHELLE: I’m sure you’ve got the moves.

103 RON: I might have had them once, but not now.

MICHELLE: C’mon.

Michelle pulls Ron onto the floor and as she dances energetically around him, he makes a few small awkward moves. He is feeling very self-conscious until she grabs his arms and they begin a slow waltz. Both are now feeling comfortable.

MICHELLE: I should take lessons from you.

RON: I beg your pardon.

MICHELLE: I should take lessons from you.

RON: Oh.

Ron allows Michelle to swing around him a number of times as his feet do a couple of tap dance steps which has Michelle laughing. Ron suddenly feels like he’s Fred Astaire as Michelle stops momentarily to admire his nimbleness. When Ron stops dancing the music fades far into the background.

MICHELLE: Ron, that’s amazing. Who taught you all that?

RON: I had an uncle on the stage. It’s been a lovely night. I don’t

remember when I…when I had such a good time.

MICHELLE: My pleasure. I’ve had fun too. Oh God, I feel so much better

without Mick harassing me, breathing down my neck and…

104 RON: I don’t really know but it sounds to me like he doesn’t make you happy.

MICHELLE: This is it. I have to leave him. He’s selfish, opinionated, a pig when he

eats and he treats me like…really badly. Sometimes, I’m really scared of

him.

RON: That’s no good.

MICHELLE: Your wife would have never been scared of you, would she?

RON: No. I don’t think so. A few times I was scared of her! Scared, no. If I ever

got angry about something, I’d put my hat on and just walk out of the

house and tell her I was just popping out for a couple of hours and

everything would be alright then.

MICHELLE: Where would you go?

RON: Sometimes for a walk, or up the street and do a bit of shopping or drop in

on someone.

MICHELLE: And she wasn’t mad when you got back?

RON: Sometimes for a short time but things would cool off. When she was

annoyed, she’d deliberately put the radio on very loud and it was never

tuned properly. It used to drive me mad.

105 Michelle starts to giggle and finds it hard to stop as Ron enjoys being able

to make her laugh.

RON: Or she’d serve a meal that she knew I didn’t like and say ‘That’s all you

deserve tonight Ron and there’s no dessert and not a scrap for breakfast

in the morning!’ (Laughs then long pause)

MICHELLE: I’m sorry to ask, but is your wife still alive? I wasn’t sure.

RON: She’s alive but she’s not with me. She’s not at home. She was three

years older than me and she’s in a nursing home. She’s been there for

ten years.

MICHELLE: I’m sorry.

RON: I’m used to being alone now. You have to get used to it. It’s the meals

that I don’t like. Eating alone all the time. Sometimes I wander around the

rooms in the house and think about our time there, the people that used

to come over and visit and then when I go to the nursing home and try to

talk to her she can’t remember any of it. She barely recognizes me now.

Her dementia, you see. (long pause)

MICHELLE: I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. Are you getting a bit tired? Would you

like to go home soon? I’m getting a bit tired as well and I’ve had enough

of you know what.

106 RON: That would be good.

SCENE 36

BRYAN: If somebody walked into the room now and asked: ‘Bryan Fallon, are you

a lonely man?’ I’d tell them: ‘No, I am not a lonely man. I know people. I

could find a phone box right now and be in there for a couple of hours.’

SAMMIE: I think the last time we had a drink together, he tried to kiss me. He leant

over on the stool over there and he wanted my lips but all he got was my

ear. (laughs) We’re mates, good mates, drinking buddies. I’m a married

woman after all. Not that it matters most of the time. But I know a man

when he cares about me and I reckon Bryan cares; reckon he likes me a

lot. I can tell the sad ones, the really sad ones, the ones begging for

company. Had a friend who worked at a brothel for a couple of years. She

couldn’t believe the men that went there and how some of them didn’t

even want sex after a few trips, some even after one trip. What they

wanted was a friend, somebody to talk to, just a bit of companionship.

SCENE 37

At an inner city hotel, after the football game, there is drink and chat. Brett stands close to Jane with Jackie and Steve standing further apart awkwardly.

JANE: Thanks for tonight. That was really fun. We would have just gone home

and moped about.

107 BRETT: Oh no you wouldn’t have, you would have probably been taken out to

some fancy restaurant by a couple of real estate agents or something.

JANE: We wouldn’t have done that!

BRETT: I reckon you would have.

JANE: No, no way.

BRETT: Where you going from here?

JANE: Home, I suppose. It’s getting late and I’ve got a bit to do tomorrow.

BRETT: I thought we should all go and get something to eat. That Greek place,

Stalactites, on the corner of Russell and Lonsdale, is always open late.

That’s where we usually go before the last train.

JANE: Look it sounds good but I’ll have to ask Jackie. (calling out) Jackie, Jack,

shall we all go and get something to eat?

Jackie doesn’t answer yes or no but instead walks over to Jane in a concerned, purposeful fashion.

JACKIE: I think I might have to go, Janey. I’m going to get a cab. I’m tired. Why

don’t we call it a night? You can stay over at my place if you want.

108 JANE (hesitantly): I thought we could go and get some food and then we’ll get a

cab if you want.

JACKIE: Excuse us for a moment.

The two women walk away from the men. Jackie speaks sternly.

JACKIE: Jane, listen, we’ve had a good time but let’s not take this any further.

They seem nice enough but I don’t want to be with them at two in the

morning. So let’s get out of here, and look, you’ve had enough to drink.

JANE: Bloody hell, you’re a party pooper. I reckon they’re harmless. Sure,

they’re a bit rough around the edges but it’s been fun, hasn’t it?

JACKIE: Well yeah.

JANE: Then what are you worrying about?

JACKIE: I’m not going to sleep with either of them. No way.

JANE: God, who’s looking that far ahead? Let’s just get something to eat.

JACKIE: No Janey, I’m going to go. Are you coming?

JANE: Why don’t we all get a cab back to your place and shout them that? They

paid for the footy.

109 JACKIE: Janey, they’re men. What man wouldn’t pay for a woman to go to the

football? C’mon, this is getting stupid. Are you coming or going?

JANE: No, I’ll stay. I’ll be fine.

JACKIE: It’s a bad idea.

JANE: I’ll be fine.

JACKIE: You’re sure. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but okay.

JANE: I’ll be fine, Jack.

They hug goodbye and walk back towards Brett and Steve.

JACKIE: I’m going to head off. I’m feeling it a bit after the working week. Nice to

meet you. Thanks for the footy.

Jackie returns to Jane and kisses her on the cheek before departing.

JANE: Bye.

Steve, Brett and Jane all look around wondering what to say next. (long

pause)

STEVE: So we’re a threesome?

110 BRETT: Not the greatest choice of expression, mate.

STEVE: Yeah, bit clumsy after a few.

JANE: So shall we go and get something?

BRETT (flirtatiously): This woman knows what she wants.

JANE (flirtatiously): I might and I might not. You’ll have to see, won’t you?

SCENE 38

Ron and Michelle are standing under a streetlight looking at one another as if they are about to depart.

MICHELLE: Thanks for a great time.

RON: That’s alright.

MICHELLE: It was nice to meet you. I suppose I better be going. (pause)

RON: Would you like to come in for a cup of tea before you go?

MICHELLE: I…

RON: C’mon, I’ve got some cake as well.

111 MICHELLE: What sort?

RON: It’s a lamington sponge.

MICHELLE: A lamington sponge. How could I say no!

SCENE 39

BRYAN: I wonder where Sammie is tonight? I think sometimes I’ve fallen for her.

Have I thought of taking her away from here, of us setting up a place

somewhere in the country? What keeps her on that high stool like what

keeps me here? (He laughs quietly. He picks up a pen and paper that are

on the floor and writes down the following while speaking.) I’ll get the

telephone put on. I’ll start looking harder at the employment pages. I’ll go

out and do some proper food shopping. I’ll get back to doing some

exercise and maybe go for a swim. I’ll join the library. I’ll check out the

cricket club. I’ll have a chat with Frank at the caf and tell him he’s right

about factory times. I’ll make contact with my kid, ring England and tell

her that I love her.

He finds some sticky tape under the bed and sticks the list above his bed head. He reads over it repeating some of the promises a couple of times. As he does this, there is a loud knock. He goes to the door and Sammie enters, happily drunk, with two bottles of wine, one she’s drinking from, the other unopened. They size one another up, shyly at first as if they are youngsters at a disco. Then they dance, separately, then arm in arm, picking up the pace and fun as they go before falling into kisses and gyrations.

112 SCENE 40

STIFFER: Where’s your car, Jimmy?

JAMES: A couple of hundred metres down here.

THE THRASH MAN: If I know what Stiffer’s thinking, I think there’s a little drive ahead.

They continue walking until they reach the car.

STIFFER: Where’s the car? Where is it?

JAMES: Just here, just here.

STIFFER: Right, fuckin enough’s enough, don’t ya reckon, Thrash Man?

The Thrash Man and Stiffer belt James and Jason mercilessly to the ground. As they bash them up, Stiffer starts yelling. Stiffer and The Thrash Man move back to Sherry while James and Jason remain on the ground.

THE THRASH MAN: I want some time behind the wheel, Stiff.

SHERRY: You never let me drive, Stiffer.

STIFFER: Shut up, Shez, next time, baby, all right.

113 SHERRY: Yeah yeah yeah. What a fuckin night.

STIFFER: Where we going after?

THE THRASH MAN: Fuckin anywhere, doesn’t matter.

STIFFER: Should we go and score?

SHERRY: We can hold out for an hour or two. Let’s go somewhere later.

Let’s head to Frankston or somewhere.

STIFFER: I’m not driving to fuckin Frankston. It’s a shit-hole.

THE THRASH MAN: Worse than Footscray!

SHERRY: Don’t fuckin know about that, Thrash.

STIFFER: All right, we’ll take it down the Nepean Hwy but not all the way to

fuckin’ Frankston.

THE THRASH MAN: There’s no point keeping that thing beyond tonight. We’ll trash it

somewhere and get a cab back to St .Kilda when we’re done with

it.

SHERRY: Yeah, where? What you got in mind, Thrash?

114 THE THRASH MAN: Dunno.

STIFFER: You work it out, Shez. You know them places. (long pause)

SHERRY: I’ve got it, you’re gonna laugh harder than you’ve ever laughed.

THE THRASH MAN: What you got in mind?

SHERRY: A pier.

STIFFER: What?

SHERRY: We drive the car to the end of a pier and push it off.

STIFFER: What into the water?

SHERRY: No fuckwit, into a load of elephants. Der!

THE THRASH MAN: Where?

SHERRY: I don’t know, I gotta think. There’s Half Moon Bay but it’s a bit

small…Fuck, I don’t know, Mordialloc, it’s big enough, no-one’s

ever around. Got the keys, Stiffer?

STIFFER: Yep. Off a fuckin pier hey. That’ll be fun for the fish. (The three of

them begin laughing uncontrollably)

115 THE THRASH MAN: A million bucks to the person who can get the fuckin’ car back up!

The laughing is uncontrollably malicious. Then Stiffer begins kissing Sherry as The Thrash Man keeps laughing and begins slowly to vie for Sherry’s attention.

SCENE 41

Emma moves closer trying to keep Leigh alert.

EMMA: Hey.

LEIGH: Yeah.

EMMA: You know that photo you have on your mantelpiece of the three of us at

the beach in Perth.

LEIGH: Yeah, what about it?

EMMA: Take it down hey. Put it somewhere.

LEIGH: Why?

116 EMMA: We’ve gotta move on. It’ll make you feel better not to see it everyday. I’ll

put my photos away as well. We’ll both feel better.

LEIGH: You’re brave when you’re drunk. You always were.

EMMA: And getting braver.

Emma then quickly moves much closer to Leigh and puts her hand on his cheek.

He is slightly stunned. She kisses him heavily on the lips and as she does so, he

places one hand on her shoulder and one on the back of her head. Slowly he

reciprocates. When they finish kissing, they hold hands more tightly and stare

into each other’s faces.

EMMA: A new phase.

LEIGH: Maybe. Could get to like a new phase.

SCENE 42

Lights up on Bryan and Sammie in bed with their arms around one

another.

117

SAMMIE: If I head-butted a brick wall a hundred times, my head would still feel

better.

BRYAN: What were you drinking before you got to me?

SAMMIE: Vodka, beer, a couple of whiskies and then the red.

BRYAN: Here, I’ve got some water. (He passes her some bottled water)

SAMMIE: Pretty flash. Bottled water.

BRYAN: Well it’s bottled, but it’s from the tap.

SAMMIE: Pretty impressive anyway. Whatta you got planned tomorrow?

BRYAN: Don’t know.

SAMMIE: Fuck, I should ring my husband. Ah he can wait, in the morning. You got

a car?

BRYAN: No. You?

SAMMIE: Lost it drink driving and wrote the thing off the same night.

118 BRYAN: We could go for a walk, maybe I could buy a few things and we’ll eat in

the park.

SAMMIE: An old romantic, hey?

BRYAN: Just one day a year.

SAMMIE: You’re better than having to live in this place, Bryan. I know. You’re not

stupid.

BRYAN: I burnt people. People burnt me. I messed everything up. But I’m starting

to feel better. Ever had that feeling when you just don’t know what to do

next?

SAMMIE: All the time. That’s why people drink in pubs.

BRYAN: How about a swim tomorrow?

SAMMIE: A swim? Is it going to be hot enough?

BRYAN: Last night’s late news told me it’s gonna be thirty-one. That’s hot enough.

Jeez Sandra Sully was looking hot but I reckon she has trouble reading

that autocue!

119 SAMMIE: I had a one-night stand with a guy who said that as well just before we got

down to it. Don’t worry about her, Bryan, when I’m around. All right, you’re

on for a swim. What will I do for a swimsuit? Get in naked?

BRYAN: Either that or just go in those shorts and singlet. Sammie, I don’t know

why someone like you would bother getting married.

SAMMIE: I’ve got no idea either.

BRYAN: Nah.

SAMMIE: Hey, we could get some fish and chips. It’s the best hangover food. Fixes

things up in no time.

BRYAN: That’s right.

SAMMIE: I could get to like you a bit more, you know - maybe even semi-regularly.

BRYAN: Could ya?

SAMMIE: I reckon.

BRYAN: Well that’d be good.

SAMMIE: I gotta get some sleep. (long pause) Bryan, stop thinking about that idea

and go to sleep for a bit, would ya?

120 BRYAN: Yeah yeah, I will - in a minute.

Sammie turns over and Bryan stares into space peacefully.

SCENE 43

In the house, Ron brings cups of tea and the lamington sponge to the

table.

MICHELLE: It’s a lovely house, Ron.

RON: It’s a bit old but I get a bit of home help from the council to keep it in order.

Even my wife has said it’s looking good.

MICHELLE: I’m so messy. I’m hopeless. The sponge looks good.

RON: I get them from Sunbeam Cakes. It hasn’t changed for thirty years.

MICHELLE: And everyone is always so happy.

RON: They must be on pills or some sort of tablet. (Both have a hearty laugh)

At the restaurant table, Brett showers all his attention on Jane as they have a laugh together and begin to touch. There are the sounds of other people talking over one another close by. Steve has resorted to reading the footy record. He then drops his head and nods off to sleep. Jane and Brett sneak in a kiss and they then quietly get up and leave, with Brett leading the way. Brett reassures Jane that Steve will be fine as he falls

121 more deeply into sleep and begins a light snoring. Jane starts to giggle and they have a quick kiss.

MICHELLE: I know this sounds but…well, I have some grandparents in the country, in

Sale, that I see a bit, but you know earlier tonight when you said I was the

first person you’d spoken to all day, well you’re the first…the first…

RON: Old?

MICHELLE: Older person I’ve ever had a long conversation with or really spent a few

hours with besides, like grandparents, when I was a kid. I don’t go down

and see them very often. I should. I can’t remember any others. A bit of a

chat on the train or at a bus stop or something, but nothing like us tonight.

RON: It hasn’t been too painful, has it?

MICHELLE: Painful, no, you’re joking, aren’t you? I’ve had a really good time. I’m glad I

met you, my great new neighbour.

Long pause. Michelle moves off her chair and goes over to Ron and puts her arms around him as he slowly reciprocates. After she releases him, he gets off his chair and they stare at one another. He then holds out his arms and they embrace. Michelle softly cries in the process.

MICHELLE: I’m sorry, I’m, ah, I didn’t mean to cry all over you.

RON: I’m feeling a bit teary too. That’s alright. I don’t get out much, you know.

You brought bits of my youth back tonight. I remembered what it was

like…

122 MICHELLE: To go out on a date?

RON: Yes, something like that. (long pause)

MICHELLE: Ron, would you like me to stay over the night? I don’t really want to go

back to my house. No one’s there and it sometimes scares me to be there

alone, and if you’ve got some spare blankets or something. I could make

you breakfast in the morning before I go.

RON: Oh, I’d get up a bit too early for you, I’d say. I’d wake you.

MICHELLE: C’mon. I do good scrambled eggs. I can even go down to Sunbeam Cakes

and get us some fresh bread.

RON: Well, I’ve got some spare blankets and a couple of pillows. There’s a

spare room, not much in it really but a bed. I better not tell my wife about a

younger woman staying!

MICHELLE: She needn’t know a thing. I’ll get up early too. What time do you usually

wake?

RON: Oh about six. Make a cup of tea. Tune the radio properly.

MICHELLE: Whoa, I’m not sure about that, but how about we say seven thirty?

RON: As long as it’s not midday.

123 MICHELLE: It’s a deal.

RON: Well, then, I better get a few blankets for you. Don’t want you getting cold.

Maybe you could get a bit of bacon as well while you’re down the street?

MICHELLE: Okay it’s another deal.

Michelle smiles at Ron as he shakes his head and has a chuckle. As he turns away to leave, Michelle speaks.

MICHELLE: Hey Ron, how about you show me some of those dance moves in the

morning after breakfast?

RON: Alright, I’ll see what I can do. I’ve always wanted to do that. Always.

Lights fade slowly to black as Ron departs the room.

The End

124 Data Analysis

Which plays of Murray-Smith and Keene have influenced Friday Night, In Town and which of their plays are linked to my research question of how divisions of class affect their central concerns of pain, loss and loneliness? Beginning with brief consideration of Murray-Smith’s Atlanta (1990), the focus turns to Honour

(1995). Stylistically, Honour became very important to the possibilities of narrative flexibility within Friday Night,

In Town’s unfolding scenarios. On Keene’s side, the focus will be his poverty play To Whom It May Concern. (2000)

Through my close reading of the works to be discussed in this data analysis,

Friday Night, In Town attempts to exhibit highly visible elements of class consciousness and class warfare set alongside intrinsic daily rituals and attitudes. In melding the above influences, there are inevitable class clashes, although for some of my characters, confrontation remains within their social stratum.

In a National Archives Of Australia interview Murray-Smith states: ‘You have to leave yourself emotionally exposed, be open to difficulty, be prepared to face the demons.’ (2002) Leonard Radic pinpoints the end results of this philosophy:

A recurrent theme in the plays is fear, grief and loss. Characteristically, they are plays in which an outsider or unwelcome influence, disrupts a settled relationship. (2006, pg. 271)

Radic’s summation is at the emotional forefront of Atlanta (1990) and Honour

(1995) - Murray-Smith’s biggest international success to this point. In Atlanta,

Murray-Smith portrays a group of friends trying to deal with death for the first time. Although not as morally unhinged as other Generation X portraits, such as

125 Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs In Space (1987) or John Birmingham’s share-house novel He Died With a Falafel In His Hand (1994), the characters of Atlanta share a lack of emotional backbone and a reserved, timid state of mourning. Claudia, the disruptive influence of Honour, could easily have stepped from Atlanta herself. A middle-class postgraduate student, she marches into the world of Gus and Honor, an aging successful literary couple. Gus falls immediately in love with

Claudia - leaving Honor in the process.

Honour is no radical story-line. Murray-Smith herself agrees, claiming it is an

‘unsurprising story surprisingly told’ (The Age, 2006). However, Michael

Billington, senior theatre critic for London’s Guardian newspaper, views this premise positively because Murray-Smith brings ‘fresh life to an old story by dealing in minute detail, with the shifting balance in the central relationships’ (in

Hallett, Sydney Morning Herald, 2003). English critic Phillip Fisher, in reviewing the National London production of Honour

(2003), uses the metaphor of the boxing ring to elaborate on the play’s restricted but hectic, nimble movement where

‘the various pairings often confront each other like boxers, or alternately, chase each other around the space’.

Radic’s appraisal of the play supports Fisher’s rough-house sporting analogy:

The play was written in short scenes in which the characters confront each other in changing combinations of two or three. The writing was bright, brittle, economical, and aphoristic, sometimes to the point of glibness. (2006, pg.276)

As an example of the re-gathering of the numerous relationship tensions inherent in Honour, Friday Night, In Town utilizes a lone monologue which is also the play’s centre-piece. Like Honour, the monologue delves into familial betrayal but

126 with more viciousness and taboo secrecy. However, the work is socially re- located to imbue itself with elements of Keene’s impoverished fabric.

One never suspects that Murray-Smith’s characters find anything romantic or heroic in violence or the disenfranchised per se, or even do much thinking about them – the possible exception being Rapture (2002). However, through emotional and verbal resonances, much of Murray-Smith’s influence has been filtered into Friday Night, In Town. Honour is broken into heated discussions, arguments and one-on-one confrontations. In Friday Night, In Town this tension unfolds by the shortening of scenes as the play progresses. This technique is also used to centralize two key themes that also dominate Honour: the secretive, probing problems as against the paradoxical joys intertwined with the beginnings of love, and the question of a person’s physical need against their emotional well- being. In Friday Night, In Town, these themes are explored in the sexual tension that arises between Brett and Jane after the football game:

Brett: Where you going from here? Jane: Home I suppose. It’s getting late and I’ve got a bit to do tomorrow. Brett: I thought we should all go and get something to eat. That Greek place, Stalactites, on the corner of Russell and Lonsdale is always open late. (pg.100)

Like Honour, one member of the trio loses out and is left behind. In trying to acquire Jane, and by leaving Steve nodding off in the restaurant, Brett forgoes a sense of mateship. In his tip-toe departure with Jane, he devalues the

Australianist legend with which he identifies.

127 In Friday Night, In Town only the silent warring friends, Leigh and Emma, share a highly considered, Murray-Smith type university-educated rapport. Both are written as updated contemporaries of Atlanta’s friends - or in a family sense, the precocious niece and nephew of Gus and Honor. Their outward, middle-class confidence and playful jest are exemplified as they sit in a trendy city bar withholding the social protocol of buying a drink:

Leigh: That barman is starting to give us evil looks. We should buy a drink. Emma: I’m starting to enjoy our audacity in not buying one. Leigh: Do you think we can just sit here and not order anything? Emma: How rebellious of us! (pg.77)

Leigh and Emma’s confident banter, however, is a rarity in Friday Night, In Town as none of my other characters has quite the linguistic power and class privilege inherent in Murray-Smith. Although some of my characters have jobs and better education than Keene’s, they are inclined to share his characters’ uncertainties and feelings of helplessness. My characters often venture very slowly into emotional outpourings; a trait common within Keene. This reticent silence and eventual entanglement of language is heavily developed from Keene’s Silent

Partner (1992) onwards, most notably, in To Whom It May Concern. A stylistic debt to Pinter can be traced in Keene’s explanation below:

The words spoken by the characters in To Whom It May Concern emerge from a profound silence. The words we hear them speak are the only words they speak; there is no unheard conversation between them. We hear everything they say. The rest is silence. (www.danielkeene.com/whom.html)

In John Tulloch’s Replacing the Culture Of Fear (2006), English theatre director

Dominic Dromgoole argues that theatre and art should stop worrying about what

128 is on the daily news and try to move forward, by developing ‘an odd reaction to the friction between our journey and the facts of the world’. (in Tulloch, 2006, pg.146) Where one can easily envisage that many of Murray-Smith's characters might argue and regularly debate the daily newspapers and evening news,

Keene's To Whom It May Concern & other plays continually airs the notion that this moment, this single confrontation, these pleas for emotional intimacy, are the only scenarios these people can be involved with - a place where there is no luxurious possibility for the outside speculation of others.

To Whom it May Concern claims such territory. A dying father must abandon his retarded, middle-aged son. The son can make no other utterance but 'Da' and the father has nowhere to leave the boy in good care. Keene utilizes a language of constant reiteration, where the father checks and worries continually about his son's welfare. Finally, he takes his son to the beach with the notion that allowing him to drown is better than for him to be left alone in the world:

You’ll be warm once you’re in the water it’s only at first you’re cold you’ve got to go straight in and under that’s best (pg.19)

Critic Alison Croggon believes that Keene's examinations and theatrical elevations of these characters give to 'these clearly unexceptionable people the same mythic status that in the past has been accorded to kings. In this way, they might be said to be truly revolutionary.' (Croggon, 2000, pg.xiv) However, the dangers in these representations are strongly objected to by veteran Melbourne critic/actor John Flaus who believes that Alkinos Tsilimdos’ film version of Silent

Partner (2001), for which Keene wrote the screenplay:

…falls into the traps which have long beset ‘educated’ Australia’s representation of ‘broad’ Australia: exaggeration,

129 antipathy and the presumption of audience superiority over the colony’s home-grown version of Cockney. (www.sensesofcinema/contents/01/16/silent.html)

This is uncomfortable criticism, leaving any playwright open to the suggestion that a writing outside of their own class and ancestry could easily reveal a lack of authenticity. Flaus’ valuable critique was unsettling when I began interpreting the petty criminal element of Friday Night, In Town. Those characters (Stiffer, Sherry and The Thrash Man) are highly fictionalized, and may – to some extent – draw upon stereotypes. Flaus’ reservations could apply to them also.

Friday Night, In Town shares with Keene, a decision to give the needy and the unexceptional visibility - but with a more hopeful edge. This is explored in the character Ron Wilding. Elderly, lonely, he waits at the train station, not for a train, but merely to chat with someone. Living alone across the road, with his wife in a nursing home for the past ten years, a moment of his youthful past is recaptured when Michelle gives up on getting the train after a fight with her boyfriend. Ron and Michelle have a drink together, a dance, and later, a hug and cry – a moment easing their loneliness. This is not a drama of heavy consequences in the sense of anything going wrong, but rather, the first momentary steps towards existences extending their hands in social compassion. These motives lie within

Friday Night, In Town. They reassert the basic need for human warmth and companionship that Keene’s father and son are attempting to hold throughout To

Whom It May Concern and what John and Bill of Silent Partner crave beyond their co-dependence.

It is also at this point that Keene’s affiliation with Samuel Beckett is clearest.

Waiting for Godot (1956) is, on one level, a portrait of two people deeply reliant

130 on one another. Through Estragon and Vladimir, it is strongly emphasized that a life cannot be lived without reliance on another person - even if there are threats to disband.

Estragon: (coldly). There are times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part. Vladimir: You wouldn’t go far. (pg.16)

However, in trying to endlessly resolve their struggle, they are hurt by the smallest loss of contact:

Estragon: Why will you never let me sleep? Vladimir: I felt lonely. (pg.89/90)

The dignity inherent in companionship and the inner strength gained from being dutiful towards someone else are Beckettian themes deeply influencing Keene.

When people have barely anything to give, the giving is so much greater: witness

Beckett’s Pozzo letting Estragon gnaw at some bones, or Keene’s father and son having just enough money for a lemonade in a sunny beer garden, or the cooked breakfast made by Bill for John in Silent Partner. Friday Night, In Town has attempted to imbibe this lonely and needy humanity: in Michelle encouraging Ron to have another drink; in Sammie telling the barman how she speaks to Bryan; in

Brett trying to encourage Steve to meet Jackie and Jane after endless weekends of television. This is the heartland of Keene’s influence.

American academic James Campbell describes the pageant-play as:

a large scale, usually outdoor affair, in which a large proportion of the community enacted an allegory of rural English history, culminating in a swift motion from the English pastoral to imperial triumphalism. (www.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/Spring2005/Esty.htm)

131 According to Dianne Howard, passion plays were initially performed in church chancels and naves in close proximity to the gathered congregation. Over time the performances were held at the entrances of churches, evolving from the passion to the pageant. This broadened the audience and the performances lengthened sometimes lasting up to three days. In Maurice Hussey’s introduction to his adaptations of the Chester Mystery Plays he states:

The play-cycle, indeed, offered in its texts a synthesis of the hopes and faith of medieval man and in its performance each year a perfect summary of his culture. (1957, pg xii)

Cast from the church into the outdoors, the plays began on a simple wooden platform stage. The plays then went onto wheels and became moveable, creating pageant wagons, and through laymen and guilds, the stories went beyond their biblical origins by adding scenes of local colour. Subsequently, with less emphasis on church doctrine and more direction towards light, comic entertainment, crowds grew, often becoming rowdy and drunken, turning the pageant-play into ‘an insular rite’ (Esty, 2005). This form eventually died out with the sixteenth century. It was revived by Louis Napoleon Parker in 1905. T.S

Eliot’s 1934 play The Rock about Anglo-Christianity in the process of imperial decline is a famous example of a modern pageant-play.

An essential ingredient of the pageant-play throughout the ages is a local, easily identifiable vision concentrating on the habits and current circumstances of a community. The writer must impart a detailed, insular sensibility. With sixteen characters in one particular city on the same evening, and in its stylistic convention of a naturalism filled with local vernacular, Friday Night, In Town cultivates a modern representation of this largely forgotten genre. This tradition must have life defining themes. In my attempt to replicate the intentions cited by

132 Professor Salter, Friday Night, In Town builds on certain elements of his definition, where the play must:

…come to us encrusted with the living and thinking of real people, dwelling in real towns, experiencing plague and pestilence, rain and sunshine, revelry and tragedy, life, birth, marriage, child-bearing and decrepitude through generation after generation of brief lives. (in Hussey, pg.170)

Two key elements of the pageant-play, and subsequently, Friday Night, In Town are music and staging. While developing the play, I made popular contemporary song choices as a background atmosphere to many scenes. This was an attempt to pinpoint the way music resonates for particular groups of people and to identify styles of music with people from disparate social backgrounds. I chose fifteen songs for this purpose but abandoned all of these selections. Instead, in July

2007, I commissioned Melbourne composer Cam Butler to write a soundtrack for

Friday Night, In Town. The reasons for original, instrumental music over well known popular song is to remain faithful to Hussey’s guideline for the pageant- play tradition where:

It is hoped, however, that no familiar music will be heard during the performance of the cycle since that will help to render the undertaking familiar and remove the experience of wonder and mystery…(1957, pg.170)

It is my hope that an independent Melbourne company would produce Friday

Night, In Town in 2008. A production of it could be mounted one of two ways: as either a set theatre piece, or with further authorial changes as a roving cast and audience piece moving through Melbourne. For the former, a symbolic re- enactment of the pageant-play tradition would see a director designating a series of small stages for each set of characters. As a further traditional step, stages mounted high would represent visions of life closer to heaven while stages

133 mounted at low levels would represent areas of hell. As two examples of this procedure for the staging of Friday Night, In Town, Ron and Michelle’s friendship would be elevated towards heaven while Stiffer, Sherry and The Thrash Man would reside at the lowest or most far flung point. The remainder of the characters would be between the two.

The latter production, echoing the pageant wagon element, would see the audience moving from room to room, street to street or building to building around central Melbourne. Furthermore, beyond the influence of the pageant- play, the backdrop of Keene's To Whom it May Concern and other plays which were staged at the Brotherhood Of St.Lawrence building in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in

1998, showed me how inhospitable non-theatre spaces could be transformed for performance. Keene’s location decision to perform the work only metres from where the people represented on stage are living has been a conceptual underpinning in the realisation of Friday Night, In Town.

With its hotel/bar as the central location Friday Night, In Town aims for a whirlpool effect of relationships that embody the beginnings of social rituals.

Through the utilization of stringent scene cuts, Friday Night, In Town segues from one story to another as if the audience were walking into various drinking establishments, backtracking, then returning again to find the same people still there building their relationships. A sympathetic progression of this technique is shared scene by scene between Ron and Michelle as they move from strangers on a train station, to acquaintances having a drink, to friends who will have breakfast together the following morning. A savage inverse is the class hatred that slowly fills Stiffer and Sherry in their drinking session with James and Jason.

134 In merging a criminal underclass with two private school products, I have intended to form a Murray-Smith and Keene cross-pollination. James and Jason, due to age and upbringing, represent complete naivety to the nearby world of the disenfranchised. The demarcation line is set early:

Jason: What do you guys get up to? Sherry: What do you mean? Jason: Ah, I mean, what do you get up to during the day? Sherry: Is he having us on Stiffer? (pg.62)

The couples of Friday Night, In Town are pivotal in portraying how an evening begins for people who are trying to extend their social circles and search for romantic possibility. This is highlighted in the football game scenario between

Steve, Brett, Jane and Jackie. These people are all single workers at the tip of early middle-age, who in couplings, have a partner to tackle the city with and a

Beckettian co-dependence on each other’s actions and motivations. While their peers raise families in the suburbs, they represent a division of Generation X chasing a finality to their unresolved personal lives. Surrounding them are the characters attempting to shed a deeper sense of loneliness.

Friday Night, In Town in its unfolding pageant form brandishes a tight, schematic intention. It aims to emanate both a dense, claustrophobic portrait and a road map of an Australian city on a Friday night: when the working week is over, people have some money to spend, inhibitions to lose and a sense of occasion as they buy a drink. Its main thematic intention is to weave a potent tapestry of a city’s life blood. The finale of Friday Night, In Town and my decision to end on a hopeful note is to replicate ‘a final alleluia from all survivors’ (Hussey, 1957, pg.170) - an essential ingredient in closing a medieval pageant-play cycle.

135 Through the development of Friday Night, In Town a multi- layered impulse to record the fluctuating temperaments and fortunes of a city’s inhabitants has eventuated; a move away from simply telling one story to attempting to tell many.

In relation to Murray-Smith and Keene, this exegesis began with what I now feel was a mistaken sense of their relative cultural merit. In reading Keene, I was expecting a continual deep submersion of unfettered narrative poignancy but eventually tired of technical pretensions: the dash instead of a character’s name, the lack of punctuation and the continual use of the lower case instead of capitalization. More unappealing, however, is a sense of mysterious, cloudy existential grandiosity. While not suggesting he should wholly embrace the vernacular, I prefer Keene’s Australian subjects to his existential European tropes. With those, he chooses placelessness over location. For this writer,

Keene is at his most effective, alluring and touchingly compassionate when his narrative feet are grounded on home-turf, even if he refuses to give his place a name. In To Whom It May Concern, Silent Partner and Tom White we know where we are. In other works such as The Nightwatchmen and All Souls, we don’t. Keene’s sub-textual forays into a deeply European existential angst raise a tricky question of critique. As European critics heavily praise him, do Australian critics now feel brave enough to criticize him? While heavily praised by Radic in

Contemporary Australian Drama, my criticisms are noted in relation to the play

What Remains Of Dying where:

…in his determination to avoid documentation and information-giving, Keene retreated into a kind of abstractionism, thereby denying his audience the opportunity

136 to get to know the man and to empathize with him. (2006, pg.220)

The above reservations, however, do not overshadow Keene’s combination of humility and deftly interwoven empathy. They are the devices and aspects I have tried to infuse into my creative practice. When he chooses this line, his examinations of class and human relationships have a riveting central core, an inescapable tension, and at their very best, such as the poverty play cycle, a life- changing perspective to be carried away from the theatre as a call for action.

In coming to Murray-Smith, I admit a dilettantish bias, my expectation being a tedium through the repetition of middle-class scenarios. Instead, the human dramas were more compelling the deeper I delved. However, Murray-Smith’s lack of social scope must open her to criticisms of one-dimensionality. Unlike the humanitarian eclecticism of Andrew Bovell or Hannie Rayson (from Hotel

Sorrento to Inheritance being fine examples of Rayson’s oeuvre), Murray-Smith seems unable or unwilling to embrace worlds below the middle class. In her plays, I often hoped that an entry into Keene’s world, and greater entry into my own dissections of suburban life might eventuate. While these topics are discussed in plays such as Redemption (1997), Nightfall (1999) and Rapture

(2002), they are never played out. Her serious, bourgeois concentrations were wonderfully deflected recently in the hilarious post-feminist farce, Female Of the

Species (Melbourne Theatre Company, 2006). This was much needed new ground.

While Friday Night, In Town has a larger number of characters that echo Keene more than Murray-Smith, thereby creating the illusion that his influence is more

137 prominent, I feel technically that my writing post-Friday Night, In Town will reveal more of Murray-Smith’s solidly defined narrative and character progressions. Her influence is more clear-cut. She possesses what the new playwright has to learn: narrative tensions and forceful characterization. Perhaps, one has to 'learn'

Murray-Smith before one can 'emulate' Keene - to know the rules before breaking them. The evolving panorama of Friday Night, In Town alongside this exegesis has sparked the necessity of this dual impetus and has instigated a creative work now fully open to directorial input – a winding track of medieval pageant-play colorations.

138 Conclusion

For the writer emerging from the early years of playwright development, a large cast work such as Friday Night, In Town is a radical alteration of scope and confirmation of creative improvement in structure and story-line. As a relatively young playwright with a formative background in poetry and lyric writing, Friday

Night, In Town represents a tower-like adaptation of earlier poetic subject matter.

Like some of those poems, the play connects and disconnects people when the sun has set and alcohol leads them into divulging secrets, mis-using others or looking for tenderness. In drawing on Joanna Murray-Smith and Daniel Keene as my contemporary guides, this project has allowed me to explore deeper and more wide-ranging patterns of Melbourne society. By embracing the pageant- play tradition, I was able to find a way to focus a plethora of characters into one frame without a loss of continuity. Furthermore, the historical research and numerous contemporary links utilized alongside Murray-Smith and Keene fed and bolstered my creative practice by divulging ways of developing character, shaping narrative, removing past weaknesses and fortifying strengths.

Although not in wide contemporary use, the pageant-play tradition provided a maturing, systematic course for applying Krauth’s concept of launching oneself into the wider world. His article The Domains In the Writing Process was important confirmation of, simply, a way to commence a narrative. In this sense,

Friday Night, In Town is not for this practitioner a new approach in gathering narrative, but rather a new approach in expressing it. The striking advantage of the pageant-play tradition is that it offers the contemporary playwright a wide-lens opportunity to evoke a particular place, time and/or set of people. It is a tradition

139 that from its inception moved rapidly from reverence to rowdiness, and has always postulated the possibility of a highly accessible theatre mirroring the way a place and its people function. On this level, in contemporary form, it should attempt to replicate the title of McGrath’s influential book - A Good Night Out.

On a cultural analysis level, it is hoped that Friday Night, In Town succeeds as a time-piece, an engrossing theatrical portrait of an Australian city, and as theatre open to debate. For this writer, it marks a watershed on two levels: as a technically developed play sourced from a theatrical world now five centuries old; and as the final stamp in a decade and a half of creative practice – now hopefully pointing to more highly accomplished and resonant outcomes.

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