The Brag

[Sydney 2011 Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras]
Night Letters
Young guns tackle Robert Dessaix’s best-selling novel.
By Simon Binns

Sydney’s annual Mardis Gras festival is a cultural phenomenon. The parade down Oxford St, which serves as the centrepiece of the celebration, has become almost as iconic an image of Sydney as the Harbour Bridge, and the festival as a whole has given a public voice to a community whose interests and rights are too often marginalised.

However, as impressive as the giant floats and feathers of the parade are, it’s the other, less tangible elements of gay experience that Christopher Hay, artistic director of So What? Productions, is interested in bringing to the fore.

“A lot of Mardis Gras stuff doesn’t engage with anything other than ‘Oh look, pretty boys taking their clothes off’ – which absolutely has its place, but to me there is a seriousness to Mardi Gras that the theatre program has sometimes lost out on,” explains Hay. “We wanted to say, ‘There is work which is relevant and important for homosexual audiences which is not flamboyant or light. There’s a big difference between homosexual content and camp.”

Hay will address the imbalance with Night Letters, adapted by Susan Rogers and Chris Drummond from Robert Dessaix’s best-selling nineties novel of the same name. The play focuses on Robert (the main characters just happen to have the same names as Dessaix and his partner), who gets sick and convinces himself, whether it be true or not, that he is going to die. In an attempt to get away from his known world and make sense of his life he goes to Europe. However, instead of being able to focus on his own experience, Robert gets caught up in the lives of the people he meets, and is left more confused than before. This process is told through letters that he is writing home, to his partner in Melbourne.

Night Letters struck Hay as a work that was concerned with the more serious issues that the Mardi Gras Festival encompasses. “It’s interested in modes of masculinity, about how you can live in the world as man and what sexuality has to do with that. It’s also interested in how you can live in the world as someone whose story is not told – and those are very important confrontations that Mardi Gras is also about.”

One of the last plays developed through the National Playwright’s Conference, a bastion of Australian playmaking that has since folded, Rogers and Drummond’s old-fashioned, well-made script stood out to Hay as a great story that was beautifully told. “It resists the trends of contemporary play writing,” the director observes. “They [Rogers and Drummond] took a stand and said, ‘This is a particular type of play that is out of fashion but it’s the kind of play that we want to make.’”

With an ensemble of actors who have all worked together before, the production also presents a great opportunity for this young company, who pride themselves on their bold choices.

“The biggest thing we’re about is not being scared of ambition,” says Hay, citing So What’s recent production of King Lear, which toured to the Adelaide Fringe Festival, as an example. The attitude is, “So what if we’re 19? It’s a work that we’d like to do, it’s a work that we’d like to challenge ourselves with. This is a space for us to do things that we might never get the chance to do again.”

What: Night Letters by Susan Rogers and Chris Drummond; Dir. Christopher Hay
When: February 17 – March 12
Where: Seymour Centre
More: sydney.edu.au/seymour