The Brag

Zoe Coombs Marr
Going Places
By Pierce Wilcox

It’s been less than 24 hours since Zoe Coombs Marr was announced as the 2011 winner of the Philip Parsons Young Playwright’s Award, and she’s hovering somewhere between excited and surprised. Her winning piece, And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life, is a disturbing and hilarious solo show that’s closer to soul-baring stand-up comedy than your traditional kitchen-sink drama.
“It is weird for me to win a playwright’s award, because I wouldn’t consider myself a playwright,” Coombs Marr confesses. “It’s the thing that I have most difficulty with, defining what I actually do. I do stand-up in a theatre context, I do theatre that’s kind-of comedy, sort-of performance. It’s an ongoing negotiation. I just try to make stuff I would really like to see.”

The award comes with a commission from Belvoir to develop a new play. Coombs Marr may have made her name on the festival circuit, but she’s no stranger to the main stage, having created Who’s The Best? for Sydney Theatre Company’s Next Stage program earlier this year, as part of performance trio post.

“I think there’s a lot of talk about the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘fringe’, and I don’t know how relevant those terms are any more,” suggests Coombs Marr. “In order to have a sustainable career in the arts, most of us have to be able to work across a lot of different contexts. For me it’s always been about creating work for a specific context and trying to speak to that audience. And different contexts have different audiences.”

Coombs Marr’s current work, I’ve Been Everywhere, Man sees her land in a new context: the Old Fitzroy, where she’s performing a new solo show as part of The Horse’s Mouth festival, a celebration of autobiographical storytelling. “It’s great! I’ve never worked there before. It’s really rough, it’s accessible… you can see some great stuff there, and you can see some crap stuff there, but it’s always quite fun, and it’s really laid-back.”

I’ve Been Everywhere, Man is inspired by a misguided attempt to travel around Australia. “A lot of stuff went wrong. I was quite crap at it. My story’s about that: my car breaks down, I get confused, I drink too much… it was all quite strange.”

It’s a familiar anecdote, but Coombs Marr has a rigorous self-awareness that suggests she’ll always offer something deeper than a simple fireside chat. “I mean, they always say, ‘Everybody’s got a story to tell!’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have a good story to tell. I’m not really interested in just ‘telling a story’, or representing stuff that happens outside of the theatre, in the theatre. I’m more interested in what is actually going on in the theatre, what’s actually happening in that space.”

That’s not to say, though, that a straightforward personal revelation can’t touch a chord in young and old. Coombs Marr recalls a story that featured in one of post’s shows, about someone in a dance concert wetting their pants. “We had so many responses from that, people just coming up and saying ‘I wet my pants in a dance concert!’ It’s amazing how many people wet their pants in dance concerts.” She laughs at the memory. “You gotta find some way to connect with people.”

What: I’ve Been Everywhere, Man as part of The Horse’s Mouth festival, in a triple bill alongside Tim Spencer’s Show Me Yours… and Phil Spencer’s The Great Apeth.
When: December 8, 10 and 14
Where: The Old Fitzroy Theatre
More: horsething.com