The Sydney-based independent theatre company Collaborations Theatre Group is just one of many organisations doing a whole lot of good for the health of the Australian arts scene, even if it doesn’t make headlines every week.

But for writer/producers James Balian and Roger Vickery, their time is now. A Nest Of Skunks,their new edge-of-your-seat play about a refugee family taking shelter, will premiere this August in Marrickville.

“Collaborations Theatre Group is basically an umbrella concept,” says Balian, “with the aim of putting together shows that predominately had Australian content, with ‘collaboration’ being the operative word.”

Balian has long been a champion of creative collaboration. “With my first play Brother Daniel, I wrote it but I brought in a young guy to direct it and I sat in on rehearsals and helped with the script,” he says. “[A Nest Of Skunks] fell nicely into that collaborative approach with Roger having the initial short story”.

I intently kept it from being published,” Vickery says of his original plot. “I felt it had to be nurtured, I never thought it could turn into a play – I was thinking short and sweet.”

Yet the metamorphosis from short story to play has indeed taken place, and it’s been a dynamic and collaborative process. Balian says, “It was such a strong story that it triggered that whole possibility where you could create a whole world around why those people were there.

“I wrote the initial one-act play, with a plot and complications, and gave it to Roger. We then decided it really warranted being a full-length play and he worked on it and there was a whole lot of to-ing and fro-ing, so it ended up being both of our work.”

Asked how it all didn’t go balls up along the way, with his story being handled by another writer, Vickery simply says: “I told James that he was lead dog if the barking got fierce. I trusted him.”

Vickery and Balian’s joint effort proved the key to bringing director Travis Green into the project. “He loved the story,” Balian says. “Roger and I went to the first rehearsal and then left the new development to them … what they were doing was in the end better for the play”.

As for what inspired the initial versions of A Nest Of Skunks, and in particular its unpacking of issues surrounding refugees, Vickery says: “I grew up in Albury and at that time it had the largest migrant camp … Albury was really affected by migrants who came in. I went to school with the first generation to speak English – everyone’s fault lines were really apparent.”

In this mid-20th century environment, questions about immigrants started to define Australian communities, families and individuals. Being one of them, not being one of them, thinking about them, responding to them, holding beliefs and opinions about them, making conclusions about them. Vickery’s view was and remains simple: “People who are refugees bring history, baggage. They may [not be] saints, but they need refuge.”

Beginning with this ethos, A Nest Of Skunks focuses on the morphing mirages undermining the dark and sticky world of refugee policy, politics and the humanity at the centre of it all.

“With the diatribe that goes on about refugees, at the moment it’s about Muslims – everyone’s a Muslim,” says Balian. “Before it was the ‘illegals’, the ‘queue-jumpers’, people were also called by numbers – that’s how they dehumanise them. You look at them differently. Those are the things that were playing on our psyche.”

From the start of their collaborative process, Balian and Vickery were clear about what they wanted to present their audience with in the play. “I personally hate lectures,” says Balian, “someone demanding I change my opinion and people stand up and give a heart-rending story I have to feel sorry for. So we wrote a thriller.”

A Nest Of SkunksrunsWednesday August 3 – Saturday August 13 at The Depot Theatre.

Get unlimited access to the coverage that shapes our culture.
to Rolling Stone magazine
to Rolling Stone magazine