The Truth About Kookaburras is the latest play by one of Australia's most prolific playwrights, Sven Swenson. Swenson's work has won awards and been produced internationally. He's a thought-provoking writer and never backs away from contentious issues.
With Kookaburras he's gone into taboo territory - the locker room of a footy club. There's nudity, coarse language, violence and lots of humour as Swenson explodes some of the myths about buck's parties and men behaving badly.
ourbrisbane.com caught up with Sven Swenson just before the opening night of The Truth about Kookaburras for a quick chat.
OB: One of your previous works, Beautiful Souls (2006) went on to be presented at The Beckett Theatre, New York and The Hudson Theatre, Los Angeles in 2007. How does working in Brisbane's performing arts scene compare with the United States?
SS: I was unable to go to The States for Beautiful Souls' US premiere and only really had input and feedback from afar. Shows are so much more expensive to mount there and so tensions are greater. They don't have the same sort of independent scene that we do here. You could never mount The Truth about Kookaburras in an independent production there because it would cost millions. There seems to be no such thing as in-kind support in the US.
There's also a huge difference in approach between New York and LA. New York respected the text as it was and were very careful to honour the writer's intention. The LA director wanted to re-write everything so that the play said something completely different. I wouldn't let them and they spat the dummy. The result was that New York team then remounted their production in LA.
OB: The provocative theme of your latest production is very timely (considering the number of footballers in the headlines for misbehaving)! Can you tell us what attracted you to this subject matter?
SS: I wanted to look at the underpinning attitudes that lead to the headlines. It seems to me that the drunken fraternity of some football clubs is like a repetitious buck's party. That tradition itself has always fascinated me. There's a long-standing social acceptance that men will get together and behave badly at buck's nights, but they're a recipe for harm and misadventure.
OB: Did you consult with many footy players when writing this play? What was your research process?
SS: Yeah, fortunately I was living next door to a footy player for the last three years. His wife is our stage-manager, so we have two handy research sources who bring different perspectives. A few of the cast either are footballers or have been. It was really interesting when I sent one of them the first scene prior to audition and he came along saying "I thought, okay, this'll be a playwright's idea of what goes on in a footy dressing shed: it won't be accurate to the behaviour because that'd be way too risky to put on a stage... but this is pretty close to the mark." He then filled me in on some of the antics he'd either witnessed or been part of and a couple made their way into the text.
OB: An ensemble cast of 19 is very large, how does the dynamic, both on stage and off, differ from a smaller cast? Has this had any positive/negative impacts on your production/sanity?
SS: Sanity? What sanity. Long gone! I wanted to approach this play in a completely different way to anything else I've done. I wrote it while we were rehearsing it and the cast never knew any more of the narrative than I delivered to them on a given night. That kept the mystery alive for them, but I think it was also frustrating as well. You've got nearly 20 people nervous about the arc of their character's journey. You can't spend the same amount of time with each actor in a large cast as you can a smaller one, obviously. Scheduling became a bit of a nightmare. The upside is that we have what I wanted: a true ensemble. It's the most courageous cast I've ever worked with and I think the sense of being part of a large group has influenced their individual boldness. I suspect that's also at the heart of footballers behaving badly in the real world.
OB: Given the theme and the timing, do you expect a broader spectrum of audience members than you traditionally get to a production?
SS: Right from the time I first thought of writing the play, which was in about 2001, I knew there was an opportunity to capture an audience that wouldn't normally attend theatre, and that was certainly one of the compelling reasons for committing to the work. I also wanted to write a contemporary play for a large ensemble cast, which is a rarity and hopefully that will also contribute to audience-building.
OB: What particular aspects of it do you think will appeal to your audiences?
SS: There's a lot of humour in Kookaburras. In fact there are a couple of scenes that still have the crew and me in stitches. It's a big, brave, blokey monster of a piece and I think the fly-on-the-wall-of-a-footy-dressing-shed aspect will hold a lot of appeal. Phil Slade and I have written a couple of original songs, so there's a music element. It's a murder-mystery with some pretty strong twists along the way, but I hope there's also considerable beauty in it and some poignancy.
The Truth About Kookaburras played Metro Arts in June 2009.
