Playwright's Note for Stories in the Dark l Reflecting on award-winning Australian theatre

Currency Press is Australia's foremost publisher of the Performing Arts. We've been sharing Australian stories since 1971, and with those stories, we've also shared insights, ideas, and critiques. We think of them as the stories about stories. The stories behind stories, stories that prepare us for the journey we're about to undertake. Hello, I'm Toby Leon, and this is not in print. Today, Deborah Oswald is going to read her playwright's note for stories in the dark, which was first produced by the Australian Theatre for Young People in 2007. It's about obsession, the good kind, the kind that incites action, creativity, and in this case, the mixture of seemingly disconnected elements. But then, that's a writer's job, mixing elements together to produce a kind of mental alchemy in those who experience their work. Deborah does just that, and she's going to tell us how. Here's Deborah reading her playwright's note, which she wrote to coincide with the publication of the play in 2008. Sometimes, I get the spark for writing a new play when I suddenly find a connection between two of my obsessions, and that's how stories in the dark came about. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by folk stories and borrowed arm loads of library books of myths and tales. In recent years, I discovered the great store of tales on the internet. I would lose myself for hours on the net following tales of story from one website to another. I found myself back at the local library trawling for books of legends again, but I had no idea how I would ever use this fascination with folk tales in my own work. Around the same time, I became interested in the struggle of the international legal system to find justice for victims of war and genocide. I was reading books about Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but I didn't imagine such reading would find its way into my own work, and I had no idea that these two interests of mine would intersect. During rehearsals for another play, I got chatting to one of the actors, the wonderful Maggie Blincoe. Maggie told me a delightful story about performing in the musical Oliver. At the beginning of the second act, Maggie and the young actor playing the lead role would sit on a piece of scenery suspended higher above the stage. They had to wait there in darkness for 20 minutes until they were cue to be lowered onto the stage. To pass the time, Maggie would tell the boy a story whispering it aloud. Eventually Maggie ran out of stories. She began reading from books of traditional tales by the light of day, so she would have a fresh story to relate to the young actor each night in the dark, high above the stage. I loved Maggie's story, and it helped me click an idea into place. I would throw the world of folktales into the middle of a dark place, a contemporary painful situation where the stakes are very high for two kids trapped in a war torn city. For Anna and Tom's story, I've drawn details from the Siege of Sarajevo, but the setting could be many times in places. Folktales from different cultures are an extraordinarily rich form. I love the way they offer exotic and earthiness, slapstick comedy and heart-breaking moments, disturbing ideas and nourishing ideas, connecting us to the wisdom of previous generations, feeding our yearning to imagine a world where things are fair, lucky, potentially magical. Stories are a way to imagine ourselves through dilemmas and emotional blows we might have to face one day, so they can be part of our moral and spiritual education. During a time of crisis and dislocation, the tales can remind us that other kinds of life went on before this and will happen after this. There's something about the simplicity and the mystery of folktales told aloud that can draw listeners in, sneaking around our opinionatedness and prejudices that touch us deeply. Many of the stories are surprisingly dark, fatalistic and funny, facing the reality of death and suffering, urging us to endure and try to laugh at life's grim elements. Then again, should we regard most folk and fairy tales as just romanticised escapist fantasies, do they anesthetise us and trick people into expecting the world to be fair when it's not? Are such stories inadequate, absurd, or even offensive in the face of ugly reality? Or can they help the human spirit to survive? These are some of the questions I wanted to explore in stories in the dark. I had a great long list of tales I wanted to draw from, but only a few would fit into this one play. The first story, the Ogre's Three Golden Hears, is a pretty straight adaptation of the Grimbrothers version, but the Grimbrothers were themselves retelling a traditional tale which exists in other versions. Many of its story elements, like the abandoned baby rescued by a childless couple, a boy sent on an impossible quest and so on, pop up in countless tales. One of the fascinating things when you read tales from different cultures is the way strikingly similar elements crop up in stories from all over the world. A good example is the image of singing bones, the idea of the bones of a murdered person crying out for truth and justice. There are singing bones stories from Africa, Scotland, India, Russia, and elsewhere. With the tales for this play, I felt free to scrounge chunks from various traditional stories and glue them together, adding my own variations, settings, and twists. For a story like the Ice Dragon and the She-Wolf, I fished bits from the sea of folk tales, a village terrorised by a dragon, a woman trapped in an enchanted animal skin, a mother sacrifice, an extreme landscape, the power of true love. And I used them in my own combination to create an inverted commas new story, which would do what I needed for that moment in the play. And that's exactly how folk stories work, constantly adapting and borrowing. In choosing stories, the most important goal was to create a powerful chemistry between the tales Anna and Tom tell each other at night, and the daytime story of their struggles in the city. In the end, I wanted this play to be about the power of stories and the limits of stories about friendship, loss, and survival. The cast and creative team of the ATYP production then faced the job of handling this odd mixture, creating the grim, dangerous reality of a city in war, as well as bringing fantastical folk tales to life on stage. We had a lot of fun creating ogres, princes, she-wolves, toxic dragon poo, singing bones, and the rest. I wanted to thank the literature board of the Australia Council, Richard Glover, Maggie Blinco and Michael Wynn, every one at ATYP and Riverside theaters. I'm grateful to the fabulous creative team and young cast of the ATYP production whose ideas helped shape this play. Most importantly, I have to think Timothy Jones, who supported and guided the project from its beginning as a two-sentence notion, right through to doing a great job of directing the first production. Thanks for listening to this episode of Not In Print. We hope you enjoyed hearing more about this great Australian play. You can find out more about who we are and view our full catalogue at currencypress.com.au. And if you have any comments or questions about this episode or any other episode, we'd love to hear from you. Just search for currency press on Facebook or Twitter and drop us a line. This episode was produced by currencypress, with the generous assistance of the Department of Performance Studies and the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney.