“I’ll stake a claim: I am the slowest playwright in the southern hemisphere.”

Peta Murray writes plays and short stories. She is also a dramaturg, director and has taught playwriting at Melbourne University and RMIT. She is currently co-facilitator of The Black Writers Lab for Ilbijerri Theatre, Melbourne and is one of this year’s Fresh Ink National Studio tutors.

The Build by Peta Murray

I’ll stake a claim: I am the slowest playwright in the southern hemisphere.

Most plays take me years to write. Seven to ten years is normal. Writing my latest conflation (let’s call it This) I’ve had my skates on. It’s taken a mere four years to a first draft.

Between plays, I forget.

I call myself names. I dream again of gainful employment with regular hours. I tell myself I am over theatre, and it is over me. I tell myself I have nothing to say, nor ever did. Only questions. Then, waiting again, I remember. For a big play, and This is a whopper, I am looking at years and years of… (insert expletive here)

And so I muddle on. I carry an empty exercise book about with me, ever hopeful. It has my working title on the front in thick black pen.

I keep my hands busy. It used to be with cooking. These days it’s with woodwork, or gardening or yet another musical instrument I will never master. In this early phase, please, ask me nothing. Don’t say:

Are you working on anything? I can tell you nothing of what it is that occupies me. Only that some ineffable thing has caught my attention, lodged itself somewhere in my skin. Between the toes perhaps, like an irritant in an oyster?

It might become pearl. It’s more likely tinea.

Time passes.

Something is happening over which I have no sway.

I am absorbed, or rather, absorbing.

It is a process of incorporation.

It’s not waiting-in-idleness, though it certainly resembles it.

Something is in train. It started in the soles of my feet, perhaps, where flesh meets ground. Through a process of sustained attention – intermingled with profound anxiety – some kind of drawing up of meaning has begun.

My new beast, This will overturn everything I think I know about playwriting.

It will have no shape I can discern, no clear content, characters, style or purpose till the last.

It will have a context, yes, a faint sense of connection to something other than itself.

But for years its existence will be nothing more than a collection of notions and lists and nagging thoughts and conversations with myself. Some character may do this. Someone else might do this.

I might make use of passing obsessions. Forgery and the counterfeit. A certain celebrated artist.

Knowing no more about it than these few hunches, I will skirt my desk, avoiding my computer. There will be little point going near it.

Every now and then, almost furtively, I will scribble a word or two on the big sheet of butcher’s paper I’ve pinned to a wall.

Yet, slowly, this sense of being with something grows. Incipience. I choose the word quite deliberately.

There’s something here, within me, and it’s nearer now, but if you must ask me what it is, please, bear with me as I give you the vaguest of answers.

I’ll make sawing gestures, trying to draw in the air the invisible mechanics of this thing, how it must hinge here, and open there. I sense its inner workings, how the energy of it might be compressed here, to spring forth there, but I can’t find any words for it.

It’s still unspeakable. The sense of torment grows. All this time, and nothing to show for myself. I will have to give up.

Then, at last, one day, out there in the world, something tilts.

An old crack in the social fabric, something that had been papered over, yawns open.

A grand inequity is visible again, and I am furious. Fury becomes fuel. I have a reason to write this now. I know what it is, and more to the point I know why it is, and why I need to write it, now, at this time in my life.

Now I can see what This wants to be. I understand the joinery of the thing. I am, after all, a carpenter’s daughter. I have its measure; I have the tools and techniques.

I am a playwright again.

I sit at my desk. I look at the list on the butcher’s paper, on my wall.

It’s all there, every last angle and ornament, but now I know why. I have a design, and all that I’ve collected, each of these materials, has its place.

I write.

I write round the clock, pretty much, till I have hammered a first draft into the page.

(May 2011)

Post-script:

Seven months later, and seven drafts on, I am cautiously beginning to allow This (not its real name) out of the house and introduce it to people I trust.

I hope it will see development and possible production in the next year or two.

Meantime, the wait begins again, with a new exercise book, a new working title, a couple of random hunches and some fresh sheets of butcher’s paper on the wall.