We have moved!

As the Fresh Ink program continues to develop and grow, we have been working on a new website, to give us a better platform for all of the new things coming your way.

On the new site, we will be featuring filmed interviews with some of Australia’s leading playwrights, alongside regular blog pieces, our competition LOVE BYTES, and all of the different facets of THE VOICES PROJECT, including the fabulous short films by Damien Power, BOOT and BAT EYES, based on the monologues of playwrights Joanna Erskine and Jessica Bellamy.

To keep up with all of the latest Fresh Ink and for alerts over new posts, make sure to join our Facebook page.

Thanks for your support of the blog over the past 8 months. It has been a real pleasure to bring you such great blogpieces from such outstanding writers, and we look forward to continuing to do this over on the new site.

See you over at www.freshink.com.au

I love the way you always carry my handbag wherever we go – my “everything but the kitchen sink” handbag – to the club, to the movies, and back up those two flights of stairs that take twice the time they did in the 80s. You’ve carried it for me like a habit, unasked for the last 60 years. For that, I love you.

I love the way you let me copy you in Maths on Monday mornings when you know I am rank hungover from the weekend – you turn to me and you smile that little “rethink your life choices” smile and then you tug my left ear, in a kinda annoying way, but as if I’m gonna complain. Cos I love you.

I love the way you sit hunched on facebook chat like some freaky insomniac tarantula, and the second I come online, you pounce all “BITCH WHASSUUUP” and we talk about who we pashed on the weekend and who was good and who was like a slimy broken washing machine, suds everywhere and bad breath. And for that I love ya. Big time.

I love the way you have no backlit screen to mess with my delicate 2am reading eyes. You’re so light in the hand, my love. You are a revolution in publishing, no matter what the fuddy-duddy “I just need the feel of real paper in my hands” losers say. I really love you.

I love that you’ll hold my hand when I meet you after Period 7 at the school gates and as soon as we walk outside you cram your body and your lips against me so hard it’s like we’re both about to die and everyone gawks at these two blazers, two ties, two trousers, two boys mashed together, breathing as one, but we don’t care anymore. Not a bit. Cos we’re in love.

*****

Alrighty then: How do we write about love? And how do we win a  place at the Fresh Ink National Studio this year and an iPad with Love Bytes? Read on, and give it a go….

In 2010, I was one of several young writers given the task of writing about love for the inaugural atyp monologue showcase and production of Tell It Like It Isn’t – a series of short monologues for young performers, all inspired by first love.

In the writing of my monologue, Little Love, I was forced to consider all the different types of love out there, and why this four-letter word is so directly linked, in different ways and for different reasons, to the experience of being human.

Each Tell It Like It Isn’t writer was asked by playwright Lachlan Philpott to bring an item of inspiration with them to the Fresh Ink National Studio to kick-start their monologue – a piece of music we were obsessed with when we were 16 years old (the most awesome of the lot was Dilemma by Nelly).

By listening to it, this song evoked so strongly the memories and feelings that came with being 16. It was a great way of tapping into something genuine and personal, but also allowed us to broaden and reframe these emotions by creating worlds different to our own immediate experience.

I highly recommend this exercise as a starting point for your own monologue. A good question to ask is: what does this song remind me of, from my own life?

For example, if you listened to the song This is How We Party by SOAP on your Walkman on repeat one afternoon, waiting for someone at the school gates who never showed up (I am really showing my age here, but go with it), every time you hear the song from now on, it will dredge up that feeling of rejection, of self-pity, and of embarrassment.

And while you might not want to share with Australia’s theatre-going community the precise story of what a jerk Billy was for never showing his ugly face, and how much he’ll regret that decision upon seeing your new airbrushed headshot, you can tap into that red-hot searing feeling of rejection to write an entirely new story.

What does rejection feel like on your skin?

What does it do to your tastebuds?

Do your eyes tear up or do you refuse to let yourself cry?

How does rejection manifest itself outside the school gates context; perhaps in an airport arrival lounge, or on an abandoned space station?

The bruises and stains of your own memory will make your writing physical, sensory and human.

In this way, you’ll find yourself writing what you feel, if not necessarily what you know.

And if a song doesn’t work for you, try it with a poem, a work of art, a flower, a smell, your grandma’s borscht, or whatever else floats your boat.

Our final monologues for Tell It Like It Isn’t were fascinatingly varied, and reflected the full breadth of our imagination and passions. There was romantic love, sure, in all its permutations, but the buck didn’t stop there. There’s familial love, for your parents or siblings or creepy Uncle Bob or nosy Aunt Mary. There’s social love – for your ever-patient best friend, or that cool kid whose life you just want to grab and make your own. There’s even consumer love – for a gadget, for a schoolies cruise, or for the effect that Lynx deodorant has on all the ladies hanging round your locker.

There’s love that’s reciprocated, or love that is tragically one-sided.

There’s love that lasts for months or years or forever, but there’s also a kind of love that exists in one touch, or kiss, or one night spent together.

Love is day and night obsession, either humming constantly, or hitting you in little jagged bolts of memory.

Love is fear and panic and the midnight terror of having something to lose.

Love can be wonderful, but it can also make you feel bad and sad; ugly and unsure.

Love is much much more than ‘happily ever after’.

So what’s your love story?

Tell us your love story in less than 3 minutes, with our online monologue competition, Love Bytes, now launched. As Jessica notes, you can can win a place at our Fresh Ink National Studio and an iPad.

The monologues from The Voices Project 2011: Tell It Like It Isn’t, featuring Jessica Bellamy’s Little Love, are now available from Currency Press, in a collection that also contains the scripts for The Voices Project 2012: The One Sure Thing, the 2012 monologue showcase. Click here to purchase.

I knew this image took place in a kitchen and that the person floating away was doing so because they had lost a lot of blood.

Blood and guts and the body are recurring themes in my work over the past year. I’m not sure what this means, even on a pop-psychology sort of level, so I assume I’ll keep writing about these things until I figure out why.

Rhys Keir performs Hunger, by Brooke Robinson in the 2010 atyp production of The One Sure Thing

Hunger places seventeen-year-old Sam in a commercial kitchen that is also a dystopia. It’s a world of total loneliness and disconnection and he as a kitchen hand is desperate for approval and kindness from the head chef.

I was interested in writing about a world I knew nothing about – a busy commercial kitchen. I spent some time reading blogs of professional chefs to try and get an idea of the way they spoke and what their day-to-day life is like. What I read was people who, in their quest to make the best food and become the most popular chef, ended up living an insular life on the fringes of society by working very long and very odd hours. A blog by a chef in New York gave me a great starting point: “a life of broken dreams, broken lives and living in the moment. No past, no present, just ‘get it out there’ and make sure it’s HOT.”

I would make Sam’s dystopian kitchen a closed, timeless, sort of self-perpetuating system where nothing but getting the food out mattered – not even bleeding to death!

As Sam cooks on the production line, he realises he has cut himself and has dripped blood into one of the dishes. The head chef doesn’t notice and serves the dish to restaurant customers without Sam able to stop him. The customers applaud the food and soon the whole restaurant wants Sam’s dish. Aware that it’s his blood that has made the food so desirable, Sam secretly leaks more and more of his blood into the dishes, his reward being affection from the head chef, something he has never had before, possibly from anyone.

With Hunger, I chose to write about death in a blunt way by showing a death on stage. Sam ultimately sacrifices his life for what he sees as his only opportunity for approval and human connection and thus dies satisfied. He dies outside of the kitchen and its self-perpetuating system – his death is of little importance and the hellish world of the kitchen will carry on uneffected.

There are three worlds in the play: the dystopian kitchen, the bleached, calm and almost forbidden world of the restaurant and the alfresco dining area, a sort of fantasy escape world where Sam goes to die.

Sam and the head chef’s is the only relationship in the play and it is a very utilitarian one.

Sam speaks to the head chef for the duration of the monologue, although most of the conversation exists in his head and only a fraction is actually said aloud. We get the idea that Sam has a lot of these one-way conversations with his boss. Maybe he has conversations – real or imagined – with other people outside of the play, but this is the one that matters.

For me, Hunger is a play of images and rhythms: I hope that line-by-line I’ve somewhat captured the sense of urgency and mania of a commercial kitchen and that the images are a truthful albeit unrealistic way of portraying death.

***

Hunger is one of ten monologues from The Voices Project 2012: The One Sure Thing, currently running at atyp in Sydney. It is also included in The Voices Project, which is available for purchase from Currency Press. 

So when the textbooks were handed around in the classroom some seven years later, I was ready for it. At the age of fifteen I felt I had got Hamlet in one, understood the whole thing, and on one level I had. What transported me then was the gothic, primitive yet complex world of intrigue and a visceral response to treachery and the supernatural. I found the play thrilling, disturbing and a huge release from the workday drudgery of school and domesticity.

Olivier’s screen performance no doubt had a lot to do with it; a combination of effete narcissism and violent derring-do – it was understandably appealing to an adolescent. There are other points of contact too: the violent mood swings, the desire to be alone and indulge in introspection, sexual possessiveness of the mother and jealousy of the parents’ relationship, cheeking authority, contempt for one’s elders (in this case Polonius), fondness for philosophizing on the Big Question, an ineptness in handling one’s first sexual relationship (Ophelia) and the need for a buddy (Horatio), sibling rivalry (Laertes) and a shallow cynicism about things outside one’s experience. What does Hamlet know of the insolence of office or the law’s delays?

In the fifty-odd years since that first experience, I have encountered many Hamlets, played him twice, directed the play three times (so far) and boned up on all the latest theory as it relentlessly churns off the presses. I feel that my first response to the play and its hero has in no way been diminished. My mind now contains a hefty portfolio of alternative actors and interpretations, but they are all fruit off the same tree.

(page 178, 179)

***

The biggest challenge for facing the actor who would be Hamlet is to make the part your own. It’s good to have a knowledge and respect of tradition and to study the great actors of the past. It will remind you of what a great privilege it is to play a role like Hamlet and humble you to think of how many fine actors have exceled in it and thrilled audiences for the last four hundred years.

But you must not get cowed by tradition or hung up on it. When your turn comes you have to put all that to one side and look at the role as if it’s never been played before and you have no idea of how it’s going to come out. You start with a clean slate and begin to identify with the role.

But that doesn’t mean limiting it to your own personality and frame of reference. You can’t scale it down to fit your own comfort zone. Rather, you have to go out to it, stretch yourself wide, open yourself to all possibilities by applying the old what if exercise: what if I met my father’s ghost? What if I found out that he’d been murdered? How would I feel if my mother hurriedly married my uncle, a man whom I despised? What would I do if I found out he’d murdered my father? How would I feel if my girlfriend committed suicide? They are all very big what ifs and demand a huge stretch of your imagination and emotional response. You’ll find discrepancies between your own reaction and what Hamlet does. Your feelings about revenge, about the afterlife, about honour, may not accord with his. That’s where the acting comes in: to step into Hamlet’s shoes, see the world through his eyes, make his what ifs your own.

Most Hamlets don’t go far enough. I haven’t seen many who convinced me they had seen a ghost. I haven’t seen many who convinced me they loved Ophelia. A lot of Hamlets flatten the role out, try to create a consistent ‘character’. But there is no ‘character’, just a series of situations, reactions, decisions, impulses that, when added up, give us a Hamlet. Forget about ‘consistency’, which is such an abstract notion. Play each scene, each situation for what it gives you. In this he’s loving, in this scene, bloody-minded; in this one suicidal, in this one jokey and light-hearted. In this scene he is cruel, in this one kind. In this one sluggish, in the next hyperactive. Just as we are in life – inconsistent. In Hamlet’s case the inconsistencies are heightened by his superior brain and the extreme situations he finds himself in.

(page 183, 184)

***

Incidentally, I’ve always felt that ‘To be or not to be’ doesn’t belong to the play – at least not where it occurs. That’s an odd thing to say, because in one sense ‘To be or not to be’ encapsulates all of  Hamlet and is as much a signifier of the play as Yorick’s skull. Its philosophical tone is very much in the spirit of the play overall and sounds like the sort of thing Hamlet would have said at Wittenberg, in a seminar maybe, before he came home. It has a Protestant emphasis on ‘conscience’ and negates purgatory,  ‘from whose bourn no traveller returns’ (a rather difficult thing to say after he’s seen the Ghost). But it comes at a very odd place in the play. Last time we saw Hamlet he was all fired up with excitement about his plans to stage the play and ‘catch the conscience of the King’. Why this sudden and irrelevant relapse?

It’s also a difficult piece to stage. Polonius and Claudius withdraw having planted Ophelia to ambush Hamlet. He walks on and soliloquizes for some time before noticing her. Either she takes refuge somewhere and reappears at the end of the soliloquy or else she hovers around, pulling focus while he utters it.  And poor old Polonius and Claudius are stuck behind the arras wishing he’d get on with it.

It proves far more dynamic if you take the soliloquy out and bring Hamlet straight into confrontation with Ophelia as it’s set up to happen. No time out for a soliloquy. But of course simply cutting it is hardly an option. Audiences would demand their money back. But when I’ve directed the play I have found it very useful to put ‘To be or not to be’ earlier in the piece, in the middle of Act II, Scene 2. Polonius has just told Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet is mad and spends hours walking in the lobby. They then spot him approaching, book in hand, and withdraw so that Polonius may interrogate him. This seems to me the perfect place to pop in ‘To be or not to be’, as if Hamlet is chewing over a thesis in the book he has been reading. It is not a passionate, urgent speech, but academically discursive. It leads very well into the dialogue with nosey Polonius: ‘What do you read, my lord?’ Hamlet” “Words, words, words…”

But I can never get over the feeling that it was a speech that Shakespeare pulled out of a drawer and snuck into Hamlet.

(page 190, 191)

***

These are extracts from On Shakespeare by John Bell

You can purchase the book, here.

As part of atyp‘s monologue program,The Voices Project, 10 young actors take on the most famous monologue of them all in TO BE To find out more, click here.

Read leading Shakespeare tutor and actor Sarah Woods on the making of TO BE, here.

You can also listen to a great interview, here, on Radio National’s Artworks, in which actors Ewen Leslie and Garry McDonald discuss how they brought new life to their roles as Hamlet and Polonius in Melbourne Theatre Company’s recent production.

10 actors, one day, one city, and the greatest monologue of all.

TO BE is the first strand of THE VOICES PROJECT from the Australian Theatre for Young People (atyp), and is a new take on the most famous words ever written for the stage.

Director: Damien Power
Producer: Bec Cubitt
Co-Producers: Eva DiBlasio, Eleanor Winkler
DOP: Guido Gonzalez

Read about the making of the short by Sarah Woods, our acting coach for the day, here.

Meet the cast and find out what they have to say about the experience, here.

About THE VOICES PROJECT

THE VOICES PROJECT presents new monologues written by emerging playwrights from atyp’s Fresh Ink writing program in an annual theatre production (THE ONE SURE THING opens in February – find out more and book, here), and online as short films: BOOT and BAT EYES, adapted from acclaimed monologues from playwrights Joanna Erskine and Jessica Bellamy, (premiering online in February). There is also an online writing competition, launching mid-February.

THE VOICES PROJECT aims to provide a platform for the voices of a new generation of Australian playwrights, performers, theatremakers and directors to be seen, to be heard, to be performed.

And what better way of kicking off a monologue project off than with the greatest monologue of them all?

I love Shakespeare.

I love his plays, his characters, his extraordinary use of language, his huge, big-hearted humanity, his terrifyingly accurate insight into what makes us tick, and, and, and …

So when I was approached to work with director Damien Power as acting coach on TO BE, the promo for atyp’s THE VOICES PROJECT, I was delighted at the prospect.

What a great idea, I thought: launching a monologue-writing project with, arguably, the most famous monologue ever written.

And to have “To be or not to be…” coming out the mouths of ten young people, ten different souls – different genders, ages, up-bringings, even cultures – well, I was excited!

On reflection, I realise that it is my excitement for and love of the material that helps to break the ice when teaching or directing Shakespeare – particularly with young people: I just have to think about how much it excites me and why, and then share this with them. I find it can be catching.

In this instance, the young actors in question had already done an introductory workshop on the monologue – so I certainly wasn’t working from scratch. Nevertheless, I’m a firm believer in the premise that all acting needs to start with sense. The words need to be made sense of before anything else can happen. So the first thing I asked each actor was: were they across all the meaning in the speech?

Most had at least a reasonable understanding of the general gist, but there were a few gaps to fill in – actors need to be absolutely specific in their understanding of the material so as to be absolutely specific in their playing of it. My starting point was with an eye to guard against washy, generalised acting down the (very fast) track to their performance for the camera.

The next thing I talked through with most of the actors was Hamlet’s given circumstances. What had happened to Hamlet up to this point – the moment before he opens his mouth to utter those (now) very famous words? This background provides the very real grief and trauma that Hamlet’s ideas spring from … and stops the speech from being a dry, intellectual argument. Every Hamlet is different. I talked to the actors about working from themselves. This was their Hamlet, and Damien didn’t want them to ‘put on a character’ – which I was totally in accord with. We encouraged them to see what came out if they put themselves – with their age, their gender – in Hamlet’s shoes.

Earlier this year I played Gertrude in the STC Education production of Hamlet. And ours was the Gen Y, female Hamlet! Initially, I wasn’t sure how it would work, but it was fabulous seeing the terrific actor, Sophie Ross, in the role – and seeing how young audiences jumped whole-heartedly onboard her ride and stuck with her all the way. She played her Hamlet about 17 years old and girls and boys alike seemed to relate to her.

So it was a lot of fun for me that on this shoot, of our ten actors, we had seven female Hamlets – and I had a positive female Hamlet experience under my belt to relate to them if necessary.

As it turned out, none of the girls had any dilemma with the gender-bending casting. What was interesting, though, was that across the board, we saw very little natural tendency toward anger from any of our female Hamlets, which would have been a fairly reasonable response to the given circumstances, I would have thought – (although not as much in this speech as in other parts of the play). Nevertheless, the girls brought many other very real and relevant qualities to the piece. Particularly powerful was their connection to Hamlet’s profound sorrow.

Our three young men were all excitingly different – their personal responses to the piece being nudged even further in different directions by the evocative locations Damien had chosen for them: the bitter impotence of a bad date in a parked car; the futile struggle of life in a dirty back lane behind a restaurant; the isolation – (but also private space to think) – of a late-night basketball court. All Damien’s locations, in fact, lent great texture to the performances.

The next – AND ALL IMPORTANT – thing to work with the actors on was: what were they DOING?

Not just their physical activity, but what were they doing with the words?

Hamlet is wrangling with a huge dilemma: he is contemplating suicide. So the actor doing this speech needs to be encouraged to really wrangle with the issues.

Sort it out.

Make a decision.

Solve the problem.

Do!

ACT!

Hamlet’s great frustration is tied up in his inability to prove the power of his convictions by acting upon them. Of course, by the end of the speech Hamlet has not succeeded in any of this – (otherwise it would be the end of the play right there!) – but he must actively attempt to do so.

I had a terrific day working on TO BE.

Damien’s choice and range of locations injected extra fun into the challenge for each of the actors. It also added to and informed each of our Hamlets’ given circumstances. There was a really calm ease about Damien’s direction and I felt we worked well together.

But the young actors were what it was all about on the day. They were lovely, unpretentious and dedicated.

It was a pleasure to work with them.

THE VOICES PROJECT: TO BE is online here.

THE VOICES PROJECT: BOOT and THE VOICES PROJECT: BAT EYES premiere online in February.

THE VOICES PROJECT: THE ONE SURE THING begins its run at atyp on 1st February. Book tickets, here.

Find out more about the young cast of TO BE, here.