Playwright Stephen Carleton is on a road trip with his eight-year-old son and is calling me from a cafe in Canberra. It’s a fitting rest stop given the absurd political nature of his latest play, The Turquoise Elephant, which has just seen him win the the Griffin award. Set in a future Australian republic, Carleton’s play tracks the grotesque consequences of climate change as a new species of turquoise elephant invades the Australian Capital Territory.
The characters are unsure if the elephants are real or if they are hallucinating. They begin to think the beasts are watching them, but then again, maybe they are the ones going mad. “Or is it the audience who are mad for ignoring climate change?” Carleton says. “It is a play of extremities, the characters are extreme and the plot is macabre.” However, the black comedy style has audiences chuckling. As Carleton says: “Sometimes you have to laugh to survive.”
As our national politics become increasingly bizarre, Carleton’s heightened style creates a scarily accurate if surreal reflection of Australia. No doubt Brisbane’s turbulent political past and present – from Joh Bjelke-Petersen to Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer – has served as inspiration for the play. Perhaps it is Palmer’s giant dinosaurs from his Coolum theme park, Palmersaurus, that will invade our cities when climate change takes hold, or global warming that inspired him to embark on his plan to build Titanic II.
In the 1970s, a new wave of Australian theatre set out to explore our national identity on stage, from The Removalists by David Williamson to The Legend of King O’Malley by Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy. Half a century later, a new new wave is occurring – out of Brisbane. This time, the transformation is stylistic with an eclectic mishmash of absurdist black comedy making it on to the stage.
Director and playwright Benjamin Schostakowski is another Brisbanite whose play A Tribute of Sorts follows socially awkward teenage cousins, Ivan and Juniper Plank, as they perform a variety show chronicling, in alphabetical order, the deaths of 26 children. The play was part of Brisbane’s La Boite’s Indie season in 2012, followed by a return run at Queensland Theatre Company in 2014 that resulted in four Matilda awards.
A Tribute of Sorts is Napoleon Dynamite meets The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The play’s dark comedy comes from Schostakowski’s storytelling techniques that range from shadow puppetry and multimedia to old-fashioned song and dance. In October, Schostakowski will direct final year NIDA students in another Brisbane black comedy by Lewis Treston, Reagan Kelly, which tells the story of an ex-school captain chasing the exhilaration of oblivion after her first suicide attempt was seen as a joke.
Brisbane’s new new wave has been nurtured in no small part by La Boite. The company has a strong commitment to emerging artists through its Indie season and artist-in-residency program. But Carleton suggests it’s the combination of La Boite and Brisbane’s own publishing house Playlab that has brought this generation of writers to the fore.
Established in 1978, Playlab is Australia’s second largest publisher of plays, with a commitment to publishing new plays and voices that reflect contemporary Australian society. “That Brisbane has its own publisher is no coincidence,” says Carleton. “It is part and parcel. Playlab have their finger on the pulse and they are publishing the work.” Performances and re-performances follow.
In 2004, then artistic director of La Boite, Sean Mee, programmed an entire season of Brisbane plays. Only now is the empowerment of that decision for Brisbane theatre-makers really being seen. Mee’s successor David Berthold, now director of Brisbane festival, brought national attention to the company and newly appointed Todd MacDonald hopes to establish international collaborations that will further benefit emerging artists. “We want to take our work to the world,” MacDonald says. “It is not about importing, it is about importing collaboration – a two-way street.”
Removed from Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane provides a safe place for theatre-makers to take risks because there are fewer rules about what theatre is and can be. As Schostakowski puts it: “Brisbane doesn’t take itself too seriously, so it creates a place where you are able to develop your own ideas, and don’t have to follow bigger trends of major capital cities.”
Ironic, then, that the minister for the arts, senator George Brandis, calls Brisbane home. His national program for excellence in the arts has pulled $104.7m from the Australia Council’s allocation to arts organisations including La Boite, Australia’s longest surviving theatre company.
The program’s draft guidelines suggest the minister will have final say on who receives funding, but this “Brandis knows best” arts autocracy has left companies at the heart of experimentation in a state of uncertainty. “Small to medium organisations are at a disadvantage as any innovation is certainly not going to appeal to the criteria,” MacDonald says. “What will happen to the diversity of the arts? How long will it take to erode? These are the questions that are being asked.”
Stereotypes about Brisbane bandied about by the southern states – the “cultural backwater” that still likes to believe it is a “big country town” – are long obsolete as the Queensland capital grows into a culturally intelligent and confident city. But the evolving Brisbane theatre scene is the result of long-term investment and development in the arts, investment that currently hangs in the funding balance.
