Kylie Trounson has a right to be nervous. On Thursday night, her first mainstage play opens at Melbourne Theatre Company. Her friend the theatre director Naomi Edwards suggested the idea for The Waiting Room four years ago and has collaborated with Trounson since. Edwards will also have her mainstage debut as director. A female playwright and female director are still a rarity in Australian theatre. “It’s unusual and it’s awesome,” says Trounson.
Trounson will be nervous for another reason. Her father, Alan, will attend opening night to see a play revolving around his work as the driven scientist during the early days of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). It’s also about her mother, Sue, and Kylie herself, who grew up defending her father from schoolyard taunts that he was a “baby murderer”. As a child, she avoided answering the phone in case it was those Right to Lifers again.
“It’s terrifying,” Trounson says of the looming opening night. “I’ve put myself, my dad and my mum on stage. That’s quite nerve-racking. Am I doing the right thing by all of us?”
The Waiting Room is structurally ambitious, playing around with Kylie (played by Sophie Ross) writing a play about her father who, with Professor Carl Wood, produced Australia’s first “test tube baby” in Melbourne in 1980. She interviews two of the strongest critics at the time, the Catholic bioethicist Nick Tonti-Filippini and feminist and academic Robyn Rowland.
The play also follows a couple, Zoe and Raf, trying to conceive a child through IVF in the days when there was little chance of success, and then today, when one in 33 Australian babies are conceived through a process that remains gruelling, expensive and far from guaranteed. Through it all, Jesus, Aristotle, Eros and Galileo put in their two-cents’ worth.
In February last year, Trounson missed the play’s first big reading at MTC because she went into labour with her first child, Caspar, now one.
“I texted the director the night before and said, ‘Good luck, guys. I’m going to hospital.’ ” She worried whether including her own experience of having a baby would look self-indulgent, but “you can’t write a play about conceiving babies and be conceiving a baby and not have that experience affect what you’re writing. It’s completely affected how I view my dad’s work. It wasn’t just work. I realised he was bringing people into the world.”
IVF is now so routine it is difficult to recall how controversial it was. Yet the ethical debates that flowed from the creation of an embryo outside the human body continue in new forms. IVF has allowed a 67-year-old woman to give birth. It enables surrogacy, with all its dilemmas of paying poor women to incubate babies for the wealthy. And as Alan Trounson has argued, IVF is now a business that charges as much as the market will stand.
More prosaically, women have more choices and some put off having children with the belief that science can always help.
“For my generation it’s a bit of a tricky one,” Trounson,37, says. “It’s something that we’ve always known was there, a bit of a backup plan, a safety net, so we have always said, ‘If I can’t have a baby I can always have IVF,’ not really understanding that over a certain age, it’s pretty tricky to have a baby through IVF.
“It’s incredible for people who can’t conceive naturally, but perhaps it’s also made us more unable to conceive naturally.”
Trounson interviewed Tonti-Filippini, who died last year, and Rowland, now a poet. Both were generous with their time and reflections and the exchanges are included in the play. She says their views deepened her understanding of why people were anxious about scientists creating embryos in laboratories and later about research on embryonic stem cells, which Alan Trounson also pioneered.
For Tonti-Filippini, it was about science removing God from the sacred act of procreation. For Rowland, it was about male scientists experimenting on women as guinea pigs, “one big competition between the boys”, striving to be the “biggest daddy of them all”.
Trounson’s parents supported her writing about their lives, including the strain her father’s obsessive work put on their marriage. Alan Trounson was pleased that a play would be written about science at all. At the time, the work was slow, exhausting and under-funded, but it still had moments of sheer thrill.
He and Wood (played by Greg Stone and William McInnes) were just beaten by the Britain’s Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards to claim the “world’s first” IVF baby in 1978. Frustrated by Australia’s lack of support for research, Trounson left to head up the prestigious California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in 2008. He returned to Melbourne last year to work on nothing less than the potential of stem cells to cure cancer without surgery or chemotherapy.
The Waiting Room took Kylie four years. Playwriting, like science perhaps, is more about love than money. Also an actor, she works part time as a personal–injury lawyer to allow her time to write. In July, she will return to work from maternity leave: “I’m going to try and balance writing, acting, lawyering and mothering. I don’t know quite how I’m going to do it.”
She spent a lot of time talking to her father, now 69, about the play. He read it, made a few suggestions, and is pleased that the history of this science that changed the way we live and think has been told in a creative way.
“We’ve become closer, which is nice because we’ve been meeting each other about our work, talking about our work, his work and my work,” says Trounson. “We’ve come together as equals to make something.”
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The Waiting Room , Melbourne Theatre Company until 27 June
